#i think ill post some snippets from this weeks experiments again

[fishyfishyfishtimes]

This week we got to continue our rainbow trout experiments. See anything different here?

That’s right, the water is a bit darker! This is because this girl was raised in a recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) that mechanically and biologically filters wastewater and recycles it back to the fish. Most of the gunk gets cleaned out and harmful nitrogen substances get turned into harmless ones, but some compounds remain dissolved in the water!

I filmed this girl because she had a most peculiar way of swimming. She seems to use her pectoral fins an abnormal amount and lays on the bottom in an upturned pose! And seemingly only during the lowest speeds, too. She appeared quite healthy otherwise, I’m not too certain what caused this behaviour.

[hacash]

ted lasso 2x09 thoughts

ARGH

those are it. those are my thoughts.

Ok, slightly more coherently…

Sam’s getting recognition! Sam has his own chant! I love that for him. Love it all. It’s obviously so good that Sam is becoming an in-universe hero when we’ve loved him from his first scene - however, that also comes with the caveat of not wanting him to move anywhere from Nelson Road. I’m curious to see where they take it though, because I obviously can’t see Toheeb Jimoh leaving the cast before the show finishes, but at the same time this offer is so good for him?? I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.

(If, on the other hand, Toheeb is being written out because he’s going on to star as a lead in another show where we could see more of his beautiful face and stellar acting every week? I would find that acceptable.)

Screeners’ reactions for this episode had me thinking something cataclysmic and dreadful was going to happen between Sam and Rebecca with them reuniting and it hitting the papers - and it ended up being fine?? Of course she’s torn about him leaving. Even if they end up never being together again Sam clearly represents something wonderful to Rebecca - possibility and the sense of being treated right - and those feelings don’t just go away.

I expected a bit more reaction from Ted about the whole Sambecca thing, but that little look in his eyes after their conversation did have me curious - does he disapprove more than he lets on? is he secretly pining for Rebecca already? only time will tell. also I did notice Ted was once again basically saying whatever Rebecca wanted to hear and agreeing at every single line - he might be going to therapy but he’s not out of the people-pleaser woods yet.

Another bombshell next year? OH COME ON. If that’s not a prediction of some sort of confession of love I will go out and buy a hat just to eat it.

SHARON. How I am going to miss thee. But it was a lovely and understated farewell to a character that I’ve really come to love - Sexy Mother Fucker; he stole my move, yaas - showing how much she and Ted have helped each other grow and I just *tear*. Also I’m a Tedbecca shipper through and through, but Jason and Sarah do have such lovely chemistry together.

Also the pub regulars basically pleading for free therapy? Aww.

Higgins luring Ted back to read Sharon’s note with a well-chosen letter based pun? I love this man to the ends of the earth.

I FUCKING KNEW THAT HIGGINS KNEW EVERYONE’S BIRTHDAY. I PREDICTED THAT SHIT.

Roy and Keeley…I’m sorry, I’m emotional and anxious and hopeful and I do not think they’re going to break up. Relationships go through messy spots and people struggle, and the mark of a good, communicative, grown-up relationship is that you take time and discuss your issues and move past them. Keeley and Roy’s relationship has always been characterised by that maturity, and I just don’t see a couple of ill-timed romance confessions breaking that down.

(If anything, we might get a discussion from Roy about Keeley trusting him - I’m guessing there’s a fair bit of time lapsed between Jamie’s confession and her telling all to Roy, and I can see that being the sticking point that upsets Roy, that she hid this from him for some time. He clearly didn’t feel at all upset by what happened with Nate; it’s the - arguably fair - point that Keeley didn’t let him know that her ex confessed love for her that I think is going to be the issue.)

Also, the ‘are you married’ question - coupled with the fact that we keep seeing Roy on his knees in front of Keeley - makes me think we’re going to get a proposal next episode.

Also I love that we’re seeing more of Keeley’s psyche beyond the ‘cute and supports everyone’ façade - her mother’s experience with ambition and not being able to achieve it is a really interesting little snippet, not to mention the reason she bonds so much with Nate and is able to see how someone seemingly ‘undeserving’ should be able to realise their dreams.

also her and Rebecca’s ‘bleargggggh!’ competition! and Ted thinking he was going to be on the cover of Vanity Fair! return of Biscuits with the Boss!

ok, deep breaths now

NAAAAAATE

WHAT ARE YOU DOOIIIIIIING

Is it bad that I sort of liked the whole thing with Keeley? Not in a ‘yes I want this to happen’ sort of way, but because it makes so much sense that Nate (particularly Nate in his current state) might mistake that level of bonding and emotional support as something romantic. We know Nate is insecure and hasn’t had much of a social life in the past, and that he idealises Keeley for her basic kindness and decency: much like Jamie in 2x10, he’s mistaking Keeley’s kindness as something more…it’s absolutely gutting to watch, and also so human and real that I can’t help but take my hat off to the writers for it.

(Honestly, there’s been so many posts on tumblr about how toxic masculinity fucks men over to such an extent that when they receive kindness and friendship for a woman they immediately think romance - but yeah. this show does tick all the boxes.)

I did see the kiss moment coming a mile away and was really worried that Nate was going to be…uh, very entitled about it, given his current state, but the fact that he wasn’t - that he was immediately horrified and realised he’d fucked up and stumbles away muttering about how he ‘is worried about it’ and ends the scene spitting at himself in the mirror again and looking absolutely disgusted with himself - well, in a way that just hurt more. (I mean, I’m relieved Nate wasn’t all bolshy with it because his reaction does show there is still some of the old Nate still there…but still, owch.)

And then that text from Trent…

Next episode is going to hurt like hell, isn’t it? I absolutely cannot wait for the showdown between Nate and Ted, it’s been a long time coming…like I’ve said, while I think ultimately Nate is going to have a redemption arc, because thematically it makes sense and would send some pretty iffy messages if he doesn’t, I don’t think it’ll come until season three. Right now I just want to see Ted get angry after several seasons of suppressing his anger, I want a full-blown emotional hash-out between them both - basically I want Jason and Nick to have me sobbing before 9AM.

My one question is: are we going to see Nate realising what he’s done, or not? Was this a pragmatic, doing-this-for-the-sake-of-the-club betrayal or a blind, lashing-out-in-frustration betrayal? In short: is Nate Lando or Anakin in this scenario?

I’m very curious as to what show people who say this ‘came out of nowhere’ have been watching. Nate’s been heading for some sort of implosion since mid-season, and we all knew it was going to hurt some innocent bystanders.

I’m saving something light and cheery after all the angst, so let me just say: cinema has never surpassed, and will never surpass, the scene of the Richmond boys dancing along to Bye Bye Bye. Almost made up for the fact that they were criminally underused in the rest of the episode, and quite frankly this had better be redressed in the season finale.

and WE FINALLY SAW COLIN DRIVING THE LAMBO. I don’t know what I find funnier: the fact that it’s some neon lime green monstrosity that every fourteen-year old boy would have dreamt of owning growing up (should my new Colin tag be Colin ‘I Need To Rethink My Relationship With My Car’ Hughes, or Colin ‘More Money Than Sense’ Hughes? enquiring minds want to know…) or as was pointed out to me by @kamillahn, the look of absolute terror on Colin’s face as he begins to drive. Colin, hun, please just buy yourself a Fiat. It’s not worth it anymore.

[dastardlydandelion]

Please post the sickfic prompt turned corpse disposal. 😂

sure! that one’s p bloodless, i can post that one. 

ao3 link 

content warnings: implied/referenced child abuse, implied/referenced spousal abuse, minimally described fresh dead body, illness description 

Billy isn’t sick.

Billy doesn’t get sick. He really doesn’t. Hasn’t had so much as a cold in years, albeit he’s claimed one as cover here and there whenever coke overuse made him maybe sorta sniffly and Neil started to eye him up like he might be suspicious.

Billy isn’t sick.

If he’s feeling achy, well, he’s just sore because Neil laid the belt on him pretty hard two days ago after he got sent home from school midday Monday, written up and suspended. If he’s coughing, well, it’s just because he’s been smoking more than usual. Neil’s been stressed out lately, so that means Billy’s stressed out too.

“No,” his father says sharply when Billy takes a seat at the breakfast table.

And Billy blinks at him, confused but careful.

“You’re not going to sit with us and cough all over the food like a human biohazard. I raised you to show more courtesy than that.” Neil gives him a stern look. “Go back to bed.”

“I’m not even—“

“Go back to bed, Billy.”

Billy hears the warning heighten in his father’s tone. He doesn’t argue. He hauls himself back to his bedroom and it’s whatever. He wasn’t really hungry anyway.

* * * 

Okay, so Billy is sick.

He got himself suspended because he felt something coming on. He knows his body. He was feeling off kilter and sluggish, uncomfortable in the chest when he inhaled too deeply. So he put his boots on the desk in history class and flipped the teacher the bird when she asked him to sit properly. Even went the extra mile and sneered, told her to blow him when her jaw hit the floor.

He figured it’d buy him enough time to recover without having to call in sick, or get in trouble for skipping class. A suspension was one indiscretion and only likely to invoke one punishment. Skipping multiple days would’ve been multiple indiscretions and more likely to invoke multiple punishments.

In retrospect he should’ve just called in sick because the whole point of avoiding that route was avoiding having to admit it, but he can’t really hide it. Whatever he’s got came on hard and fast, doubled-down by Monday evening. It hasn’t gotten any better. Billy feels bad all over, the cough is near constant, and he’s shaking with chills. Puts his leather jacket on before he buries himself under the blankets and still can’t get warm.

And the coughing, ugh, the fucking coughing. Billy knows he’s being loud. He tries to hold it in but he just can’t. Spasm after spasm squeezes his lungs until they’re aching for air. His chest feels like it’s full of swamp muck and all he can do is ride it out, clutch at his ribs until he makes it to the oxygen on the other side.

Billy should get up. He should make himself get off his ass, go buy some cough drops or at least refill his glass of water. He’s going to make it happen. He’s definitely going to make it happen…just maybe not yet.

He never really gets around to it. Spends most of the afternoon slogging through coughs and trying to get comfortable even though it doesn’t really matter which way he tosses or turns, he’s still cold to the bone, chest stabbing with every burdened breath. The day drags and Billy catches snippets of the other members of the household moving about, knows it’s evening when Neil sticks his head in.

“I dug this out of the cabinet for you,” he announces, holding up a blue container. “Vapor rub. It’ll calm your cough down. Help you sleep.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

His father pads across the carpet, sets the container down on Billy’s nightstand, right within reach. He hovers uncertainly, eyes narrowed. Opens his mouth to say something and maybe he does, but Billy doesn’t catch it, snapping upright to bury another flurry of coughs into his closed fist. It’s a forceful fit and before he knows it, his father’s thumping him on the back. He’s probably trying to help but the heel of his hand connects with one of the bruises the belt buckle left and Billy can’t stop himself before he flinches.

Neil retracts his hand, leaves without another word. Billy rakes in breath at the coda of the coughs, air scraping against his roughshod throat. He goes as deep as he can even though it hurts, snatches the container of vapor rub.

Billy begins to unscrew the lid and notices some of the ointment is crusted under the lid. It flakes off. This stuff looks old. Billy checks the date on the label. Sure enough, it’s been expired for close to a year.

He throws it across the room in frustration, watches it bounce off the wall. Lies back down and pulls the covers up to his chin.

At some point Neil bangs on his door and demands he cut out the racket, probably thinking Billy rebuffed his generosity. Billy’s too exhausted to bother explaining the shit’s expired. Instead he turns his face into the pillow and smothers his fits into the fabric, hoping it muffles the sounds.

* * * 

Sometime later Thursday morning, Susan knocks on his door. Billy contemplates pretending to be asleep. Really, he wishes he was. He’s feeling pretty rundown but he can’t seem to get more than a wink before he wakes up coughing.

But if he doesn’t answer it now, she’ll probably just bother him later. So Billy plods to the door and pulls it open.

“What?”

“Um,” Susan begins eloquently, blinking at him as she fiddles with the thin object in her hands. A thermometer.

“Neil tell you to do this?”

“N-No, but, uh. It’s probably a good idea to check your temperature. No offense, Billy, but you don’t sound so good and you’re awfully flush…”

“If I cared, I’d check myself,” he snorts irritably. “Try to stick that under my tongue and I’ll break it in half. Save your mother hen shit for Max.”

With that, he slams the door in her face. They’ve no love for each other. On infrequent occasions Susan will forget this and make some half-assed attempt to get closer to him. Billy’s always quick to remind her where they stand. It doesn’t take much.

Afternoon rolls around without Susan bugging him anymore. Billy isn’t a big reader but he doesn’t feel up to much else between increasingly productive coughing bouts that leave him hacking up gross, greenish globs into his small wire mesh trashcan. So he flips through some music magazines and the book he’s supposed to read for english class until he gathers enough energy to kick himself into gear.

He didn’t bother changing out of his clothes yesterday so he doesn’t need to change now. Just sprays himself with some cologne, figures he probably smells because he’s sweating nonstop. Discomforting drenching cold sweats like getting caught outside in icy rains, an experience Billy was blissfully unfamiliar with until Neil decided to leave sunny California behind.

He browses the small medical selection at Melvald’s, grabs a couple bags of cherry flavored lozenges  and a bottle of cough syrup. Covers a couple fits with the crook of his elbow on the way to the counter. He swallows the gunk that comes up because there’s nowhere to spit it into and scrunches his nose in disgust, feels like freaking slime sliding down his throat.

It’s the town cuckoo who rings him up. Or that’s her reputation anyway but she doesn’t seem particularly nutty to Billy. Hell, seems less weird than Susan does when she’s doing shit like talking to the spiders she takes outside.

“Time to go, Little Creepy Crawly,” she’d singsonged last week, shaking a daddy longlegs out of her tissue on the front porch. “Go be free.”

“You need fucking friends,” Billy had told her after the fact. Sound advice, he’d thought. Susan only ducked her head and disappeared into the next room.

Town Cuckoo gives the amount. Billy digs through his wallet and comes up two dollars short. Ugh. Fucking brandname linctuses. Shit’s a ripoff but there was no generic equivalent on the shelf.

She tells Billy it’s on the house, forehead crinkling just a bit as she studies him, eyes all melty with sympathy. Screw that shit. Billy isn’t anybody’s charity case. He gives her a pointed glower as he stamps a five down on the counter, takes the two bags of lozenges, and leaves.

He eats through half of the first bag until his throat tingles with menthol and artificial sweetness, and actually manages to sleep for a few solid hours. He knows it’s been hours because when he wakes himself coughing, it’s dark out. Nighttime.

Billy curls inward with the spasms, tries to catch his breath between stabbing pains. This sucks so much. He’s hacking up more gunk. Attempts to rub some of the discomfort from his heavy, congestion leaden chest to no avail.

He just keeps coughing and coughing and he knows before long, Neil’s going to get in his shit about the noise so he forces himself to throw off the covers. His bruises are still healing. He doesn’t need any more.

Billy crams his feet in his boots and drags himself down the hall. To his surprise, Susan’s sitting at the kitchen table. She’s crying. The sobs wrack her whole body the way the coughs wrack his and her cheeks are blotched cherry red just like his lozenges, tear tracks shining under the kitchen light. It throws him, really. He’s lived with Susan for years and he doesn’t think he’s ever seen her cry. She just. Doesn’t show much emotion at all, let alone displays like this.  

Billy watches it the way he’d watch a car crash. Susan doesn’t even notice him until he’s coughing again. He curls his fist around his mouth, muffles them as best he can. Fumbles for his car keys when he’s made it through to the other side.

“Where could you possibly be going?” Susan asks, her voice thick, like there’s a bubble in her throat.

Maybe Neil hit her. Billy’s seen it so he knows it happens sometimes even though he’s pretty sure it’s not often. Not like how Neil hits him. Or hit his own mother. Susan is probably Neil’s favorite, obedient like a well trained dressage horse following all of his cues. Isn’t anything like his own mom who defied Neil like a wild mustang he couldn’t tame, who went braless and smoked hash with the hippies, screamed her lungs out at Neil in furious harpy volumes and called him names no matter how mad it made him. Who did her best to give back as good as she got even outmatched, even if it made him madder, throwing things or fists or swinging Billy’s Little League bat.

Susan is submissively behaved and tepid tempered, always wears her bra under the clothes Neil buys her in the fashions he prefers her in. Susan speaks softly and sweetly, never stays out unscheduled and doesn’t smoke anything at all, always smells like floral perfumes and lotions, never ever, ever like cigarettes or marijuana or other men’s cologne. When Neil hits Susan she goes slack and sloth and silent, and does not lift a finger to fight. It is the only thing she and Billy have in common.

“Nowhere,” he answers. “Gonna sleep in the car before Neil gets on me about making noise.”

“Billy, it’s too cold for that…besides, Neil isn’t going to wake up yet.”

“How do you know?”

What, does Susan think she’s a fucking fortune teller now?

Sure enough, she doesn’t have a straight answer for him. She stumbles over syllables that don’t shape into sentences and the last thing Billy feels like doing is indulging her.

“Pfft. That’s what I thought. By the way, you’re ugly when you cry.” Billy glares at her until she turns away, timid, bowing her head. He heads out to the Camaro, gets in the driver’s seat and pulls it back.

Yeah, it’s cold out but he can’t get warm inside under the blankets anyway. Neil’s already in a bad mood. He’d only barked about the racket last night but his father’s bite is worse than his bark and Billy knows better than to expect a second warning.

* * * 

Friday morning, the frosty air scrapes Billy’s throat raw and makes him cough so, so hard. He’s beyond done with this shit, fuck everything. He takes shallow breaths to avoid the pangs of going too deep. The coughing still brings up gunk he spits out and he can feel the congestion crackling in his chest like thick, goopy molasses drowning his lungs, sticking between every rung of his ribcage.

It’s actually. Kind of. Beginning to concern him.

Is being sick normally like this?

Billy hasn’t been sick in so long, he seriously doesn’t know. But it’s been days and he’s not feeling any better. He feels worse. He really does. Breathing has become a grueling travail. Even to his own ears, his exhales sound wet and ratty. The coughing was a nuisance when it first came on but now it’s just downright exhausting.

But.

Well. He’s gotta be okay. He’s too young to be like, seriously sick. It’s probably just one of those things where it’s going to get worse before it gets better. A lot of things are like that, right?

Everything gets worse before it gets better. He’s fine. He’s definitely fine.

Billy goes inside. Everyone’s at the breakfast table and he doesn’t take a seat because he’s a biohazard and Neil already looks dour. Susan’s pouring him coffee. Max nibbles at a piece of toast. She has a cut on her cheek that wasn’t there when Billy saw her yesterday. Doesn’t look bad, just a simple scratch stretched under her eye, but when he peers closer is that…is that a bruise?

Yes. It’s pretty small. Faint. He would’ve missed it entirely if the thin red thread of her cut wasn’t so stark against Max’s pasty skin.

He’s smart enough not to ask in front of Neil. He doesn’t say anything. Gets the juice from the fridge and pours himself a glass. He’s two sips in before he has to set it aside, covering his mouth as another fit takes hold.

Neil is glaring when he makes it through. Right. Don’t cough around the food. Billy isn’t even sitting with them but whatever. He’s not gonna poke the bear. Heads off to Max’s room and waits.

Eventually she comes in to get her backpack, frowning at his presence. “What’re you doing in here?”

“What happened to your face?”

“Geez, Billy, you sound terrible.” Her nose crinkles.

“I asked you a question, Max.” Billy impatiently twirls his finger, slightly annoyed. He already knows he sounds bad, doesn’t need to be reminded.

Max turns away from him with a shrug, starts stuffing her textbooks into the bag. “I fell on the pond yesterday when I was playing with my friends. Where I fell…the ice wasn’t smooth. It was rough and it scratched.”

Billy narrows his eyes and measures her up. It isn’t a particularly unlikely story. But he wants to be sure.

“You’d tell me if it was Neil, right?”

“…of course I’d tell you if it Neil.” Max looks up from messing with her stuff and faces him with clear resolution in her gaze. “Neil hits you all the time so if he hit me, you’d be the first person I’d tell.”

Billy keeps his eyes on her as he goes over what she said. She doesn’t look like she’s lying. She doesn’t sound like she’s lying. Besides, Neil’s striking hand probably would’ve left a bigger bruise and he can’t place anything on it that would’ve scratched her skin like that. Neil’s fingernails are short and blunt, smoother than Billy’s, which get jagged when he bites. He doesn’t wear rings beyond his wedding band, and his is smooth silver, no shiny rock cut in the middle like Susan’s.

“Alright,” he concedes, turns to leave.

The coughing fit hits heavy, like a wrecking ball to the chest. Billy hangs onto the doorframe with one hand, covers his mouth with the other. It’ll pass. It’ll pass. It’ll pass.

Christ, he’s sick of being sick.

It passes. Billy keeps his grip on the doorframe as he works on drawing in air.

“You okay?” Max asks from behind.

And he can’t actually answer that just yet, still catching his breath.

“You sound really gross, like you’re literally dying.”

“I’m not…I’m fine…even run you to school, if you want.” Billy relaxes his grip on the doorframe and turns back to her.

“Oh.” Max perks up at that, eyes bright. “Yeah, can you?”

She lowers her voice as she adds, “I’m mad at my mom. I don’t really wanna ride with her.”

Billy doesn’t ask what for. It’s probably something stupid. Susan getting after her for not zipping up her coat or touching yellow snow or some other dumb shit. He’s too tired to care, really.

“Sure I can, s’what I just said, isn’t it? Finish getting your stuff together, bus leaves in five.”

* * *

Billy does’t go home for a long time. After dropping Max off, he just sits in the parking lot for awhile, rests his head against the steering wheel while the heat blasts from the vents. He’s got it all the way up and he’s so sweaty his hair’s plastered to the back of his neck, but he’s still freaking cold.

He doesn’t know what he did to deserve this.

Or.

Okay, maybe he does.

Eventually he pulls out of the parking lot, drives around listening to music just to be doing something. Winds up in another lot, an empty lot, where the rumor is they’re going to build a mall next year. Billy hopes so. Hawkins is mind-numbingly boring. Sometimes he just wants to scream about it, set fire to the fucking cornfields and scream at the top of his lungs.

His lungs aren’t really up to screaming right now though. Neither is his throat, really, tender from coughing spasm after coughing spasm tearing it up. Billy doesn’t know if he’s even been this sick.

He’s even considering bringing it up to his dad, maybe even. Asking Dad for help. And that.

That means he’s either desperate or delirious, and neither is a particularly reassuring thought.

Fuck.

Billy despises the fact it even crossed his mind. He can’t go to Neil. He won’t. That’s stupid. Neil would probably just dig him out some more expired vapor rub. Definitely wouldn’t take him to a doctor, at least not until the bruises heal. Maybe he’d compromise and get him the cough syrup Billy didn’t have enough cash for…

Between musings, Billy finds himself squeezed in another fit that pummels his chest like invisible fists. It’s so bad he’s left battling for just a breath of air, so forceful for one very scary second he’s even worried he won’t get it. That the coughing will go on and on, and he’ll never take another breath again. That they’ll find his body right here in the empty lot where maybe the mall will be one day.

Except the coughing eventually does subside and Billy does manage to get some air. But the fit spooks him a little. Takes enough out of Billy that he decides he’s probably going to have to go to Neil. Shit.

He puts it off as long as he can. Doesn’t even go home until he knows everyone is done with dinner. To his surprise, Neil isn’t watching tv. Billy heads down the hall. The light is on under Max’s door. The light is on under the master bedroom door too. Billy hesitates before knocking.

Does he really need to go to Neil?

Maybe he was exaggerating when he was worried earlier. Billy’s hand retracts from the door. It's promptly clamped around his mouth for what must be the hundredth time. He’s hacking hard into his palm, chest throbbing.

He doesn’t actually mean to open the door. But he grabs the knob for support and jerks when the metal is shockingly cold under his fingers. The next thing Billy knows, he’s stumbling over the threshold.

Susan whips toward him, eyes as wide as dinner plates and mouth frozen open in horror. At first Billy thinks it’s him. She’s so disgusted she’s horrified by him and his biohazard germs and any second Neil’s going to pick his head up from the bed and bark at Billy for intruding without so much as a knock, and then—

Then his eyes fall to the long bloodied baiting needle in Susan’s suddenly trembling hands.

“S-Self d-defense,” she quavers, backing away, that needle outward in her shaky, shaky hands almost like she thinks Billy’s going to advance on her. “It was s-self defense, B-Billy, I had to.”

Because Neil’s still motionless, facedown on the bed even though his son’s still coughing, making a racket and expelling biohazard bacteria in his very bedroom. He’s still coughing, fuck, his eyes are watering, but they aren’t so watery he can’t see what’s right in front of him. Billy plants a hand down against the dresser and tries to breathe.

“Self defense,” he rasps at the end of the fit, blinking at the acupuncture kit open inches away from his hand on the dresser.

“S-Slightly preemptive self defense,” Susan amends, swallowing. “Make no m-mistake, I had to. I had to, he— he was right on the verge of a b-blowup. You know your father, Billy.”

That is true. Billy knows his father well. He doesn’t speak to Susan as he shuffles up to the bed. Gulps down some of the gunk in his throat, grazes his father’s cheek with his fingertips. There’s blood welled up in a hole at the base of his skull but he’s warm, kinda, so maybe Susan didn’t kill him after all. He moves his fingers to feel for a pulse.

It isn’t there. Neil’s dead? Neil’s really dead?

“Dad?” he tries. It comes out a hoarse squeak. He clears his throat and tries again. “Dad? Dad, c’mon.”

Billy jostles his father’s shoulder. It yields no response. The bare skin is still warm, deceptively so. There’s not so much as a flicker of life beneath it.

“Holy shit,” Billy gasps.

Susan presses back against the wall, eyes still very wide, clutching that baiting needle so tight her knuckles are blanched. Her hands shake and shake.

“What are you going to do?” she asks in a whisper.

“What am I going to go?” Billy echoes. “I— I don’t know! What are you going to do? Call the cops?”

Because even if her self defense was preemptive, to use her description, maybe it’d still fly. Billy has bruises. Maybe Susan has some too hidden under that deep cranberry dress.

“Cops?” Susan’s mouth tightens as her head gives a firm shake. “Of course not. Don’t you know what police are like? Your father would’ve fit right in.”

Billy considers this as he coughs, stuffing them into the sleeve of his leather jacket. He can’t say his own experience with the law has ever been positive. And Neil was a security guard. What’s a security guard if not a wannabe cop?

“You planned this,” Billy heaves out when he’s done coughing.

“I’m….I mean, y-yes, but I—“

“What was your plan?” Billy interrupts. “Where were you going to go from here?”

“I didn’t expect you to show up,” Susan says, soft and frowning.

“I live here,” Billy points out and he laughs. Strange, strained laughter peals out of him until it triggers another bout of coughing because. What. The. Actual. Fuck.

“Oh, Billy…do you want some water? Maybe you should sit down.”

“Where?” he rasps between coughs. “Next to my dead dad?!”

“Keep your voice down,” Susan urges, waving the needle like a conductor’s baton. “Max is still awake.”

Billy wipes the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand. Stares at Susan as he does his best to take even breaths.

“You’re wheezing.”

“You’re deflecting,” he fires back. “What are you going to do?”

“Um, uh…chop him up,” Susan admits quietly. “I’d p-planned to chop him up.”

“That’ll make a mess,” Billy blurts out, blunt.

“Messy, yes, but it’s the easiest way. I can’t exactly carry him.”

Billy touches the small of Neil’s bare back, skims his fingertips between hair thin acupuncture needles. He probes at the small of his own back, winces when dull pain pulses through the bruise. His throat is thick with something other than phlegm and his heart is racing rabbity fast. In this moment, Billy makes a decision.

“Not by yourself.”

Susan gapes.

“Where we taking him?” Billy asks.

“I…I honestly didn’t have an exact location mind, but farther away. Not here in Hawkins, the town is too small.” Susan swallows again and tugs at her sleeve. “I planned to bag his parts in pieces and drive a few hours out and spend the night disposing of the bags in different areas.”

That makes sense, he thinks.

“Sometimes I go to this gay bar about two hours away. Pretty big dumpster in the back.”

Billy tries to hit it at least once a month, if he can save up enough of his allowance for gas. Sometimes he collects enough chump change from idiots at school who forget to close their lockers, and isn’t above duping people outta their dough by turning on the charm, either. His interest in girls isn’t exclusive, he finds a helluva lotta guys interesting too. It’s just nice to get out of fucking Nowheresville even on the nights he doesn’t end up fooling around with anybody.

Susan looks absolutely bewildered.

“Gay bar,” he repeats slowly. “You know. Pride pub, homo hub?”

“I know what a gay bar is, Billy. Why on earth are you going to one?”

“Gee, I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m secretly a drag queen bingo champion,” Billy scoffs in annoyance and it turns into a cough. The one sets off a fit.

“Billy, um…I don’t, um. I’m not judging your preference in partners or your private life, but you’re too young to be going to the bar. Any bar. It’s not legal, you’re a teenager.”

Jesus, he can hardly breathe. He feels like he’s going to fall over. Maybe he actually should’ve sat down next to his dead dad.

“Oh dear. I’m— I’m going to get you some water.”

Billy doesn’t fall over. He has good stamina. He’s hard to knock over, prides himself on that fact. He makes it through the fit upright. His chest is sore from the stabbing and he’s a little dizzy, perhaps from fatigue or breathlessness, but he’s steadfast.

Billy accepts the glass Susan holds out to him upon her return. Her fingers feel like icicles as they brush his and he suppresses a shiver. Takes slow sips and finds a little relief. Eventually sets the glass down on the dresser when he’s done.

“Technically, it’s not me who goes to the bar. You’re right, I’m not twenty-one yet. But Jason Scott on the other hand, well, he’s twenty-five.” Billy fishes his wallet out and frees his fake ID from its fold. “Looks pretty legit, right?”

Susan silently studies the piece of plastic and worries her lip between her teeth.

“But we don’t actually have to go into the bar to put my dad’s body in the dumpster anyway. I mean, going inside would really be a pretty bad idea…”

“Indeed it would, but I’m glad you showed this to me. It wouldn’t be smart to put Neil anywhere you or I associate with at all. But if you’re not actually associated, it’s an option.”

“It’d take less time than the way you were gonna go about it. Cleaner too.”

Susan nods her agreement. “However, I still might…mm, Billy. I’m not sure if you’re going to like this. But in order to prevent him from being identified, I think I’m going to chop off his head…and his hands. Well, perhaps those I’ll just burn with the clothes iron, um. Either way, his fingerprints need to be destroyed.”

Billy’s gut lurches as he soaks it in. It sounds logical. He can’t deny that, but something about the idea of his dad’s decapitation doesn’t sit. Kinda gives him the heebie-jeebies. And that’s weird. That’s really weird because he’s okay with everything else.

Well.

Okay, maybe he’s not okay with it, but. He understands it. It’s Neil. Of course he understands the bruises she may or may not be hiding, the fear in her heart regardless.

“Do you have to chop his head off? Can’t you just smash his face in?”

“I considered that,” Susan says, nodding again. “Those cast iron lion bookends on the shelf are nine pounds each. I weighed them this morning.”

Billy likes the sound of that better. Neil is going to be dead and disfigured either way. He’s not sure why it makes a difference. Maybe it doesn’t, really. He thinks he might have a fever. Maybe the fever’s just getting to him, making him a little loopy and pulling his thoughts in less than rational directions.

“I could do that part,” he offers. It’d probably take him less time to bash Neil’s face in than it’d take Susan. He has more physical prowess, after all, more power to put behind the blows.

“Are you up for that?” she asks, eyeing him skeptically.

“Yes,” he snaps, somewhat defensive. He’s sick but he’s not helpless.

Billy’s claim isn’t undermined by the brief bout of coughing that overtakes him. He halts the reflex to clutch his ribs. Not now, not in front of her. Especially not with what they have to do.

“There’s two bookends,” Susan points out, seems a little nervous as she watches him cough. “We could take turns.”

With that, she disappears from view. Billy hacks some more gross globs into his hand and for convenience’s sake, just wipes it off on his jeans. When Susan comes back, she has one of those big black contractor trash bags. Spreads it out on the bed beside Neil’s form.

They roll him together and Billy doesn’t know what to make of what he feels when he actually sees his father’s face, features devoid and dead. Very, very dead. Tears do not sting his eyes. They just well up watery because he’s coughing again, battling for breath again, so, so wrung and exhausted, lungs like sodden sponges sopped with sputum.

Then he’s holding the bookend, cast iron artistically sculpted, the maned king of the jungle bearing his teeth in a roar. Billy looks at his father’s dead face and hesitates for only a heartbeat. When he brings the heavy object down, he puts all the force he can muster behind it and it makes an utterly atrocious noise Billy will never forget, but—

Some part of him has always wanted to do this. For that part of him, it is the only thing he’s ever truly wanted. And when Susan takes her turn Billy watches her face and realizes, oh, going slack and sloth and silent with the taste of Neil Hargrove’s hand isn’t the only thing they share at all.

* * * 

They wait until late to don gloves and roll Neil up in the shower liner. They stuff him in the bed of his own truck for transport. Billy takes the torso end because it’s heavier, Susan hefts him under the legs. Billy drives because he knows the way even though it’s the last thing he feels like doing.

It goes mostly okay. He only has a paroxysm bad enough to make him pull over once.

Susan reaches across the seats and rubs his shoulder. Billy’s too busy getting his breath to shrug her off.

“I’m sure you’re not going to love this idea, but I think it’s time to see a doctor. This could be bronchitis, Billy, or even pneumonia.”

“Pneumonia isn’t real,” Billy grouses tiredly. “It’s like the boogeyman. Just some story old people made up so their grandkids wouldn’t play in the rain and track mud all over the house.”

“Uh…um.” She blinks owlishly, forehead creasing. “No, that’s not quite accurate…”

“I’m screwing with you, Susan.” Because that’s easier than conceding to her.

It would’ve been one thing with Neil. As fucked up as things were, Neil was his dad. Neil was supposed to take care of him.

But Susan. Susan is different. Susan is mostly Max’s weird mom who displays about as much emotion as a mannequin whenever she isn’t (wasn’t) dancing on Neil’s puppet strings or talking to the spiders as she shakes them free from soft tissues. Albeit tonight is a game changer. They’re very literally partners in crime now.

“We could even go to the ER after this,” she suggests uncertainly, wary edge to her tone.

“That’s for emergencies. I can wait.”

“If you’re sure.” Susan hums in her throat and draws her hand away.

They have good timing. The bar’s been closed for almost an hour by the time they get there and all the cars have cleared out. Billy backs up to the dumpster so he and Susan can stand on the bed and lift Neil in that way, rather than having to drag his deadweight out and struggle to raise his cumbersome bulk up over the side.

He doesn’t want to be out here any longer than he has to. Whole thing gives him the heebie-jeebies. He feels like a cop is about to pull up any second now and frankly, it’s cold as fuck. He’s cold as fuck.

Not as cold as the unearthly chill that seems to pierce through the plastic liner when Billy lifts his father’s trunk for the second time tonight.

“Do you feel that?” he irresistibly asks Susan, watching her adjust her grip on Neil’s legs and searching her face for the eeriness he’s feeling.

“Feel what?” Susan asks, frowning.

Death itself? Billy doesn’t know.

“Nothing, it’s…just cold, I guess.”

“Oh, Billy, I think you have the chills.”

And he knows he does but it’s not the same thing. He doesn’t comment any more on it. Together they get Neil up on the metal rim of the open dumpster, push him over. Garbage crunches and crinkles beneath his deadweight. Billy feels another coughing fit coming on and manages to suppress it until he gets back inside the truck.

“Do you want me to drive home?” Susan asks.

“No. I know the way better, it’s easier if I do it.”

“You could, um. I mean, you could direct me if I get a little turned around. You’re looking pretty tuckered out.” It’s dark but Billy can hear the frown in her voice.

“Alright,” he sighs out. “Fine.”

Because she’s not wrong. He’s drained at this point. Shoving his dad’s body in the dumpster spent the last store of energy he had. He and Susan swap places. She doesn’t have much trouble once she actually gets back on the main road.

“Thank you,” she murmurs eventually. “If I had to do this myself, I’d still be in the middle of it.”

“Yeah…sure thing, I guess.” She killed his dad. No big deal. Billy blinks, isn’t sure what else to say.

“…so, um…you like the fellas, huh?” she asks, voice light and not a bit unkind.

“Uh-huh." He shrugs. "Guys, girls, I mean, I'm not that picky. A hole’s a hole, a mouth’s a mouth, fingers are fingers.”

Susan chokes on a scandalized gasp and Billy gets a chuckle out of it, even as it turns into a cough.

“That’s, uh. T-That’s certainly crude.”

And it’s funny really, that Susan seems more creeped out by a boorish comment than she did by holding his dead dad’s corpse legs.

By the time they get home, Billy’s so beyond spent he knows he can’t even make it to his room. Doesn’t bother to try. Collapses on the couch cushions without attempting to take his boots off. Smothers what has to be the goddamn millionth round of coughs into the throw pillow.

When he picks his head up, Susan’s standing there, fiddling with the thermometer again, fretful expression on her features. Oh, fuck it. Fine. Billy bites the bullet and takes it from her, begrudgingly jamming the thing under his tongue.

[loseyoutoloveme]

will you do a song by song review for life support? i really liked the ones for sweetener and thank you next!

oh absolutely, i’d love to! thank you for asking and being interested 🖤 all thoughts below.

the beginning:

this was such a great way to open this album, it’s so cinematic and really sets the mood so perfectly. one of my fav instrumental intros i’ve ever heard.

9/10

good in goodbye: “you put the over in lover, put the ex in next.”

the lyrics are so wonderfully corny and i’ll love this song forever, like the chorus is literally just so fun to sing along to.

i do think it feels a little... shallow compared to the rest of the album, and the album being released so long after this song came out makes it feel disconnected from the rest. but i love it so i don’t care.

7.5/10 

default: “i know, i know this must be coming for me, i swear, i swear i will be the end of me, the end of me.”

this song is just sooo...... OUCH!

i’m obsessed with the way the chorus just SOUNDS like an emotional spiral, like her life falling apart, like falling into a deep depression, and then the outro builds like destructive racing thoughts.

also i never noticed the wave crashing and the bubbles at the very beginning until really recently, and i love that little touch. the whole song feels so underwater. cloudy and fuzzy. it does a good job of depicting certain symptoms of various mental illnesses.

8.5/10

follow the white rabbit: “is it haunting, baby, that i’m wanting, baby, that i’m wanting, wanting you?”

i actually was fully not expecting to like this that much based off the snippets she’d shared, but omg this left me WEAAAAK on first listen, which was the best surprise

there are definitely so many layers to these lyrics too, despite it being just a bombastic sexy toxic love song on its surface, particularly when thinking about the album as a commentary on mental illness, and some of the breakup/love songs as metaphors rather than straightforward love songs. definitely about infatuation and toxicity and perhaps knowingly entering a bad relationship as a bad coping mechanism, a way to avoid dealing with your pain or (as we see in effortlessly) a way to just feel anything at all.

9/10

effortlessly: “i hold my breath to breathe, hurt me so i feel, used to do these things so effortlessly somehow.”

oh god this song is just a punch in the stomach

i ALSO didn’t really expect to love this one based on snippets but the lyrics are just devastating and perfect and i hope speak to anybody who has struggled with self-harm and medication.

i don’t even have thoughts on this song, it just makes me go jsn*@(#nkdasdnkasd7*@U#j2k3n

love that this is such a fan favourite. it deserves!

10/10

stay numb and carry on: “truth is it was never love, your fault if you thought it was.”

the reverse “i’ve become emotionless” at the beginning >>>

also love the “i was gin and you were toxic . . . wish we’d just stayed plaTONIC” like a platonic relationship would be the opposite of toxic. it’s such fun wordplay.

also “i don’t feel like anyone” makes me emo, she really just slid the most simple but heartbreaking lines in everywhere and you don’t notice them until they hit you out of nowhere one day and you’re like ...OH

AND THE WAY HER VOICE STARTS TO GO MONOTONE AT “i’ve become emotionless” 

in conclusion, madison beer is a vessel for god

10/10

blue: “you could be as sweet as honey but i knew the darkness in your mind.”

this is my least favourite on the album but it’s still fantastic

the lana influence is clear without being too copycat, like it’s still SO madison. sorta like lana’s video games modernized and adapted into something truer to madison’s vibe.

love love love the whole outro

glad that this wasn’t a single like it was planned to be

7/10

interlude: “would you do that shit for me too?”

VOCODER RIGHTS

this album in general is just not really for people who don’t like vocoders and lots of technical effects. i looove that she leaned into it so hard bc it’s so HER.

this song also has so much depth for an interlude, relaying the experience of feeling SO hard about people, and realizing like you’re putting in way more than you’re getting back.

the post-chorus is like... 🤩🌌💫☄️🌠

7.5/10

homesick: “these humans speak my language, still don’t understand it.”

THIS SONG...... IS MY BABY......

oh god it just breaks my heart on every listen. the image in my head is of a little girl talking to the stars.

and why does the line about her mom and dad make me wanna cry every time? i have no idea.

I BELONG IN SPACE...... FLOATING WITH DEBRIS.......

i’m sure she’s not the first person to ever use this metaphor for mental illness, expressing the alienation of mental illness (especially one as stigmatized and misunderstood as bpd) by talking about LITERAL aliens sdkjfsdfksd, but she does it SOOOOO well and sincerely that it feels like it’s uniquely hers.

the rick & morty sample is so funny and so weird and so madison. i will probably never watch an episode of that show in my life.

10000000000/10 this song is the loml

selfish: “shouldn’t love you but i couldn’t help it, had a feeling that you never felt it.”

my absolute favourite of all of the singles, noooo question about it. it’s a perfect, perfect, perfect song.

two years, alone on new years’, nightclubs, gemini... women writing lyrics with very specific details about the shitty men that the song is about... it’s everything to me.

this song will just NEVER age. every time i listen to it, it’s like the first time all over again.

10/10

sour times: “don’t know what song of mine you heard that made you think i’d want to spend the night with you.”

home with you’s big sister<3 

not the strongest lyrics, but the concept and production are more than strong enough to carry the song.

she came on this bitch mad as hell

also love that this have been another fan favourite, seemingly??

men gross

9/10

boyshit: “don’t know how to talk or communicate, we’re so on and off, to you it’s a game.”

it took me awhile to get into this when it was a single ngl, probably because it came out the same night as evermore sjdknfsfnkjsd, but once i got into it, it became the best song ever

she’s soooo reliable with her “men ain’t shit” songs ugh

8.5/10

baby: “i’m a handful but that’s what hands are for.”

when this came out as a single it was the only thing i listened to for a solid week and a half. just an excellent song. the chorus is evvverrryttthhhiiinnnnggg.

WHAT IS IT SO CATCHY FOR?

9.5/10

stained glass: “my life’s a still fading memory of what i can’t have, and everything ’round me is starting to fade into black, but black and white is so much better, i’m learning how to hide my colours.”

i’m so surprised by how much non-stans seem to love this omg, it’s never been a fav of mine, as much as i still love it

but i’m obsessed with how different and distinctly madison it is

also this is a much more genuine take on the “pls stop being mean to me just bc i’m famous / you don’t know what people are going through” type of song than most of the others i’ve ever heard. her pain is evident, and the soft “i just might break” is just..... </3

the glass breaking and little scream are so good

she loves a good metaphor and so do i!

7.5/10 

emotional bruises: “how do i word this? was about to write you this letter, but it was just curses in cursive, you probably deserve it.”

this was definitely my most anticipated song along with everything happens for a reason, like i listened to the snippet on repeat CONSTANTLY lmao. and the full song definitely lived up.

the scribbling sound is so fun, i love her obsession with little real-life sound effects

10/10

everything happens for a reason: “i still can’t find a reason you’d wanna hurt me so bad.”

THIS SONG IS VERY MUCH EVERYTHING

again, this was for sure one of my most anticipated songs and just kjsadsdkajsm god i love love love it

i think she posted a video one time of the song over a clip of the mermaids from peter pan and it was so pretty and i still picture that video when i hear this song. it’s just soooooo hazy and dreamy and retro and perfect.

also the song on the album where she got to show off her vocals the most. she found her niche with this song, truly.

100/10

channel surfing/the end: “YOU’REBADFORMYHEALTHISHOULDPROLLYKEPTSOMEHELPICANTCONTROLMYSELFIMADDICTEDOTHEHELL”

oh my god i was FLOOOOOORED at the dear society clip. dear society was and is one of my FAVOURITE songs, and i appreciate her reasoning for not including it on the album (just wanting some space for a new song instead of one we’d already had for so long), but it did hurt a lil. i was so happy she found a little way to include it :’) rip to hurts like hell tho since she didn’t get the same treatment sjdnksd.

the channel surfing is also just such a fun concept for an outro.

and her laughing with her producers at the end followed by such a sweet calming tropical instrumental...... oooo it’s so nice, it feels like the calm after the storm.

10/10

overall, this album was just SO worth the wait, it’s so fantastic, it’s the loml, one of my favourite albums ever. i LOVE that it’s helped anyone with BPD feel seen and understood, and as someone who doesn’t have bpd but has a couple of loved ones who do, the emotions she expressed in these lyrics have helped me to understand this disorder more too. just such a special album.

most of the criticism i’ve seen of the album has been that it’s overproduced, and that’s definitely criticism that i understand, bc it IS heavy on the technical side and some people just don’t like very heavy production, buuuut... some people do! i do! madison does! and heavy production does not automatically make an album bad. this type of production isn’t something that i expect her to move away from, because it’s clearly her thing, and maybe that just means her place in the industry will be more with the heavy heavy pop fans and maybe even in more hyperpop circles. i also think it’s SUPPOSED to be overproduced; it’s supposed to be a mess of emotions and sometimes a little chaotic. she executed it very well.

i hope by the time her next album is out, people will stop comparing her to like every single artist out there. some reviewers seem determined to pigeonhole her and compare her to every female artist under the sun, which feels like an absolute disservice to me. she is influenced by many different people and they comes out in her music, as it does any artist’s because everybody has their inspirations, but her sound is VERY much her own. as someone who has liked her for years, i can absolutely feel her essence in each song and nobody else’s.

a 10/10 album and such an amazing, promising debut<3  

[the-sober-story-so-far]

A pre-snippet to the past 10 years

 Hi there, i’ve got quite a few posts to catch up on since i’m on day 3 of sobriety but I feel like any story should start with where I was these past 10 years. I became a mother at 19, happily. My son was planned, I had met the love of my life a bassist in a metal band and fell in love with the lifestyle that came with it.

 When I had first met Matthew I had never partied before, I was in a very abusive relationship before where I wasn’t allowed to experience what most teens did. Parties, drugs,drinking, hell even my proms. So when I met Matt (before i was pregnant keep in mind) I went wild. We would party almost every night, we fell in love fast too. One of those loves that just hit you right in your face like a bullet. We were inseparable and we were both wild as could be. Once we had decided to slow down and stop going out as much we decided we wanted to get married and start a family together no matter how young we knew that regardless it was meant to be. So we were engaged, we were actually trashed when we got engaged it was pretty punk rock if I say so myself. In the middle of an alley in baltimore, he didn’t have a ring and it didn’t matter. We were just jamming to some Coheed and Cambria in my car drinking a 30 pack parked in this alley when he suddenly told me to get out of the car and follow him. At that point he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. I thought he was just drunk or joking at first and I remember I kept asking him the next day if he was serious well, obviously it turns out he was. 

 So fast forward a bit, we were engaged and started trying to get pregnant and it took a few months but with luck we ended up pregnant. We decided to get married at the courthouse since we were already on the way to getting married that year anyways. Then we had our beautiful son, I was sober my entire pregnancy. I remember the first week after I had him I got trashed though just to celebrate 9months of pain and hell but at this point i was still a social drinker. The toddler years were happy years, we would only drink on the weekends or here and there when friends would come over. It wasn’t to the point where I had a problem yet. 

 Then he turned 4, and life got really hard. Problems with my family arose, financial problems as well. My mental health declined and i was diagnosed with Bipolar Type 2, as well as OCD, Severe Depressive, Severe Anxiety and Borderline personality Mercurial type. As well as having PTSD from my childhood with my parents. My mom almost passed when I was younger from liver failure. She ended up having a transplant and living. I had an emotionally abusive father, my mother’s mental health was never stable I actually use to remember her waking me up at 4 am and screaming at me as a child for things I had done the day before. I witnessed so many fights and insane moments a child shouldn’t. I then ended up in an abusive relationship from 14-18 with a boy who would hit me, verbally abuse me, gaslight me, manipulate me and then one day eventually sexually assault me in my sleep. The thing about trauma is it always catches up to you.

 And that’s where I think it all started going wrong, it began catching up. I moved out in my first apartment with my husband and my son and finally had freedom. We had lots of parties, I met lots of “friends” who only cared about where the next party was or who had the drugs. I began partying more and more, and made decisions I was not proud of. Including hurting my husband more than I ever could have even fathomed, I don’t like to speak of it. I have faced my guilt about it daily but in short I was unfaithful. Even if it was one time, it was inexcusable. My cousin had moved in with me, and though I love her back in that time she wasn’t the best influence either. She always wanted to party or smoke weed as well. We became partners in crime, we always wanted to get into some chaos and have fun. Then we were forced to move back to my parents all 4 of us this time due to a shooting in my apartment complex where we were no longer safe. It was unbearable living there during that time, before my mom began fixing herself and facing her own demons and dealing with my father and his emotionally abusive ways.

 So we ended up moving to my grandparents, where we were later kicked out of for having people over partying almost every night. At that point I had also assumed I wanted to be polyamorous, which indeed I am not. I am bisexual yes, but the polyamory was just an excuse in my own mind not to work on my own marriage and fix the damage I had unleashed upon it. When we lived at my grandparents was when the peak in my drinking began. I began drinking daily with my cousin starting early in the morning drinking bottles of rum and vodka all day to the point of blacking out, mixing clonopin with it. Smoking spice, smoking weed, just drugs and booze constantly. One night I overdosed and slit my wrists so bad that the scars are still there to this day I am lucky to be alive and you’d have thought that would have been enough to stop me from my path of destruction but it did not.

 I did end up quitting spice, once we were kicked out of my grandparents I saved money at my job and we rented a place with my cousin and a “friend”, the drinking only got worse there. More parties, more drugs. I started dabbling with Molly and Adderall while i was there and almost ecstasy. My mental health declined so bad due to being worried about a relationship with a girl I thought I loved and spending my money on substance that we lost our house after I lost my job.

 I moved back home again with my parents, just my husband, my son and myself and the drinking continued then for a few months it was daily drinking until one day I did finally get sober and quit drinking, months later I started to become incredibly sick and was still sober but thought I had cancer from how violently ill I was but I was too afraid to go to a doctor for it, instead in my fucked up mind I decided to attempt suicide twice. I lost many friends along this journey from the choices I made, and from who I was. I felt that being sick was my penance for being such a piece of shit for so long.

 Months passed after this, I was sick for at least 9 more months vomiting at least 9 times daily sometimes more. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t shit and I knew something was wrong but I had doctors who didn’t care to find out, who brushed it off as IBS because I was “young and healthy”. 9 months they let it go, it turned out to be my appendix and a dead bowel. The day my appendix ruptured sepsis poured into my abdomen and i was dying, I was actually dying like I had wished for all those years and then it was in that moment that I knew I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live, I wanted to fight. I had my surgery and had 3 months of severe complications including seizures, fluid ruptures and a massive hole left in my abdomen from those fluid ruptures. September of that same year my intestine popped up below the surface of my skin and I had to have my first hernia surgery, it was successful until November of last year when it tore open and I had my final one. During the process I was foolish enough to keep the same doctors, to be dismissed over and over until the first hernia surgery when I had finally had enough and found doctors who actually cared. However, now I have severe PTSD with practitioners not to mention a nurse  who physically and sexually assaulted me and a doctor who possibly did while I was under anesthesia. This is getting back to the trauma creeping up on you, it all has a purpose.

 So, I went through severe anxiety, and experienced what real PTSD was. I was still sober until one night my husband and his friends and myself were all hanging out in the garage and they said have a beer you’ll be fine and that was when it all started again.

I used to look forward to every Friday and Saturday just wanting to get drunk to feel something, all the while i was still using marijuana daily as well. Well, maybe not to feel something i’d say more to feel nothing. And then it went from 6 drinks to 12 drinks, from Saturdays and Sundays to every day of the week. From 6 packs daily to 12 packs daily. From 12 packs daily to 15 drinks daily, from 15 to 18 and so on. This was a year ago i relapsed and this is my first 3 days sober since it all happened.

 This is to document my journey, this is to look back and feel pride in how far i’ve come and this is so that I know I can do anything and how much I refuse to go backwards. If you’re reading this, i hope if you are in a place where I was it gives you strength, I hope you never feel alone. 

 Welcome to my sobriety diaries.

[fokrot27]

THE TRUTH ABOUT ZHEANI

Dear DA fans

Kim Posibill here...

After this girl, Zheani Sparks recently started spreading insane rumors about DA online, I went to do some digging to find out who she REALLY is.

To anyone that doesn’t know what's going on here, let me bring you up to speed. After Ninja & Yolandi broke up in 2013, Yo-landi got a boyfriend, and Ninja started dating different bitches around the world. During this time Ninja met an Australian psycho fan called Zheani Sparks. After chatting to Zheani online for a while, Ninja invited her to South Africa to come visit him. During her visit, Ninja introduced Zheani to ¥o-landi. During this slightly awkward moment, Zheani asked Yo-landi for a selfie, that Zheani then posted proudly on her IG and Tumblr. Yolandi never saw Zheani again during her little African holiday. Shortly after this Ninja got bored of Zheani, cut her visit short, and flew her home. But he wasn’t a dick about it, and still answered her texts she send him from time to time.

A year or two later when Ninja & Yo-landi went to Australia on tour, Zheani offered to work for them as a tour assistant, bringing them vegan food daily for 2 weeks. During this tour Ninja & Yo-landi noticed that Zheani kept hitting on the other famous rappers backstage. When Ninja & Yo-landi saw Zheani give her phone number to 2Chainz after 10sec of meeting him, it suddenly became super obvious to them that their personal assistant was a star fucker. However they kept it cool, and let her finish bringing them food on tour, then they politely parted ways.

Following this it seems that this girl Zheani lost her fucking mind and became a raging internet hoe. She also attempted to start a rap career. To launch her rap career Zheani came up with a wild story that Ninja & Yo-landi TRAFFICKED her out to Africa, where they TORTURED her during a SATANIC RITUAL of some kind. This was her marketing angle, (and probably a wild fantasy of hers).

I was recently contacted by a loyal DA fan who shed some light on these highly imaginative rumors Zheani is attempting to spread about Die Antwoord. Zheani met this DA fan online after she accepted payment from him for a special live pornographic online service she offered, that involved Zheani performing nude satanic rituals (via snapchat and Skype) that her clients can wank to. This fan told me that he was severely upset about the crazy rumors Zheani is attempting to spread about Die Antwoord, and that he is now embarrassed that he payed for this weird porno service. He asked to please stay anonymous.

HERE IS THE EMAIL HE SENT ME (followed by a shit load of dodgy fuckin VIDEOS, PHOTOS and credits card receipts from Zheani Sparks.)

"I received a direct message on instagram sometime last year from Zheani where she told me about a project she does, she described at as a mix between the occult and pornography. You pay 30 Australian dollars a month to be part of her "inner circle," (a reference to devil worship). This gives you access to her snapchat. Once you are on the snapchat you are welcomed to her inner circle and she sends you two video'd satanic rituals of her exposing herself, masturbating, performing oral sex, posing her hands into devil horns and making exorcist style poses. She then asks you how you feel after watching these because she believes they have magical powers. I told her i felt like I knew her better (tongue in cheek referencing the fact she has no clothes on) and she told me that's correct it was a magical energy exchange well done. This self belief that she has super powers is sad, possibly a result of mental illness, and it's clear she tries to manipulate people myself included with it. I just go along with it because it's effectively all pornography, though she thinks it's something greater. The account is called "Gothotic Ritual," The 30 australian dollars gives you access to the snapchat for a month and you top up again although she give me a free month because she'd been speaking with me before. Although she eventually asked me to tip extra one month because I'd been given a free month. She also tells you as soon as you join she takes payments for individual rituals. 30 dollar basic access includes her sending you private messages on her snapchat story she posts snippets of herself conducting rituals for other individuals personal commissions and her performing various sexual acts with various partners, males and females. The rituals she has sent snippets of have included her making devil horns, bathing herself in what appears to be blood, masturbating with blood, screaming at the top of her lungs in the middle of the ocean naked, projecting satanic symbols on her naked body while she masturbates, and more.

After the snippets of the ritual she performs in the ocean naked screaming, she posted on her story that after that ritual she felt like she could sense presences in her house and seemed very worried by it. This is a tell tale sign of psychosis or schizophrenia..

As of my last payment and tip to her from the beginning of month I have received nothing in return, and she hasn't been on snapchat or responding on instagram at all, so I imagine I'm not the only one who has been robbed of money. She used the money she receives of this snapchat to fund her entire album including the song The Question. I have seen her briefly advertise the service on her instagram stories and then deletes it when she is obviously struggling for money she tries to get more people involved for this pornographic service.

During our porno conversations, I'd also asked her a few times about Die Antwoord, because I had seen photos of them with her on her IG from years ago.

Im a big DA fan and also wanted to know more about the band.

There is a few instances of comments and posts after she got back from south africa in 2013, of her explaining how much a great time she had and she couldn't wait to see the Die Antwoord guys again, (plz see screenshot below)

Anyway, Sheani BLATANTLY told that she was making a song that was designed to HURT Die Antwoord, her exact words were that she was "Invoking a lot of Kali Energy," Kali being the hindu God of War. There was not once a sign that she had or did feel abused or broken regarding any of this. It was more like “LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT WHAT IM DOING, I’M AMAZING AREN'T I?”

While she sat aloof and gulped her massive glass of wine (this blatant egotism that Zheani carries is very obvious after your first few experiences with her, only my polite manners and libido kept me talking to her).

She only mentioned on the magnitude this would create around her MUSICAL work, the backlash and publicity it would create from Die Antwoord, and that she was ready for all that, due to her "Kali Energy,”

[FOR PROOF (PHOTOS AND VIDEOS) CLICK BELOW ]

[fangroyal]

WIP Meme

Okay, so hear me out, but I’m gonna start by giving a big thank you to @doubleappled​ for this one. You said you were tagging anyone who hadn’t gotten around to doing this yet, and I happen to be one of those, so I took that message to heart. Haha! I’d secretly been wanting someone to tag me in this for awhile, but it hadn’t happened yet, and I finally decided fuck it, I’m just gonna do it myself. I’ve not written in months because of this weird illness I’ve been dealing with, and I’ve been wanting to go through my WIP to kind of...try to get myself back into it? So here goes.

The Rules: Post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous.

Now here’s another thing. I don’t have a single WIP folder. I have MANY, all split up into different categories. So I’m gonna list them as such.

Harry Potter

(Untitled Broship 01) and (02) - some dumb Draco & Pansy ideas I had like three years ago

(Untitled Krumwood) - What it says on the tin. I think I was gonna do this for some comment kink type fest awhile ago and just....never....did???

Pride - back when I used to be obsessed with Oliver/Draco. x’D I was planning on incorporating some Ginsy as well. Basically, I’d gotten super inspired by a picture similar to this one (can’t find the original now), and fell in love with idea of them hooking up at a wizarding pride parade, covered in rainbow paint/chalk/whatever.

Harry Potter > Requests

Jersey - So you all know, I name any request type WIP docs after the requester. Just a way to help me remember. Anyway, this is for my Draise fake dating fic The Wedding Date, which I’d originally started writing..........a year and a half ago..........for the amazing Jersey’s (aka @kevinsnowday​) bday in 2017. I managed to post chapter one on her bday just fine, and then......never.....got around.....to the rest........Sorry, boo. ^^’ I really, really want to get back to this one eventually.

Harry Potter > Requests > Gay!Draco Challenge > Round 2

kreeblimsabs - Another really old one I want to get back to, my god.....I got this request a fucking year ago this very week, I think........This was from, as the folder names say, round two of my Gay!Draco Challenge. kreeblimsabs (who I’m not sure if they’re still on Tumblr, it won’t let me tag them for some reason) requested I write them a Dron drabble inspired by my favorite Disney song. Well, I’m gonna tell you all now...my favorite Disney song happens to be Hellfire from Hunchback of Notre Dame. So yeah. Haha! The ONLY reason I haven’t written this yet is because that’s such a dark and iconic song, that I wanted to do it when the mood really struck me, which unfortunately hasn’t happened yet. Hopefully someday!

Harry Potter > A Weasel and His Ferret (my Dron exclusive folder ‘cause I’m obsessed, get it? Haha! x’DDD)

(Unnamed Dron 01), (02), (03), and (04) - some random little snippets I always keep around, either to throw into another fic at some point, or to build up into their own

An Unconventional Marriage - GUYS, listen! LISTEN. I have been wanting to write this idea for YEEEAAARRRSSSS. YEARS I TELL YOU!! I think I was still in fucking college when I came up with this, and I’ve never been able to work it out. This is my idea for a Drastoria fake marriage type deal, where they’re the bestest of best friends who decide they’re gonna play the game both their families want by marrying each other, but they’re gonna stay just friends...while fucking whoever they hell they want on the down low. Obviously culminating in Dron on the Draco side of it. I want it. I need it. I CRAVE IT. I hope I actually do it someday.

Because Blaise Zabini Is An Asshole - inspired by this Tumblr post

Chocolate and Sass - A quick little oneshot idea of them meeting as little little kids, no prejudice between them, sharing a chocolate frog. Cut to them fucking, drunk on chocolate liquor as adults. Yeah. I know. But I thought it’d be fun.

I Want To Warm Her Heart - Inspired by one of my favorite White Stripes songs, I Want to be the Boy to Warm your Mother’s Heart, which has always made me think of Dron. Ron’s experiences with a very...icy (*cough*homophobic*cough*) Narcissa over the course of his relationship with Draco.

Like Fathers, Like Sons - A mid hook up Ron and Draco (post divorce, no infidelity here) walking in on a mid hook up Scorpius and Hugo.

Support - Oh my god, you guys, this one is annnnnciiiieeennnttt. I’m pretty sure I started writing it directly after my very first fic posted to AO3, like holy shit. The title is a redemption for me on a fic I wrote at 15 (which still exists on FFN, and also just so happened to be a Dron as well, but please don’t bother looking it up, haha). Lucius was assassinated in Azkaban post-war, and there’s a death threat out on Draco. Auror!Ron is assigned as his body guard during the weeks surrounding the investigation and his father’s funeral.

The Measure Of It All - a crack fic about Ron’s huge cock

TLC - Equally as ancient. Draco’s a masseuse. Ron goes to get a massage, surprised to discover who it’s with. Smut ensues. Enough said.

What Happens In Muggle London - sequel to my fic What Happens In The Forbidden Forest, in which eighth year sneaking out to go clubbing in - you guessed it - Muggle London fuckery ensues

A Match Made In Hogwarts - a multi chapter post-war matchmaker will-they-won’t-they

A Very Fine Line - the second thing I ever posted to AO3, and will probably never finish

Keeping The Faith - That time I really wanted to do a wizarding version of Jones Town.......Don’t look at me........

One Week - I remember nothing of this other than that they were going to be Auror partners, and it was going to be a challenge to myself to see how many cliches I could fit into one fic. Haha.

Switching Sides - What if Draco ended up defecting and becoming a part of the Camping Extravaganza of Deathly Hallows.........Yuuuuup.

Wishful Thinking - Can you believe I’d at one time planned on adding three more chapters to this fic? Yeah, me neither...

19 Days

(Untitled ChengYi) - Yeah, I don’t know either.

It’s Exactly What You Think - sequel to my fic It’s Not What You Think, in which I’d intended for some actual Tianshan to happen

Who I’ve Been Waiting For - I’m so out of the loop with writing for this fandom these days, I don’t fucking know...All I remember is this is supposed to be when they’re adults and Jian Yi returns. Zhengxi’s been hooking up with He Tian in the meantime. They were gonna turn into a poly thing at some point. I don’t fucking know, you guys.

Batman

(Untitled Jaydick) - What it says on the tin. Post Arkham Knight angst, reuniting, and smut.

JTHM (Johnny the Homicidal Maniac)

You Make Me Sick -  Yooouuuuu guuuuyyyyysssssss!! You have no idea how badly I want to write thiiiiiisssssssss!!!! WHERE MY DISCIPLINE AT, LIKE GODDAMN. The title is a play on the Devi spin off comic, I Feel Sick. (I hope you JTHM fans out there got that, ‘cause I’m super proud of it, haha.) IF I EVER FUCKING WRITE IT, this is gonna be a Nny/Squee, but....not really. ;) Basically, the idea is that Squee kind of....discovered his sexuality? Because of Nny??? And grew into a very gay, very pain centric, confused young adult with a major crush on his old next door neighbor. Has had numerous torrid love affairs because of this that never ever ended well. It’ll start with him seeing Nny for the first time again in, like, twenty years and going into a spiral over it.

South Park

The Walking Conformists - GUUUYYYYSSSSS. Sorry to keep “guys”ing you, haha, but this. THIIIIISSSSSSSSSS. If i ever buckle down and WRITE THIS BITCH, I swear it’ll be my holy fucking grail. At least to me. CuRed. Goth kids. Road trips. Zombies. What more could you want?! I’m happy to discuss privately with any one of you who’s interested, because it’s way too much to put here, and this post is long enough as it is.

What We’ve Got - sequel to my fic What We Can’t Have

(Rockstar!Michael) - What it says on the tin. CuRed, obviously.

(Untitled Religious Boys) - Bradley/Gary Harrison. Sexual discovery. Yaaassss.

Everybody Knows - CuRed where everybody thinks they’re already dating, and of course I mean everybody knows they’re meant for each other but Michael and Pete ;)

Nobody Needs To Know - Another old as fuck WIP inspired by the SADDEST SONG IN THE WORLD from the musical The Last Five Years. If you know anything about that musical and this song, you can guess what this fic would be about. Michael cheating on Pete with Firkle. Adults all! No chan here, bitches, you know me, c’mon.

The First Step - CuRed. Holding hands on the school bus. Will be the purest thing I’ve ever written if I ever finish it. It’s a drabble, and I swear to you it’s, like, two paragraphs from being done, and I’ve just never gotten down to it.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT, I have a lot of WIP...Don’t have anything in my Fests/Challenges folders at the moment, because it’s, uh, been awhile, heh heh.

I’m gonna tag my love, @violetbehaviour​, because I think we’re the only two left who haven’t been tagged for this. xD But if any of you reading this are like me, and haven’t been tagged yet but really really want to be, please consider this me tagging you!

[samiholloway]

Post it forward self care thingie:

Self-Care

I'm still figuring out what self-care even is--like, I'm pretty sure if I'd had Tumblr a decade ago I would have been better at taking care of myself, but I didn't, and I lived a long time in this idea that "taking care of yourself" meant basically "paying your bills at all costs". So I worked three jobs one year. I went to school and worked, both full time, for a few years before that. All of these jobs were stressful, hard on my body, hard on my mind, and basically pointless and meaningless. School was not meaningless, but resulted in a lot of debt, which results in endless worry even when I'm not really thinking about it. And then all my friends moved away, I moved away, and I realized that I had no more support systems.

Frankly, I hadn't known how many support systems I even require to function until people who didn't know they were intricate parts of that system weren't there anymore. I don't blame them--how could they know when I didn't even know?

So there was a gap. Something like five years where I was barely a person, let alone a functional one, and I'm still digging out of that grave, and each level I dig through is kind of...Like, personally offensive? Offensive the way broad injustice is offensive, because while I was digging out, I was also learning to identify all the cultural and institutional BS that resulted in my breakdown as well as the personal choices and mental issues and health concerns that did. I'm basically just wildly annoyed at all times that I'd been indoctrinated into this kind of thought that working was the point of adulthood, that personal variation was meant to be stamped out, and that jobs that suck and destroy mental health are normal and expected, and that, worse of all, *that's still the norm*.

So I'm learning where my fragile parts are: what sorts of experiences will mess me up again if I allow them to, and how I can buffer against that. And I'm learning to separate crappy social norms from my personal opinion of myself--which is hard, to say the least. 

And I'm learning how to carve out spaces in my days that are for me to do what I want to do, in the way that I want to do it, to make up for all the times when I have no choice because breakdowns result in poverty and therefore limited choices.

Here's some stuff I do for self-care:

I write. A lot. I write stories and poetry and journal entries. I write on my blog and on here and all over Twitter. I write just to write, because being wordy is part of who I am.

I've filled 32 notebooks in five years, I journal so much to get through this crap. Sometimes I even go find actual journal-therapy questions to answer to get me moving in new directions.

I've made new friends, and reconnected with old ones I lost track of when I wasn't being a very convincing human being. They're all far away, but it's better than not having anyone at all who understands me--and that, I think, is an important part: people who know me for real and get what I'm going through.

I try to get out of the house every day, even if it's just for five minutes to poke at the plants or take pictures of some flowers or the sky or something. Even if it's just standing on the porch at night to look at the moon. I'm going to try to actually go places, now that I know the bus system a little better.

I've started making things again. Most of them, no one will ever see, but it's like little snippets of me in a world that's not-me: a collaged page in a journal or a sketchbook, a poem scribbled on a post-it-note, a doodle, a little painting experiment. I learned a new way to bind books last night. I'm reading up on a bunch of stuff I've always wanted to learn and kept putting off.

I schedule my stuff--I'm super into my planner and the whole planner life thing, and it helps me actually get stuff done. But I also give myself one or two days a week to just say "eff it" and drop everything and renegotiate. I usually sleep or read on those days; quiet internal things help keep me sane.

I track stuff. My monthlies, moods, weather, allergy reports, how many cups of tea I drink, what I'm reading and watching. Sometimes it warns me when I'm sliding before I feel it; sometimes it's just proof that a day happened when I'm all fuzzy and forgetful.

I pamper myself once in a while: long warm baths, skincare and haircare days, making my fav cookies just because I want them, using the expensive soap or perfume or bedding or plates--whatever to help me feel better and not hoard up the Good Stuff.

I make a lot of lists. Stuff to get out of my head. Stuff I want in life. Stuff I don't want. Ways I can change things. Things I can't change and ways to work around them. Books to read. Places to go. Good stuff I need to remember. Things to do. Things that happened today.

I try to keep educated on things as they happen so I'm less likely to be blindsided. I want to drop out of society quite a lot, but if I do, what then?

I listen to music. A lot. All my fav things, as often as possible, because music is a great way to replace anxiety-causing noise and to focus.

It's a little life, but it's MY little life, now, and I'm working on dismantling all the mess depression and chronic illness and not-knowing-introverts-need-different-things-than-extroverts left behind.

It’s a process, which I think is the most important thing I learned about self care and mental health: *health* is a moving target, and you have to keep doing stuff to find it and keep it.

[gaiatheorist]

“Reintroduction of apex predators.”

(My head is playing the 2am game again, there are dozens of things I should be concentrating on, but I’m busy going mad. It’s fine, I usually come back eventually.) 

2am-ish. “Bleurgh. Ick. Cold. Timesit?”

Yes, ‘Bleurgh’, and yes ‘Ick’, that’ll be the wine. Yes, ‘Cold’, because I’d fallen asleep on the sofa again. ‘Timesit?’, bollocks, I didn’t put my phone on charge, so there’s an on-screen reminder that a pending update couldn’t be installed overnight. I hate phone updates, I always worry that something will go wrong, which is ridiculous, because I haven’t ‘always’ had a mobile phone, and there must, logically, be a way to un-install an update if something does cock up. It’s just after half past three now, so it’s taken me about an hour and a half to convince myself that ‘nothing bad will happen’ if I update my phone. Not that updating my phone would stop OTHER bad things from happening, I’m not THAT mad.

The sensible thing to do if you wake up at 2am on the sofa would be to go to bed. I’m not sensible, and, since the brain haemorrhage, there’s been even more of the “Ping! Wide awake!” malarkey. It is a behaviour I need to change, and, yet again, I failed to do so. (Side-thought about setting up a GO TO BED screen-saver on my phone?) I’m differently-mad to my friend, who called around for a cup of tea after his eye test this week, we share some similar traits, and we’re open-ish with each other. He wakes up every single morning crippled by confusion, processing the fact that he’s one of billions of bipedal beings on the surface of a spinning rock, and, every day, it takes him ‘hours’ to shake off that confusion, and regain some semblance of functionality. In a way, I’m glad I just wake up in the middle of the night, with hundreds of fragments of nonsense-thought running through my head, because his existential anxiety every morning sounds awful. (Waking up at 2am, knowing it’s going to knock-on my sleep pattern again, and immediately checking the internet to see if anything has happened is awful, too, but I’ve normalised it to an extent. It’s my awful, I’m used to it.)

We’re similar in that I knew where his post-vasectomy anecdote was going as soon as he started it, I guessed the ‘masturbating with a bag of frozen peas clamped to his testicles’ part, but the ‘while the police raided the house next door for cannabis’ twist was a surprise. We talked non-stop for an hour, about what utter chaotic twats we were two decades ago, about the times he’d driven the ex and I home out-of-his-mind drunk, bouncing off kerbs, that I couldn’t remember, because I was also out-of-my-mind. He couldn’t remember the time he’d stayed at our old house, and put his foot THROUGH one of the stairs. We both remembered disgusting days of just not going to work, and arsing about. We both remembered the Ouija board, his unflattering nickname for one of my friends, and how unpredictable-unstable our weird little pre-bubble group was. We’ve concluded that we were twats, and we’re trying not to be any more.

Part of his twattery was multiple affairs, his wife is an absolute stoic, and keeps taking him back, they’ve divorced twice. He’s married her 3 times, and she was his third wife, I think. Other people’s business, isn’t it? After one of the affairs, she banned him from associating with us, like she was a grown-up, and we were teenagers, leading him astray. I became ‘Her!’, and the focus of her hate, more so than the ‘other women’ he was having affairs with. (To clarify, there was never any of that between us.) I’d forgotten about being ‘Her!’, but, apparently she hasn’t, and still resents me. I’ll live, but now sort-of-understand why I don’t have his actual mobile number, he only ever contacts me on Fakebook, AND he deletes the chat-messages. “She’d go mad if she knew I was here.” For fuck’s sake, unwittingly duplicitous-complicit in a married man’s sneaking-about.

I went the long way around that, didn’t I? There are several escaped crickets having a little adventure on my living room carpet, I really ought to pick them up.

OK, I woke up at an unreasonable time, and did what I shouldn’t have done, in checking the news, to see if anything had happened. With me, that’s a hang-up from September 11th, I’d been ill with a migraine, and missed the news, I plunged into obsessive-panic about not missing ‘The News’, which, back then, was on the TV, there was one computer in the house, which took about a century to boot up, and then the rest of your life to connect to the dial-up. How times have changed. I’m not the only one doing it these days, logging on, and hoping for the best, but acknowledging that there is the possibility that something catastrophically ominous is on the horizon. Please, please, let me find something in the news that’s not Him, or Her, like the lovely nun yesterday. 

Lettuce? I don’t buy it as a matter of course, the father-in-law used to plant millions of the ‘butterhead’ bastards on the allotment, horrible, floppy-limp things, full of mud and slugs, for years my fridge was guaranteed to contain mud and slugs. “Here, lass, I’ve fetched you a lettuce!” I don’t like lettuce all that much.

Wikipedia? OK, it’s a side-swipe at people telling huge great big massive lies, but the ‘many hands make light work’ approach is encouraging. A chain is only ever as strong as its weakest link, but so many links could effectively knit truth-chain-mail. Too relevant, though, too linked to real-time events.

Bullshit Barbie? No thanks, I read that yesterday.

I flicked through, looking for something that wasn’t ‘that’, ready to be witty, or engaging, or insightful before some knobhead invariably weighs in with “How is this news?” That’s the fucking point, knobheads, we’re aware of the news, which is why we’re also looking at “10 ways to tuck in a shirt.”, or whatever, with courses as heavy as these ones, we absolutely need palate-cleansers as well. The ‘breaking’ banner will pop up if something happens, in the meantime, we’ll read the fluff, and the filler.

It would appear that it’s not working, though, the distraction-method. I clicked on an article about a proposal to reintroduce lynx in Northumbria, thinking that couldn’t possibly have any “We’re all fucked!” connotations. (Except if you’re a roe deer, apologies to any roe deer reading this...) I can see the logic, the lynx would be brought in to control the roe deer population. The deer haven’t done anything ‘wrong’, they’re just being deer, you know, making more deer, eating leaves, making more deer to eat more leaves, when the tree really needed those leaves, to photosynthesise, and keep us all breathing, and such. The local farmers don’t want the lynx, because they worry for their livestock, and I’m relatively certain there’s probably some knobhead setting up Fakebook pages that say lynx eat babies. (Note ‘relatively’, and ‘probably’, I talk shit, but I’m not Bullshit Barbie.) 

It’s not the ‘people refusing to accept science, because it threatens their lambs’ thing, it was one phrase, used repeatedly. ‘Apex predator’ (Food-chain, chain-mail, my head is misbehaving, but that’s why I’m rattling it all out here, to purge my cranium of these thought-snippets.) Apex predator, top of the food-chain, it’s nature’s way, because most creatures on this revolving rock don’t have access to family planning. Oh. The thing at the top of the food-chain, or food-pyramid, or food-web, depending on how they’re teaching it now eats the things below it. (Fucking hell, woman, park THAT Gaia Theory, this potential catastrophe for the planet ISN’T a global phone-update, move away from the rats-and-cockroaches ideation.) 

Nature does its thing, or, at least it did, until we started trying to boss it. We’re twats, some more so than others, we kill things we have no intention of eating. We kill each other. We bugger about with the environment, and then complain about lettuce. We, in the UK have eradicated most of our apex predators, what chance do a handful of nappy-eating foxes have of controlling the rabbit population? (Especially if people in silly clothes carry on with their ‘sport’.) We ate all the dodos, and all of that particular kind of turtle, we’re killing the fucking BEES, and we all know how that ends. (Removes tinfoil hat.) 

We have new apex predators, and we need to figure out how to keep ourselves as safe as we can, because these new apex predators don’t behave in exactly the same way as the ones we’re used to. The ‘bubbles’ are electronic versions of stone-age tribes’ perimeter-spikes against sabre-toothed tigers. (I don’t know, I’ve already told you I never paid attention in History, sometimes I used to pick my ear until it bled, so I could get out of class to see matron for a plaster.) I’m dithering around a vague notion that our greatest weapon is the truth, but also dabbling with the idea that our strength is our number,  not in the same way as animals produce ‘spare’ young, because they know some will be eaten, though. We are little, but there are lots of us, aside from good guys always coming last, we DO need to remember that we’re human, in the face of this inhumanity, the first big collection of little things that stoops to the level of the new predators is on a very shaky foundation. 

This thing will run its course, as all things do, we just need to remember to show our arses to bears, and punch sharks on the nose, not the other way around. Personally, I’d prefer this fuckpuddle to be mopped up with paper rather than projectiles, and soon, because this limbo-uncertainty is exhausting us, and sending us mad. Nobody’s going to pop out from behind the sofa with a hidden camera crew and shout “Fooled you, you’ve been part of the biggest reality TV experiment ever!” We need to watch and wait, keep ourselves and each other safe.

[starnova-between-two-worlds]

Born this way.

Music: Various Vocaloid songs/some Calum Scott 

All signs, it turns out, point to me having been born with this. 

Yesterday I finally worked up the nerve to ask my dad about what my babyhood was like. Except for snippets in a baby book updated up to age 4, my babyhood is entirely shrouded in mystery. I wanted to know what went on then, if anything at all went on that could have somehow led to this. What happened to make me...a glitch? Did it happen back then? 

It was my dad talking and he likes to idealize things, so I can’t tell how much of it he really told me or how much of it was just tiptoeing around the bush to make things sound normal. After all, he does that for his wife now even though anyone with a brain knows something’s terribly wrong. But in that moment he didn’t really have TOO much reason to lie to me. It was only me and Lightning there. His wife wasn’t there. I expected some glaring incident to stick out at me--something that would make me go “AHA!” and understand everything. The first thing I asked about was how I was nearly miscarried early on into the pregnancy, which I had learned from reading the baby book was a thing that happened. I wondered what his wife had done to cause a near-miscarriage, and what it could’ve done to my developing brain... 

Well, turns out she did nothing. He said even the doctors couldn’t figure out the cause, other than “complications.” My fetus had just decided to attempt suicide for no discernible reason, by the sounds of it. Scary. I almost died when I was still a 21-week-old fetus, for no real reason other than just deciding to jump ship. You take that to bed with you about the blessing of being alive...

I asked why I had to be in the NICU when I was born (which was a screwed-up birth process, it turned out. Maybe that was secretly the “AHA?” The fact that for some reason the doctors had to fucking fight to get me out of the womb because I was stuck in the damn corner? I don’t know, I don’t know enough about conditions that cause prenatal brain damage. More “I’m so fucking glad to be alive” material, though, as I could’ve ended up stuck in there and died). It was just for jaundice. And did they visit me in the NICU? I had a feeling my dad’s wife wouldn’t have visited me because “She couldn’t be bothered.” But no, she did. They both came by every day to hold and feed me. Even my dad’s wife, who by the sounds of it, was either totally normal during my entire babyhood, or was doing a damn good job of pretending to be...

Other than the “your birth was really fucking complicated and you almost died twice” story and being born on the low end of “healthy birth weight” (to think I’d NEVER be a tiny person again), the rest of it was...unremarkable. I sat there listening to how absolutely nothing abnormal or untoward happened during my first three years of life. In fact, the developmental markers were all hit quickly and very early, one after the other in rapid-fire succession. A hyper-processing supercomputer even at that tiny age...figuring words out and succeeding at an early age, walking at 8 months old, tiny sentences 8 months later. For some reason, I always expected to be a slow, delayed baby. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had turned out I didn’t speak a real word until I was 3 years old. To see it marked down that I was talking in sentences by 16 months was a mind-blower. He said my doctor at the time couldn’t figure it out how I was born 6 weeks premature (another “AHA?” Maybe?), yet everything had not only fully developed the way it was supposed to but had developed BEYOND what it was supposed to. 

...So what the hell. 

I obviously didn’t tell my dad the real reason I wanted him to tell me all these stories. I waved it off as “There’s an entire 3 years of my life that’s a complete mystery to me” which is not a lie. The real reason was that I wanted to find the “AHA,” the thing that had happened which had led to this mystery that psychiatric science happens to have a name for, schizotypal. I wanted to see if anything had been done to my poor brain by that narcissist I was at the mercy of for all of my childhood. I wanted to know WHAT HAPPENED.

Only to find out that nothing happened. My babyhood was...well, not typical considering the advanced development, but not anything that pointed to something outside causing this mental illness. When we thought it was BPD, we could pinpoint EXACTLY what would have caused it. But now... 

The symptoms of this particular monster started to show up at around age 3. Dad told me about how they would take me to the park, but I hated other kids and would avoid them like it was an instinct. If one came around, I would hide until they went away. I could understand why. It’s the same reason I don’t like people now: they’re loud, they act weird, they get in my way, and you never fucking know what they’re going to do next. It’s the reason I now wear noise-blockers when in the presence of other people at school. I never liked the two-legged vermin. It sounds as though even my first experiences with social peers were not happy ones. Dad said he ended up having to take me to an old park where nobody else ever came around to, and I had the time of my life, playing with “the dinosaurs” and “Miss Frizzle and the Magic School Bus” and “Flotsam and Jetsam,” Ursula’s two eels who were my favorite characters (can I take a moment to brag that by 4 years old I could pronounce most of the dinosaurs’ names, including things like “baryonyx” and my favorite “parasaurolophus”? I couldn’t SPELL them for shit, but I could say them. Though I remember having trouble with “euoplocephalus” and would call it “euoplocetalus”). 

Now that I think about it, could these have been proto-soulbonds? 

I started fixating on anything with a screen at 3 years old. What can I say? Those screens showed me windows into worlds that even then I felt were so much nicer than this one. I mentioned the Zoogs from Disney Channel in another post. Anyone remember  those little pixelated cyberspace-alien things from the acid-trippy Disney segments in the late 90s? Well, those things were my greatest “friends” back in the day. But people from this world? Those loud, fleshy creatures that only LOOKED just like me? It turns out there was never a moment in time when I didn’t want them the hell away from me. 

This has been going on LONGER than I can remember... 

And we have no discernible reason why. 

Which can only mean one thing: I was born this way. 

Born glitched. Born incompatible. Born into a world in which I just do not belong...and never will. A critical error...

It’s been a day and I still don’t know what the fuck to do with this information. I really don’t. The first thing I did when I got home from school was go directly to Google and not pass go. I slammed “was I born schizotypal” into that Google search like my life depended on it...and I felt very much like it did, at the time. Well, even Google was like “Why the fuck are you asking me that question” and giving me arbitrary links...and then I found two things: a research study on the birth factors behind schizotypal, and a PsychCentral forum post by schizotypals asking eachother when it all started. 

To make a long story short because I really don’t want to type anymore (I’ve been sitting here for a goddamn hour and my feet are getting restless to get up and move)...I was born this way. 

And I still don’t know what to do with this information. All I know is I kinda don’t want to go to school today. Except Edward says that will only make me feel worse... 

And the worst part of all is that this means I could have broken her...

What would you do if your child was born fundamentally cut off from her own world?