#She can handle a lot short of getting dropped into a meat grinder

[oculusxcaro]

As Khare's mutation continues to advance, the harder she becomes to kill. Injuries that would cripple or outright kill grown men can be healed in minutes while entire limbs can be regrown in around 24 hours. Currently she's survived taking a bullet, tumbling down a mountain and getting mauled by a bear with 'only' a few scars to show for it but as her humanity diminishes, her absurd levels of durability will only continue to increase.

[tinyshe]

GARDEN REPORT 20.10.22

It feels like I have dropped into another universe and in some ways I have. I have totally dropped out of my usual routine and entered into a different hustle and bustle. I am going for a position at a boarding school but my teaching cert won’t transfer across borders. Looking into seeing if I can get something situated or at least try. Found a house in the little community (just over a thousand souls! how wonderful!) there but winter has settled in and I don’t feel very secure moving the household to the land of ice and snow with very little sunlight -- it just doesn’t seem wise rushing in along side Winter. I don’t know if they will hold the house or the position while I try to figure this out so I am putting it in God’s hands.  I am also doing some writing for a magazine and I am finding it very hard because this is the first article for them! Definitely a C19 brainless feeling in addition to the deadline stress since they asked me with such a short notice. And throw into the mix, trying to find a reliable, used auto with very little money in hand. Currently at a part time position in a place that is about ready to go under so also looking for another PT while I flop about trying to get my life together/forward/change.

But the exciting part is while I wasn’t watching, the garden grew and the chickens started laying! I don’t know when they started. I went out to check on winter repair (I need to weather strip some hatches since boyo did not) before the wind storms start in earnest and there in the last box was a clutch of eggs! Asked the children and they didn’t know because Bronte is always complaining and talking the moment you open the door or she spies you in the window plus to they are still unnerved by hordes of little birds swooping in. Its getting better because the doves are also foraging here so there are lots of new types of feathered friends (and enemies). Was moving more things about and came across a lonely, dying, lemon cucumber plant with its prized fruit. The garlic is coming up! The winter garden is in full harvest mode with all sorts of greens Except for the brussel sprouts which did not get put in the ‘grow cage’ and are repeatedly mowed down even though I nestled them under bigger leaves. I didn’t expect to harvest any yet but I think I will be transplanting them and worry about height later if I am to get any at all come Spring. Everything in the grow closet came up and doing well but did a rush job sealing some places not realizing that I was also taking away some daylight because I couldn’t get plexi nor real glass to fit so went with old seed mats that died and stapled those in place. So we got the lanky plant thing going on. Will do some shuffling to bring the shelves with plants toward the entry and the worms in the back corner. I am hoping that it goes well in there and I can get some peas! I was up helping Mary today and spied her peas! She always grows the most marvelous peas and is all the envy. It is getting so cold and frosty all the time (and we were suppose to have a ‘warmer’ / milder winter than normal! never trust the weather man!). The mushrooms are going but its debatable if the maitake will go much this year! They are trying though! That part of the garden is frost free but the cold winds don’t help much. I do have the ‘turkey tails’ but am at a hesitation to harvest those even though I do use them medicinally for my cancer. I have two of the tiniest plums struggling to stay alive on the plum tree and have a blossom on each pear tree. Even the silly bramble berries are sending out some flowers!?! Go to sleep plant friends! Rest!

In the process of finishing up fruit leather. Using old fruits, fruits and berries from the freezer and running them through the foley ... I don’t know what you call it other than this. It is a manual food press, crank, sieve thing. You dump the soft food in the big stainless steal funnel that sits over a pot and there is a metal paddle that presses the food through a sieve disk (there are several caliber of disk to chose from) as you crank the handle on top. Makes a lovely froggy sounding croaking noise as you turn the crank :) The foley (what my grandmother called it) is sort of like a manual meat grinder but bigger. And the food goes downward instead of out the side.  I do have a Victoria but this is an older type that hooks and rest over pots/bowls. But anyways, once I have the puree mixed, I put it on parchment paper (type for baking not calligraphy art) with the paper edges catching under the dehydrator rack edge, smooth the puree across the paper and slide the fruit in for about a half day at a very low heat. Since I am using the older fruit, there is not as much juice but the food is still good. Once the leather is done, I cut it into four long strips, rolling in jellyroll fashion in the parchment paper (if last batch I will use old paper that I have been drying on and not size new). I pop these little snack rolls into a jar with little silica pack and cap the lid tight. I am sort of at a stand still with stocking pantry any further because if I am moving, I want to travel as light as possible because it is costly by weight to move things! I could distribute the food amoung my friends I guess but then I would have to replace all the jars and bottles! See?! Too many worries makes the what ifs too large to manage so we will take it in little steps and let God decide. In the mean time, I am going to try to get back out in the garden to enjoy what I can when I can.

[statusquoergo]

Harvey gets arrested! And might lose his license! And Samantha is working on something special! And Katrina wants in! And everyone’s up against Andrew Malik! Boy, that’s a lot of stuff, this is going to be one jam-packed episode!

I mean, yeah, it is, but we’ll get to that later.

Continuing our merry cavalcade of returning guest stars, Harvey arrives at his condo, bottle of wine in hand, to find Sean Cahill loitering out front, having been arrested by Andrew Malik for “[conspiring with Harvey] to swap Mike Ross for William Sutter.” He’s shown up now to “get their stories straight.” Harvey responds by…demanding that he’s now Sean’s attorney of record so that they “can talk about anything and it’s not admissible,” and Sean agrees despite the fact that the optics will be downright awful. And very suspicious. These guys are idiots.

Looks like this week’s spin of the Wheel of Exploitable Social Justice Issues landed on the #MeToo movement; Esther Litt, appearing for the first time since Season 5 (“Hitting Home” [s05e07]), with zero lead-in, interrupts Louis’s dictaphone rant about his and Sheila’s attempts to choose a baby name to ask Louis to help her tank a merger which is apparently “solid as a rock,” on account of the fact that the company her company is planning to merge with employs her former mentor, Paul Richmond, who sexually assaulted her fifteen years ago. She doesn’t want to go public with the accusation because “women who come forward get put through a meat grinder,” but she does want Louis to “make this deal go away.” Anyone want to put a bet down on Louis being able to keep his head and not out his sister to this piece of shit? I believe the odds in Vegas are sixty-five to one against.

Based on the fact that Harvey “[doesn’t] give a shit about wine,” Donna quickly deduces that something serious must have happened to hold him up; Harvey confesses that Malik is after Cahill for conspiring with Harvey, which Donna and Harvey both know perfectly well is bullshit because Malik doesn’t care about Cahill (and how dare anyone other than Harvey be the target of some pointless personal vendetta). Long story short, they’re both worried, but they don’t have any other choice than to trust Cahill, so that’s what they’re gonna do.

I’m starting to think Suits is pulling out its courtroom set at every possible opportunity in an effort to maintain its credibility as a legal drama, since ninety percent of the buffoonery that goes on at the firm itself is just everybody’s torrid social affairs occasionally gilded with the odd misuse of legal terminology. So here we are again in court for some distinctly not-a-trial activity as Malik argues that Harvey should be removed as Cahill’s attorney based on the fact that he’s the one Cahill allegedly conspired with, and they’re trying to use attorney-client privilege to get away with the crime.

Couple things; Malik’s case might’ve been strengthened by bringing up Aranson v. Schroeder, 671 A.2d 1023 (N.H. 1995), wherein a “malicious defense” liability was created for “counsel who engages in the fostering of an unfounded defense or pursues a defense for an improper purpose”; also I hate to break it to…all of them, but Harvey’s only been Cahill’s attorney for about a day, and the subject of their alleged conspiracy wasn’t regarding legal advice or representation, so it’s not covered by privilege.

Harvey asks how this is any different from a joint defense agreement, the answer being that a JDA refers to communications between a client and attorney being conveyed to another of that attorney’s clients, not communication between an attorney and one of his clients (even if the attorney is also his own client), but Malik instead accuses Harvey of setting the case up for a mistrial (how) so Harvey offers to resign if Malik wants to hand it over to someone else. Malik refuses to “[walk] away from a case [he’s] been building for eight months,” Harvey claims that Malik isn’t charging Harvey directly because it’ll look like a vendetta, and the judge interrupts their little cat fight to decide that Cahill’s willingness to waive his right to a mistrial grants him the “right to his counsel of choice,” because those things are related, and “[he wants] discovery documents in [Harvey’s] office in an hour,” so I guess one hour of Suits time equals six months in the real world, if any mathematicians in the audience want to do the calculations.

Louis shows up in Katrina’s office to make a delightful hypocrite of himself in light of this episode’s “women’s rights of autonomy” theme to declare that whatever she’s doing isn’t as important as what he needs her to do, although I guess it’s fine since she caves immediately? Anyway he shows her the terms of the merger and she reasons that the thirty percent premium (the what now?) means that the company must be covering for something, so all Louis needs to do to tank the deal is figure out what that is.

Surprise! Malik called Faye to get Harvey kicked off Cahill’s case. Harvey continues Louis’s beautifully unaware misogyny theme by telling Faye that she’s “not a real attorney” (uh, yeah, she absolutely is) and refusing to drop Cahill, which Faye counters by informing Harvey that she’ll represent Cahill instead (I told you she’s a real attorney) because Harvey’s involvement is a conflict of interest, which she knows for a fact because—wait for it—she read Malik’s affidavit from Kevin Miller “swearing that [Harvey] conspired with Sean Cahill to get Mike Ross out of prison.” Harvey blows her off by claiming that he has “actual work to do,” as though the affidavit doesn’t implicate Cahill exactly as much as it implicates Harvey, and at this point it’s really inarguable that Harvey deserves to be arrested for something, I don’t even particularly care what it is anymore. Maybe someone’ll frame him for murder, that’d be a fun change of pace.

So I hope no one took that bet that Louis would hold his tongue during his meeting with Richmond, because after a brief back-and-forth that ends with Richmond declaring that Esther’s company is his now, Louis absolutely loses it, yelling that Richmond is a “piece of shit” and that he knows what he did, threatening to “come right after [him]” if he doesn’t give up on the merger deal. Richmond basically admits to having assaulted Esther but says he’ll charge her with slander if Louis doesn’t drop the issue, and I know this isn’t Law & Order: SVU or anything, but seriously, this plotline is being handled with all the tact and deftness of a baked potato.

Reviewing the massive trove of documents they received during that magical one-hour discovery, Cahill makes what in hindsight is an excellent point when he asks if “Mike Ross [was] really dumb enough to straight up tell his cellmate what he did.” Harvey defends Mike by saying that they needed Kevin to trust them, and Cahill complains that if Kevin doesn’t recant, he’s going to “slap him with a parole violation and he’s going back to prison” (what?), although Harvey points out that would make Cahill guilty of witness tampering, so maybe let’s not. Alex, who’s helping them out because how’s he supposed to earn his pay this week if he’s not on camera, suggests using the power of the SEC to put pressure on Malik, because “this is a vendetta, and when it goes south, it’s gonna look as bad for Malik’s superiors as it does for him.” Assuming it does go south, of course, but I’ve certainly never accused any of these guys of any sort of modesty before and now seems a terrible time to start. Meanwhile Alex will keep investigating why Malik is doing all this now, being that “the Sutter case was in the public record and so was Mike’s release,” and that was like…three years ago. I think. Point is, it’s been awhile.

To answer Alex’s totally legitimate question about the suspicious timing of all this, Harvey arranges a meeting with Kevin Miller, who explains that he was given immunity (I guess for his nonexistent role in the conspiracy), contingent upon his not warning Harvey what Malik was up to, in exchange for his testimony, because “if [Malik] convicted Cahill and [Kevin and his wife Jill] didn’t cooperate, he’d void the deal [they] made, Jill would go to prison, and [Kevin would] go with her.”

Okay so first of all, this threat relies on Malik convicting Cahill, but without Kevin’s testimony, he basically has no case, so that means nothing. Second, if he’s talking about the immunity deal he offered at the start of that conversation, what the hell does he have to offer Kevin immunity for, and if he’s talking about the deal Harvey made with Cahill acting on behalf of the SEC, the SEC is definitely not under the purview of the judiciary of New York, so Malik really doesn’t have the authority to go around overturning it in the first place. And I mean I get Kevin not knowing that before he gave his testimony, but why wouldn’t Harvey mention it? Like, right now?

Then Kevin smugly confides that “[Malik has his] affidavit, but he doesn’t have proof,” referring to Harvey’s recording of Sutter, but, dude, an affidavit is proof. Either that, or Kevin committed perjury, in which case he’s probably going back to prison no matter what deal Malik does or doesn’t have the authority to overturn. The one useful hint Kevin has to offer is that whoever set Malik off on the warpath after all this time, it wasn’t Sutter, because Sutter died eight months ago, so I guess this wasn’t a total waste of time after all. The big problem now is that Malik couldn’t have gotten this information from anyone but Sutter, but there’s no record of them ever having spoken; never fear, though, because Donna’s on the case! Turns out the information was a deathbed confession to another inmate. But who?

Pause on that one while Esther rips into Louis for breaking his promise not to tell anyone about the assault. Louis wants her to go public, she doesn’t want to do that to her kids, there’s a lot of yelling, and she tells him to leave both her and the issue alone.

So who heard the deathbed confession? Returning guest star and resident creeper Charles Forstman! Forstman admits that he arranged all of this specifically to spite Harvey, of course, and refuses Harvey’s offer to maybe get Cahill to possibly cut his remaining sentence in half in exchange for giving up the goods because “the side [he’s] on is always gonna be the side that’s against [Harvey].” Side note, he is easily my favorite character in this episode, and this is very much my favorite scene.

Part II

[talesofterror]

The Story Behind ‘Scary Stories to Read in the Dark’

Alvin Schwartz, the author and adapter behind the Scary Stories trilogy, actually began his career as a journalist, writing for The Binghamton Pressfrom 1951 to 1955. He also had a penchant for wordplay, saying that creating rhymes is a good way for “people to express their feelings without getting in trouble.” After Schwartz left journalism, he started working for a research corporation, which he couldn’t stand, and began doing that part time, devoting the rest of his hours to writing books. One of his first published works: a Parents’ Guide for Children’s Play. His journalistic instincts and whimsical leanings are probably to thank for the Scary Stories’ characteristic surrealism and eerily matter-of-fact storytelling.

Research was a huge part of Schwartz's process for all his books. When writing his book Witcracks, Schwartz turned to the archives at the Library of Congress and those of the president of the American Folklore Society, using that research and his connections for Scary Stories. Among his sources were books like American Folk Tales and Songs and Sticks in the Knapsack and Other Ozark Tales. He also drew from publications like The Hoosier Folklore Bulletin and interviewed folklorists.

"Some of these tales are very old, and they are told around the world," Schwartz wrote in the foreword to Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. "And most have the same origins. They are based on things that people saw or heard or experienced—or thought they did."

When asked about his writing process for an interview with Language Arts magazine, Schwartz said, “Basically, what I do with every book, is learn everything I can about the genre. This will involve a lot of reading and scholarly books and journals and sometimes discussions and scholarly folklorists … In the process of accumulating everything on a subject, I begin setting aside things that I particularly like. What's interesting is that eventually patterns emerge.”

The first Scary Stories book was released in 1981, and Schwartz would go on to write two more—More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones—before his death in 1992. By the time the Scary Stories series reached the height of its popularity in the early '90s, the book was condemned by parents nationwide. "There's no moral to [the stories]," former elementary school teacher and mother Sandy Vanderburg told the Chicago Tribune. "The bad guys always win. And they make light of death. There's a story called 'Just Delicious' about a woman who goes to a mortuary, steals another woman's liver, and feeds it to her husband. That's sick."One parent even made a connection between Schwartz’s book and a serial killer, citing the story “Wonderful Sausage,” about a butcher who puts people through his sausage grinder and sells the meat to his patrons. “Right away I thought of Jeffrey Dahmer," Jean Jaworski, then the mother of a fifth grader, told The Argus-Press in 1995. "It's just not appropriate for children." She asked the school board to remove the book from the library, but a special committee voted unanimously to keep the books, and the school turned down an appeal. In an interview with the journal The Lion and the Unicorn, Schwartz said that he didn’t deal directly with complaints about his books. “My editors deal with them,” he said. “Every letter is answered and the point is made that this is traditional material and that, in addition, it has developed a lot of interest in reading.”When discussing how a Christian group had tried to get his book, In a Dark, Dark Room, banned from a Denver library, Schwartz said he wasn't surprised. Instead, he said, he was “pleased to have that kind of attention. It was ironic and pleasing that, at the same time, their ideas were rejected by the children.” The books’ nightmarish illustrations are perhaps as well remembered as the stories themselves—and even less pleasing to parents. One father, J. Daniel Merlino, who called for the books’ removal from his local school’s library, told The Hartford Courant that “I can appreciate the creativity. But the images in those books are surreal. A throat being torn out. A liver being eaten. These images are the stuff of nightmares.”Michael Wohlgenant, whose 7-year-old daughter had nightmares for months after reading “Wonderful Sausage”—its illustration involved a dismembered hand holding a forkful of human flesh—also pushed for the books’ removal. “You entrust your child to the care of school officials when you send them to school,” he said. “You don’t expect them to be traumatized and harmed.”Stephen Gammell, the mastermind behind the creepy drawings, won a Caldecott Medal for picture book illustration for his work in Karen Ackerman’s Song and Dance Man in 1989. Though these illustrations were slightly more lighthearted, they showcased the splotchy, watercolor-heavy style that’s exemplified in the artist's grim, surreal Scary Storiesillustrations. (You can watch a fun time-lapse of Gammell’s process here, in the trailer for his book Mudkin.) "Stephen Gammell has made a very important contribution to these books because he has such a wild imagination," Schwartz later said.  When HarperCollins released a new version of the Scary Stories books to commemorate the series' 30th anniversary, fans were dismayed to see that Gammell's illustrations had been removed. The reprint features new illustrations by Brett Helquist, whose excellent work you may recognize from the Series Of Unfortunate Events books.The newer, less creepy illustrations provoked outcry from those who grew up with the books, even prompting a BuzzFeed article called “They’re Ruining Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark.” According to Meredith Woerner in an article for io9, “[…I]f your child couldn't handle Gammell's paintings, they're certainly not going to be able to stomach a short story about a scarecrow who skins a farmer alive and dries out his skin sack trophy on the roof. Gammell's art is an integral part of this collection. The least they could do is release a special art book as a companion. This is just supernatural blasphemy.” The series topped the American Library Association’s list of the Top 100 most frequently challenged books for 1990-1999. Ten years later, the Scary Stories books remained in the top 10, coming in at No. 7 on the list for 2000-2009. The books were most frequently challenged for reasons of “insensitivity, occult/Satanism, violence, (and being) unsuited to age group.”About that last thing: The books fall between the 600 and 760 Lexile mark (a system used to organize reading levels), meaning that the books' vocabulary level is most suited for fifth graders. Some of the Scary Stories vocabulary words highlighted by the Lexile system were “clink,” “blunt,” “shrouds,” “drafty” “afire,” and “shatter”—further proving that the series’ simple vocabulary doesn’t rule out spooky content.  The story “The Red Dot” may have instilled a deep fear of spiders laying eggs in your face, but don’t worry—according to the National Geographic, it's not likely to happen. May Berenbaum, entomologist at The University of Illinois, explained that a spider’s egg-laying structure isn’t equipped for injecting. “I suppose a spider could drop or plaster eggs on the skin’s surface,” Berenbaum said, “but it’s not clear why a spider would want to do such a thing.”  “The Big Toe,” the notorious story in which a starving boy finds a human toe in the ground and makes the terrible mistake of eating it, is based on an old folktale that dates back to early 19th century Germany. (Maybe not surprising; this is the country that brought us Der Struwwelpeter, after all.) Mentions of the tale were first found in the Grimm Brothers’ notes, and a version of the story—with an arm replacing the titular toe—was later a prominent feature of Mark Twain’s public speaking appearances. When he was done speaking, Twain would jump into the crowd and scream at an unsuspecting audience member. Because the tales featured in the Scary Stories books came from folklore, there were many different versions of the stories floating around—and “High Beams,” which Schwartz told The Lion and The Unicorn was “one of the most popular stories” in the series, was no exception. The story features a girl driving home alone from a nighttime basketball game. “There is a car following her and periodically the other driver will turn up his beams,” Schwartz said. “She can't understand what is going on, and she becomes progressively more frightened. As it turns out, there was somebody sitting in the back seat. He had slipped in when she left and each time he rose up to assault her the guy in the car in back of her turned on his high beams.”The story, he said, is one that’s “told all over … It appears in a dozen different versions. … All of these stories, and there are scads of them, are really saying: ‘Watch out. The world's a dangerous place. You are going out on your own soon. Be careful.’”  Schwartz told The Lion and the Unicorn that he’d heard a fragmented version of the tale, “which is about a butcher who is sort of a prototypical Sweeney Todd,” in New Orleans. But it was also inspired by a song he learned as a kid at Scout camp called “Dunderbock and the Sausage Machine.” That butcher in the song, Schwartz explained, made sausage from dogs and cats, “and one day the machine slips or falls and he goes into the machine himself. This is the end of [the song]: ‘His wife had the nightmare. / She walked right in her sleep. / She grabbed the crank, gave it a yank, / And Dunderbock was meat.’” You can listen to a version of the song here. Schwartz told The Lion and The Unicorn that he only implied violence in his stories, and opted for gore instead. There was at least one story that he said he found very upsetting:“Infanticide … is a theme in American folklore and European folklore. There is an Ozark folktale ... in which a man in his youth goes away and travels and becomes quite successful. His parents are quite poor. He comes back one night after many many years have elapsed and he looks completely different. He thinks he will therefore surprise them. He has come back with a lot of money and he wants to give it to them. They have an inn and he takes a room there for the night. They don't recognize him and he thinks that in the morning he will announce that he is their son. Well, they murder him during the night for his money. It's a marvelous story but I would not put it in one of my books. … This kind of thing I avoid.” 

The Scary Stories trilogy is currently being adapted into a feature film by CBS Films and John August, writer of Big Fish and Frankenweenie. The movie, which had originally featured Saw writers Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, is currently in development. http://go.redirectingat.com/?id=102000X1558244&xs=1&isjs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fvimeo.com%2F140869525&xguid=5654c334e78e511664f86c0e84da7999&xuuid=33f0ff2eb203a2236ecea1fb665dd3d7&xsessid=fdb9e6f33358e52b6678eb6cb953b530&xcreo=0&xed=0&sref=http%3A%2F%2Fmentalfloss.com%2Farticle%2F69886%2F14-terrifying-facts-about-scary-stories-tell-dark&pref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&xtz=480

[violetsystems]

#personal

I’d be lying to you if I didn’t say I was hurt a lot by this last week.  It’s kind of like banging your knee on the same chair every morning.  You ask yourself two questions.  Why is it still there in your path of movement and are you going to suffer aesthetically by keeping things the way they are?  We’re not talking about my horrible interior decorating skills here though we’re talking about how broken my life is.  In my defense I came back to the same warm space I always come back to.  I didn’t bruise a kneecap but my heart is pretty sore.  There’s little things you learn about facing travelling alone.  You face your deepest internal fears about yourself often.  People often forget how long you’ve been facing them.  I find being a kind, genuine, and thoughtful person goes a long way when you are on your own.  I also keep to myself for the most part.  Stuff seems to float around me like some casting interview happening next to me at a counter over coffee.  Walking  past skate videos on Flushing on my way to get coffee.  Finally see people wearing daybreaks in the wild.  Mostly in the wildest and conspicuous of places.  Followed by a pack of runners in the outskirts of Brooklyn under a viaduct.  There’s things I live that I often forget I’m a part of.  Mostly because people pretend I don’t exist.  It’s easy when nobody really includes you in anything beyond the periphery.  I’m not cool enough to exist at this point.  Not without somebody to vouch for my right to breath.  For the most part I have to go out of my way to stay comfortable exploring alone.  I sometimes get that people feel comfortable around me.  Like it’s some hidden scene or secret revolution.  But most of the time people forget I’m just trying to get a sandwich.  I wander a lot.  I walked half of New York with my bags on Saturday.  I probably should have taken the offer to leave them at the hotel.  I got to 14th after lunch and coffee at the World Trade Center a little without direction or purpose.  Some girl flagged me down.  She pointed at the ground.  “You dropped something.”  I looked down puzzled.  I did actually drop the entire contents of my wallet in the middle of Xi’an Cuisine a day before.  I was humiliated.  I got over it.  I had wandered into two of the same chain by accident.  The first time I was hungry so I got noodles.  Second time just mildly amused about the karma of it all.  I stopped at the station to pause to scan the ground.  I asked where.  “I was going to say you dropped your smile.”  I was confused then even more humiliated.  And then it turned out to be a canvasser.  And I quickly tried to escape the gravity of bullshit, anger and manipulation I felt.  I’m used to being manipulated by now.  If you know how badly I’ve been fucked over at this point it’s a Seinfeldesque tragic comedy to some people.  Water cooler humor at my expense.  People keep taking the joke of my life farther it seems and leaving me out of the punchline.  The girl asked where I was going.  I didn’t know.  I wander like a Viking because I feel trapped in a cage.  And yet I have a quiet little place that I’ve carved out of pain and suffering with a sunlit kitchen and stray cats on the porch.  I didn’t say much in reply.  I just shook my head and shouted softly back.  “I’m going home.”  And at three pm on a Saturday I took the F train back to Queens and took the bus back to the airport where I sat and played Hearthstone for hours.  My flight leaving on time at ten pm and arriving slightly earlier than usual.  What a vacation right?  It definitely had it’s moments.  Mostly in my own head awash with my own special blend of hopelessness, apathy, and genuine sense of duty.  My smile on the ground because I’ve been walked all over.  Maybe I left it at home.  

There are times when talking to people has its rewards.  I got lost in Bed-Stuy getting off the Marcy stop.  I was staying in a pretty heavily Hasidic Jewish area at the border of Dumbo in Brooklyn.  A man in a Star Wars hat pointed me to a short cut.  I just needed my bearings and it wasn’t an overbearing interaction.  I got back in one piece.  Walking the streets by yourself can be a little scary.  But when you’ve been faced with so much trauma at a certain point you get over the sensitivity.  I’ve been writing here for years silently about all the episodes of PTSD I should be recovering from that nobody has answered for.  At a certain point people try to drag you into whatever drama or narrative they feel you should be part of.  But they never ask if you are ok with it.  They never even ask your name.  I feel like a ghost half the time.  It probably doesn’t help I have Daul Kim quotes all over my blog.  For the record the only social media I really use is here and Instagram.  I don’t use tinder to meet people or dating apps to go on dates.  Subsequently I’ve been on very few dates.  But the ones I’ve been on have been actual dates.  Coffee and conversations about the moment.  None of that I feel particularly uncomfortable about being myself in front of someone I like.  In some ways going to New York alone is proof of that.  It’s also proof that no one accepts the person that I am.  I had friends in town.  Nobody texted me.  Nobody reached out.  I frequent the places I feel comfortable in.  I shop at Dover.  Get coffee all over.  But I do it myself.  Nobody helps me.  Nobody holds my hand.  I sit in public and play Hearthstone on my laptop while people talk loudly around me.  Like i’m the anchor of some hidden tourist scene when in reality I’m like some private security guard.  I don’t get paid.  I don’t get any recognition.  The things I do get paid for have demonstrated some very harsh realities to me.  I don’t feel appreciated and I didn’t have a restful vacation  I haven’t had a restful life for years.  This is going on the third year I’ve traveled to New York.  Incidentally the third year of quitting drinking.  A habit I have no desire to go back to.  Part of my charm has been facing my anxieties head on in public.  Slowly melting down in silence then coalescing into a new person.  It’s called growth.  It sucks when nobody can see it.  It sucks harder when you realize you’ve outgrown a lot of things and people.  It also sucks to not know exactly what you are growing into.  If you have been around the earth as long as I have you can worry you are growing into death.  I’m still just as invisible and insignificant as I was years ago.  I just admit it to myself now.  I start from that point and ask a very important question.  Where am I really significant?  Where do I matter and where am I valued for who I am?  If you really want me to answer that question after all this it is very simple.  I belong at home alone.  Shutting the fuck up and focusing on my own growth.  I’ve been there for the world for so long and the world has abandoned me for the most part.  Leaving me to stare down at my shoes on the ground and smile softly.  Because my feet and my will are the only thing that have ever kept me moving through all this bullshit.

I’m sad.  Profoundly so these days.  Some people might call that deep.  I’d wager if you knew how deep my love for things go you’d know how hurt I am by all of it.  Most of it is not anyone’s fault I guess.  It’s the way the world works.  I’ve never felt good enough for people who claim to be cool.  I always thought that’s not something for me to judge about myself.  I don’t really break my neck to be part of anything these days.  When I do it’s almost always attacked or thrown into some drama.  My narrative gets hijacked often.  People keep whispering behind my back that I could be something.  Never to my face.  They suggest that I should keep chasing after my dreams.  But truthfully nobody has really checked in with me in the last three years to know what those are.  These days my dreams collide in reality often like the gears of some bureaucratic machine.  I’m caught up in those gears past a point of turning back.  Like a meat grinder.  My life is so broken at this point I can only focus on that things that work.  I work out in my kitchen in private.  I play games on my laptop and listen to seventies psych and funk.  I’d love to share that with someone someday.  I’d love to share a different playlist too.  But simply having an environment that you can be safe in and share with someone is a whole other thing.  And nobody has ever asked me what I feel I have succeeded in.  They just think of me as some washed up failure.  And yet I can travel anywhere for the most part and handle myself just fine.  People even seem to feel safe enough around me to leverage that.  Sometimes that is ok.  We call that sharing power.  But there are times when people want too much.  Expect too much from something they know actually very little about.  And that is me.  You’d think from me pouring my heart on the internet all these years people would understand how utterly destroyed I feel.  And they don’t.  They’re too busy with their own narrative to care unless you bend over backwards to fit into it.  I’ve always bent over backwards in yoga like positions to fit into a narrative I support.  A movement of feminism.  A movement of class.  A movement that has rolled over me like a bus more times than I care to moan about but I trust all the same.  After all I’ve done I’m still not living for me.  I have nowhere else to go at this point.  I”m stuck in my kitchen which isn’t a very terrible place.  That’s America for you I guess.  I have a roof over my head but not much else in my life that feels very real.  There’s not much I can do about that except remain patient and focus on my own growth.  In that I’m not so sad at all really.  I’m literally the best I’ve ever been at this point.  Healthiest and most fit too.  Not good enough to star in a prescription drug commercial or reality tv show pilot.  Good enough to keep the streets safe for most people.  Maybe good enough to smile to the right person one day.  For now I don’t really have much reason so I’m going to focus on saving the energy for somebody that matters.  In that you know nothing ever really changes with me.  However far away that feels.  Or however too serious I take all this when I know it will be ok.  Sometimes it takes time for people to realize your worth.  People doubt I can be me to this very day.  But you can only be the best you if you challenge yourself to realize that first.  And I know I’m what I’m worth.  People don’t stick around.  And for me it’s worth sticking it through to prove that I do.  All winter.  And then some probably.  And then some.  And even then I’m still going to love you just the same.  But I know when to hang my head low and protect my heart.  Maybe that’s why I don’t smile.  Because nobody deserves the opening other than you.  I’m fine with that.  I’ll live with it.  Until then.  <3 Tim