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[strikehdoniacomic]

If I could give one piece of life advice to my fellow humans, it would be this highly specific little chestnut: "If you ever sprain your ankle, get medical care."

One of the most common things I've heard from older people than myself is, "Oh yeah, I twisted my ankle in (insert grade of school here) and it's never been the same." Or, "I have a bad ankle. I can't tell you how many times I've sprained it." And one of the most common things I've heard from younger people is some variation on, "Yeah, I think I just twisted my ankle. I think I have some old crutches from high school at my parents' house. I'll just use those for a few days."

I didn't learn this until after I sprained my ankle last year, but 20% of ankle sprains lead to chronic ankle instability, which was grimly defined by my doctor as, "an unending cycle of ankle sprains."

Another thing I didn't fully understand is that "sprain" is an umbrella term for any of those ligament injuries. Yeah, you could simply stretch the ligament-- twist it. Or you could tear it. Or you could completely sever it, and those are all sprains. If you're not a doctor, it's likely hard to tell what degree of sprain you have. The worse the sprain, the higher the chance of it healing weird and becoming unstable. If you are having trouble putting weight on your ankle and it's not feeling better the next day, please get it checked out!

I know medical care is expensive and many of us don't have health insurance, but it might cost you more in the long run if you don't get care for a hurt ankle. Otherwise you might spend a lifetime of having to get MORE ankle injuries checked out, missing work or social opportunities due to ankle injury, having to limit exercise, surgeries later in life, and more.

When I hurt my ankle and foot last year, I assumed the broken foot bone would be the bigger concern, but my treatment plan was almost entirely centered around the ankle ligament tear. My doctor said that was the more serious injury and the more finicky bit to heal. I worry when I hear a friend mention they sprained their ankle and were just treating it at home, 'trying to stay off it as much as I can.' That usually means a few days, but I had to stay completely off mine for 4 weeks, followed by a walking boot, a brace, and months of physical therapy. It was intense!

Ankles are annoying because they support your entire darn body and you don't realize how much you need them until you hurt one. So that is the one nugget of wisdom I hope to leave all of you with!

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Me trying to explain to random people on the street that Daniel and Johnny’s dynamic isn’t in Miguel and Robby but Sam and Tory from the embarrassment to the country club with a Larusso covered in food/mess all the way to “You’re alright Larusso/You alright Larusso?”

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this is basically it.

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U KNOW WHAT TO DO LMAO

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gay characters

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the times sam & dean showed up with their fake ids while wearing their normal clothes were so funny. they’d be wearing six layers of dirty flannels, carhart sweatshirts, and leather and b like “hello yes we r FBI agents & hail from the big city”

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the existence of zoomer sam also implies the existence of xennial john

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something i love about 1x12 Faith (though, what don't i love about that episode) is the way that sam touches dean while he's sick, and dean's reaction to it. obviously sam is attempting to help dean because he's injured but

it's just so soft and careful, and dean allows it at first. maybe because he knows sam needs to do it to make himself feel better, maybe because he enjoys it himself

sam literally runs around the car to help him

and gently guides him away from the guy being yelled at by the police officer, like he's desperate for them to avoid conflict in case it somehow prevents dean from getting healed, or risks him sustaining further injury, and dean allows it

sam's hand is on dean's back for ages, but dean doesn't push him off at first, and even allows the greater contact for a few seconds before he pushes him off, and even then sam leaves one hand on his back for a moment longer

dean ofc gets grumpy and proud and pushes him off at times

(the way sam stomps around the car like a man on a mission and yanks dean up is kinda funny, and i can't blame dean for not wanting to be manhandled)

the way dean waves sam off but then leans in close anyway is really cute

and then, after dean has been healed, they sit close together with their knees almost touching regardless.

in conclusion, i think that dean really enjoyed the excuse for contact and sam's concern for him, but ofc he is prideful and Manly and had to save face. they're adorable and i love them

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season 2 of spn was like "holy shit we have a gun that kills demons!" and season 14 was like "this gun might be able to kill god. this may as well happen". bigger stronger gun indeed

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I just had. An experience.

So a woman comes in to my work and asks to use the bathroom. Okay, normal. She happens to be a beautiful woman—not my type, but, you know, classically beautiful in the way that makes you a little bashful to talk to anyway.

She comes out a little bit later to say that the soap dispenser is empty. She’s holding her hands up—purple nail polish—clearly distressed by her exposure to filth and unwilling to touch anything until that can be fixed. I am nothing if not eager to help (knight complex) (beautiful) (purple nail polish) so I leap up and run to the supply room for the refill bottle.

I wedge the bathroom door open, you know, for her comfort, she’s standing there (beautiful) watching me, I’m silently pretending that she must be secretly impressed by my ring of keys (like the song), I’ve got a bit of a swagger on maybe (purple nail polish). I open the soap dispenser expecting an empty canister. It doesn’t look empty. I stick my fingers in (looks can be deceiving) and it’s completely full, freshly refilled, now I’m suddenly aware that she’s still watching me over my shoulder and I’m sticking my fingers into a hole (purple nail polish) and ha-ha-ha, it’s only a little suggestive with the soap, forget about it.

I struggle with the soap dispenser, she’s still watching me, I realize that whoever filled it last didn’t prime it. “I have to prime it,” I say, for some reason I have to explain out loud (beautiful).

I reach for the, uh, tube at the bottom. It hangs down about four inches. It’s rubbery. Yielding. But, uh, firm. I have to. Squeeze it. Repeatedly. She’s watching me still. Soap is leaking out of the release valve on the cap and onto my hands. Still no soap is coming out.

There’s probably congealed soap near the tip blocking the opening, I realize, and try to covertly squeeze it to check. Like. An udder. I’m massaging it (purple nail polish) and she’s still watching me. I glance up in the mirror. Her expression behind me is unreadable. Her eyes are fixed on the little rubber phallus I am stroking. I’m sweating.

“I have to…” I begin. I panic. I don’t know how to finish my sentence. I can’t say anything that can be construed as sexual. “…Milk it,” I say. A mistake. Now it somehow sounds more sexual than if I had said “jack it off”. I could have played that as a roguish joke. Milk it doesn’t sound roguish, it sounds creepy. The clogged soap comes free. White translucent liquid soap spurts all over my hands. There is a terrible sound accompanying it. She says “eugh!” over my shoulder. I try to rinse my hands and the soap container off with water before putting it away but soap just keeps leaking out, it’s everywhere. Why does it have to be white? Why does it have to be this consistency? Why is the suspensor tube shaped… like that (couldn’t it be just a little bit bigger if it had to be shaped Like That?) Why did she have to stand there watching me?

From here on out I’m just buying fucking pump bottles for the bathroom. Jesus fucking Christ.

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Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.

It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.