#(in fact there exists an identical photo of me downing a beer)

[dallonm-archive]

[image description: a wideshot of the san francisco skyline, tinted orange by a sunset. Above the skyline, in a white serif font reads "REVELATIONS, REVELATIONS." in all caps. below, in lower caps reads "update #2" /end id]

Revelations, Revelations | Update #2

Hey besties! I've got a funky little RR update

I've had a little bit of a love hate relationship with this book in the last two months but I am loving it right now! I think my struggles came from how I didn't really accept that this book is Hard to write. like it's complicated! and it's set in another country in another era like idk what to tell you! And accepting that was such a weight off my shoulders because I'm not putting the blame on myself. I also was really stuck in part one's problems and I had to be like <3 bestie <3 abandon it til post draft editing. So right now it's like:

Part one: I see it as a little stray cat in an alleyway that I kneel down in front of like pspspsp :) and then it hisses and bites me because it is actually a feral raccoon. Definitely not where I want it to be but like I can fix him

Part two: super fun!! A lot of deeper (and messier) elements are introduced here and I feel like the story's ~vibes~ have clicked. It's a lot of fun and it's getting complex. Whilst there's conflict going on in part one there's definitely this false sense of stability and then part two hits all of them like a baseball bat

My drafting has been much more chill and non linear too, just writing the scenes I want to and then connecting them together. I've been focused less on rich prose/descriptions and more on prose that explores character and it's been very refreshing! I love my flowery prose but I think it's easy to get caught up in. I'm also no longer going to do chapter by chapter updates, both for plot privacy but also because this story is very delicate both in content and the drafting process and I don't just want to expose the bare bones of that, you know? So I'm just gonna do some sectioned rambles and talk about a couple chapters under the cut!

also no longer doing multiple taglists because i can't keep up so! general taglist, ask to be added or removed! ; @kowlazovdi @avi-burton-writing @ryns-ramblings @kitblogsthings @ezrathings @aetherwrites @radiomacbeth @bijouxs @bookphobe @haldimilks @alicewestwater @bookpacking @shaelinwrites @onlyganymede @theelectricfactory @write-like-babs @oceancold @veiliza @sidhewrites @wolf-oak @oasis-of-you @coffeeandcalligraphy @cecilsstorycorner @howdywrites @keira-is-writing @flip-phones @svpphicwrites

Only major change to report is I switched to alternate POVs instead of multiple chapters at a time in one POV because I'm insane <3 I had a lot of fun braiding POVs in Life Cycle of Massive Stars and wanted to try it here and it works much better! Though at this point I am simply ignoring the existence of part 1 because it really was the guinea pig part LMAO i experimented so much with structure and form and now it's a mess but it's <3 a future problem <3 i'd rather have one messy part than a whole first draft that's behind on my growing ~vision~ of the story.

[image description: a slightly purple tinted photo of two arms extending from the top and bottom of the photo, cropped to only show their hands. Their index fingers touch. in the middle, in a white serif font reads "dorothy" /end id]

Not a chapter, I had a lot of trouble with Dorothy in part 1 but I still love her so instead y'all are getting a mini character ramble! I felt really bad about her for the longest time because I've only been writing her since last summer whereas I've known Felix since like 2018 so there's naturally an imbalance, but I Do Not like that!! And she's really taken her time revealing herself, but I am ~fascinated by her.

I feel she's best summarised by this disillusionment for her life but mostly herself, because she's framed her whole identity by illusory perceptions of other people: a mother she doesn't remember, a girlfriend she breaks up with every six months but still shares a bed with, a twin brother she hasn't seen in person for four years and still sees as a teenager drenched in religious manipulation. It's a lot! She assumes that she feels dissatisfied with her life because she's without her twin, but then Felix returns to her life and shockingly this does not fix all of her problems??? She also doesn't know how to be alone, which definitely will not get better after Felix returns oop

The day her brother decides to leave, Dorothy is home alone.

Her San Francisco apartment is hollow like a hungry stomach. Three days ago, she drove Jolie to the airport then came home to cover the bathroom mirror with towels. On the first day she took an extra shift at the book store, drove through Sea Cliff at sunset, bumped into Mona on the stairwell and joined her and Margot for wine and slipped out when they began arguing over rent and office interns, started then discarded a portrait of a fictional girl and slept from two to five in the morning. On the second day she worked and spent an extra hour designing a window display on science fiction that she put together on the third day. Cut and painted a rocket ship on cardboard that she’ll have to scold kids for tugging, then get scolded herself by their mothers.

The day I finalise a design for their apartment it's over but I call this trick Trying To Get Around The Fact I Made Characters In Their Earlier Twenties Live In San Francisco (cw: drowning)

The apartment is nicer than her, but it’s been home for three years and they get $100 off rent each month because Jolie tends the garden and looks just like the landlady's daughter that drowned in the Pacific.

I don't think I've talked about Jolie much here which is funny because she is probably the most well-received amongst my friends! They love her so much and it's because she's a hot but slightly toxic lesbian smh, I'm like no seriously she does some fucked up things and they're like you promise?? Some funky facts:

Her real name is Jolene and she hates it except when the Dolly Parton song came on, that gives her a god complex

We are going to ignore how I accidentally named two characters after words for beautiful and pretty in French we are going to pretend it was intentional because when this gets published a uni student could get some good analysis out of that in their Intro to Literature class

She joined the cult with her mother at 13 and left as soon as she turned 18 LMAO. She was Dorothy's only connection to the "outside world" and the only reason she was able to leave

Her dream job is gardener/florist! We get it I watched Bly Manor last November. She's also a bartender

would probably have this on her car /j

[image description: a close up of a car sticker of a frog above "MILF" in green caps. below "MILF" reads "Man I Love Frogs" /end id]

Dorothy and Jolie have always been on and off and building tension but Dorothy realises this can't keep going when Jolie gets into a barfight at work and Dorothy feels Insane because she's the only one concerned?? (cw: blood, mild violence)

“You’re lucky it’s not broken.” She angles Jolie’s face, hand under her chin. Even with red blotted around her nostrils and lips, mulberry lipstick smudged, she still smiles like her bruises are a trophy. It’s a surprise she doesn’t dwell on it: it’s just some blood, doll, nothing to worry about. She didn’t even strike that good. Her technique was all off. If she shows her face back here I’ll just teach her how to punch properly. The worst part is over and I’m a big girl. Do I look upset? Am I crying? When they drive home, she’ll ask to stop and see if she can get free cigarettes or beer by holding her nose and making herself cry. She’ll probably ask Dorothy to hit her so it starts bleeding again. But she’s quiet, leans against the basin and lets her dab damp towels on her face. It doesn’t take long to clean up. It was just some blood.

“Nursing,” Jolie says.

“What?” “You keep saying you want to go to school but don’t know what for – nursing. You’re too good at taking care of people.”

That ending is like Top Three dialogue lines that made me really Concerned for how this character arc is gonna go :) but don't worry about it y'all. I do think Jolie genuinely loves Dorothy but that does not mean! the relationship is healthy!

Basically I love her a lot now that I know her better and I am excited to see where she goes! I think the biggest part of her arc is motherhood/daughterhood and TBH as a recently realised trans dude it took me a Minute to feel entitled to write her story? But being a cis woman shaped my life for two decades and getting to navigate that and being a daughter from a perspective that's totally distanced from myself is very helpful. It's about the inherent admiration and pain that comes from being a mother's daughter! (cw: blood, diet culture/disordered eating)

She lies next to the table and presses her forehead to the glass corner and imagines what would shatter first: the glass or her skin. And she imagines being a girl again, with French braids and too much baby fat in her cheeks and being picked up by a mother before the blood stains her hands and then her dress. She’d tell the mother she just wanted to read her magazines, the dog-eared articles about divorce and top tips for menopause and the benefits of eating half a grapefruit before your calorie-counted meals. And the mother would just brush the bangs out her face, press a pack of thawed peas on the wound and let her choose between the band aid with hearts or the band aid with flowers. And maybe the mother would know she did it for attention because they both know a daughters cry slices oxygen like glass to skin, but she’d still detangle her curls in the evening and kiss her forehead goodnight and serve her breakfast in the morning with half a grapefruit – the other half on her own plate, untouched and left to rot.

[image description: an orange firework exploding against a black sky. across the photo, in a white serif font reads "the last 10 hours of 1986" /end id]

This is technically two chapters, one in each POV and they close part one! Title is v explanatory and they're meant to be framed like a countdown - my plan was for the scenes to get shorter as it gets closer to midnight and that didn't really work but? The twins def get messier as the countdown goes down and THAT is what we like to see. This is also the only end of a part where the twins are separated but don't worry about it hehe :)

Dorothy

This chapter is like the First Time Dorothy does something for herself and. Good for her!

She’ll publish poetry under a pen name and horror short stories under another. She’ll paint indigo mountains and magenta oceans and not care when the colours stain her clothes. She’ll teach Felix how to blend acrylics and he’ll teach her how to remember piano notes and they won’t argue about who abandoned who. When Mona and Margot break up, she’ll go down to comfort Mona or Margot and then kiss Margot or Mona. She’ll move out and tell neither of them. She’ll find a landlady with a dead daughter and get a discount on an ocean view apartment with wall-length windows. Isaias will move in next door and they’ll have weekly dinner parties with wine that costs more than $10. She’ll go vegan. She’ll be so in tune with herself she won’t need to read magazine horoscopes or pay $50 for a psychic reading that assumes she knows her grandparents. She’ll know when she’s happy sad angry and why. She’ll take portrait commissions so she can afford a therapist. She’ll love her life and ignore that there’s no space for Jolie because she wants there to be. She’ll need nobody except herself. She’ll try and make things with Jolie work. She’ll kiss a random girl at midnight to see if it’s any different. She’ll go home after the countdown.

I had the revelation (aha) of Isaias and Dorothy as besties and I am OBSESSED! I love Isaias but struggled with his role so I'm really happy about this. Like he practices calligraphy and writes poetry titled after his favourite plants is he not the ideal character!! Hoping this will make it easier to learn about him so we can get that fun content

Felix

Felix's is fun because he makes the best decision of his arc but also the stupidest fucking decision of his arc. He truly has the range NOBODY is doing it like him. Here's a part that mirrors the excerpt above because even when they're apart Felix and Dorothy are like hmm we Will Be Intrinsically Connected (cw: drug, vomit and sex mention sorry he's going through it!!)

Two hours before midnight and Felix is alone in the bathroom. The party he abandoned synths through the ceiling. He plays Love My Way on his Walkman. Highest volume. Eyes closed. Imagines 1987 and decides he’s going to be honest about everything and nothing. He’s going to tell strangers at bars that he studies Literature at Stanford. He’s going to date a girl and pretend he has parents to introduce her to, that he grew up on a farm in Ohio and was secretly raised atheist, lie about what lies his parents told him. He’s going to grow out his hair and and blend cyan on his eyelids and send polaroids to his father with no return address; burn his fingertips on a candle flame like Michael will burn the photos of his son. He’s going to adore himself. He’s going to quit smoking and start jogging. He’s going to fuck Pacific Heights husbands whilst their wives sleep in the master bedroom and maybe they’ll angrily call him when they’re served divorce papers and hang up when he laughs. He’s going to get promoted to Assistant Manager and not care that his job is dead-end. He’s not going to kiss anyone at midnight because he doesn’t want to. He’s going to flush the cocaine because he doesn’t want it. He’s going to stare at his reflection until it moves for him. He’s going to vomit in a minute. He’s going to pierce his right ear with a sewing needle.

Felix at the end of part one: I give no more fucks!!! I am going to do whatever I want!!! Life is too short!!!

Felix at the end of part two:

[image description: screenshot of a tweet by @/idksomedumbshit. the tweet reads, "i can't mansplain manipulate manwhore my way out of this one boys" /end id]

I do think it's iconic that this time last year Felix was a repressed Christian boy and now his dream is to be a homewrecker THAT is growth. I also got to write Felix and Jolie which was fun because they do Not like each other <3 but they respect each other <3 but only sometimes <3 They have their first little bonding moment where Jolie pierces his ear in their bathroom but then Felix says something to piss her off so Jolie is like hmm okay time to chose Violence. This dialogue is funny because Felix does not really hate himself at this stage Jolie just knows she's gonna fuck him up by saying that !! My life would be so much easier if these twins had a normal relationship with the concept of being a twin but also this story would be very boring

The needle pierces his skin and he doesn’t feel it. Only the tequila swirling behind his eyes. The sting of the light-bulb. Jolie speaks again, “but she looks just like you, doesn’t she? Not the same of course, but enough to see each other in each other. That’s the worst part, right? To see the person you hate on the face of someone you love?”

[image id: a photo of the ocean with cliffs in the background, tinted orange by sunset. in the middle, in a white serif font reads "1/10/1987" /end id]

This chapter is so CUTE and also my first successful attempt at a different form that I can consistently keep in the narrative <3 I really like the idea of a fluid novel form that's adaptive to how the character's perception of the world would change which? Idk how much I can maintain that but this definitely follows it. I need to fine tune the execution but the concept is shots and transcript from a camcorder recording and playing with what the camera sees/doesn't see. The title is what the tape would be labelled, and on 1/10/1987 (american dates throw me off omfg) Beau takes Felix to a seaside town for his birthday and yes it's gay <3 but it's also just a lot of stupid dialogue which was very refreshing because I overthink dialogue so much I always think it has to have deeper meaning when sometimes its like....characters can sometimes...have Fun together. They are simply displaying Relationship Dynamics!

BEAU: Okay, give me a second…(the camera zooms on Felix) There we go! Right, okay, so it’s Saturday, January 10th, 1987, what’re doing out here today?

FELIX: What is this, an interview or something? You sound like a TV host on those morning shows.

BEAU: Oh my God no they’re so annoying, don’t compare me to those.

FELIX: No but I can imagine it perfectly. You’d just be all (holding a pretend microphone) Gooood Morrrning from sunny San Francisco! My name is Beau Teixeira and—

Beau: (laughing) Shut the fuck up!

I love this chapter a lot because you can definitely tell that their dynamic has Shifted but also! They are still just friends being friends and I really want them to just kiss already but also I love the natural progression of friends to lovers....falling in love and not realising it and then suddenly it all makes sense...

BEAU: You wanna try filming? It’s easier if you hold it on your shoulder. Like this. Put your hands where mine are.

[How their fingers whisper against each other. How Beau’s cologne smells of lime and tangerine. ]

Beau steps back into view, runs a hand through his curls. Leather jacket flutters in salted wind. Behind him the sunset flickers over waves like a candle flame. He smiles at the camera.

BEAU: I think you’re a natural! You’re definitely gonna be first choice for cameraman on my shitty morning show.

[How Felix smiles at him.]

(cw: next paragraph talks about the AIDS crisis)

Whilst this is a Fun And Cute Chapter there is more depth to it since the last time we see Beau and Felix before it is the first time they open up about the AIDS Crisis and their fears surrounding it. I have a lot of complicated thoughts about writing this part of history that I could write about all day but it boils down to the fact that "so many queer stories are centred around queer trauma and tragedy and queer people deserve to read stories centred around love and happiness" and "with a queer novel set in 1980s SF it'd be just as bad to completely ignore what happened" are two things that can coexist. I definitely think stories centred around the crisis are necessary (recently read The Prettiest Star by Carter Sickels and highly recommend! Also has a similar camcorder function and an emphasis on preserving. Also made me cry) but shouldn't be the default, especially in a story that if published would have a queer readership, so whilst it's something I want to explore I want to do it in a way that ultimately celebrates queer happiness, love and life. Definitely way more that could be said about this and the function of queer trauma in queer narratives but! Both Beau and Felix feel a need to not only capture as much as possible, but to capture it specifically with the intent to look back in the future, as well as a general We Are Going To Try And Find Happiness Wherever We Can. Also feel like a lot of Beau's character clicked whilst writing it which was very fun!

[How Beau wouldn’t say where they were going but cracked before they left San Francisco because he had too many stories to tell: five year old burning his tongue on café tea, six year old falling into waves and being unbothered, seven year old plucking chrysanthemum petals from stranger’s gardens. How Beau has an orange car freshener and missing headrest on the passengers seat. How Beau drove a longer route because it was closer to the coastline. How Beau played Pet Shop Boys’ Please and knew the words to every song. How Felix realized that he did too.]

[image description: a man and a woman sit next to each other on a bench. the photo is taken from behind them. in the background, you can vaguely see water, hills and the golden gate bridge. across the image, in a white serif font reads "everything the same about dorothy and felix" /end id]

Little title explanation: part 1 has two chapters, "Everything Different about Felix" and "Everything Different about Dorothy" which introduce their relationship + impression of each other after not seeing each other in person for four years (and also how they have images of each other in their heads that are false but they're attached to and it's really not helping the whole complicated twin relationship thing but don't worry about it) and I'd like to expand on that in part two so! An attempt was made. This takes place the day after the above chapter on the twins' actual birthday, the first one they're celebrating together since they were 18 and the first one in the "outside world" so it's a moment!

I'm not happy with how this chapter came out but I think it's just because it's an important one to me! Partly because it helps cement the idea that in spite of their complex relationship, Felix and Dorothy never stop being twins and they never stop loving each other even on the days they dislike each other. But mainly because: these are two adults who lost their childhood to trauma and they finally have the freedom to live their life and! Sometimes that means living for the inner child that never got to be a child. As a certified Adult With Childhood Trauma having a chapter like this was v important because trauma never leaves you but that doesn't mean you can't be happy!! Also it's just. cute. They run around San Francisco, bake a really shitty birthday cake, talk about whether or not San Francisco is real, I want what they have. There is underlying conflict because hoo boy there is Shit simmering rn! But it was nice to have this and the previous chapter as just like. Two little golden moments you know. Calm before the storm if you will

Midnight. Dorothy lies on a mattress on the floor in an apartment in San Francisco. Her brother’s head in her lap. “You know what’s crazy to me? Nobody ever asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. That just wasn’t something we were allowed to think about. I know it’s depressing, I just think about that a lot.”

Felix keeps his eyes on the ceiling. The clock ticks. “Well, what do you wanna be when you grow up?”

“Astronaut, of course.”

“I was gonna say astronaut.”

“You definitely weren't,” she says. “Besides, I already claimed it.”

He looks at her. “I was thinking it. Before you said it, I claimed it in my mind.”

“That’s not how it works. I can’t read your mind.”

Felix sits up. “Wait, you can’t? Gee Dotty, some twin you are.” He grins. So does she.

Usually I am like. I don't think they would care too much about the twin thing. But I also think they would definitely joke about it, like if someone asked a stupid question Felix would be like "well of course we can read each others minds, dont you know how twins work?? like right now my twin sister who is my twin is thinking about giving me, her twin brother, $200" But lets end this on an excerpt where Dorothy doesn't give him $200 but she does think Oh How Did I Spend Four Years Without My Brother

(cw: death mention + missing persons mention, plane crash + boating accident mention)

Dorothy is used to his presence, has been for a year: coffee stains on the table, cupboards left open in the kitchen, clustered ashtray in the living room, hair gel and Jazz aftershave behind the bathroom mirror, Queen or Bowie or Alphaville sifting from his room. His voice. How he always knocks on her door to say goodnight. How he weaved himself into the ecosystem like air but tonight she watches her brother do nothing but breathe and she remembers waking up every January 11th in 1983, 84, 85, 86, and chucking a towel over the bathroom mirror. How she told strangers at bars that she’s an only child; or that she had a younger brother, but he died in a plane crash or a boating accident or went on a hiking trip and never came back, was likely immortalised as a John Doe in Oregon or Nevada records. How she went four years without coffee stains and open cupboards and goodnight knocks and Queen or Bowie or Alphaville renditions when he forgets that she exists in this space too. How hollow those four years were.

And that's all I have to share! I'm not sure when the next update will be, but I much prefer this format of talking about the story! If you read this far I love u <3

[aweirdkindofyellow]

The Royal Invitation, Pt.15

Aerowyn Matilde George Rothchester might seem like a very long name, but it definitely is not for a royal in the Kingdom of Dalewin.

After her grandfather, the beloved king, passed away, Aerowyn (also known as Winny) is called back from her art school in New York. She’s thrown back into her royal duties, expected to know what to do.

But with the Royal advisor on tour with the new king, Winny is left to figure things out with his stepson. The only problem, he has no idea what he’s doing, after all he’s only the lead singer in a band.

Co-written story with @scream-tears.

Chapter 15

Winny’s POV:

I stared at Alex for a while. His eyes were shut and he looked asleep, I just needed to be sure that he actually was. When he didn’t even twitch after a few more minutes, I carefully slipped out of my bunk. As soon as I was standing on the floor, I checked up on Alex again, gladly seeing that he still hadn’t moved. I tiptoed over and gently closed the curtain so he could no longer be distrubed by anything that happened in the corridor.

I turned around and went to the next bottom bunk, squatting down so I was face to face with its curtain. As I learned to do, I softly knocked on the plastic board to get the attention of whoever was on the other side. However, I got no response. I rolled my eyes a little and knocked again, a bit louder, but still trying my best not to wake up anybody else around.

When I still didn’t get a response, I sighed and just yanked open the curtain a little. Jack stared back at me like a deer caught in headlights. The only light illuminating his face was coming from his laptop and he was wearing huge headphones. I raised an eyebrow at him, still waiting to get some kind of reaction. When his initial shock wore off, he moved his headphones to free one ear to listen to me.

“Everybody’s asleep!” I whispered.

He didn’t make a sound when he put away his laptop and headphones, only to poke his head out of the bunk and look left and right to see if I was correct. When he saw that I was indeed not lying, he pulled me into his bunk. I was immediately straddling him and I quickly closed the curtain before anybody would wake up and walk past.

“Come here,” he groaned and pulled me down to start a fiery kiss, immediately already tugging at my shirt.

We did our best to be as silent as possible. However, it was inevitable that occasionally a limb or another body part smacked into a wall. That bunk was barely big enough for two people to squish in, let alone to people to get it on. We managed to make it work. And it seemed like nobody had noticed anything. Or at least nobody said anything or gave us any weird looks. Not even Alex seemed to suspect a thing. He just showed up excitedly for our morning walks every day, always expecting me in my bunk.

I couldn’t believe I was saying it, but it was quite a difficult and tiring secret to keep up. Staying up late with Jack just to have to leave before I fell asleep only to have to wake up early-ish in the morning for Alex? Exhausting.

But I was having fun. I was still forever grateful that Alex had made the decision to let me come with him. Even if I was alone for a little while. There were no pressures on me here. I got to do anything I wanted. Rather than jobs being piled on jobs, I now had to actively seek if I could help out anywhere. It was absolutely magnificent.

I was wandering around the backstage area of the arena for the night while world famous rock stars All Time Low were busy doing a whole list of different interviews. You’d be surprised how many interesting things you can find in the deep dark crevices of arenas. Or they were just plain boring. There really wasn’t much of an in between.

I was walking through a hallway and past one of the dressing rooms when my name was called out. “Aerowyn!”

Without thinking twice, I turned around and entered the room, looking up to see Mark Hoppus staring right back at me. It seemed like I had just randomly and rudely walked in. “I’m sorry, I thought I heard my name.”

“Aerowyn,” he repeated.

I shook my head, realising just how big my mistake had been. I tried to act oblivious, like he was saying a word that I didn’t know. “I’m sorry, what?

“You might have been able to fool the others, but you can’t fool me,” he laughed lightly and warmly.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I continued to try and play it off.

If my identity came out, things could go horribly wrong. Maybe not necessarily in the circle of the bands on tour. But it was bound to get out. And if my behaviour or drinking and casually sleeping with Jack came out, it would be a scandal. They were pretty chill in Dalewin, but that didn’t mean everything was suddenly acceptable.

“Oh, come on, I’m not an idiot!” Mark rebutted. “A quick google search into Dalewin was all I needed. I hear about a country I never knew existed, I take time to learn about it.”

He pulled out his phone from his back pocket and tapped a few times on the screen before handing it to me. I looked down at it in my hands and saw a photo of ‘The Royal Family of The Kingdom of Dalewin’. It was a relatively old picture. I was about 16 and looked a lot younger. It was taken for my grandfather’s birthday that year. There was also a picture of the entire family, but this one was just my grandpa, my parents, Gus-Gus, and me. I was wearing some light pink dress that I could still remember to this day. My mom had refused to let me wear it, but my grandpa somehow managed to change her mind. Everybody else was wearing much more sophisticated colours.

I shrugged and went to give the phone back. “I look a bit like her, but that isn’t me.”

“Swipe to the next photo.”

I did as instructed and went to the next photo he had prepared for me. It was one of the photos taken for my dad’s coronation. Specifically one that consisted of just me and Augustus. I couldn’t even try to hide behind the fact that it just looked like me. This was a close up of us. Even the birthmark on my neck was visible.

“Okay…” I nodded. I couldn’t deny it anymore. “That is me.”

“Pretty foolproof cover,” he chuckled as I defeatedly handed his phone back.

“Well, usually it works better when I’m just Matilde George from New York with a funny accent, not Matilde from Dalewin.”

“So hiding your identity is a common occurrence, then?”

“Only when I’m in New York,” I explained and looked behind me when I heard footsteps, but it was just somebody walking past. “It makes studying there just a little easier. Nobody constantly reporting on my every move, or hoping to blackmail me.”

“You seem pretty serious about keeping it a secret.” He frowned, also briefly glancing at the door.

“If Alex were to know that you knew, he’d start forcing me to act normal again.” I sighed and tugged on my hair. “I was hoping to get away from that.”

“Normal?” He raised an eyebrow at me in amusement. “You mean to tell me you don’t usually chug beer after beer?”

“Art student Matilde does, Princess Aerowyn does not.”

“I’m assuming Aerowyn also can’t have that thing going on with Jack and Alex.”

“Thing going on?” I questioned with confusion.

“Don’t act oblivious again.”

“I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about,” I laughed awkwardly.

I didn’t consider whatever I was doing with Jack a ‘thing’. A ‘thing’ sounded way more serious. Jack and I were only having sex when it suited us, nothing else. And Alex? There definitely wasn’t anything going on there. He was one of the only good friends I had made as Aerowyn in ages. All my friends back in New York loved fun Matilde, not responsible Aerowyn.

“Alright… if you say so.” Mark gave me a very suspicious look.

Before I could assure him there was really nothing going on, Alex came rushing into the room.

“There you are! I’ve been looking all over the place for you!!” He exclaimed in relief, coming up behind me.

I looked at Mark with a hint of fear. He had the power in his hands. With just a word, he could ruin it all. Usually, my fate didn’t depend on one person so much. I was very used to having at least a little control. People did help me make choices, and I often did follow them, but I did always have the last word. Unless it was towards my parents or higher ranking royals, of course.

“Matilde and I were just discussing gardening tips with each other,” Mark quickly made up.

“Gardening tips?” Alex looked as puzzled as I tried to be earlier.

“Yep, you know, since she works with horses and stuff…”

“Ah! Right, yes.” He nodded in understanding before directing his next part to me. “I was going to go out for coffee and you’re coming with me!”

“I’m coming with you?” I challenged.

“Yeah, live a little,” he scoffed and pulled on my arm to drag me out of the room.

I made eye contact with Mark one more time and mouthed a ‘thank you’ to him. He responded with a wink and a smile as Alex continued to force me to join him.

[archieimagines]

Family Don’t End With Blood | Dean Winchester Series | Part 1

I’ve had this idea for a series for a while and decided to try to write it! Reader is the child of Dean Winchester and one of his many one nightstands. But what happens when her mother is mysteriously killed at the hand of angels? And will the reader let the Winchesters into her heart?

word count: 1999 words. warnings: violence, mental illness (schizophrenia, ADHD, dyslexia), swearing, angst, blood and gore.

enjoy ;)

You never knew your father, mom had always said that it was a one night stand. He was apparently some FBI agent that had stopped in town for a case, and he and your mom met at the local bar and later that night you were conceived. He didn’t even know you existed, you thought that had to be better than him knowing and wanting nothing to do with you.

But it would have been nice to have help to look after your mom. She had never been quite ‘there’, she was always going about how she could hear the voices and would sometimes look at you say you weren’t her daughter. Which was impossible because you looked exactly like her except you had vibrant green eyes and were almost 6’0, that you had apparently inherited from your father. When you were 11 she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic after she had screamed in the middle of a dinner how the ‘voices’ were looking for her. Not long after that, you were diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia, so not only were you making sure she was getting her treatments, you had to look after yourself. Which meant you practically raised yourself, by the time you were 17 you dropped out of high school, taking an online course so you were closer to your mother.

That was a year ago today. You were currently working at the diner just on the outskirts of the small town you had lived in your whole life. It wasn’t the best job, but it was the best you could do for the time being. Unbeknownst to you, this was the day your life would change forever, for better or for worse.

BEEP, BEEP, BEEP

You groaned while turning over in your bed to shut off the alarm you had set the night before. Sitting up, you stretched out your arms and yawned. The sound of pots and pans clanging alerted to you that mom was awake. Jumping out of bed, you quickly got dressed in the tight uniform of the diner, pulling at the top so your cleavage wasn’t spilling out. You tied up your hair, grabbed your phone and car keys before exiting the room.

You entered the kitchen, your mom’s back was turned away from you as she washed the dishes from last night’s dinner. She said nothing, focusing completely on the current task. You walked to the island bench and pulled out your and your mother’s prescription boxes.

“Mom, have you taken your meds?” You inquired looking at the box, she didn’t reply which told you she hadn’t. You popped out two capsules and grabbed the orange juice and poured it into a tall glass.  “Here,” you said, practically shoving the glass and meds in her face. She grunted, drying her hands off with a tea towel before taking them from you.

“When are you getting home?” She asked quietly, pulling gently at her dressing gown.

“Around 11 tonight,” you answered swallowing your own medicine, coughing a bit after.

“You have to be home earlier than that,” she demanded, her eyes squeezed shut.

“Well, that’s when my shift finishes, not a lot I can do.”

“I can’t be alone! They’re going to find me!” She shouted, bringing her fist against her chest. You straightened your posture and held out your hands warily.

“No one’s coming for you, mom. It’s just the schizophrenia talking,” you tried to soothe.

“I’m not sick! They came once when I was pregnant, and they’re going to come back. Please, you can’t let them take me!” She screamed, grabbing onto you hard enough to leave bruises. You grimaced, but didn’t push her away, instead pulling her into a bone-crushing hug and resting your chin on her head as she cried into your chest.

“You’re fine, shh. I’m here, mom. You’re okay,” you whispered on a loop, for almost ten minutes until she calmed down. You sat her down onto one of the dining room chairs, before grabbing a glass of water. “I’ll try to get home earlier, okay?” She nodded silently and squeezed your hand.

You left soon after that, stopping at your next door neighbours. They were a lovely elderly couple, who always kept an eye on your mother while you were at work. You told them about her episode and instructed them to call you if anything else happened. Then rushed over to your red 1970 Pontiac GTO, turning on the ignition and speeding to the diner, seeing you were 15 minutes late for work.

You turned off the engine and ran inside, huffing and puffing, receiving a few odd glances from the customers. You walked behind the counter and to the staff room to see your card had already been punched in. You smiled realising that your best friend Rachel had done it to save your ass… again. Sighing, you grabbed an apron and tied it around your waist.

You went out front, bumping waists with Rachel, who was refilling the ketchup and mustard bottles. She laughed, but stopped when she saw past your happy facade and instead the worry in your eyes. Not even having to ask what happened she hugged you tightly, letting you know that she was here for you.

“Would you two stop hugging and get to work!” Your boss shouted from the kitchen his thick Irish accent making it almost impossible for anyone but the two of you to understand him.

“Fine, Sean!” You both called out in response while rolling your eyes. The day progressed like normal, the same people that always came in did just that. Some people passing through stopped to try some of the famous pie Sean made every day. The only odd thing about the day was the news. Reports of strange murders all around the area, people who had no interaction with the other victims were found with their eyes burned out of their heads. It was worrying at one point a police officer came onto the tv to assure everyone everything was going to be all right. But for some reason you felt like something terrible was going to happen. And all the stress was giving you a killer headache. It felt like your head was about to split right open, like someone was trying to get inside your mind, even. You shook that thought, chuckling at how stupid you were being.

Sean let you off early due to the headache, wishing you a good night. You said bye to Rachel, before jumping into your car and headed home. But stopping at the convenience store, grabbing a bag of M&Ms for you and mom to share if she wasn’t already in bed.

Your heart froze when you pulled up at your driveway. The door of your small home was wide open, practically hanging off its hinges. You launched yourself out of the car, leaving the engine running as your tore inside the house. Several vases and fine china were smashed on the floor.

“Mom! MOM!” You screamed, panic rising in your chest, you checked the whole house. It was a wreck, photos, glass, paper were all strewn over the ground. Several pieces of furniture were turned upside down. By the time you reached the kitchen, tears were gushing down your face, which only increased at the sight you saw.

Your mother was atop the bench, cuts all over her body, blood seeping out a multitude of them, but the most horrific sight was the two gaping holes in her head where her eyes used to be. You screamed as your heart broke. You climbed onto the bench and pulled her head against your chest.

“Please, please don’t. Mommy. Don’t leave, I can’t do this without you.” You cried until the police came storming into your house after they had gotten several calls saying they heard screaming from your house. They had to tear you away from your mother so the morgue could take her and so they could question you. Not to long after that, Rachel came thundering in, wrapping you up in her arms. Her own tears soaking your shoulder, but you couldn’t cry anymore, you felt nothing. You were only a shell of a person without your mom, you weren’t a full person. Rachel stayed with you the rest of the night, not once leaving your side. You sat in the living room, clutching onto an old picture of you and your mother. It was just after you were born, you were wrapped up in your mother’s arms, she was smiling softly at the camera while your grandfather sat next to her, arms around her shoulders. You realised at that point, you had no family, your grand parents had been dead for years and you had no uncles or aunts and your father was complete mystery.

Well, until Rachel came down with small photo clasped in her hands. She had been going through your mothers things, so you didn’t have to. She placed it in your hands, your eyes scrunching up in disbelief. It was a photo of your father, he and your mother were sitting close together in a booth, beers in hand. You saw the similarities between him and yourself, the eyes being the most obvious, they were identical. But now you saw you actually had the same shaped lips, nose and shade of hair. Looking at your mother, you were shocked at how different she looked. She looked a lot younger, no bags under her eyes from sleepless nights. Eyes bright and aware instead of glassy and far away, and no age lines whatsoever.

You wanted to rip the picture apart as well as keep it by your heart forever. Your heart fighting with itself, one side wanted it destroyed because it reminded you that your mother was gone and how hard of life she had ended up having. While the other wanted to keep it because it gave you an idea of what she was like before everything had gone downhill. The fact your father was in it made no difference for you.

Your thoughts were cut off by a knock at the door, you stood up, and held on to the memory of your mother tightly. At the door were two men dressed in suits, one was facing you and the other was turned away and talking on the phone. The taller of the two introduced himself as Agent Perry and his partner was Agent Springsteen. He said he was from the FBI, which you had a hard time believing because of his ridiculously long hair. He started to explain to you that he thought your mother’s death was somehow linked to the string of murders happening all over the country, while he surveyed the house. You heard a curse from behind you, causing you to turn around.

In front of you was the man from the picture in your hand. Your estranged father, who up until today you had honestly thought you’d never meet, was standing before you. He stared back at you in shock, obviously recognising himself in you.

“Do I know y—?” He started warily, but you cut him off with your fist that wasn’t holding the picture, hitting him square in the face. A rage you had never felt before bubbled inside you, it was coursing through your veins and made you feel alive. He recoiled, shouting in pain, his partner turned around preparing to draw his gun. Your father looked up at you, eyes full of confusion and anger.

“Hi asshole, I’m your kid.,” you introduced yourself sarcastically, holding your hand which you were certain that you’d just sprained. Both your father and his partner froze in shock while Rachel came out to ask what was going on. Only to freeze when she saw you apparent father on the ground, you cradling your injured hand and a giant with some long ass hair reaching for his gun in your entryway.

written by: spaz

[thotyssey]

On Point With: Mocha Lite

As most people who have followed NYC drag in the past decade can attest, here is one of the city’s most talented and provocative queens. Whether she’s giving you a crushing ballad or a smashing series of high energy dance moves, she is always--fascinatingly--equal parts drama and kiki. Brooklyn Pride is happy to have her this year, and Thotyssey is happy to get her for this (long overdue) minute!

Thotyssey: Miss Mocha, hello! Thanks for chatting today, how are you doing?

Mocha Lite: Hello! Doing better... very well, actually.

Glad to hear it! It’s a beautiful day, but we’re almost to the point of Unbearable Drag Weather! Will that be a bad situation for you, or is it easy to handle at this point?

Haha! It's definitely not easy--I lost an eyebrow just last night. Every summer I do my share of complaining, but I remember somehow that I survived last summer... so I power through.

[Photo: Katelyn Baron]

How long have you been a working queen in New York City?

Just under ten years, I believe.

Here is a wonderfully vague and broad question: what is the key to longevity in this business, when most queens kind of disappear after two or three years?

I can't say I know, exactly. But I'd say, first you have to want it... and want it even when it hurts. I've been through many phases, but nothing is more successful for me than focusing on my strengths. That, and I just having an inborn love for the stage. It's kind of all I know!

And few can do it better. So you are an exquisite, multiracial native Long Islander. Were dancing, performing, fashion etc. also always part of your identity?

I’ve been performing as long as I can remember: community theater and the arts are always where all my passion has gone. Drag is really a great way to do it all.

A lot of times when I see you on the stage, it really does look like you are acting out the lyrics and / or playing characters. Does your headspace go into another realm when you're performing?

Well, I guess! It's the most fun part of drag for me-- besides making people smile. Allowing myself permission to commit one hundred percent to a feeling onstage in front of a group of strangers is [intoxicating] and thrilling. So sometimes I do need to really disappear, as it were. It really does depend on the nature of the the number, really.

You and Misty Meaner have been partners on and off stage for quite some time. Was it a situation where one of you discovered drag first and the other was like, "I wanna do this too?”

Haha, absolutely not! We both had an interest in the art form--getting to see amazing queens on Fire Island is where we started to see that there is, in fact, a world that took it seriously. And we really wanted to be a part of it. We definitely began together, and grew together.

Where were some of the venues you two started performing in?

Around that time, I did a lot of going out just to be notified--as is the beginning of most drag adventures. But I had some great opportunities at The Ice Palace, with Logan Hardcore and Ariel Sinclair. Also, some great places around Long Island that aren't around anymore, before I moved to Brooklyn.

You and Misty were basically there in Brooklyn from the beginning. What was going on in that scene when you two first started doing shows there?

Not a whole lot, to be honest. I was working mostly in Hell’s Kitchen when I first came out here. Sugarland and Metropolitan were the the most popular watering holes at the time... but Sugarland is where I really got to watch the beginnings of the crazy scene we know today.

The drag landscape that came out of ther was a little less polished then what was happening in Manhattan, a lot more “anything goes” and art-driven. Did you find yourself more comfortable in Brooklyn than in the more Broadway-influenced HK scene?

Nope, I'm comfortable anywhere there's a stage. I mean, there are some obvious differences between the drag of Brooklyn and Manhattan, but there are even bigger differences between me and some of my fellow BK girls. We are all different! That's only one of the coolest things about drag.

“Misty and Mocha” were basically the only drag couple in the city for a while, and that was considered really odd and novel to a lot of people at the time. But since then, drag couples have become much more common. Wouldn't it seem obvious that the best person to understand what it’s like to live a drag queen life is another drag queen?

To me, that does seem obvious. And I would say it's definitely a plus, having someone who gets how hard it can be. We've been together for a long time, and like any relationship issues exist. Drag has never been one of them.

Misty has a drag child now, Sassy Frass Meaner! And Princess Bitch can be considered your own drag daughter. What's the best way to be a drag parent? Princess is of my coven, a sister witch--also Lilith LeFae, and Catrina Lovelace. The idea of drag parenting is daunting to me; that kind of pressure makes me nervous. I would say guidance is definitely golden with drag, though. I've had a lot of very incredible queens teach me some really incredible things. The best way to be a drag parent, I'd say, is just to be friends, really--share information, and do your best to help each other.

Besides Lovegun, TNT was another major hub of BK nighltife where you had shows that has since closed. Do you miss those two spots, or is it more like "that's the past, time to move on?"

Any queer space shutting down will always make me sad, and I'll miss them both. TNT was definitely a very special place for me, and many others, I loved that place, and kicked ass on that stage for a few years.

And then there was Boots & Saddle. You and Misty had a long-running show there, then parted with the venue on bad terms, but ultimately mended fences with the owner. You even resumed doing a show there for those last few months before Boots abruptly closed. Would you go back there to do a gig when the place reopens under a new name and management, if that opportunity presents itself?

Sure, why not--if they'd want us! Although a lot of people lost jobs when they closed. I'd have no problem getting in the back of the line, so to speak.

Y'all are very busy now with gigs as it is. On Tuesdays and Fridays you give shows at Macri Park in Brooklyn. Do you usually have the same crowds on both nights, or are they two very different cultures?

The shows differ in style, and structure. Like you said earlier, Sassy Frass Meaner is Misty's daughter, so she is very often with us [on Tuesdays, along with] the incredible Devo Monique. But I love meeting new queens, and having them at either show.

Queerpong at Phoenix on Thursdays is your longest running gig now.

Yes Queerpong has been with us for five drunken years--it's amazing, I can barely believe it! We started the party because where we are from on Long Island, beer pong is a standard--but often hetero-dominated--[game]. So we just wanted a very gay twist on the whole vibe, and it's been so great. 

 And have you and Misty ever played against each other?

Many times. She often wins, she's really good!

This season, you're also hosting a RuPaul’s Drag Race viewing party right before Queerpong. So... I guess Eureka's gonna win this thing, right?

Maybe! She's pretty hardcore. I'm definitely a fan of hers.

Regarding this whole “Azealia Banks versus RuPaul, versus Monet, versus all Drag Race, versus all gays” business: should we be purging Azealia from our music libraries even though ”Anna Wintour” is such a bop?

I mean, who knows? If you want to go that far, that's fine I guess. Think of it this way: I'm not sure we'd love a lot of artists the way we do today if social media were even a decade older than it is. We have, in ways, lost track of how to pick battles. 

That being said, I perform a lot of Banks. I expect to hear things from people, but I don't really care. I perform Biggie Smalls too, but they throw dollars at his sexist and violent lyrics, and at me, for years (to clarify, I'm not comparing their work).  I'm just saying, beloved artists sometimes say and do wild things. It's up to you to discern what's really worth your time.

On a Lite-r note (gag), you and Misty recently started hosting a Saturday night party at the Boiler Room in the East Village. You're probably the first queens to do a show in that neighborhood bar in, well, maybe ever? How's that going?

It's fun! The staff is so nice. But it's still the beginning, and we're just getting to know the crowd... but so far I love it!

And this is cool: you will be performing as a solo act for the Brooklyn Ball  at Littlefield on Brooklyn Pride Saturday, June 9th! It has a cute theme: the “strawberry social” from To Wong Foo. How do you think that's gonna go?

I had a rehearsal today, and I'm getting things here and there together. I'm feeling confident it's going to be really fun!

Congratulations on you and Misty being nominated again for Nightlife Legend Hall of Fame at the Brooklyn Nightlife Awards! This has gotta be your year, right?

Yes! Fingers crossed! Thank you very, very much. It's exciting to be nominated, and I'm even more excited to pick out what to wear!  It's going to be a crazy weekend.

What else is on the horizon for you?

Well our Pride party at The Boiler Room is coming up! All my events this month are gonna be great--I mean, it's PRIDE!

Happy Pride! Okay, last question: since you and Misty have basically done them all (well, probably not Christina and Demi's “Fall In Line” yet, but will anyone?)... what is the best drag duet lip sync number to do?

I’d have to say in the spirit of Pride, “Happy Days / Get Happy” by Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland. It's a perfect syncopation of positively-motivated, pleasant sounds, arranged in a way that is fun to learn and perform and guaranteed to please!

My troubles are forgotten! Thanks, Mocha!

Mocha Lite co-hosts shows with Misty Meaner at Macri Park (Tuesdays and Fridays, 11pm), Phoenix Bar (Thursdays, 10pm) and the Boiler Room (Saturdays, midnight). Check Thotyssey’s calendar for Mocha’s full schedule of upcoming gigs, and follow her on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

On Point Archives

[experimentsinsimultaneoustime]

[the essay] A rose is not a rose is not a rose is not a rose is a rose

Online, everything (every thought, action, object) is abstracted into language in order for it to exist.

The gap between a rose online and a rose IRL is big. At a basic level, the online rose is no longer in a garden, cared for, watered, subjected to the wind and the sun, rooted, dying. It no longer represents the blight of colonised land under the guise of exquisite beauty. This online rose, which we still call a rose, exists differently. This rose is floating in an absurdist multidimension. There is no residual association of smell or touch. Its context endlessly warps, its meaning endlessly shifts as people scroll past it. It multiplies to become stitched between photos of dogs, drunken nights out, holiday snaps, promotional selfies, sports highlights, amateur food photography, photos of art, individualised political outcries, inspirational encouragements, life achievements, a beer can in a gutter. Its value becomes contingent upon a heat map of relational engagement: views, likes, comments, shares. But even though the online rose loses heat – is quickly forgotten – it doesn’t die. It doesn’t decompose and get turned into some other energy-matter. It simply becomes lost, or archived, in an algorithmic soup of infinity, floating in the liminal space between existence and non-existence.

 In this way, the IRL rose and the online rose have become completely different things. The meaning of the word ‘rose’ has been stretched to encompass a whole new set of relations, contingent on the inherent political structure of a global network (the internet) where information (language) defines currency (value). Eventually, the online rose has nothing to do with the original meaning of the word rose. In fact, the constant shapeshifting of the online rose’s relational environment means its own meaning is constantly deferred, until it doesn’t even have anything to do with itself anymore. It just refers to other things, which in turn just refer to other things, until we are nowhere.

 And because the internet is an ideological triumph of planetary capitalism, the meaning of everything online is at the mercy of (mostly) straight, white, male coders. They are the invisible power brokers of the abstraction of language into flows of information, where value is perpetually postponed in order to keep you wanting, and beauty is a mirage you hope you can click yourself towards. The rose is now unattainable.

 On 3 July, 2016 @britneyspears regrammed a photo of a white-pink rose from @drewbarrymore’s Instagram. Britney’s post, uncaptioned, received 74,921 likes and 539 comments. Perfect. Perfection. Britney… That was amazing. Thank you so much. Wooww. Lovee. Love it. I hate flowers. Wonderful! I love you. Omg. Any news on the new single? Pretty rose. That’s gorgeous. Wow. Lmao but wow. Pretty just like you Britney. Remember when u shaved your head? A beautiful rose for a beautiful woman.

 @drewbarrymore’s original photo of the rose, posted over a year earlier on 2 May 2015, was captioned #tgif and garnered 49,462 likes and 265 comments. Pretty flower!! Beautiful! :) That’s pretty. Ty for the very nice photos. Have a blessed weekend. O M G. I love flowers, thxs for sharing @drewbarrymore. Stay happy, healthy and blessed. Looks like it smells soooo good. Beautiful! Lovely. Love. Amazing!! So purty. I love you. I love u. Wow how beautiful that rose is!

 The rose has become a stand-in, a proxy, a conduit for understanding a series of personal histories, relational maps, unexpressed emotional states and ultimately, obsessive longing. This photograph has left its garden original to die in the dirt. It has travelled globally, transmuting to represent Drew Barrymore’s position in the market as a real person who “gets it”, as well as a symbol to express thanks to God that the working week has ended, as well as setting a relational connection between Drew Barrymore and Britney Spears, where siloed fanworlds have momentarily crossed wires as Britney’s identity transcends crazed LA celebrity to arrive at wholesome mother via the image of the rose.

 This essay itself is not about roses. It’s about the deferral of meaning, it’s about the alienating experience of objects being out of place. How can we bypass the capitalist architecture of the endless scroll, the trauma of language distancing meaning from lived experience?

 The reason deferral happens is not so much because language is inherently abstract, as because we’re experiencing this process through a dominant paradigm that prescribes lived experience as a linear timescale. How can we sit in a simultaneous multiplicity of meanings that produce value in the present moment? How can we arrange ourselves for eternal gratification?

 It’s not ordinarily possible to know about, or have the capacity to feel things, that have happened or are going to happen, outside of the present moment in which they are actually happening.

 But there are fissures in this world, that allow us to bypass the laws of our own brains, to hack logic and enter into feeling, or rather, to turn feeling into logic so that they are the same.

 Memory, belief, imagination, acid, ghosts, dreams, dancing, de ja vou and sex are just some states that invoke simultaneous time.

 I could feel us fucking for days before it happened, and for days after. The actual lived moment of physical impact was so intense, as if it were all of the echoes of before and after combined, I cried and hid my tears. Even though now, I’m walking down the street, I’m eating ramen, I’m sitting at my computer, I’m talking to a friend, it still feels like part of me is fucking you / being fucked by you. In a queer mind all love is happening simultaneously.

 Simultaneous time makes the rose attainable again, without denying its mutability. It validates the way we love each other beyond the impossibility of our present set of circumstances, and how that experience is not deferred but embodied. Simultaneous time doesn’t erase the past and the future, or the potential and unlived versions of it, but rather suggests that everything is in a constant state of happening. You can tap in and feel / know any part of it at any time. It can be intensely happy and it can be intensely sad and it can be both / all at once.

 I’m in a state of exhaustion but I can’t sleep. In my pre-dream mind, I’m kissing you outside that Italian restaurant where we both ordered lasagnes and watermelon granitas at the bar before I gave you a deck of tarot cards that I ordered online, even though I don’t believe in tarot cards, which I wrapped so neatly in paper from my notebook, and watched you unwrap so carefully, and felt kind of self-conscious as you unwrapped it, because I didn’t know how you felt about anything, because you hadn’t told me, though I would find out later via text message that your ex-boyfriend wants you back. In my pre-dream mind, I’m imagining the kiss that I pre-meditated and then didn’t act on when you actually arrived. I feel both the absence and presence of that kiss as I run my phone battery flat listening to rain sounds on YouTube, eyes closed, simulating the conditions for sleep.

 It’s impossible to describe this relationship because it exists almost entirely in a state of deferral, of ambiguous instant messages and deep longing and overlapping timescales we can’t extricate ourselves from to just be together, even though we share an intense reality of the possibility. And because it’s impossible to describe, it’s impossible to locate, and so it tends to exist wherever it can, in moments where it shouldn’t. Simultaneous time recognises that love is non-linear.

 I can feel your hips trembling around me that night my flight was cancelled, and it makes my heart cramp with hurt.

 If Britney Spears is the ultimate embodiment of the split between object and meaning in a linear capitalist framework of pleasure deferral, simultaneous time returns her to herself, and to her fans. It validates her incoherence, and it validates the fanatics’ fantasy as an embodied reality that manifests as feeling and identity.

 We’re back out on the street after the sweat catharsis of a 25-and-a-half-hour rave that we experienced for four hours, not touching. You’re wearing a pink bucket hat and the air is cold and you’re tired and we talk seriously about Big Life Decisions and whether he should be the one to love you. It’s really bad timing, you apologise.

 At the tram stop, back in singular time, where I have to wait for 9 linear, non-cosmic minutes, a seagull eats the crumbs of my chilli flavoured chips and I wonder if that’s bad.

[thepeakmoment]

More Peaks Returns

It appears to me that Lynch is inserting some heavy commentary about societal behavior, the most obvious being the “fix your hearts or die” assertion about Denise Bryson’s transition. Another clear instance is the decay of social norms exemplified by the elaborate unfolding drug storyline. Several characters are being depicted wheeling and using drugs, and Lynch-Frost are telling an updated version in P5 of the illicit activity, how it has already effected Shelly’s daughter and husband, a continuing cycle of abuse and dysfunction still playing out.

I also believe Sherrif Frank Truman is a personification of Lynch’s transcendental meditation wisdom. Harry Truman’s brother is an honest character and to be trusted absolutely as a transparent truth teller. His name is the very meaning of honest, open, direct — Frank. His earnestness is exemplified when Doris Truman shows up at station spouting domestic house anxieties while Truman remains sitting, saying nothing at all throughout. It reads like a subtle teaching of how not to respond to anxious energy, worry and dis-ease — do not engage with it. This is classic buddhism — how everything arises from conditions, has a presence in the moment, then decays when conditions change — thus, everything changes, no reason to get wrapped in unnecessary entanglements, including the wrath of someone overreacting to common occurrence. See impermanence.

A Twin Peaks Podcast: A Podcast About Twin Peaks and Deer Meadow Radio are two of the better podcasts on The Return worthy of listening.

Random

Richard Horne — is this the first clue from ?????’s prophetic clues, “Watch for Richard… and Lynda.”

Richard Horne passes bribe money in a pack of Morley cigarettes… the brand of choice for Cigarette Smoking Man.

Salesman asking Lucy at desk for Sheriff Truman, Lucy asks which one? An in-joke allusion to another Sheriff Truman duality, Harry-Frank.

There was a bonsai plant on side table next to Sam sitting on couch in P1, which was also featured in original series’ S2 Windom Earle arch.

Marjorie Green carries her dog, Armstrong, a small Mexican Chihuahua.

Here’s a good article on the absence of Badalamenti music thus far in The Return. 

No white dot in Bob Cooper's pupil/eye — life-less .

End of P4 before Bang Bang Bar is blue rose scene… shot in blue tint

Owl cookie jar on counter behind Dougie Cooper during breakfast 

A lot of Lynch visuals hearkens to Eraserhead, coming full circle in his cinematic journey of a master’s craft.

On Jun 4, 2017, at 9:59 AM, Dom wrote: I think I made a nice discovery which I posted on Reddit (Fred_Truax).

I cannot find Fred[undescore]Truax in any reddit search — author:Fred_Truax yields nothing. I’m not a Reddit reader, the whole thing is a fuck show of multi-threaded comments. It hurts my brain to go there. I can tolerate direct links, though.…

Reading Best Fan Theories at Indiewire, one theory suggests Wally Brando is really dead (source: Reddit /u/chblank), that “Lucy and Andy [are] in denial and shock … of losing her only son as a child.… Sheriff [Frank] Truman may have hired an actor to play their son — a role that fake Wally took literally, considering his “The Wild One” getup and bad “Godfather” impersonation. This could also explain why Wally Brando makes a point of telling his parents that they can convert his childhood bedroom into a study, as a way to help them move on and let go of the past.”

Same article posits that the headless body in the librarian’s apartment belongs to Major Briggs (source: Reddit /u/billy_yllib11). “Although the decapitated head belongs to the dead woman, there is a grotesquely contorted body detached underneath, one that comes from an unknown person. Later, we learn the forensics team has a match on the body, but they need military clearance to unlock its identity. Perhaps the kind of clearance that Major Briggs once had when he was working on top secret projects for the government? Of course, if the decapitated body does in fact belong to Major Briggs, it would also contextualize the appearance of his disembodied head, which floated in space at the beginning of [P3].” …But how does Dougie Cooper’s ring get in stomach?

I also noticed something strange about those two scenes:

In episode one when Sam leaves the Glass Box room the second time to go into the lobby to see Tracey (and the security guard is NOT there) he leaves the small black box of video cards on the step ladder near one of the cameras. The black box remains on the step ladder for the entire scene almost. The box disappears for a moment when they start to take off their clothes, then is back on the step ladder right before they are attacked.

However in episode 2 when Cooper enters the Glass Box and we think Sam is in the Lobby with Tracey, you can clearly see the black box of video cards and his pen on the side table next to the small couch he sits on.

Did Cooper enter this room at a different time they what it appears to be? Is Cooper in a second identical room? I just think its weird the black box is in two different locations in what appears to be the same time?

What do you guys think?

I’m beginning to understand these time shifts as backward dimension bleeding into forward dimension. BOB Cooper begins “‘yrev' very good to see you again old friend” to Gordon Cole when they first see each other again (P4). Relatedly, there’s fervent speculation that Sonny Jim blinks backwards while in back seat of car when Dougie Cooper notices Sonny and sheds a tear (P5).

Backward-forward are the two directions in which one can enter-exit the Black Lodge, shown to us in Classic Peaks and FWWM. Now we’re seeing vertical up-down direction to enter into-exit out of the Lodge, exhibited by the sudden vertical floor vibration as the Arm's doppelgänger appears and Cooper falls down through floor. Or Laura pulled up off the floor screaming into oblivion, as well as  the ghostly pirate-like figure in a jail cell floating up into thin air.

Backwards is a reality dimension different from forward (as normal) dimension. P3 glitchy quick backward-forward movement when Cooper lands into hub in space and interacts with eyes sown shut woman, a reality between the two dimensions (?), existing on the threshold — Dweller on the Threshold?

This new movement is depicted in the opening title sequence when the wavy-flowing red curtains cross fade to chevron pattern panning across floor, seemingly tracking the camera in a circle. I love the new title sequence opening drone shot over the falls, hangs on waterfall from above, dissolves to a slight CU of waterfall spray, then segues to the rhythmic curtains — an abstract version of the classic series opening dissolves from the waterfalls to a flowing river.

I am also convinced that Laura is going to leave the Black Lodge somehow and venture into the real world.

On Jun 4, 2017, at 3:01 PM, Erik wrote: Dom, did you see the Tweet I sent your way? with the info that the Casino Cooper goes to in Vegas was actually filmed in Commerce, CA. (they have actual casinos there) about 35 miles from my house. judge for yourself...

<PHOTO>

Dudes, when we finally graduate from trekking back to Peaks (WA), we have to eat at The Roadhouse Restaurant & Inn. Can’t believe we overlooked this. We’ve done the original Mar-T Cafe (plus the deplorably named and renovated Twede’s) and Fall City Grill (Haps Diner), we gotta do the Roudhouse, regardless if it’s only the exterior.

It will be interesting to see if the green revolving doors that Cooper has trouble with are actually here as well. So I guess we know where you might stay next time you come out here to Pin Peaks Locations. I thought it would even be fun to get a room and watch the season finale there, then go down to the gaming floor and "Helllloooooo!"

As far as the actual plot...

I have come upon no clues or conclusions at all. It is very dense material. What little I have read online is complex and sometimes implausable, but who am I to say?   I like the scene when Douggie is getting dressed and Sonny Boy … comes out and they make a lot of visual and action references to the Season 2 opening scene. What does it mean?  No clue.

In P4 Cooper is Home — Dougie Cooper says aloud, “Home.” This is symbolized as a birthday with balloons in the kitchen behind him. Similar balloon shapes appear when he is dropped off at outside of work building, when Cooper mimics statue pointing gun. I’m thinking Dougie is the character Lynch-Frost are using to teach the viewer how to assimilate and understand the Twin Peaks world view. From Dougie's point of view, he seems to know little or nothing about the world. He’s in process of making sense of it, and now that he's starting from home, we should follow along and we'll learn together. As viewers, we’re putting some faith in the storyline will resolve eventually, even if only in part. During the following scene when Gordon meets Denise Bryson in her office, she says, "I trust you Gordon." We should trust Lynch.… But how does this all jive with ??????’s “You are far from home”?

Gonna review a bit and start my edible regimen, no cherry pie this week, coffee and donuts YES. Last time, I cracked a beer when it started, had a full bowl next to the food. I did not touch either of them for 2 hours straight. Completely forgot about them actually. Totally engaged.   Only ate pie, donuts and coffee... I'll have messenger open at 5:30PM est standing by.

On Jun 7, 2017, at 4:38 PM, Dom wrote: So who do you think are Richard Horne's parents? Audrey and Cooper? Audrey and Jack? Ben and his wife? Jerry and some random chick?

Definitely not the son of Cooper and Audrey. Cooper’s been in the Lodge and he shot Audrey down at every turn before meeting Annie. The other possibilities are intriguing and any of them are plausible. Audrey and Jack — do you mean John Justice Wheeler? Richard Horne seems to be 25 years old and got hooked up with the wrong crowd, that’s easy to do these days. Ben and his wife? Maybe, they could have reconciled their stormy marriage. Ben does seem to have remained steadfast in earnest goodness since emerging from his civil war. Perhaps Richard Horne is Jerry's son that steals his father’s weed to sell. Or maybe Jerry is a big kahuna now in the drug trade? I doubt it. Regardless who the parents are, Richard is a Bobby Peru/Leo Johnson mutt that fits right into Lynch’s social commentary of prevalent drug use still running amok in the world.

Great to see Mike return too.

Would be cool if Mike and Bobby had a beer together at The Roadhouse, catch up a bit with each other — Bobby asking Mike, “Do you remember Laura Palmer?…” I wonder how Bobby will act around Shelly?

I also have another prediction;

The person Gordon wants to look at Cooper will be Diane play by Laura Dern. That's not much of a shock but...

Remember when Albert says he doesn't know where she lives, but knows where she drinks...

My prediction is that they will find Diane (Laura Dern) in that bar we went to in Los Angeles that night I arrived on my last visit. It has all of the nice woodwork and we had to walk down a flight of stairs to enter.

I have resisted right from the outset of Laura Dern cast as Diane. I don’t really want Diane’s identity to be revealed, would much rather have her remain anonymous on the other side of Cooper’s dictaphone. I know there’s speculation and makes sense that Diane will appear as Dern, but this way too obvious, especially after all Lynch has presented us thus far — even considering how close Dern is to Lynch. But still, I hope it isn’t so.…

I also find it weird that Agent Tammy Preston in episode 4 had to ask Albert who Phillip Jeffries is. She learned about his existence in the Secret history of Twin Peaks as she was the agent in charge of examining the dossier. She even added her own notes about him.

That is awesome about the Casino. Next time I come to Los Angeles, I am so game to go play some slots. HELLO  O  OOO OOOO!

[elfnerdherder]

Magnum Opus: Chapter 9

You can read on Ao3 Here

Chapter 9:

           Abigail wasn’t at school the next day, but Marissa assured him without looking up from her textbook that she and her father often took the train about to go and see potential universities. When Will went to thank her, her head ducked farther, although she peeked up at him when he sighed and looked away. It seemed that that bridge would take farther to cross, and that was perfectly fine with him.

           He used the library during study hall to apply to a few more jobs, tabs opened to as many as the school would allow. Some job links were blocked by the school codes, but he didn’t let that stop him. There were plenty that he could apply to, and it was only when he heard the hushed, secretive sounds of whispering that he even looked up from his work. He caught the eye of two poorly hidden students watching him, and he grimaced.

           “I’m pretty sure that’s him.”

           “Why don’t you go and ask him?”

           “Dumb ass, you don’t just go up and ask if it’s true his friend murdered someone!”

           “Ten bucks if you go and ask-”

           “You go and ask!”

           What had they called the newspaper? Tattle Crime? It wasn’t blocked by the school, and he clicked the link to the page, surprised when the photo of a murdered girl popped into view. He choked on his tongue and looked around, checking to make sure that someone wouldn’t pop up behind him to scold him. He scrolled past the photo and read the article, something about a girl disappearing the week before, then found back in her bed within a few days, dead. Antler velvet had been placed in wounds that looked like she’d been mounted somewhere. The words were colorful, the imagery grim, and he gave a start when he saw the name at the bottom. Freddie Lounds. The girl that chased him towards his truck at the funeral flashed into view, and he scowled. That’s who’d written about him?

           The next page held another article, though this one centered on a man that dressed as a clown to stalk people at night. After that, there was an interview with a man that claimed dissociative identity disorder who’d murdered ten families, then Will was startled when he stumbled upon a photo of himself at a rather familiar graveside.

           “What…?” he murmured, mouse hovering over the photo. He stood beside Jared Freeman’s father, and if he didn’t know better, he’d have sworn that he looked to be grieving. Did he truly look so haggard? Did his eyes really give the impression of a whipped dog? Will scratched the sparse stubble on his cheek, the sad attempts of an eighteen-year-old’s scruff, and he grunted. The suit didn’t look as dingy in the picture as it did in real life, and he was grateful.

           “I attempted to reach out to Jared Freeman’s close friend, Will Graham, but he wasn’t inclined to speak on the matter. He fended me off, tears in his eyes, and he begged that I just let the situation go.

           “Can’t you just let him rest in peace?” Will Graham asked.

           “We deserve to know the truth of the matter,” I said to him. “And we want to know if you knew anything about his attack on your teacher before he ever attacked her.”

           He refused to answer, and we’re left to wonder if there was any way that this could have been prevented. Was Will Graham aware of his friend’s motives before the shooting? Did no one notice the signs that led a seventeen-year-old boy to commit a heinous act of murder-homicide before the eyes of special needs students? The FBI agents that were at the scene of the crime refused to comment as well, but as we know they’re inclined to pretend that all is well when it’s, in fact, not. I intend to get to the bottom of this, readers, and see what can be done to prevent further horrific acts against good, innocent people.”

           Will read the portion mentioning him once, then twice. He stared at the part where it claimed that he’d had tears in his eyes, and he savagely exited from the browser, logging off of the computer, pulse pounding. He’d had a gut instinct to not talk to Freddie Lounds, and he’d been right. The gall –the absolute nerve! Without acknowledging the librarian who called out to him, he stormed from the school and hopped into his truck, driving home while he drummed his fingers along the steering wheel, trying to expel the fury that churned inside. Rain spat along his windowshield, and he jammed a napkin into the leak at the very bottom that sometimes let in water.

           His father wasn’t home –it was early, even by Will’s standards. He took the map he’d gotten from the Wolf Trap Art Center and took to the forest, needing to get rid of the energy building, his lungs hot and his muscles begging release. Will tore through the forest, leaping over fallen trees and slipping under low-hanging branches, delving farther and farther into the mess until he lost track of time, until time ceased to be anything more than an idea, and a faint one at that.

           He wasn’t sure when it felt right to stop –at some point, his body had had enough. Will leaned over, hands on his knees as he focused on inhaling deeply, holding, and exhaling, his face hot and his hair matted to his forehead. It felt nice, though. When he got his breath back, he stretched and looked around, the faint sound of rain above a gentle reminder of the elements outside of the canopy of hardwoods surrounding him. Within the woods, everything was muffled, a soft place to fall if one had the misfortune of stumbling.

           He found a stump and sat down on it, stretching his legs out and rubbing his calves that twitched occasionally from the exercise. By his guess, he was a few miles into the forest, out of touch of anything that could reach its greedy, grasping fingers to hurt him. Freddie Lounds didn’t exist in the forest. Jared Freeman didn’t exist in the forest. Miss Avery didn’t exist in the forest. Jack Crawford didn’t exist in the forest. He wiped sweat from his forehead and leaned against the trunk of the tree behind him, smiling savagely. Release felt nice. It was the closest to peace he’d felt since Jared Freeman had first walked into their classroom and revealed the gun he’d tucked into his jacket.

           Vines, moss, and dead leaves spread like a thick, welcoming blanket over the forest floor, and Will slid his shoe over it, wondering when blisters would begin to rub. Dockers weren’t the sort of shoes to run in, but they were all that he had. Maybe when he got a job he’d get proper hiking boots? Sometimes you could find those things at Good Will or Ross, if such a place existed in or around Wolf Trap. He nudged a stick, then kicked it, watching it turn end over end before it paused to lay still beside a hand.

           A hand.

           Will froze; his breath hitched, and he stared, sitting rod-straight on the stump as his eyes grabbed and held onto every detail, every curve. A series of tubes connected and led up towards the trees, but the hand appeared to have sprouted from the ground, at home among the foliage and small plants.

           “That’s not real,” he said, and he blinked pointedly, trying to dispel the image. He’d just looked at dead bodies, and Hannibal had shown him photos of dead bodies in the forest; it was the only reason he was seeing what he saw. It was no more real, no more tangible than Miss Avery in the park or Jared Freeman in his truck. He blinked again, but still it sat, fingers curled lazily, as though it couldn’t be bothered to make a fist to fight, to escape. Scattered along the ground around it, mushrooms sprouted into the shape of a lopsided rectangle, reaching. Grasping. Searching.

           That time, his running was out of fear.

-

           His father got home while Will sat on the edge of an ambulance, a blanket for shock wrapped tightly around him. Although Will tried to explain that it was unnecessary to have one, the paramedic asked Will to humor him, so he did. A light drizzle fell, a steady and wet sludge that added to the bleak atmosphere that clouded his thoughts and left everything smudged. His father pushed through the crowd of police, and he stopped before Will, smelling of beer, cigarettes, and wet dog.

           “What the hell happened?” he demanded.

           “It’s fine, dad, I-”

           “What did you do?” he snapped.

           “I didn’t do anything, I just-”

           “We just get to this town and I get home to find you surrounded by cops and an ambulance? I can’t leave you alone for five minutes without some shit hitting the fan?”

           “Sir, everything’s alright, and your son is unharmed. Do you want to take a walk with me?” An officer stepped over and glanced from Will to Bill, his question not exactly a question. Bill Graham jabbed a finger at Will, as if to say, ‘we’re not done,’ before he followed the officer, adjusting the ball cap he’d won in a poker game.

           “Will?” Will looked away from his father that paced before an officer, and dread filled his gut at the sight of Jack Crawford working his way through the crowd. The sun was just beginning to set over the trees in the distance, and a mantle of devilish orange and red sat on the agent’s shoulders.

           “Good evening, Agent Crawford,” Will said.

           “Why do I have a call from the police saying you found human remains in the woods back there?” he asked.

           “Because I found human remains in the woods back there,” Will said. His tongue tasted the dirt the hand had casually lounged in, and he gagged.

           “Why were you the one to find it?” he asked.

           “Because I went on a hike and that’s where it was,” Will said. He looked down to his shoes caked in mud, and he kicked a large chunk off on the bottom of the ambulance. When the paramedic turned the corner, he tossed the blanket off, stretching his aching muscles as he stood up.

           “You went on a five mile hike and found a hand?” Jack asked skeptically.

           “I didn’t know that I was five miles in,” Will said. Jack eyed him, and he sighed, stuffing his hands into his pockets, as if to prevent him from strangling Will.

           “What did you see?” he asked. Will nodded, a small weight lifting from him. He could do answers and questions, a mechanical repetition. Something like that was easy to manage.

           “I saw a hand sticking up from the ground, and I saw a series of tubes attached to it,” he said. “Growing over the place where I think the rest of the body is, fungi was everywhere.” He studied Jack’s face as he spoke, watching as the grave, angular expression shifted to recognition. Ah, so he knew of the study Hannibal had shown Will.

           “Was there only one?” Jack asked.

           “I only saw one, but I showed the police where it was, so they’d know better than I do.” He bit his lip, considering the ground beneath his worn feet. Should he tell Jack that he knew about the other case? Was there a correlation, or was this something new, something different? How had Hannibal gotten his hands on a current investigation? Why hadn’t he told Will that the man wasn’t caught?

           “Why you?” Jack murmured, but Will knew that it was a rhetorical question. Why indeed? It seemed the coincidences of coincidences, to move away from a murder just to stumble into a new one. Will wondered if he was cursed.

           “If…I can say, Agent Crawford,” Will began. Every inch of his brain screamed for him to stop, to resist speaking, but the sight of the hand in his mind’s eye drew the words from him, a siren’s song. “This is the same as the others, right?”

           “And how would you know about the others?” Crawford demanded. At that, Will floundered, gritting his teeth. How indeed?

           “Tattlecrime,” he said, and Jack cursed, not bothering to care that he was in the presence of a high schooler.

           “That god damn Freddie Lounds,” he snarled, and he pinched the bridge of his nose. Will nodded, relieved. As Hannibal said, the lie had to be a good one if you were going to tell it.

           “Do you think it’s the same?” Will asked.

           “From what I was told, yes,” Jack said reluctantly. “But that’s not important for you. You did a service, calling it in, but that’s as far as you go, kid.”

           “He’s looking for connection,” Will said, and Jack paused. The words fell from him, heavy and dark with implications, but he didn’t let that stop him. He thought of Jared Freeman, standing at the edge of the grave, nothing but the depths of the earth connecting him to Miss Avery. “He’s…he’s searching for that. Fungus, they have…mycelium, and when you enter the area they’re in, they know you are there. He grows it on them, and that’s how he can connect us all.”

           Jack Crawford stared down at Will, and Will felt naked. The man’s dark, probing eyes stripped everything that was him down to his core, and Will was back in the counselor’s office, explaining Jared Freeman’s love to room full of skeptics. He inhaled, held it, and exhaled shakily.

           “Did you see that the same way you saw Jared Freeman’s love for Miss Avery?” Jack asked.

           “Yes,” Will replied. He looked to the side where his father was speaking heatedly with the officer, and he nodded firmly. “He reaches out, and he wants the world to reach back.”

           “I see,” Jack said slowly, and he frowned.

           “If he’s inducing diabetic comas, he’d be a doctor, I think. He’d have to have that know-how,” Will said.

           “That’s what we supposed,” Jack said. He sighed, the sigh of a person that’d witnessed too much for his time, and he looked towards the herd of people milling about. “That’s not something for you to worry about, though.”

           “That’s because I don’t have diabetes,” Will muttered darkly.

           “I appreciate your input, Will. The FBI will handle it from here, but for you…” He shook his head, at a loss. “What can I do for you?”

           “Do you have an aspirin?” Will asked. Jack disappeared around the ambulance, and he returned with an aspirin and a bottle of water. Will took it, reaching up to rub the ache that started above his ear and curled over, diving into his other ear. “Thank you.”

           “Stick to your house, alright? Try and stay out of trouble. Tell your dad to stick around this time so that I can find you if we have any questions or concerns.”

           “I can do that,” Will said. Jack lifted a hand and clapped it on his shoulder, squeezing it. The contact surprised Will, as though Jack was trying to convey something to him that transcended words. He gripped his shoulder, held it tight before he turned and headed into the mass of government officials, taking control with a loud, engaging voice. Will felt the heavy, stifling presence of his father behind him, and he turned around warily.

           “Officer said you stumbled on a body in the woods,” Bill said, frowning.

           “It was an accident,” Will replied, as though finding a body in the woods was something someone could purposefully do.

           “They said they’re going to search the area, but they’ve got it taken care of. Said you’d handled yourself like a full grown adult.” His father lifted the hat off of his head and scratched it, stuffing the hat into his back pocket.

           “Thanks,” Will said. Bill Graham didn’t reach out to squeeze his shoulder, but he didn’t reach out to smack him in the back of the head, either. They stood like that, surrounded by flashing police lights, the murmuring of too many voices, and the footsteps of the harried before Will excused himself and headed down the driveway to the house, locking himself in his bedroom for the rest of the night. After a short while, he heard the door to the front room open and close and knew his father was going to do the same.

           I stand before Miss Avery, palm pressed to gentle palm. She makes no move to fight me; she makes no move to run. She inhales, and I can sense it, just as easily as I sense the blood pulsing through her veins, just as easily as I can all but feel her lungs expand.

           “I reach out to you, and now you reach back,” I say.

           “Whenever you enter this place we have found, I feel you near,” she says, and I sigh. It is the softest sound, the quietest of feelings. It is one thing to reach, extend, and grasp. It is another for someone to finally reach back, to see as one is intended to be seen. As one we lay down together, side by side, our breaths intertwining until there is nothing that separates the you from the me. This is beautiful. This is peace. This is my design.

           Will woke, and he wiped tears from his cheeks, his breath hiccupping in quiet, desperate gulps. It was a silent grief, something that swept away all chance of sound to escape as it stifled his voice and gripped his throat. He curled up on his side, blanket pulled close, and he wondered if Jack was going to be able to find such a person whose desperation to connect was so dire it was like trying to hold onto sand. No matter how tight his fist, it would inevitably escape through the cracks.

           Mostly, he wondered if one day he’d be the one burying someone in the ground. He wondered who would be the one to find it if he did.

-

           The weekend dragged itself to Monday, a hangman’s noose wrapped around its neck. When Will went to go and apply for jobs on Saturday, his father refused with a stern shake of his head. Instead, he found himself sitting on the couch, watching the football game with Bill Graham whose enthusiasm for UGA hadn’t changed despite changing states. He didn’t have much fight to give, in truth –not with his leg muscles complaining the way that they were. Ten miles was a long run for anyone, even someone in peak physical condition. Although Will was no weakling, peak physical condition didn’t quite fit into his description. He’d stood in the shower for quite some time, allowing the hot water to sooth the blisters that’d rubbed into his ankle and the sides of his feet.

           Sunday, his father disappeared to spend a day with his new co-workers, leaving Will to his own devices. He considered going to apply for jobs, but when he saw Jared Freeman in the kitchen, staring down at a Hungry Man meal, he quickly forwent the idea. Instead, he found himself staring up at the ceiling of his bedroom, wondering just how long his father’s concern lasted. Had it been long enough for him to realize they didn’t have much to talk about? Had it been long enough for him to determine that he couldn’t do anything about his odd, troubled son? He wanted to be angry, but he couldn’t find it in himself to be. He rubbed his aching feet and let the clicks of his eyelids count the seconds until darkness fell.

           Monday came, and he escaped to school, relieved to have something to divert him. He met with Beverly near the front entrance, who was accompanied by two younger siblings whose hair and eyes gave them away as such.

           “Did you hear about those bodies?” Beverly asked by way of greeting.

           “No,” Will lied.

           “They found five bodies out in the woods!” one boy said.

           “They were so gross and decomposing that things were growing up over them,” the girl added, nodding. “Things like fungi and mushrooms and lichen.”

           “These are my siblings, if you can’t tell. Henry and Cassandra.” Beverly pointed to them, then herself. “I’m the oldest, and there’s three more after that, if you can believe it.”

           “That’s a lot of kids,” Will said.

           “They say the more kids there are, the better the character growth,” Cassandra said, grinning.

           “Are you an only child?” Henry asked.

           “Yes,” Will replied slowly.

           “We can tell,” Cassandra said knowingly.

           “Oh, come on,” Beverly rounded on them, and they hurried off, laughing as they headed towards their respective classes. “Jeez, sorry about that.”

           “No, they’re…well, they’re not wrong,” Will said, and his smile felt savage at the edges. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked about the bustling students, out of place and out of time with them. The rain had continued well into the weekend and gave no sign of stopping, switching periodically between heavy downfall and light mist.

           “Well, they’re still jerks. They’re right about the bodies, though. They were in Wolf Trap, deep in the woods, hands sticking up out of the ground like claws.” She walked with him towards his locker, and Will grabbed his books, nodding along.

           “That’s bleak,” he said.

           “Bleak and creepy. Someone joked that whoever did it was just trying to grow a mushroom garden, but those aren’t the kind of mushrooms you’d want to eat.”

           “I’ve never had a mushroom that I liked,” Will said, and Beverly laughed.

           “Then I guess you won’t run the risk of biting into one of these guys, right?” The bell rang, and they headed towards first period, Beverly breaking away once she reached the right hall.

           “Hopefully,” Will agreed.

           He found Abigail at lunch, although it troubled him that he sought her out so persistently. Beverly was nowhere to be seen, so he made his way over without interruption, noting how she sat alone. He sat down in the chair beside her and saw a faint discoloring of purple beneath her eyes from lack of sleep.

           “How was your weekend?” he asked.

           “Oh, it was good…I went to check out a potential university, then my dad and I went hunting.” Her hair was pulled back, up and away from her fair features, and it wasn’t lost on Will how her mouth quivered before pressing shut. She looked like one sharp exhale would blow her away.

           “Did you get anything?”

           “Yeah, we found a doe,” she said with a quiet, short laugh. “Did you go fishing?”

           “Not with all of the rain, no. The river will rise when it’s all done, then I will. That’s the best time to catch them.” They ate in silence, the air dank with unsaid words. It was the sort of silence that chafed, and if Will hadn’t seen what Abigail had wanted to show him, he’d have said he imagined her ever wanting to be his friend. Abigail yawned, Will yawned, and he looked down, studying the inedible-looking pizza.

           “Do you do everything with your dad?” Will asked, hesitant. He flexed and clenched his hands, uncomfortable.

           “What do you mean?” Abigail asked slowly.

           “Hunt together, go look at universities together…you must be really close.” Off to the side, a couple of kids tossed a football, laughter ensuing as they moved towards the center of the eating hall. The ball was quickly confiscated, and the students booed the teacher away.

           “Yeah, I’m pretty close with my dad. Are you?”

           “No, not really,” Will said. He wasn’t quite sure why he was so bluntly honest with her; her expression of surprise showed that he hadn’t answered the way that she expected. He looked away and took a bite of pizza.

           “Are you close with your mom?” Abigail asked.

           “I don’t have a mom to be close to.”

           “My dad sad you seemed interesting. Maybe you’ll get to see what the hype is all about.” It was supposed to sound like a joke, but the punchline came out wrong. Will looked at her, and her voice caught in her throat, stifling the laughter that was supposed to follow. She forced a breath and grabbed her water bottle, distracting herself by taking a drink.

           “Maybe,” Will said. They ate in silence for the rest of lunch, only the sound of rain tapping gently on the skylight above them to punctuate the thoughts in their heads. When the bell rang, he left her to her own devices, wondering just what had happened over the weekend to make her so afraid again.

[wineanddinosaur]

A New Wave of Small Craft Breweries is Redefining Midwestern Beer Culture

As the American writer Willa Cather wrote in “My Antonia,” “The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.” The same could be said about a Budweiser: The only thing very noticeable is that it is still, all day long, a Budweiser.

Budweiser, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Old Style: These beers hail from the Midwest, a region characterized by its infinite horizons, idyllic farms, and red brick factories. Beer brands like these are America’s bread and butter, known for their economy and approachable flavor profiles. But they and others like them — Schlitz, Miller Lite, and so on — are more than crowd-friendly thirst-quenchers for the football tailgate. These mass-produced lagers reflect much of the country’s perception of the Midwest itself: constant, reliable, and unremarkable.

Now, amidst MillerCoors, Anheuser-Busch, and Pabst Brewing Company, younger, smaller breweries are embracing their regional history while expanding and experimenting in new directions. In a region that resists definition, these small breweries capture the spirit of what makes the Midwest so unique: They are paying tribute to their regional heritage while creating some of the most creative, flavorful brews in the country.

Barrels at Guardian Brewing Company. Photos courtesy of Guardian Brewing Company.

Guardian Brewing Company strikes this balance between regional pride and new directions. Operating out of a historic farmhouse in Saugatuck, Mich., the brand is not what one might expect of a Midwestern microbrewery: It has a gluten-free and vegan-friendly food menu, a management roster of mostly women, and a range of boisterous, eclectic beers.

“It’s a little bit of everything,” Kim Collins, Guardian’s co-founder and head brewer, says. “But this place just screams Midwest to me,” she continues. The draft menu is diverse, ranging from “Nessie,” a gin and tonic-inspired imperial double dry-hopped IPA with Mosaic hops and blue juniper berries, to the “MiCo Medio,” a cream ale brewed with hatch chiles that set fire to the otherwise soft palate.

This type of creativity exists in many small breweries in the region. Jaipur Brewing Company of Omaha, Neb., is an Indian restaurant that brews its own Jalapeño Ale, a local favorite and the most requested on the brewery’s menu, according to the company website.

Worth Brewing Company of Northwood, Iowa opened brewing 10-gallon batches (only around twice as much as the average homebrewer makes), but it packs bold flavors into its “Snug” English Stout, which is served on cask nitro and has notes of stone fruit and chocolate.

At Minneapolis’s Sisyphus Brewing, “The Banana Boss,” a hefeweizen that tastes like banana and tapioca, invokes a crisp, wheat taste so inviting that the brewery claims, “once you have one, you’ll want bunches.”

Despite America’s perception of the Midwest as a featureless paragon of normalcy, craft breweries show that variety is central to the Midwestern experience. At the same time, the juxtaposition of these flavorful, experimental ales with the conservatively flavored light lagers of yore is representative of a bigger picture: This region is complicated.

And although the Midwest is often stereotyped for its whiteness — and indeed, racial segregation was built into Chicago’s infrastructure — Midwestern cities are some of the most diverse in the nation. In 2017, immigrants comprised a greater share of the Great Lakes Region’s working-age population than their U.S.-born peers. The people who live in the Midwest aren’t identical and neither are the beers they enjoy. And while craft breweries enjoy the fans and communities their creative beers have cultivated, they are not trying to push the Budweiser drinkers away. In fact, they embrace them.

“[In the Midwest,] I think there’s a resistance to the imposition of any sort of value judgement that one thing is better than another,” says Lyz Lenz, a columnist at The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and author of “God Land,” a book about faith in America and Midwestern culture. “A lot of the things made for mass consumption are actually really enjoyable. A nice bottle of Miller High Life, when you’re standing on a porch all day, is great.” Small-batch Midwestern breweries know this, and they’re not afraid to flaunt it.

A beer flight at Lion Bridge Brewing. Photo courtesy of Lion Bridge Brewing.

In the spirit of Midwestern inclusivity, nano- and microbreweries almost always have something slightly familiar on the menu. At Lion Bridge Brewing in Cedar Rapids, this type of accessibility is at the forefront. “Bridge Beer,” a light golden ale, is meant to be a “bridge” between craft and domestic ale and lager. “We’ll have [wedding] rehearsal dinners here where the couple that is hosting is really into beer, but their grandparents might not be,” Ana McClain, the brewery’s co-owner and business manager, says. “Those are the people who get the Bridge Beer.”

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Lion Bridge’s beers are both unconventional and accessible, providing crowd-pleasing options for the community while encouraging exploration for those willing to expand their palates. The same is true for Guardian, Jaipur Brewing, Worth Brewing, and Sisyphus: All offer some variation of a sessionable golden ale or lager, a throwback to the beers that made the Midwest famous. There will always be an interesting set of drafts, but you can always find an option that sticks closer to the region’s nostalgic roots.

There’s a lot of economy in drinking these mass-produced brews, an important factor for a region whose median household income is nearly $2,500 less than the national average. But beyond frugality, there’s also a shared nostalgia that remains central to the Midwestern experience.

In paying tribute to these mass-produced beers while continuing to experiment, small breweries strike at the heart of what it means to be Midwestern: They’re community-oriented and inviting, but they also push the boundaries of taste and flavor. Importantly, they make their beers accessible to everyone who visits the taproom, regardless of personal preference.

By resisting ill-spirited competition, Midwestern breweries focus on accessibility, openness, and creativity. “There’s nothing that makes Midwesterners coalesce more than a reason to rise up and prove everybody wrong by doubling down on something,” says Lenz. “The only way to unite people in the Midwest is to tell them to change.”

The article A New Wave of Small Craft Breweries is Redefining Midwestern Beer Culture appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/craft-breweries-redefining-midwestern-beer-culture/

[isaiahrippinus]

A New Wave of Small Craft Breweries is Redefining Midwestern Beer Culture

As the American writer Willa Cather wrote in “My Antonia,” “The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.” The same could be said about a Budweiser: The only thing very noticeable is that it is still, all day long, a Budweiser.

Budweiser, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Old Style: These beers hail from the Midwest, a region characterized by its infinite horizons, idyllic farms, and red brick factories. Beer brands like these are America’s bread and butter, known for their economy and approachable flavor profiles. But they and others like them — Schlitz, Miller Lite, and so on — are more than crowd-friendly thirst-quenchers for the football tailgate. These mass-produced lagers reflect much of the country’s perception of the Midwest itself: constant, reliable, and unremarkable.

Now, amidst MillerCoors, Anheuser-Busch, and Pabst Brewing Company, younger, smaller breweries are embracing their regional history while expanding and experimenting in new directions. In a region that resists definition, these small breweries capture the spirit of what makes the Midwest so unique: They are paying tribute to their regional heritage while creating some of the most creative, flavorful brews in the country.

Barrels at Guardian Brewing Company. Photos courtesy of Guardian Brewing Company.

Guardian Brewing Company strikes this balance between regional pride and new directions. Operating out of a historic farmhouse in Saugatuck, Mich., the brand is not what one might expect of a Midwestern microbrewery: It has a gluten-free and vegan-friendly food menu, a management roster of mostly women, and a range of boisterous, eclectic beers.

“It’s a little bit of everything,” Kim Collins, Guardian’s co-founder and head brewer, says. “But this place just screams Midwest to me,” she continues. The draft menu is diverse, ranging from “Nessie,” a gin and tonic-inspired imperial double dry-hopped IPA with Mosaic hops and blue juniper berries, to the “MiCo Medio,” a cream ale brewed with hatch chiles that set fire to the otherwise soft palate.

This type of creativity exists in many small breweries in the region. Jaipur Brewing Company of Omaha, Neb., is an Indian restaurant that brews its own Jalapeño Ale, a local favorite and the most requested on the brewery’s menu, according to the company website.

Worth Brewing Company of Northwood, Iowa opened brewing 10-gallon batches (only around twice as much as the average homebrewer makes), but it packs bold flavors into its “Snug” English Stout, which is served on cask nitro and has notes of stone fruit and chocolate.

At Minneapolis’s Sisyphus Brewing, “The Banana Boss,” a hefeweizen that tastes like banana and tapioca, invokes a crisp, wheat taste so inviting that the brewery claims, “once you have one, you’ll want bunches.”

Despite America’s perception of the Midwest as a featureless paragon of normalcy, craft breweries show that variety is central to the Midwestern experience. At the same time, the juxtaposition of these flavorful, experimental ales with the conservatively flavored light lagers of yore is representative of a bigger picture: This region is complicated.

And although the Midwest is often stereotyped for its whiteness — and indeed, racial segregation was built into Chicago’s infrastructure — Midwestern cities are some of the most diverse in the nation. In 2017, immigrants comprised a greater share of the Great Lakes Region’s working-age population than their U.S.-born peers. The people who live in the Midwest aren’t identical and neither are the beers they enjoy. And while craft breweries enjoy the fans and communities their creative beers have cultivated, they are not trying to push the Budweiser drinkers away. In fact, they embrace them.

“[In the Midwest,] I think there’s a resistance to the imposition of any sort of value judgement that one thing is better than another,” says Lyz Lenz, a columnist at The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and author of “God Land,” a book about faith in America and Midwestern culture. “A lot of the things made for mass consumption are actually really enjoyable. A nice bottle of Miller High Life, when you’re standing on a porch all day, is great.” Small-batch Midwestern breweries know this, and they’re not afraid to flaunt it.

A beer flight at Lion Bridge Brewing. Photo courtesy of Lion Bridge Brewing.

In the spirit of Midwestern inclusivity, nano- and microbreweries almost always have something slightly familiar on the menu. At Lion Bridge Brewing in Cedar Rapids, this type of accessibility is at the forefront. “Bridge Beer,” a light golden ale, is meant to be a “bridge” between craft and domestic ale and lager. “We’ll have [wedding] rehearsal dinners here where the couple that is hosting is really into beer, but their grandparents might not be,” Ana McClain, the brewery’s co-owner and business manager, says. “Those are the people who get the Bridge Beer.”

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Lion Bridge’s beers are both unconventional and accessible, providing crowd-pleasing options for the community while encouraging exploration for those willing to expand their palates. The same is true for Guardian, Jaipur Brewing, Worth Brewing, and Sisyphus: All offer some variation of a sessionable golden ale or lager, a throwback to the beers that made the Midwest famous. There will always be an interesting set of drafts, but you can always find an option that sticks closer to the region’s nostalgic roots.

There’s a lot of economy in drinking these mass-produced brews, an important factor for a region whose median household income is nearly $2,500 less than the national average. But beyond frugality, there’s also a shared nostalgia that remains central to the Midwestern experience.

In paying tribute to these mass-produced beers while continuing to experiment, small breweries strike at the heart of what it means to be Midwestern: They’re community-oriented and inviting, but they also push the boundaries of taste and flavor. Importantly, they make their beers accessible to everyone who visits the taproom, regardless of personal preference.

By resisting ill-spirited competition, Midwestern breweries focus on accessibility, openness, and creativity. “There’s nothing that makes Midwesterners coalesce more than a reason to rise up and prove everybody wrong by doubling down on something,” says Lenz. “The only way to unite people in the Midwest is to tell them to change.”

The article A New Wave of Small Craft Breweries is Redefining Midwestern Beer Culture appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/craft-breweries-redefining-midwestern-beer-culture/ source https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/190273143244

[johnboothus]

A New Wave of Small Craft Breweries is Redefining Midwestern Beer Culture

As the American writer Willa Cather wrote in “My Antonia,” “The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.” The same could be said about a Budweiser: The only thing very noticeable is that it is still, all day long, a Budweiser.

Budweiser, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Old Style: These beers hail from the Midwest, a region characterized by its infinite horizons, idyllic farms, and red brick factories. Beer brands like these are America’s bread and butter, known for their economy and approachable flavor profiles. But they and others like them — Schlitz, Miller Lite, and so on — are more than crowd-friendly thirst-quenchers for the football tailgate. These mass-produced lagers reflect much of the country’s perception of the Midwest itself: constant, reliable, and unremarkable.

Now, amidst MillerCoors, Anheuser-Busch, and Pabst Brewing Company, younger, smaller breweries are embracing their regional history while expanding and experimenting in new directions. In a region that resists definition, these small breweries capture the spirit of what makes the Midwest so unique: They are paying tribute to their regional heritage while creating some of the most creative, flavorful brews in the country.

Barrels at Guardian Brewing Company. Photos courtesy of Guardian Brewing Company.

Guardian Brewing Company strikes this balance between regional pride and new directions. Operating out of a historic farmhouse in Saugatuck, Mich., the brand is not what one might expect of a Midwestern microbrewery: It has a gluten-free and vegan-friendly food menu, a management roster of mostly women, and a range of boisterous, eclectic beers.

“It’s a little bit of everything,” Kim Collins, Guardian’s co-founder and head brewer, says. “But this place just screams Midwest to me,” she continues. The draft menu is diverse, ranging from “Nessie,” a gin and tonic-inspired imperial double dry-hopped IPA with Mosaic hops and blue juniper berries, to the “MiCo Medio,” a cream ale brewed with hatch chiles that set fire to the otherwise soft palate.

This type of creativity exists in many small breweries in the region. Jaipur Brewing Company of Omaha, Neb., is an Indian restaurant that brews its own Jalapeño Ale, a local favorite and the most requested on the brewery’s menu, according to the company website.

Worth Brewing Company of Northwood, Iowa opened brewing 10-gallon batches (only around twice as much as the average homebrewer makes), but it packs bold flavors into its “Snug” English Stout, which is served on cask nitro and has notes of stone fruit and chocolate.

At Minneapolis’s Sisyphus Brewing, “The Banana Boss,” a hefeweizen that tastes like banana and tapioca, invokes a crisp, wheat taste so inviting that the brewery claims, “once you have one, you’ll want bunches.”

Despite America’s perception of the Midwest as a featureless paragon of normalcy, craft breweries show that variety is central to the Midwestern experience. At the same time, the juxtaposition of these flavorful, experimental ales with the conservatively flavored light lagers of yore is representative of a bigger picture: This region is complicated.

And although the Midwest is often stereotyped for its whiteness — and indeed, racial segregation was built into Chicago’s infrastructure — Midwestern cities are some of the most diverse in the nation. In 2017, immigrants comprised a greater share of the Great Lakes Region’s working-age population than their U.S.-born peers. The people who live in the Midwest aren’t identical and neither are the beers they enjoy. And while craft breweries enjoy the fans and communities their creative beers have cultivated, they are not trying to push the Budweiser drinkers away. In fact, they embrace them.

“[In the Midwest,] I think there’s a resistance to the imposition of any sort of value judgement that one thing is better than another,” says Lyz Lenz, a columnist at The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and author of “God Land,” a book about faith in America and Midwestern culture. “A lot of the things made for mass consumption are actually really enjoyable. A nice bottle of Miller High Life, when you’re standing on a porch all day, is great.” Small-batch Midwestern breweries know this, and they’re not afraid to flaunt it.

A beer flight at Lion Bridge Brewing. Photo courtesy of Lion Bridge Brewing.

In the spirit of Midwestern inclusivity, nano- and microbreweries almost always have something slightly familiar on the menu. At Lion Bridge Brewing in Cedar Rapids, this type of accessibility is at the forefront. “Bridge Beer,” a light golden ale, is meant to be a “bridge” between craft and domestic ale and lager. “We’ll have [wedding] rehearsal dinners here where the couple that is hosting is really into beer, but their grandparents might not be,” Ana McClain, the brewery’s co-owner and business manager, says. “Those are the people who get the Bridge Beer.”

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Lion Bridge’s beers are both unconventional and accessible, providing crowd-pleasing options for the community while encouraging exploration for those willing to expand their palates. The same is true for Guardian, Jaipur Brewing, Worth Brewing, and Sisyphus: All offer some variation of a sessionable golden ale or lager, a throwback to the beers that made the Midwest famous. There will always be an interesting set of drafts, but you can always find an option that sticks closer to the region’s nostalgic roots.

There’s a lot of economy in drinking these mass-produced brews, an important factor for a region whose median household income is nearly $2,500 less than the national average. But beyond frugality, there’s also a shared nostalgia that remains central to the Midwestern experience.

In paying tribute to these mass-produced beers while continuing to experiment, small breweries strike at the heart of what it means to be Midwestern: They’re community-oriented and inviting, but they also push the boundaries of taste and flavor. Importantly, they make their beers accessible to everyone who visits the taproom, regardless of personal preference.

By resisting ill-spirited competition, Midwestern breweries focus on accessibility, openness, and creativity. “There’s nothing that makes Midwesterners coalesce more than a reason to rise up and prove everybody wrong by doubling down on something,” says Lenz. “The only way to unite people in the Midwest is to tell them to change.”

The article A New Wave of Small Craft Breweries is Redefining Midwestern Beer Culture appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/craft-breweries-redefining-midwestern-beer-culture/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/a-new-wave-of-small-craft-breweries-is-redefining-midwestern-beer-culture

[ecotone99]

[RF] How Tinder made me realise that I’m a bad person (I am female).

\All names have been changed for the sake of anonymity.*

PART ONE:

NO ANSWER

One of the most frustrating thing about being a bad person, is knowing you’re a bad person but not being able — or not wanting — to stop it.

I joined Tinder back in 2014. I was 22, and attractive enough to get hit on once a day (which isn’t boasting — most girls my age receivethe same kind of attention). While out to dinner one night, my entire circle of female friends joined at the same moment, agreeing that we’d enjoy the novelty of selecting men based on their photo and seeing if those men returned the favour. I can’t speak for all of them, but I assumed that the idea of actually conversing with any of these men — let alone meeting up with one — never entered any of our minds.

For the first week or so, I was very selective on who I “swiped right”, and I “matched” with every single one of them either instantly or within a day of the swipe. Most of the men would open with some asinine question or ho-hum one-liner. I was never even remotely interested in replying.

What was interesting is that most, if not all of these men would take my lack of response as a failure to make a good first impression. So they’d try again, and again, and again, each message using a different tactic to try and get me to reply.

The order of events almost always went as follows: they’d start out with wit, then self-deprecation, then earnestness. Then they’d throw out a compliment, then downplay that compliment, then say something “jokingly” mean, then something casually judgemental. Then they’d get apologetic, then attempt to explain away their multiple messages as the opposite of desperate. Then would come the passive aggression, then the slight suggestion of actual aggression, then actual aggression, and then finally they’d explode into outright, chauvinistic, insult-ridden rage.

My girlfriends — at least, the ones who hadn’t started actually interacting with their matches — were experiencing almost identical patterns of behaviour when met with radio silence. While we’d have have a chuckle about it, most of the girls would express guilt and admit that what they were doing was mean. Just as we all pledged to download the app, we made a pact to delete it.

I was part of that pact, but curiously, had no intention of honouring it. My dirty little secret was that unlike them, I felt no guilt, found it genuinely hilarious, and almost enjoyed the experience of witnessing someone grow increasingly insane as they have a one-way conversation with a series of pictures.

At the time, I rationalised this enjoyment and lack of guilt as harmless. If anything, I was proving that most men are entitled and that directly beneath any man’s kind exterior lied an aggressive, woman-hating asshole. My 22-year-old self would even go as far as to think that my actions were reasonable, or even honourable — a feministic method of unveiling man’s true colours.

So, I started swiping right on a less-discerning selection of men. Those that I didn’t find aesthetically appealing, even those whose profiles were blatantly ignorant or bigoted, would get a swipe to the east.

And boy, the cross-section of insanity demonstrated by this larger sample size was gobsmacking. These reactions to my radio silence were more entertaining that any book, than any film or TV show. I became addicted to guessing the path each individual would take towards a meltdown, and it even got to the point that upon receiving a particular message, I could predict exactly what would come next,almost down to the letter.

Deep down, I knew this wasn’t acceptable behaviour, so I only told one friend about it — the one who had issues with men in general. We’d both have a laugh about it, but I’d downplay how much I was getting off on it. She was one of the girls who had been on the receiving end of similar meltdown’s, but now just used Tinder as a means of validation — propped up by the fact that all these guys thought she was hot, but “nice” enough to instantly delete them after the ego fix. Even then, she expressed guilt over the behaviour and said she was a few days away from deleting the app.

Most of my other girlfriends had grown to use Tinder alongside their real-life dating world, and one had even entered a relationship with someone she met on it. Very quickly, the world was starting to embrace this kind of technology- and it was no longer deemed as desperate or sad to use the net to meet people. So, I could no longer be as open about how I still thought it was all so pathetic.

I thought I’d grow tired of this eventually, and that the intentional provocation would soon be a thing of the past. I was right about the first part.

PART II

ANSWER

Mark was a sports journalist. He liked Rugby Union and Game of Thrones. He enjoyed socialising but also a quiet night in with a boutique beer. He was looking for anything from fun to something more.

He had light grey eyes, one hell of a beach body, and a tiny moustache that looked like a splayed-out dead spider. And he was the first match to which I actually replied.

Mark’s one-way conversation was carried out over a period of weeks. He was one of the rare guys who only messaged every once in a while, and whose meltdown wasn’t as extreme as the others. In fact, I’d say he didn’t melt all the way down. Or very far down at all. He would just say random things that popped into his head, but none of them seemed like tactics. Almost like he was using our chatbox as a notepad.

Then one evening, when I was on an actual date with a guy who would end up being my boyfriend, he wrote a long message that really hit a nerve. He called me on thoughts I hadn’t shared with anyone, as if he knew I had this bizarre, voyeuristic bent. But he wasn’t aggressive about it, he was matter of fact, maybe even a little understanding. If I wasn’t four prosecco’s down, then I probably wouldn’t have replied.

But I did. I told him that what he said was ridiculously insulting and that I’d been super busy and not looking at the app. I told him thathe was a judgemental asshole and that just because he was a man he wasn’t owed a reply.

The label of entitled chauvinist didn’t sit well with Mark, and his reply was apologetic and remorseful. When I didn’t respond, he made aneven deeper apology. He then tried to explain his intentions, then admitted that something in his past had made him not trust women, buthe was working on it. Before long, just like all the others, he landed on Agression Island; retracting his apology and reinforcing his

judgements of me. The last few messages were filled with some of the most vile, disturbing insults I’d ever read.

And I loved every minute of it. The insults had no effect on me, as I knew the intention behind them — to make me feel as bad as they did.

Mark helped me. realise that through my replies, I could make menmeltdown in more interesting ways. Without saying much at all, I could essentially control the way they felt about themselves. No longer was I an innocent bystander watching a train-wreck. I was laying objects on the track that would cause it. It was so much more thrilling, and equally satisfying.

Unlike during the period of intentional radio silence, after Mark, I did feel a fleeting pang of guilt. Or to be more honest, guilt over the fact that I should feel more guilty. In my real, face-to-face world, I would never, ever think to treat a man in this way. This was almost like a game. A first-person adventure game where the aim was to prove every man was, deep down, a horrible animal.

By now, I was in a semi-serious relationship, but I wasn’t willing to give up my secret pastime. Afraid my online world would intersect withthe real one, I deleted my existing Tinder account, then created a new one under a different name, a different age, and linked to a different

Facebook account (this was back when you had to use Facebook in order to use Tinder). I put up photos that looked the least like I did in real life, or ones that featured my body and only offered a suggestion of my face. As far as I was concerned, I could have been anyone.

I’m not sure how long this post-radio silence stage lasted. But if you’re interested, here are some of the messages I received during thereply period:

Example 1.

“I am the last person who would ever call a girl the c-word, but I am so close to using it for the first time right now. I’m not going to let you provoke me into saying it. I’m not going to let you win. I’m unmatching you”

Then, 20 mins later, from the same guy:

“You are a cunt”.

Then, the following morning:

“I can’t believe I called someone a cunt. I’m actually crying here. I can’t believe you made me do something I never thought I’d ever do. Ididn’t mean it. You definitely deserved to be called something, but not that. You might have not been very nice to me, but I went further than you and I deserve any insult you can think of.”

Then, not long after.

“God, you really are a cunt, aren’t you? Turns out there are actual girls out there that deserve the word. Learn something new every day.”

User 2

“You’re exactly like every other attention-seeking whore on here. You probably have like 8 sugar daddies and fuck anyone with their own boat. I look forward to when your looks fade and you’re sitting in the corner of a bar, staring at your prune hands and wondering where it all went wrong. Luckily, I have a good heart. Have a nice life.”

Then, a bit later from the same guy.

“I hope you get raped by a homeless man”

Yet, no matter the severity, I still didn’t take any of their insults to heart. The more severe the message; the more it’s intention was to hurt me — the wider my grin. I know it’s warped, but all it meant that I had won by a larger margain.

What did insult me, though, was the rare case of a guy not taking the bait and unmatching me without a reply. I’d experience a never-before-felt inner anger, and be in a horrible mood for the rest of the day. One time, I even tried to find one such guy on Facebookbased on his first name, but quickly realised the desperation of such an endeavour.

So, I guess, with all the above in mind, and a bit of hindsight, when I matched with a guy who not only didn’t take the bait, but both revelled in my attempts to rattle him, but also gave back in a way that I couldn’t put down to chauvinism or privilege, it’s understandable that I, for the first time and on an impulse, agreed to do something I’d never do.

PART III

MEETING.

I agreed to meet Maurice in roughly an hour after our online exchange. If it had been any longer, I would have cancelled. As the hour progressed, the exhilaration of our text confrontation was interrupted by thoughts of my actual life and “real” character out in the real world.

By the time it reached ten minutes before our scheduled meeting, I was back in societally polite mode, wondering what the heck I was doing. Not only did I have a boyfriend for whom I genuinely cared, but I was taking something that wasn’t quite real — something I framed as a twisted online game — into real life. So I quickly made a decision.

As soon as we’d meet, I’d admit that I only agreed to it in order to apologise. I’d say that I was just fucking with him and that I was actually a nice person. I’d reveal that I had a boyfriend but suggest we still have a friendly drink and chat so as not to come across as atotal asshole. Then I’d head on home.

Even though he was about a half-block away, waiting at a pedestrian light, I instantly recognised Maurice. He was an overweight, balding man in his 40s, who was even more overweight and hairless than in hisphotos. But as the light turned green and he started towards me — I was taken aback. He had the swagger of a man who knew he had it going on but didn’t have to show it off. Think the air of Ryan Gosling trapped in the owner of an old mom and pop burger joint.

We shook hands, and I was polite and light. As was he, but as we walked to the closest pub, he retained this knowing, almost devilish grin.

After a single drink, it seemed that Maurice wasn’t intimidated by my looks, nor my youth. It didn’t seem as if he had any interest in trying to impress me. At first, I thought this was his act — the only way a man like him could reach out of his league (I know that sounds mean, but we really were apples and oranges when it came to level of hotness), but then he began to compliment me on my online attempts to get him riled up — quoting some of my best messages. He was genuinely impressed by that behaviour — as if the worse my text provocation, the more interesting it made me.

This threw me for a loop. My polite-mode switch was trembling, eager to edge towards the off position. The hunger with which lead me to cut online men down to size, began to rumble in my belly.

So, I began picking away at anything he told me about his life. Not like I would have online — more akin to light-hearted teasing. Every time I thought of a genuinely meanspirited provocation, it just wouldn’t leave my mouth. When he argued that looks are subjective and that personality can turn roadkilled pizza into the Statue of David, I made an obviously light-hearted comment about the size of the latters’ nether-organ.

Instead of faux-self-deprecation or puffing out his chest out of insecurity, he stared me right in the eye and told me the exact size of his penis and how it was below average. He then said that from experience, he knew for sure that the “it’s not the size, but what you do with it” argument was only a half-truth, and that over the years, due to his size often not satisfying a woman, he’d become an expert at using his mouth.

It’s as if he knew that it was going to be something that I found out anyway, so he’d may as well be honest. In other words, he was certain I was going to see it, and see it that night. The thing is, it didn’t read as arrogance, and while it came across as confident, it wasn’t confidence. It was just…as if, it was a given — a fact spoken in the same fashion as if replying to “what’s the time?”

The drinks kept flowing, and the more I tried to rattle him with mean-spirited banter, the more he seemed to enjoy it. When my teasing turned to outright bitchiness, he only seemed to enjoy it more. The rage inside me was a whistling like a kettle. I wanted to wield the same sharp harshness that I could online. I wanted to crack open his personality and watch the insecure devil ooze out onto the already sticky pub floor. Most of all, I wanted to win.

But I just couldn’t seem to get there.

I can try to blame drinking for the decision I ended up making, but truth be told, it wasn’t the booze — it was desperation. I escaped to the bathroom, rushed into a stall, where I was able to fully access the Tinder part of my personality. I almost instantly figured out what I could lay on the tracks to cause this elusive train-wreck.

My plan was to go home with him, sleep with him, and, as I was never a huge fan of cunnilingus anyway, use his inability to satisfy me through that method as a way to crack him open. Funnily enough, though I found him aesthetically repulsive, the idea of sleeping with him wasn’t actually grossing me out. I think a tiny part of me was attracted to him.

When he ended up going down on me, it may have felt a bit better than it ever had in the past, but not enough for him to notice. I feigned boredom and lay like a frozen fish until he eventually gave up. When I said it wasn’t happening for me, he was convinced I was faking it just to rattle him, and initially seemed unfazed. He even asked if I wanted to have one last drink before I left.

As we sipped on some cheap red, I noticed a slight shift in his demeanour. I continued to taunt him for his delusions about being some master of cunnilingus, and the more I taunted, the more his magnetic persona seemed destabilised. Finally, when I said that I pitied him, the meltdown began.

Eventually, he was sobbing. Turns out that he despised himself, that the only way he ever attracted a woman was through well-honed, fake bravado, and that the only thing he thought he ever had going for him was his ability to pleasure a woman through cunnilingus. I’d reduced him to nothing, and he could tell that I was revelling in it.

Just as I’d hoped — he turned into every other man — hurling vile insults at me and kicking me out the door. As I neatened my outfit in the elevator mirror, I couldn’t help but beam. It was the beam of someone who’d just won Olympic gold.

As my journey home progressed, I was exhilarated, yet increasingly sick at the fact that I was exhilarated. I thought my online exploits were a game — but now that I’d got off on it in real life, and still felt no guilt — what did that mean? Was I genuinely evil? I couldn’t be a sociopath because I love and care for others, am always considering my family’s feelings, and the idea of hurting them even a hair upsets me to no end.

Where did this desire to hurt men come from? Was I repressing something from my youth? Some horrible treatment at the hands of a man? No matter how much I looked inwards or filed through my memories, I couldn’t think of a reason. I’d never been hurt by a man. I’d never even been dumped by one. My father was decent, loving, and dedicated to my mother. There was no explanation. I felt like the devil.

PART IV

CATCHING

I did, however, feel guilty for cheating on my boyfriend. Over the weeks that followed, I began monitoring his behaviour for any signs of infidelity. When we went out, I would accuse him of looking at other women. If he talked about a female work colleague, I’d ask suspicious questions. Eventually, I found a. way to access his emails and Facebook account to see if he was doing anything remotely dishonest.

He wasn’t.

The longer this went on, the more he seemed to be shutting down. He’d always doted on me, worshipped my body, showered me in romance. He usually couldn’t get enough of me. But now, it was as if he knew that something was up, and was waiting for me to confess.

Turns out, he knew more than “something was up”, but it wasn’t the sleeping with Maurice. It was the fact that my online behaviour had gotten back to him. A new client from work had seen my picture on his phone screen, and said it looked a little like a girl he’d met on Tinder. Once they became chummy enough to converse over a couple of beers, they came to the conclusion that I was that girl. That not only was I on multiple dating apps, but I had taunted him on his looks, on his job, on anything about his life that he shared.

When my boyfriend called me on it — I said that yes, I’d been using dating apps, but only as a lark, to prove that most men were actually. horrible underneath. I said that while it wasn’t admirable behaviour, that I’d only done it to a handful of men, and that they deserved to be proven for what they were. To justify my actions, I invented the story of a fake ex-boyfriend who had hurt me deeply — so deeply that I’d never before mentioned him.

My boyfriend bought it, but said that this was a side of me that he didn’t know existed, and that he needed some time to digest it. He wasn’t breaking up with me. He was just trying to figure out how he felt about it. He was perhaps the most avid male supporter of women’s rights I’d ever met, and that fact, coupled with his own past issues with bullying at the hands and mouths of boys, meant that he shared the belief that most men were assholes.

He decided that in theory, he understood why I did what I did, but that I should probably talk to someone professional, just for my own inner peace. I agreed, and also agreed to delete the apps.

I never went to a shrink, and keep telling my boy that I will, eventually. I now have a second phone, and dating app profiles that show my body, but obscure my face. I even used photoshop to mask anything identifying. I match with just as many men, and take them down just as hard. When I occasionally match with a Maurice-type, I meet them in person. and do what I can to force a meltdown. I can’t stop. I know it’s going to catch up with me soon, but it doesn’t make a difference. This is my addiction. I enjoy it and hate that I enjoy it more than anything on earth.I know now, that part of me is genuinely bad. And as I said, the hardest part about being a bad person is in knowing you’re a bad person. There’s only one man that I haven’t steered towards a meltdown — one that I’m fighting so hard not to do it to. But I fantasise aboutit all the time, and it’s only a matter of time before I get to him too.

He’s currently lying next to me.

submitted by /u/humansofindoors [link] [comments] via Blogger https://ift.tt/2uIusoi

[distantwitness]

Repost: #KillAllMen Is Feminist Liberation Through Satire

This blog is purely about my research into visual depictions of human suffering, but because I am being personally attacked on a medium I use professionally I feel it is appropriate to share here. 

Please distribute as you see fit and nolite te bastardes carborundorum. 

Originally posted at Laywers, Guns and Money.

Trolls aren't just after me, they're after your rhetorical tools in speech against oppression

Days after my twelve-hour suspension from Twitter ended, the trolls have returned under the same absurdly bad faith humanitarianism. 

The first lockout was annoying but it ended before I knew it. An evening spent on a romantic date with my very male husband made the time pass easier. 

This time I'm locked out for seven days, and when I'm a writer who depends on Twitter for contacts and research this is no minor inconvenience. My husband and I can't eat out at nice French restaurants for seven straight days, Groupons have some pretty strict limits.

On March 19th I lampooned a Federalist article, penned for the purposes of the gun control debate, proclaiming that all men are born violent. Well if that's so, then the only logical response for women, the disproportionate victims of men's violence, have no choice but to #killallmen. 

To interpret this joke of mine, which is quite clearly a joke, as an endorsement or threat of violence is stupid. Even more stupid is that the joke was banned even as it floated above an article with quotes like, "A man’s nature cannot be repressed...Men were made for the intentional use of force and power." Whatever your thoughts on Punch RockGroin's parenting advice, the response of "#killallmen" cannot be seen as a serious and to do so is either profoundly stupid or profoundly dishonest. In order for "#killallmen" to be a credible threat, it has to have some basis in reality. Spoiler alert: It does not.

An Unreal Hashtag

I'm not going to sit here and tell you that #killallmen, at least in my use, is just a joke. It is satire, and as I am currently teaching satire in world literature to British secondary students, let me tell you satire is deadly serious. To be a satirist is to identify oppression and to take power back by upending the dominant narrative. I can't claim to be the inventor of #KillAllMen, but allow me to explain the way I use it. Feminists and their male allies are constantly calling out abusive behaviours of men to stop, whether it be street harassment, unequal pay, dictating reproductive rights, etc. The response of anti-feminists is frequently to say that we are trying to end masculinity, that we are weakening men (see the Federalist article cited above), that all our desired policies will be the death of men. 

Turn of the century anti-suffragette postcard and their imagined women's violence against men. Plus ca change...

A Men's Right's Activist created meme featuring feminist video games critic Anita Sarkeesian.

It is ridiculous. So what does a satirist do when faced with an oppressive ideology that is in fact quite ridiculous? We mirror it. We say, "Yes, Kill All Men!" Because it is an absolutely ludicrous conclusion to draw and the louder you say it the stupider it sounds. We are echoing stupidity not to imitate it, but to mock it and strip it bare. 

I don't particularly care if anyone thinks I'm good at satire, all that is subjective. What I do care about are readers interpreting the function of my satire correctly. You don't have to laugh but you also don't have to phone up Interpol. Just imagine I'm a white male stand up with a beer belly on Comedy Central and change the channel when I'm not funny.

The "Threat" Against Men 

What makes "#KillAllMen" a non-serious threat where "#KillAllJews" or "#KillAllGays" are much more dangerous? The simple answer is reality. We know that there are armed groups out there with the intent, opportunity, and historical record of killing Jews and gay people. Nothing similar exists when it comes to male identity. Is there an organized armed group out there with the stated mission of eradicating all XY genes?

No.

There are however armed groups, like the military in Myanmar and the government in Chechnya, who wish to wipe men from specific ethnicities or even sexual orientation off the face of this Earth. But these threats are typically carried out by other men, and there is plenty of evidence to show the perpetrators are happy to carry on killing and assaulting the women associated with the victimized men. Women from the same group as those engaging in the violence may even show support, but they do not do as individual actors autonomous from the men running the murder show. Are men more likely to be targeted for assault simply because of their gender identity as men?

No.

Men whose physical appearance marks them as members of an out-group are absolutely uniquely targeted for violence. Black men, Latino men, Jewish men, Muslim men, gay men, men who dress in traditionally female clothing, all of them have been victims of one hate crime or another. The FBI doesn't keep statistics on the gender of the attackers in hate crimes, but individual reports of women engaging in violent physical confrontation solo against men are rare if not unheard of. Nowhere is there any evidence that men are under attack by women simply for their identity as men. 

Are men more likely to be victims of domestic violence or sexualized violence? No-ish.

Men, as well as young boys, are absolutely victims of domestic violence. No serious advocate would try and tell you otherwise. Men in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships can experience physical abuse at the hands of a partner. Male children are also vulnerable to abuse from mothers and not just fathers. However, there's a difficulty in assessing whether they are more likely because of the stigma around reporting. Women are simply more likely to report intimate physical abuse. 

It is my own personal opinion that men and boys have a much harder time coming to grips with physical and sexual abuse and might very well need more support in the short term. Women are absolutely guilty of abusing men with prejudice against race, religion, sexual orientation, or even disability. But there is no epidemic of women's violence against simply for being men. That is the paranoid fantasy of the Men's Rights Activist.

Comedian Donald Glover explaining the difference between telling "crazy ex-girlfriend" and "crazy-exboyfriend" stories to friends.

Even if we gathered all the data showing how men can be victims of violence with different motivating factors, women are always disproportionately more vulnerable and are therefore are in greater need of protection.  

Satire Is A Power Move

The Alien was female, but Ripley certainly had to mow down a lot of men standing in her way that tried to use the Queen as a bio-weapon.

If Jonathan Swift's initially anonymous pamphlet A Modest Proposal were shared on Twitter today without the historical distance, I have no doubt one of his many enemies would be arguing Swift is actually calling for us all to #EatIrishBabies. The hashtags #RoastAllBabies #YumYumYum must clearly violate Twitter's policy against hateful conduct. No one living today could argue in good conscience that Swift was actually advocating for frying up the chubby little cheeks of infants born into poverty in order to control the population of urban, and predominantly Irish, poor. So why would he argue that poor women could get themselves off the street by skinning their toddlers to make into gloves for fine and elegant ladies? Because the people Swift is ridiculing, the upper classes so concerned with these poor and lazy souls in the street, have had their humanity so far removed as to believe it. Only an idiot or a dishonest philanthropist could be so credulous of A Modest Proposal at face value.

This Isn't About Me

I watch friends and colleagues like Reza Aslan, Jillian C. York, Hend Amry, and Talib Kweli (just to name a few) get trolled all the time. I shout back at the trolls or offer public support to them when I can just so they know they're not alone. 

I am white, I am straight, I am married, and I can take nice photos because my chosen appearance is traditionally feminine.I have a lot of privilege which has protected me thus far from the sorts of abuse many of my out-group and female friends have received online. I have a body of published work out there that demonstrates my serious commitment to human rights and my ability to write compassionately about victims. I'm not terribly worried about any professional losses, simply the threat of chronic inconveniences. I'm not angry for my own sake. 

I'll get back on Twitter sooner or later and I'll be fine. We need to think about what tactics the trolls are learning to silence so many others with views similar to mine. Buzzfeed reporter, and white female, Katie Notopoulos was locked out for ten days after trolls reported her for joking "kill all white people". Granted I think my satire is a bit more sophisticated than Kate's, our tweets have the same function and we shouldn't be banning satirical speech based on a subjective judgement of its value. 

Women, of all types, are at the most risk of abuse online. Amnesty International has researched this subject pretty thoroughly and finds that women are disgusted by Twitter's response to harassment. Twitter knows it has a problem but seems unable or unwilling to fix it. Last year at The Root, Monique Judge looked at how race and gender correlated with harassment on Twitter. The list of studies and articles on the subject go on and on.   

Meninists will probably always exist, but there's no reason Twitter should take our attempts to laugh at them so seriously.  

Extra Fun: My Prezi for Year 10 and older students on Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal". Created for my job as a Tavistock Tutor. 

[bruceeves]

“Work # 961: Six Works Seven Anecdotes”

When accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, Harold Pinter said that “there are no real distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily true or false; it can be both true and false.” What I propose here is to engage with six works I created over the past three years, a series of works that are mash-ups of gay history, art history, and my history refracted through the mashed-up lens of image abutting image and text atop image. The resulting elements of ambiguity engage memory – not exclusively, but not insubstantially either – and neatly echo the lack of reliability between real/unreal true/false posited by Pinter. “Memory” as Mary Warnock would postulate “operates under perpetual tension: the only way to cope with life is to learn what to forget; the only way to feel one has an identity is to remember.”

  In 2007, after a months-long bout of self-doubt and self-recrimination, I decided to take a booth in the artist sector of the Folsom Fair North to decide once and for all whether or not to throw in the towel. I was interested in feedback more than anything. Aside from earning about 20 cents profit, the one thing I learned from my afternoon spent in Allan Gardens in downtown Toronto is that Leathermen, while supportive, are cheap, cheap, cheap . . .    With success and validation like that, I realized it would be stupid to give up so I resolved to stick around (much to the annoyance of some . . . they know who they are).

  Accepting “Salò: 120 Nights of Sodom” as its personal saviour, “Work # 864: The Nature of God” (2013) looked to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 enumeration of abuse of power, corruption, sadism, sexual perversity, and fascism as the first work in a series that explored the outer limits of masculine behaviour – a behaviour that is traditionally still expected of the boy before he can be considered fully a man. With titles like “Trailer Trash Terrorism”, “Behave Work Obey”, “Yes I Will Yes”, “Cell Block Bitch”, and “Shhh . . . (How to Conduct a Successful Interrogation – Lessons 1-20)” this is not a series of works intended for the faint of heart. What was done with this series was the antithesis of aestheticizing gleaming muscleboys or exploring the romanticism inherent in male bonding. “Work # 864: The Nature of God” allows that the rigour of discipline often morphs into the disciplinarian running amok. Notwithstanding the fact that this work has been described as ‘the water-boarding piece’ (which is an interpretation that I don’t dismiss), it is a multi-image cum-soaked force-feeding enacting either the predetermined choreography of some arcane sexual ritual or the resolution of cold-blooded revenge – that’s up for you to decide.  

  “Work # 900: (Endeavouring . . . )“ (2014) is masculine behaviour of a different sort – a mash-up of “Hercules Beating the Centaur Nessus” by Giambologna and a slightly abridged line lifted from “The Pickwick Papers“ by Charles Dickens. While it appears to be a meeting of an apple and an orange, the two parts making the whole have a lot in common. Giambologna (1529-1608) was a Flemish sculptor (born Jean Boulogne) based in Italy and celebrated for a Mannerist style of intellectual sophistication and conscious artificiality favouring compositional tension and instability over balance and clarity. It seemed logical to partner a Mannerist sculpture from 1599 with a comic novel from 1836. As in many other Dickens novels the main literary value is the often exaggerated personality traits of his characters. The abridged quote is from a scene when the perennial spinster Rachael Wardle is driven into a state of near-feverish excitement over her botched elopement. The two fragments – sculpture and text – taken together assume a different form of feverish instability by implying a post-modern conflicted relationship willfully engineered by Nancy-boy Nessus to force hunky he-man Herc into delivering the most satisfactorily masochistic pounding. “Work # 900: (Endeavouring . . . )“ could never be construed as a self-portrait. The only thing masochistic about me is my continual insistence on maintaining an art practice; and as far as what goes on, as they say, behind closed doors, I’m far too snotty and opinionated to be anyone’s slave.

  It was after much arguing that this work was finally exhibited as part of a self-described “queer” arts festival hosted by Artscape – a real estate monopoly that is the purveyor of postage-stamped sized “live/workspaces” and studios priced at levels geared to the 1% throughout Toronto – found this union of 16th century image with 19th century words simply beyond the pale for breached the organization’s (previously unknown) family-friendly guidelines . . .

  The fact that it even needs to be stated plainly that “according to the rules of my tribe, being 62 puts me 12 years past my best before date” strategically planted atop a photo of a hot torso in “Work # 904: Twelve Years a Ghost” (2014) should be indictment enough in exposing ageism as the last acceptable prejudice. I guess I must have touched a nerve when the piece was exhibited (by a curator old enough to known better) far enough away and high on a wall in the furthest back corner of the gallery . . . Fine, I’m a sixty-three year old, half lame, three-quarters deaf, widowed gay man with a cardiac condition, full dentures, horrible eyesight and rapidly developing cataracts; I acknowledge those facts. But that doesn’t make me, as is said in Yiddish, ein alter kocker – and old shitter!

  The scenario presented in “Work # 918: Ash [and] Tray” (2014), from the same series as “Work # 864: The Nature of God” and    

                dredged up from deep within my unconscious, was enacted several times over the course of one sultry evening at the Crash ‘n Burn in the summer of 1977. Toward the end of the line for the C’nB, the now fondly mythologized punk rock club brooding in the basement of its overlord the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC), the crowd had become distressingly uptown (meaning north of Queen Street). Technically acting as the eyes and ears for the head office upstairs, the perpetrator of the heinous acts was me (drunk) and the instigator (drunker) was one Paul Bartlett (now deceased), a poor little rich boy with impossible-to-resolve daddy issues and (stupidly) the perpetrator’s soon to be boyfriend. That that sultry evening proved to be one of Mr. P.B.s more rational moments was soon to become apparent. That memory is both a weapon and a crutch led Jean Genet to claim that every man guards in himself his own particular wound. I don’t remember when the affair completely fell apart but I don’t think it lasted past that Christmas. To quote Francis Bacon, they say time heals, but I really wonder about that.”

  There’s nothing metaphorical in the least about the title of “Work # 943: Spider Web Sex Machine” (2015), it’s exactly what it says – two panels, one over the other; the top, a photograph of a spider’s web glinting in the sunlight and the bottom a no-nonsense advertising styled photograph of a sex machine. Discovering its existence of such a thing left me with the same sense of unease in not being entirely sure how this baroque contraption accommodates a human body as when I inspected close-up one of the pieces of fucking furniture custom-built for the future Edward VII. One assumes that Mr. Spider has gone out for beer and poppers because the web is as empty and inviting as the sex machine is peculiar and menacing.

  On March 28, 2016 I received the following email with the subject heading “Question about Work # 943“ from a fellow with residences in both Montreal and Berlin: “Hey There, You show a sex maschine [sic] in the Artworkt Nr 943 [sic] called Spider web sex machine' out of 2015. Do you know where to buy that machine from? [sic] maybe you can give me a website or a hint in what direction to go for more information about the machine.  Cant [sic] find any hint nowhere [sic] on the internet so far. Thanx a lot for your help. Greetz [sic] J___ B______ “. Two things came immediately to mind when I read this: 1) this is the first time I’ve ever been sent correspondence from a genuine pervert (cool!); and 2) both the deutchen grammaticus and the fractured syntax made my pants feel too tight. Of course I emailed him at once (!) with a couple of suggestions and that perhaps, if all else failed, he would be interested in purchasing the one-of-a-kind “Work # 943: Spider Web Sex Machine” (2015), which is a work of art . . .

  He never wrote back. Oh well. I tried.

  On an annual school trip to the Royal Ontario Museum before I had pubic hair, I recall lingering behind my other classmates when we got to the Greek and Roman galleries because of one sculpture in particular, a life-sized fragment of a man’s nether region with orange-sized testicles and globular glutes – feeling sweat and convinced I was the focus of knowing glances. I don’t think anyone noticed, but in my mind’s eye “Work # 956: David Was Horny” (2016) is how I imagined I looked staring up at David’s gigantic balls for the first time. It made me wonder whether or not male desire has really changed all that much from 1500 to the present, and while I have long delved into the question of the "gay sensibility", it’s never been either a trip down memory lane or a retreat into the stereotyped suck-and-fuck paradigm. I've positioned myself as an ironic spectator of this world of men ripped from the daily headlines where the 19th century notion of a romantic friendship has been kicked into the gutter. Herein lies the challenge: it is old news that the male body continues to be a provocation; but ironically, a critique of masculinity has gone largely unexplored, and embraces the proposition examined in much of my work that it should be possible to be simultaneously hot and sweaty and critical and detached. It is desirable – even exhilarating – to question the givens of our cultural baggage while at the same time allowing ourselves to be wrapped in its brawny arms.                                                                   Bruce Eves, April 2016

Bruce Eves is an artist living in Toronto. In past lives he was the assistant programming director of the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC), art director of the New York Native and Christopher Street magazine, and the co-founder and chief archivist of the International Gay History Archive (now part of the Rare Books and Manuscript division of the New York Public Library).

[fadingfartconnoisseur]

AK Monthly Recap: July 2017

There’s nothing like summer in the city, feeling droplets fall on you and wondering if it’s pee.

I kid, I kid. At least 10% of the time I’m certain someone’s spitting out their window.

I spent almost all of the month sleeping in my own bed in New York, only leaving to visit the Keys for five days. Here are the best and worst happenings of July 2017!

Destinations Visited

New York, Amagansett, Montauk, East Hampton, Sagaponack, and Bridgehampton, New York

Key Largo, Grassy Key, Marathon, Big Pine Key, Stock Island, and Key West, Florida

Favorite Destination

KEY WEST. Man, do I love that place. So much fun, so chilled out, so beautiful, and as wacky as ever with all the Hemingways.

Highlights

A fabulous trip to the Florida Keys. I just wrote about the trip in depth, so I won’t repeat myself here, but the biggest highlight was hanging out with all the Hemingways at the lookalike contest!

My first real Fourth of July barbecue in years. I’ve been traveling so often on the Fourth of July, and when I’m at home, I usually hang out in Boston or go to a Red Sox game, so this was unusual! But my friend and her husband bought a house with a yard in Brooklyn this year, so yeah, they were kind of contractually obligated to invite all their friends over.

At that barbecue I was introduced to Secret Hitler. Have you ever played that game? It’s an insanely fun party game made by the Cards Against Humanity people. Think Clue plus politics. There’s nothing like celebrating your country’s birthday by accusing everyone of being fascists!

Hanging with blogger friends — and Miss Marcella. I keep joking that New York is the new Chiang Mai because so many travel bloggers pass through! This month, Steph from Why Wait to See The World (formerly Twenty-Something Travel) and Mike from Art of Adventuring visited for a few days with their 11-month-old baby Marcella. We met up with Jodi of Legal Nomads and former blogger Joel. Fun fact: I have partied with all of them in Thailand.

Steph and Mike are two of the blogger friends I’ve known the longest, so it was amazing to meet their baby. She’s definitely a kid of the 2010s — she smiles big as soon as you aim a phone at her! I hope to hang with the three of them (but let’s be honest, mostly Marcella) once they move to Bologna this fall. Like I need an excuse to drop by my favorite Italian city…

Celebrating a special bachelorette. A travel blogger friend celebrated her bachelorette party in New York this month and I got to plan a lot of it! While she was open about it being her bachelorette on social media, I’ll let her tell the story on her blog when the time is right.

Drinking on the Staten Island Ferry. This is my new favorite thing to do in New York. Did you know that it’s totally fine to drink on the Staten Island Ferry? They sell beer in both terminals and you don’t even need to brown-bag them. My friend Matt loves to do this and he invited all his friends to join him on his birthday.

The result? Around 25 of us rode the ferry four times in total, drank a variety of beers and ciders, ate cookies, visited the Flagship Brewery in Staten Island, and had a grand time! Matt even made us cozies that read “I don’t start partying — I keep partying.” SO MUCH FUN.

A fun day trip to Montauk and the Hamptons. My friends Beth and Colleen and I drove all the way out to Montauk, which is a bit ambitious for a day trip from New York (you should really stay overnight), but we had a blast anyway! I’ve wanted to visit Montauk since I got into The Affair, and we visited several sites from the show, including the Lobster Roll, the restaurant where many key scenes take place.

I really liked Montauk, even though we didn’t have the best weather. It’s very casual and down-to-earth, albeit quite expensive. Also expensive but much fancier were East Hampton and Bridgehampton, which feel like New York transplanted to the beach — LOVED it. Also, there was a guy with four border collie puppies and I got to play with them.

Later the weather cleared up and we stopped at the gorgeous Wolffer Estate Vineyards for a tasting. The single best dish I ate this month was the lobster spaghetti at Almond in Bridgehampton — perfectly cooked pasta with lobster claw meat, red scallions, grilled cabbage, lemon, crushed red pepper, and parmesan. There’s one in Manhattan, too!

Visiting the Museum of Broken Relationships display in New York. I visited the actual museum in Zagreb years ago and loved it, so I was delighted to hear the exhibit was coming to Flatiron for two days. It featured artifacts from New Yorkers’ past relationships and the stories behind them.

Challenges

I went through the biggest tech headache of my 7.5-year blogging career this month. My site was attacked twice by a Russia-based operation that disguised their traffic to make it look like it was coming from all over the world.

Not only did this shut down and block a lot of you from the site, I also took a financial hit. My display ads stopped running due to the influx of poor quality traffic and I had to pay a lot out of pocket to get the issues fixed.

And not only that — it took several teams of tech professionals weeks to figure out how to block the attack. Finally, the team at Sucuri figured it out and shut it down. If you run a website for business, I highly recommend you get protection with Sucuri so you’re prepared in case an attack happens to you. Their basic plan is just $9.99 per month.

Anyway, I went through hell and back this July. I’m glad to now have my site in the hands of the team at Performance Foundry, who are making my life infinitely easier by handling the site, protecting it, as well as managing myriad tech issues I never dreamed existed.

We had a weird encounter in the Hamptons. While at dinner at Almond, we sat down next to a table of slightly intoxicated men around our age. One made a comment along the lines of, “Sorry our friends are drunk,” and Beth said something innocuous like, “Oh, that’s fine with us.”

Well. We think that they might have misheard her, because that’s the only explanation for what happened next! They started glaring at us, making snide comments to each other about us. Then one leaned over and said, “You’re in town for the weekend? Oh, that’s CUUUUUTE. I live here.”

What the fuck?! Seriously?

Colleen and Beth and I looked at each other with giant fake smiles on our faces, unsure of what to say to each other. The men were sitting so close to us that they would hear everything we said. Eventually I started telling stories about Scrooge McDuck and we started talking about…that. Every time we laughed, their table would swivel their heads toward us and glare. One even banged his head on our table and pretended it was an accident.

The men left when our entrees came and as soon as they were gone, we exploded. What was their problem? Why would you treat strangers like that? What did they think she had said? We had been afraid to move or say anything because we didn’t know what they would do next and it looked like they were friends with our waiter. Just such a bizarre experience.

The “summer of hell” on New York transit. A lot of construction is taking place this summer, especially at Penn Station, and the trains are running slow and less often. 1 trains aren’t running to my stop on the weekend this summer, and on two different weeknights it took me two hours to get home from Brooklyn. This reminded me of how grateful I am not to have to commute to work, though.

Most Popular Post

All of the July Elevenths — Who knew that my past July Elevenths of the past seven years were so significant?

The Other Post

A Sizzling Summer Trip to the Florida Keys — Everything I did on that trip, including the Hemingways. Oh God, not like I DID the Hemingways. I’ll stop talking now…

Most Popular Instagram Photo

If you’ve got a purple sunset on Instagram, it will clobber the rest of your photos. This was taken in Key Largo.

For more live updates from my travels, follow me on Instagram at @adventurouskate!

Fitness Update

“What do you want out of this training?” my trainer Gayle asked me this month.

“Are you kidding? I’m just to look good!” I told her. “This is purely aesthetic!”

She laughed. “So how would you like to look in particular?”

“Sexy arms.”

“We can do arms!”

“Can we do the arms of Michelle Obama?”

And that’s why I’ve been doing a lot of work on my arms and shoulders this month.

What I Read This Month

I went overboard on books this month, and yes, it’s actually possible to do that. I read 10 books, including the 1100-page behemoth 1Q84. For four days in a row, I read four books cover to cover. It was too much — my brain felt fried and I couldn’t write.

The good news is that I’m on track to finish the 2017 PopSugar Book Challenge next month! Only six books remain! Here’s what I read in July:

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017) — This is the best book I’ve read this year and the one I’ve been recommending to everyone I know. The story is narrated by sixteen-year-old Starr. She’s black and lives with her family in the inner city while attending a mostly white prep school in a wealthy suburb. It’s hard enough maintaining two different identities in two very different environments. Then one night, she’s driving home with her friend Khalil when he’s pulled over by the police and shot to death for no reason. Starr is the only witness and she has to decide whether or not to speak up.

What I love about this book is that it’s not only topical and relevant, but it’s also beautifully told. Every character is so perfectly formed, you fall in love with each of them, and Starr’s family is one of my favorite families in literature. I didn’t want to say goodbye to them.

I believe in the power of literature to teach compassion and empathy. An academic study has shown this. For that reason, The Hate U Give could be instrumental in raising kids who grow up to fight the shameful racism that engulfs our country. If you’re a parent, an aunt- or uncle-type figure, or a teacher, I encourage you to introduce this book to the teenagers in your life. I hope to see it become a classic. Category: a book that’s published in 2017.

Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World by Nell Stevens (2017) — Have you ever thought that you could easily write a book if you didn’t have any distractions? Going on that premise, Nell Stevens was finishing her MFA and had the option to go anywhere in the world on a three-month writing fellowship. Rather than Europe or Southeast Asia, she chose to go to the Falkland Islands — specifically, an island with no one else on it. In winter. How could she not write a book in those conditions?

Well, things did not go to plan. Turns out living completely alone on a stormy island, having no social contact with anyone, dealing with nonfunctional internet, and surviving on 1100 calories per day is neither healthy nor sustainable and won’t make you a better writer. She tells several story fragments in the memoir, but none of them had potential to become a longer work. I found this book utterly delightful and one of my favorite reads of the year. If you’re a writer or blogger, I highly recommend you give this one a read! Category: a book that is a story within a story.

Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton (2012) — This is a book that I’ve wanted to read for quite some time. My sister loves it and Anthony Bourdain considers it the best chef memoir of all time. This book tells the stories of Hamilton’s life leading up to her career as the chef and owner of Prune in the East Village, from family lamb roast parties as a child in New Jersey to cocaine- and larceny-fueled years as a waitress in Manhattan to living and cooking with her husband’s family in Puglia each summer.

The best memoirs are interesting stories told in an interesting way, and this book fits the bill. The layers upon layers of details are fascinating, and if you love food, you’ll appreciate everything Hamilton has to say. I love memoirs about work, whether they’re about cooking or comedy or writing or being Richard Branson, but I have to say that the book’s weak points are the parts about Hamilton’s relationships with her mother and especially her husband. Perhaps that’s not fair of me to say, as both her mother and her husband had a huge impact on her love of food and subsequent career. But I found they put a big damper on what was otherwise a wonderful book. Category: a book about food.

The Riddle of Penncroft Farm by Dorothea Jensen (1989) — Back in the fifth grade, I read Baby-Sitters Club books voraciously. My teacher called them “taco chip books” (that made me furious) and demanded that I read something more substantial. She recommended this book, I read it and enjoyed it immensely, and I’ve always remembered it fondly. So when it came time to read a book from my childhood, I chose to revisit this one.

Lars is a kid who moves to his great-aunt’s farm in rural Pennsylvania, not far from Valley Forge. His eccentric aunt is a Revolutionary War buff and avid bamboozler. Soon Lars is visited by Geordie, a ghost (or shade, as he says!) who was his age during the Revolution and tells Lars his stories so he can unravel a mystery to protect his family. This book is such an engaging read about a subject kids are likely studying in school and it’s a great book to get them interested in history. Category: a book you loved as a child.

Black Dog Summer by Miranda Sherry (2014) — I picked this book up at Shakespeare and Company in Paris a few years ago, but it’s been sitting on my shelf forever, so I decided to finally read it now. Sally is living in the South African bush with her daughter when she’s attacked and murdered by intruders. But Sally doesn’t die properly — she stays on as a spirit, drifting alongside her daughter as she moves in with her aunt’s family. Soon Sally must use her powers to save her daughter and her family.

I did enjoy reading this book from a narrative perspective, but I never would have chosen it today. I love South Africa and this is not the point of view of South Africa that I like. In a country that is only 8.4% white*, yet where whites hold enormous economic privilege and wealth, this is a story about almost exclusively white people where the only black characters are witch doctors or murderers. If you want to read a more inclusive, nuanced book about South Africa and South Africans, I suggest you read Born a Crime by Trevor Noah, one of my favorite reads of the year so far. Category: a book with one of the four seasons in the title.

Hunger: A Memoir of My Body by Roxane Gay (2017) — This memoir has been in the news a lot this year, and for good reason. It broke all the rules. It doesn’t have a plot or much of a structure. It doesn’t involve a transformation. And it’s not an inspirational tale — not remotely. In fact, it’s very sad and never rises or falls in tone from beginning to end.

Gay writes frankly about living as an obese person today. Her weight issues began after she was sexually assaulted as a twelve-year-old; she wanted to make herself “big” and thus “safe.” Her words about trying to be accepted by her family and society, searching for peace in herself, and finding and losing love will break your heart. Gay is known for her intersectional writing, and she covers many angles of being a queer obese woman of color, as well as the daughter of immigrant parents. This book will give you new levels of compassion. Category: a book about an interesting woman.

From Pavlova to Pork Pies by Vicki Jeffels (2016) — I met Vicki and her husband at a conference in 2012 and was captivated by their love story. She was a recently divorced Kiwi and mom of three who went on holiday to Paris; while there, she met a younger Englishman, fell in love with him, moved to England with her kids, and got married. This book is a loose fictionalization of their journey — unlikely romance, family-blending, transcontinental move, and jumping through immigration hoops.

I enjoyed reading this book, in part from a dying-to-know perspective of their crazy love story. That said, the book isn’t professionally edited, and there are issues — for example, the tense switches back and forth between past and present, which is one of my biggest pet peeves. But if you’re willing to overlook that, this is a lovely little love story, especially if you’re interested in transcontinental romances and blending families. Category: a book by an author from a country you’ve never visited.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (2009-2010) — What a strange book. I’m still not sure how I feel about it or whether I think it’s a good book, but it’s unforgettable, that’s for sure. What is 1Q84 about? It’s a descent into a parallel world, told from the point of view of two thirty-year-old narrators living in Tokyo. It involves a love story, a vigilante assassin, a gifted ghostwriter, a powerful cult, and some fantasy and science fiction elements tying it together. Magical realism? Sure. And it’s 1100 pages long.

My biggest issue is that Murakami, like many male authors, has his female protagonist talk about her breasts constantly. Come on, dude. In addition to that, so many questions go unanswered and critical moments in the plot are rammed through quickly while dozens of paragraphs are devoted to the mundane (like all the unnecessary food preparation scenes).

But you know what? I couldn’t stop reading it. And I enjoyed it immensely. So I encourage you to go for it, and don’t let the long length intimidate you — it reads very quickly. Category: a book that’s more than 800 pages.

Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur (2015) — I’m glad I started reading poetry again — this is my second volume this year. Rupi Kaur tells poems drawn from her life, divided into four categories: “the hurting,” “the loving,” “the breaking” and “the healing.” These poems are simple, touching, familiar, and accompanied by Kaur’s drawings.

he says i am sorry i am not an easy person to love i look at him surprised who said i wanted easy i don’t crave easy i crave goddamn difficult

I dare you not to relate to these poems. Category: a book with pictures.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017) — Well, this might be the most original concept of a book I have ever read — and also one of the batshit craziest. In 1862, one year into the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie died of a fever. After Willie was interred, Lincoln returned to the crypt at night to hold his son’s body. This book is a fictionalization of that night — told through dozens of voices of spirits in the bardo, which Tibetans believe is the waiting place before spirits move on to the next world.

Imagine dozens of spirits who have no idea they’re dead, jabbering on about the unresolved issues in their past lives, fighting with each other, arguing like mad, spouting gibberish as evil forces try to overtake them. And that’s about as much as I can say about it — I’ve never read anything like it. I imagine this is the closest book I’ve read to James Joyce’s Ulysses, a.k.a. the book that scares me the most. Category: a book from a non-human perspective.

What I Watched This Month

I feel like I need a discussion group for Orange is the New Black. Season Five was weird, wasn’t it? Without giving away spoilers, this season takes place during a prison riot. And while there were many serious moments in the season, some of the plotlines were ridiculous and seemed out of place.

Where can they narratively go after a riot, really? The prison was damaged in the riot! The inmates can’t stay there — they’ll be sent to separate prisons! It feels like the writers painted themselves into a corner.

But I still love this show. It’s amazing for racial diversity, queer visibility, and telling the stories of women who are too often ignored. And it has created major awareness about private prisons in America, which could have been a contributing factor to Obama ending the federal government’s use of private prisons (which was reversed by 45, part of his overreaching efforts to undo everything the black dude did).

What I Listened To This Month

Here’s something you didn’t know about me: in high school I was obsessed with the “Thong Song.” I thought it was hilarious as well as a great dance song, and I played it constantly. I even wrote a song about the rise of Unitarianism in America to the tune of the Thong Song for an AP US History project. (You could do literally anything for a project and get an A.)

Well, they’ve finally remade it with JCY, and it is great. Sisqó said that he’s been asked to do a remake so many times but this is the first one he actually liked. It’s so faithful to the original yet sounds like it was created in 2017. Give it a listen if you haven’t yet — I bet you’ll love it! As far as the video goes, though…kind of weird casting. I mean, the dumps were definitely not like a truck.

Coming Up in August 2017

After a relatively quiet June and July, August is going to be a busy month of travel for me.

First up, Booking.com asked me if I wanted to revisit my least favorite city and give it another chance. Well, my actual least favorite city is Manila and I didn’t want to go that far, but my second least favorite city is just 90 minutes away by train: Philadelphia. If you’ve been following me on Instagram or Facebook, you know how it went! Expect a full post on it this week.

Next, I’m visiting a new state: Colorado! I’m working with the city of Vail to see just how enjoyable a ski town can be in the summer months. I see no reason why it won’t — ski towns are full of mountains, which are even more beautiful in the summer. There will be frolics through the wildflowers and hiking with a llama. Afterwards, I’m going to visit Denver for a few days and spend time with my cousins.

At the end of the month, I’m flying back to Europe for a 2.5-week trip. The first destination is one of my favorite countries to visit during the summer: Finland! I’ll be attending the World Air Guitar Championships in the city of Oulu (yes, seriously, I’ve wanted to go to this event for years) and will be road-tripping across the forested Lakeland region (pictured above), ending in Porvoo and Helsinki.

After that, I’ll be visiting some new-to-me countries in Europe. I’m fairly certain August will conclude in Belarus.

Any suggestions for my upcoming trips? Share away!

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