#imagine someone finding your secret journal and going “ya this is getting added to the mystical lore because it has to be divine magic”

[blazenexusstar]

The real magic that angel revealed to Solomon was how to format a journal that vibes with my type of neurodivergence. Truly some great knowledge.

Diagrams from a thirteenth-century version of the Ars Notoria.

[anxiouslyfred]

Secret Surprise Hell

Summary: Virgil would have thought his soulmate taking the time to plan a surprise party in so much secret he knew a lot of the details before anyone his soulmate knew in person sweet, except now he hates knowing the details and having to keep the person it’s for from finding out early.

/\/\

Knowing the secrets of someone you've never even met was a very very bizarre thing. Nobody quite knew what to make of the soulmate connection and everyone had very strong views about secrets, whether it was that they should keep everything hidden or reveal all constantly, but either way, they were deliberate over how they treated secrets.

Virgil wasn't sure if he liked keeping so many secrets, but when the world left him certain people would vilify him for everything, from the clothes he wore to the things he enjoyed not matching the popular ones, it just felt safer to keep them secret.

Occasionally he'd make a friend and try trusting them with some of who he is, and now even that felt like stealing the knowledge of his accidental secrets away from his soulmate. After all a secret shared by 2 people isn't really a secret at all when they know each other in person.

His soulmate however didn't seem to keep any particularly identifying secrets. The secrets that would appear in Virgil's mind were random, about places they went occasionally, or praises for someone called Roman. Why those things needed to be kept secret, he couldn't know without meeting his soulmate, but he kept note of them in a journal. At least nothing seemed likely to make him get his soulmate arrested over a secret.

There's been news reports over the years about soulmates getting each other arrested, or testifying against each other without actually meeting. It damaged both parties in that soulmate connection as people saw betraying the secrets of your soulmate with utmost scorn, no matter how reprehensible the acts they'd carried out were. Virgil dreaded the chance he could be in that situation, but whomever his soulmate was didn't seem likely to do that.

Currently they were planning a surprise birthday party actually. Virgil had been surprised that came to him as a secret since usually parties like that needed multiple people to plan and it had remained secret for long enough that he knew when the decorations would be brought and that his soulmate was getting them from a department store in the same chain he worked at. It could even be the same one given there had never been a clue over where his soulmate lived.

Virgil hadn't learnt much beyond that they'd come with their brother since that meant sharing the plans with someone else, but he was going to keep an eye out, especially in case anyone in blue or called Patton mentioned wanting birthday decorations. He knew that sometimes people planning surprise parties forgot to let their friends know they were remembered while planning it all. Blue had been mentioned way too much while Remus was planning the party entirely in secret so Virgil could only believe Patton liked the colour a lot.

By the time the day to get party decorations came around he'd grown more and more curious over if there was a way to plan a meet up, make secret arrangements just with himself to go somewhere specific enough his soulmate could meet him there. It was a futile dream and one Virgil couldn't imagine doing. He hated being around public spaces alone, and then the added anxiety of hoping his soulmate might actually try to turn up? It would never happen, but then again he was kind of doing the return with his reaction to this party.

“Come Onnnnnn! If we're going to get this party set up we need to get decorations and get home!” An obnoxiously loud whine brought Virgil out of his thoughts as a pair of twins came into the store. Really it was a guy in what seemed to be a see through green and black ice skating costume and combat boots was dragging someone identical to him but far more reasonably dressed into the store, already looking around to decide the direction they'd head in.

“Welcome to the store, how can I help you today?” Virgil recited, long since trained into greeting people, even if they clearly didn't need to.

The ice skater outfit twin glanced at him for a second. “If you have pinatas I need to know where and if I can beat them up before buying them!” He decided, completely seriously after a second.

“Or perhaps you could direct us to party decorations. My brother has decided to throw a surprise party for one of my friends.” The other interjected, straightening his jacket now the pull on his wrist was released.

“Someone Had Too and you, for all your bluster of being a courteous knight wouldn't even bring up his birthday at all, despite the hints he kept dropping about wanting to do something!”

Virgil interrupted with a quick cough, not wanting an argument to break out. “You want the back shelves, that corner and pinatas are like an aisle away from the decorations. That classes as a party game instead.” He directed, arm pointing through the small clothing section near the front of the store.

“We've got decorations to get and things to beat up then. See ya!” The ice skater uniform was once again dragging his twin away, already talking about the various other things the world said it was good to beat up against things it was bad to.

Once they were out of sight Virgil returned to thinking and just watching the doors, half wondering if the pair could have been connected or possibly even his soulmate and whomever they'd chosen to go shopping with. He could imagine ice skater in combat boots keeping some of the weird secrets he'd received over the years.

“Um, Hey, are there any party decorations in here?” A rather down trodden man had come in while Virgil was thinking. He was in a blue collared top, and had his arms wrapped around him trying to hug himself.

Slowly Virgil nodded, “Sure, but are you okay? You don't look much like you want a party currently.” He wouldn't normally ask a customer this, but even without the thoughts in his head that this could be Patton, he just thought the guy needed a friendly face.

“Friends all forgot my birthday, I guess I'll do something myself. Perhaps if I get a party set up and invite them over this evening I can have a small celebration or something?” The puppy dog eyes though the guys glasses were fatal, and Virgil definitely hoped this was Patton, or at least this guys friends were doing the same thing as his soulmate.

None of that could be said though, so Virgil dragged a hand though his hair. “That's rough, Buddy. Come on, I've finished my time as greeter and should check the shelves anyway. I'll show you where the cakes are and help carry any decorations you pick out once we get there.”

“You don't have to do that, Kiddo. Thank you, though. I'm Patton.” The thanks had Virgil shaking his head, but the name had him freezing. This was his soulmate's friend, or given the weird twins from earlier, his soulmate's brother's friend and definitely had a surprise party planned for him already. How the hell was Virgil going to not only keep him from spending too much on decorations, as well as away from the brothers, while still managing to meet his soulmate?

Either way he definitely was sticking with Patton now. “No, I insist. Come on, I know the nicer cakes we have in stock. What type of cakes do you like? Chocolate, plain with jam, decorated to look like character or animals? We've got something for everyone here.”

“Animals. I love puppies and kittens so if they're on anything I'll probably pick that. Some of my friends have allergies so I can't get a cake with nuts on it.” Patton was already seeming happier with his help, but paused for a moment. “If you're gonna be helping me so much Kiddo, can you tell me your name? These glasses aren't good for reading name tags quickly.”

“I'm Virgil, and now I can't decide if I should show you the latest tray of cupcakes we've started getting or one chocolate sponge I've been tempted to get a few times.” This was far more customer service filtering than Virgil usually did, but he could play sweetness and light for a while.

They were looking at the cupcakes when the twin in a red coat called over. “Hey, Patton, fancy seeing you here.”

Virgil narrowed his eyes to the end of the aisle he'd come from before turning around. With how loud the call was it screamed of distraction technique and if the ice skater dude was around Virgil was going to either give him a piece of his mind or make sure it was passed on to Patton's friends. “If this is one of your friends I should probably get back to stocking shelves before someone challenges what I've been doing.” He offered, seeing Patton glancing towards him.

“Gosh Kiddo, I hope I won't have gotten you in trouble.” Patton had those puppy dog eyes again.

“Nah, I'm pretty sure I've got a good excuse if they try anyway. We pride ourselves on customer service.” Virgil dismissed it, already heading out the aisle. “Hope you have a good birthday.”

Sure enough when he got to the aisle with birthday cakes on there was the dude in his ice skating costume. Virgil immediately marched over, more irritated he'd been caught in this entire thing than happy at the chance to meet his soulmate now.

“Next time you decide to keep a birthday party a secret go to some other bloody store. I did not need to have to distract Patton all because you and that idiot with you left him feeling abandoned on his birthday!” He got immediate attention on him, even with the completely bewildered gaze. “Also is your brother Roman, and that why you constantly have secrets thinking something he's made is good? Cause right now if Patton is his friend primarily I've got half a mind to go and yell at him. Your party for him better be good!”

The ice skater guy burst out laughing then, “Honey, I've imagined meeting my soulmate a million ways but never thought it would be telling me off in a supermarket! You're coming to this party now and I'll make sure you can corner Roman to yell at him too! Especially if I can watch with popcorn. Can you tell Jay and Lolo off at the same time? They've all said I'm making a big deal out of nothing trying to set up a surprise party for Patton, but he's done so many parties for all of us.”

“I'll add them to the list. Have they at least got birthday presents for him?” Virgil shrugged, not quite sure what to do with the sudden invitation, but it wasn't like he was doing anything that evening.

“If they didn't earlier they definitely will by now. I got my morning-star out to threaten them with when Logan tried claiming the fuss made of birthday's was excessive.” Remus agreed, already nodding before pouting. “Hang on, you've known me all of two seconds and have somehow decided to care about both Patton and me in that time? Why the hell is your biggest secret that you're lonely?”

Virgil was not here to get called out for his own issues. “Anger for being dragged into surprise party planning does not count as caring.”

“Yeah and Roman's artwork is as worthless as he claims when the shading goes slightly wrong. Pull the other one. You've latched on quickly.” Remus cut through any blustering arguments Virgil might have tried to say.

“Loud places or crowded places are way too stressful to talk to people in. Hell even here I stick to the tills whenever there's holidays coming up to avoid the crowds. Doesn't exactly help me make friends and any I had have long since vanished cause they liked them.” He shrugged, reaching for the cake Patton had almost gone for before deciding it would be too big for the amount of friends he thought might come over at short notice.

“Cake got, now for chocolate gateau so I can shove it in someone's face!” Remus bounced off, tugging Virgil along with him. “Also, since we're soulmate's I better be getting your number and address so I can turn up out of the blue randomly.”

Virgil snorted. “So you're going to stalk me under the pretence of getting to know me?”

“You know it, MarketKing, you know it!” Remus really was looking through the refrigerated aisles for gateaus, but still turned to leer momentarily at him.

“Just call me Virge, or Virgil. What's your name anyway? I kinda forgot about that since I already knew what you're doing.” He wasn't going to point out the chilled desserts were on the end of an aisle nearer the frozen foods. On the chance an employee figured out who their soulmate was while working they were allowed a margin of unproductive work time.

“Remus, although Duke or Dukey works too. It's fun to have Roman scream those nicknames after I've pranked him. Half the time he gets so embarrassed it's like a second part of the prank.” Remus cheerfully offered.

Whatever this surprise party was going to be, Virgil was definitely interested in where getting to know his soulmate would end up.

[moonstruckbucky]

I Like You a Latte [one-shot]

Summary: Bucky is a frequent flyer at the coffee shop you work for.

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x fem!Reader

Warnings: Tooth-rotting fluff

Notes: I was told I need to tone it down on the angst, so here ya go! We’ll be right back to that angst-fest though, so don’t get too comfortable. Going off the (made up) prompt: “You always come into my coffee shop and I’ve never seen you smile so I’ve started practicing my coffee art to try and cheer you up.”

The bell over the door tinkles softly as a new customer walks in. A glance up at the clock on the wall shows 6 AM. The shop’s been open about an hour, and the morning rush is set to start soon.

“Be with you in a sec!” you call to the customer, your back to the door as you prepare another customer’s drink. You have two other employees scheduled to arrive any second, and you could use the help as the coffee shop gets busier.

Whirling on your feet, you slide the cup over to the waiting customer with a smile and a bright “come again!” before turning to the next in line. Your breathing stutters for a beat. It’s him. You should’ve known to expect him; he’s always in the shop at this time, hands in his pockets, hair shoved under a cap, and deep circles under his icy blue eyes. But you beam brightly at him, and he kind of returns it. It’s just a brief twitch of his lips but you’ll take it.

“Good morning! The usual?” Large black, two sugars.

“Please.” His voice is scratchy, sleep-deprived, and you feel a small tug in your chest. His teeth gnaw on his bottom lip as his eyes drift over the pastry case. “And a blueberry scone, please.”

“Sure thing. That’ll be $5.40.” He hands you a ten, tells you to keep the change with a small downward nod. You smile back and turn away to prepare his order.

As you work, your eyes continuously drift back to the man who’s taken a seat in the corner, back to the wall and eyes on the front windows. He comes in regularly, always alone, and always orders the same thing. You’ve made suggestions before, but he turns every one of them down. There’s mystery about him, not only in the cautious way he carries himself but in the haunted look in his eyes, as if they’ve seen far too much horror and not enough light.

He slips out of the cafe sometime during the morning rush and you sigh quietly to yourself before returning to work.

It happens that way for the next week. He comes in for his usual, sits down, leaves when it gets busy. The only thing that changes is the darkness of the circles under his eyes. They’re getting darker, aging his handsome face by years, and you wonder idly how long it’s been since he’s slept. With a brief lull in the cafe, you watch him a little longer.

His broad shoulders are rigid and straight, eyes on the alert as they scan the shop and analyze every person who walks through the door. You imagine he must have been in the armed forces, probably suffering from some form of PTSD. Someone brushes by him, steadying herself on his shoulder, and you gasp as he flinches—badly. The woman takes one look at him, at his wide eyes, and scurries away.

Like a balloon, the man deflates rapidly, shoulders hunching as he curls in on himself. Your heart beats painfully in your chest and you long to reach out and embrace him, just to show him he isn’t alone. But, judging by his reaction to being touched, you don’t think that’s such a good idea.

Before you can come up with something, he’s out of his chair, throwing his garbage away, and exiting the store in a broody dark cloud.

It comes to you as you’re lounging in your apartment later that afternoon. Your shift ended at 2, so you picked up some lunch on your way home and parked yourself on the couch. Your laptop in your lap, you scroll through a coffee blog looking for new flavor ideas when you suddenly stop scrolling. A bright smile overtakes your face, and you can’t wait for your shift on Monday.

You spend the weekend practicing, having gone out and bought the necessary materials. It isn’t perfect, but it’ll do.

By the time your shift starts Monday morning, you’re practically bouncing in anticipation. Your coworker, Maddie, can’t stop giggling and rolling her eyes, and when the bell chimes and he walks in, she pokes you repeatedly in the side. A sharp jerk of her head in the direction of the door. A sudden quickening of your heart and a flutter of nerves in your belly.

This could go one of two ways, and you’re praying for it to go right. He steps up to the counter, looking as haggard as ever, and it just plain breaks your heart to see him in such a state. You offer a soft smile, one he doesn’t return, and he recites his order.

Game time. Inhaling, you ask quietly, “Can I make a suggestion?”

He blinks at you.

“We, um, we have a new latte flavor. Creme brulee? It’s really good. Not too sweet. Would you like to try it?” You refrain from biting your lip as you wait for his answer. His eyes shift around a little, nervous and fidgety. He looks back at you and nods once. You smile in relief and ring in his order. He, once again, leaves you a generous tip.

“You can take a seat. I’ll bring it to you.”

He turns sharply on his heel and strides to his usual table. Definitely former military. You turn away to begin his drink and the butterflies are set loose again as you steam milk.

The sun you create with the milk isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough. It dances as you carry it to his table. He’s scribbling in a small, leather journal that he snaps shut as you approach. You smile briefly as you set down the cup, and your getaway is hasty. You can’t fathom the embarrassment if you had to look him in the eye when he sees your doodle.

You begin organizing the sugar and creamer station with your back to him to keep yourself from watching him like a creep. Once you round the counter you chance a glance over at him. He’s staring down at the cup, eyes wide and a little shiny, and his lips are twitching. Holy shit.

You added the text You’re a Star at the last second, but you’d hoped the joke would register. Clearly it has, and you look away rapidly as he turns his head to find you. Your cheeks warm as you feel his gaze burning into you, but you pretend not to notice as you begin another customer’s order.

It goes like that for the next couple of weeks. When he comes in, he gives you a small smile that you’re pleased to see reach his eyes. It lights up his entire face and you silently revel in the secret game the two of you have. Each time it’s a different doodle with a different joke.

You even got a chuckle for your boat doodle with the phrase: Need an Ark? I Noah guy circling it. You discover he has a wonderful laugh and a radiant smile, and slowly, as the puns get worse (better in his silent opinion) and the smiles more genuine, the circles beneath his eyes grow lighter and lighter. You wonder if your jokes improve his mood so much that he’s actually sleeping better.

You get your answer when he enters one morning with a literal bounce in his step. It throws you for a loop a little, unused to seeing him as anything but the broody, sad stranger who likes his coffee black. Without a word he saunters up to the counter and slides a piece of paper across the surface to you. With a smile fighting to break through, you pick up the paper and read it. A surprised laugh passes through your lips.

I seem to have lost my phone number. Can I have yours?

When you glance up, he’s watching you, a smile on his face but uncertainty in his blue eyes. Feeling a small surge of confidence, you plant a hand on your hip and tilt your head.

“I’ll give you my number if I can have your name,” you say lightly. Pink gathers in his cheeks and you can’t help but giggle at how adorable it is. His right hand slowly extends over the counter.

“I’m Bucky.”

[fandom-imagines-stories]

Not Part of the Plan

Peter Kavinsky x Reader

Words: 2669

Part 1 of 2

Summary: You aren’t the type for spontaneity. But when your best friend Peter convinces you to go on the school ski trip, all of your lists and planning journals are thrown out the window. Especially when you discover his feelings for you and you come to the realization that maybe you no longer want to be just friends.  

Notes: You knew this was coming at some point. (this is also going to include some mentions of harassment and cyber-bullying, so just a warning on that)

You furiously scribbled bulleted lists and monthly plans and daily tasks into your journal- all color coordinated, of course. Just as you started drawing a calendar for December when your journal was snatched out of your hands.

“Peter!” You exclaimed, reaching for the book, but he held it out of your reach.

“Not so fast Squint.” He smirked, using the nickname that you hated. When you were little, you refused to wear glasses no matter how many times your mother tried to make you. So in order to read the board in class, you had to narrow your eyes to see the letters. Everyone used to call you Squint to bully you, but now it was just Peter’s affectionate nickname for his best friend. “I am adding something to your schedule.” He wrote in big letters, filling up an entire weekend. When he finally gave your journal back, you shook your head.

“I am so not going on the ski trip.”

“Aw come on Y/N.” He groaned. “I could finally show you my moves on the slopes.” He leaped over the back of the bench and sat next to you.

“Surprisingly, that makes me want to go even less.” You snarked, but you knew that there was one way he could be able to convince you.  Don’t make the face. Don’t make the face. Don’t make the face. Surely enough, Peter pouted his lips and his brown eyes widened sadly.

“Please Y/N.” He begged, the puppy-dog-face slowly starting to work its magic. You rolled your eyes, closing your journal in defeat.

“You’re bringing the snacks for the bus.” You ordered. He grinned and forced you into a hug.

“You are not gonna regret this, Squint.” He promised. You pushed away, but you couldn’t help but laugh at his antics. He draped an arm over your shoulders as the bell rang and the two of you headed inside for first period.

Peter had been your best friend since middle school. You met when he would put the papers on top of your head when everyone handed their assignments up to the front to be graded. Ever since you’d been inseparable. Well, except whenever he was with Gwen. Peter’s now ex-girlfriend constantly tried to make sure Peter never spent time with you. Whenever you made plans, she would find a way to make him cancel. But now she had dumped him for some college guy and he was trying to move on. Somehow making you come to the ski trip would help him do that.

You still had a week to work the trip into your schedule, not that you had anything planned. As Peter loved to point out, you were a bit of a recluse. Besides him, you didn’t have many friends. You mostly stayed home journalling or watching old TV shows. Maybe a bit of fresh air up in the mountains would be good for you. If only you knew how to ski.

As you packed your suitcase you could feel Gwen’s icy stare burning into the back of your head. You hurried onto the bus, getting more uncomfortable by the second. You should be at home, curled up with a book in front of your TV watching Friends. Your eyes scanned the seats for Peter until you found him saving a seat for you toward the back of the bus.

“I know you like the window seat.” He beamed, lifting the snack bag that he’d used to save the seat. You started to put your carry-on bag in the overhead storage when a pair of jocks bumped into you on their way to the back. You lost your balance and fell forward into Peter’s lap. Your face turned bright red, but he just laughed. “Hi there.”

“Shut up.” You scrambled over him to your seat and he continued to snicker. The bus jerked forward and so did your stomach. Peter nudged your shoulder.

“Come on, Y/N, where’s that smile?” He dug through his bag. “I brought your favorite travel snacks.” He coaxed a bag of the treats in front of your face. You stuck out your tongue at him and snatched the snack from his hands. He dug through his bag again, only this time, he pulled out a notebook. “Okay, so here’s the plan. I know how much you love your schedules, so I made this.” He flipped to the first page and showed you the little calendar he’d drawn for the next couple days, complete with snowflakes and a tiny ski-lift connecting the days together. You looked over his attempted calligraphy and felt your heart swell. He did this for you?

“What does, Super Secret Special Activity mean?” You asked, pointing to the very last thing listed.

“Well I can’t tell you if it’s called super secret, now can I?” He scoffed, poking your side playfully. “Everything on there is mandatory. No staying in your room except for the specific times I set aside for you.” There was a half-hour time slot in each day titled ‘Y/N’s lame alone time’.

“Peter this is…” You couldn’t really describe it. As much as you dreaded the thought of actually having to be social with other kids in your grade, the fact that he’d spent the time planning all of it made you feel something you couldn’t quite identify. It was warm and sweet, like drinking the perfect cup of hot chocolate. And for a moment you thought maybe it was… no. It couldn’t be. But the way he was smiling at you made your heart pound.

You chalked it up to just more nerves over the trip and stared out the window. The snow-covered city slowly changed into the forest. You’d always appreciated nature. That wasn’t the problem. It was the spent over two days with a group of teenagers in the middle of the mountains. And in the moment, it was the snide glances you were receiving from across the aisle where Gwen was planning your demise. This was going to be a long weekend.

Your room was nice and cozy and, most importantly, secluded. You were one of the only students that got assigned to a third-floor room so there would be little chance of any accidental run-ins with Gwen. You had just settled into your bed when a knock at the door intruded on your quiet oasis. Groaning, you stood up to see who it was. Peter grinned at you through the peephole and you remembered his list of activities.

“Come on, ya hermit!” He shouted through the wood. You opened the door with a scowl“You and I are going hiking so bundle up.” He threw himself onto your bed and closed his eyes blissfully.

“Guys aren’t supposed to be in girls rooms.” You pointed out. He lifted his head to look at you and you both knew that rule meant nothing on this trip. The chaperones were always too busy drinking wine or whatever it is adults do on vacation. You’d overheard someone saying that more kids lose their virginity on the ski trip than they did on prom night. But you and Peter wouldn’t be doing anything like that! Peter was your best friend. You couldn’t even imagine him like that. Well, there was that one time at a pool party… But that’s beside the point. The point was that you didn’t have feelings for him. You just weren’t blind to his attractive physic. That’s all.

When you’d put on at least three layers of clothing, Peter dragged you out onto the least snowy trail that was still open. There were a few other kids from your class, but they walked ahead of you or snuck off in the bushes to make out. With every freezing step, Peter promised that the journey would be worth it, or at least, that’s what he’d read in one of the brochures. He wouldn’t tell you where you were going, which was making you more agitated than the cold. You hated surprises.

“See, Squint, a little adventure every now and then is good for you.” Peter bumped you with his shoulder.

“I can be adventurous…” Even you knew that was a lie. You’d never done anything that you hadn’t explicitly written down in your journal. Maybe you hoped that if you hadn’t written it down, then nothing bad would happen.

“I think it’s up here, come on.” Peter took your hand and pulled you through a grove of trees. You both froze, staring out at the scene in amazement. It was a glistening lake, still enough that it mirrored the mountains above it perfectly on its shining surface. Everything smelled like pine and earth and lake water.

“Wow.” Was all you could manage to say, your mind still trying to take everything in.

“Told you it would be worth it,” Peter whispered, his voice laced with awe. You stepped forward, your foot getting caught on a tree root. You braced yourself to hit the icy water, but a hand latched onto yours, pulling you back, sending both you and your rescuer tumbling into a snowbank. You landed hard on Peter’s chest, knocking the breath out of you.

“Oh my gosh, I am so sorry.” You stumbled, climbing off of him awkwardly. Peter just stared at you with a smirk on his face, sitting up. He shook the snow out of his hair and helped you up. You were standing so close, you were sure that he could hear your heart pounding wildly. The trees above you cast shadows across his face, but the sun still made his eyes sparkle. You could feel yourself being drawn closer to him and before you knew it, he was leaning in as well and your lips inevitably met. Wait. Your brain frantically tried to process what was happening. This was not part of the plan! This was most definitely not part of the plan!

You pushed away and before Peter could even open his mouth to talk, you were rushing back down the path. You couldn’t handle this. This wasn’t written out in your journal or on Peter’s list. This was unexpected and you didn’t do well with things that you couldn’t see coming. It happened so fast. You didn’t have time to set up your wall to keep unwanted emotions out. How could you have foreseen that you’d be falling for your best friend?

You spent the rest of the day in your room… with your journal… alone. Just like Peter said you would be. Your phone had been blowing up with texts and calls, but you’d ignored all of them. Maybe you were just afraid he thought it was a mistake. It was definitely a mistake. Peter was your best friend. You couldn’t admit to yourself that you had feelings for him, let alone act upon them. But now they were just out in the open, ready to be dissected and picked apart by the vultures known as life and love.

You were about to start a Harry Potter marathon when there was a quiet knock on your door. You debated just pretending that you were dead.

“Y/N?” The voice greeted. “It’s Lara Jean. I think we need to talk.” You walked across the wood floor, feeling the dread building in your chest.

You were almost as close to Lara Jean as you were to Peter. You spent many summer nights watch old movies with her and her sisters. When you opened the door, she immediately pulled you into a hug.

“I wanted to make sure you were okay.” She muttered, pulling away. You groaned.

“Does everyone know about it?” She nodded solemnly. You covered your face with a pillow.

“Gwen’s been sending it to everybody, but I know that it isn’t true. I mean, Curt is a total jerk and you wouldn’t have gone out with him let alone-” You brought the pillow down from your face slowly.

“What are you talking about?” Her eyes widened.

“You don’t know?” She looked down at the floor, suddenly very uncomfortable. She took a deep breath. “I guess it’s best that you hear it from me.” She pulled her phone out of her pocket and pulled up a post on one of Gwen’s social media accounts. There was a picture of you next to Curt Landon, a boy on the lacrosse team that you’d gone on one date with last year. Lara grimaced as she swiped to the next picture. This time, the two of you were sitting in his car… and his hands were up your shirt.

The caption read; I just had a very interesting conversation with Curt about his date with Y/F/N Y/L/N. To quote; “She was a total fireball She wanted to do things that you wouldn’t believe. And let’s just say I obliged as best as I could, but hell man, I’m only down for so much freaky in one night.” You could practically hear his cocky, playboy voice. But it was Gwen’s closing line that stung. I guess it’s always the quiet ones you have to look out for.

You sat in silent shock. Lara Jean took your hand.

“It’s total bullshit, I know.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe she would post something like this. What could you have possibly done to-”

“Peter and I kissed.” You blurted out. Her jaw dropped.

“You-you what?”

“We kissed.” You stood up, feeling your heartbeat pick up as your breathing became rapid. “Somehow she must have found out. She must have gotten Curt to make up some story that we slept together. But we didn’t!” Panicked tears started to build up in your eyes. “We went on date and he tried to make a move on me and shoved him off. I should have know his friends were taking pictures for their messed up memory book or whatever those creeps have.” Lara Jean stood in front of you.

“Okay, Y/N, just calm down. I’ll find Peter and we can figure this out.”

“No. I can’t face him right now Lara Jean, I just can’t.” You started to pick up your things from around the room, clutching your journal in your arms. “I have to get out of here.” You threw your clothes into your suitcase.

“The bus doesn’t leave until tomorrow.” She pointed out. “It’s not like you can just walk home, Y/N. Just stay and we can figure this out-”

“I have some cousins that don’t live too far away from here. He can give me a ride home. I just have to get a permission slip.” You opened the door with a shaking hand. You felt the stares of your classmates as you made your way down to the lobby.

“Hey Y/N!” One of the jocks yelled down to you. “I heard you were down for some crazy stuff, so how about you come one up here and we can get freaky!” Him and his group of friends laughed.

“Will you shut up Noah?” Another voice barked. Peter was at the top of the other stairs, looking at you. You walked faster. “Y/N wait!”

“Look who it is…” Gwen snickered. “I heard some of the guys wanted a threesome, maybe you should meet up with them.” You pushed passed her.

Peter finally caught you and you couldn’t even look him in the eye.

“Y/N, come on, just talk to me.” He begged.

“I can’t deal with this right now, okay Peter?” You whispered, feeling the shame and embarrassment rising up in you. You clung to the journal in your hands, wishing you could disappear between it’s pages. But instead, you were forced to stand and listen to your classmates taunt you as your best friend’s face contorted with hurt.

“Please… just stay and we can do this together.” Without a word, you shook your head and left to find your teacher, blocking out everything. Including the boy calling your name.

[abdicatedarchive]

returning || wren and stevie

𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐍: wren’s dorm room // spring 2021.

𝐅𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐔𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆: wren x stevie.

𝐓𝐑𝐈𝐆𝐆𝐄𝐑𝐒: none.

𝐃𝐄𝐓𝐀𝐈𝐋𝐒: stevie comes to wren to tell him that juliette is back, and wren gives her the confidence to say hello

After getting a stressed text from Stevie, Wren closed his book at his desk and headed down the hall to her room. Wren fell onto the bean bag in Sailor and Stevie's room. "I got your 911 text, and I learned from my conversation with Jet to not sprint, but I did pick up the pace" said the boy as he moved a pillow onto his lap and was fidgeting with the tassels. He wondered what was bothering Stevie, "did something chaotic happen with June?" he pried before the girl could start talking.

Stevie decided to not text the whole band to hangout that day, her whole world felt like it was crashing down. She did however need to talk to someone. Sailor wasn't in the room when she got there, so she immediately texted Wren. He would give her good advice, or at least be able to calm her down a bit. Stevie was pacing back and forth once Wren walked in, she never paced. This was Stevie, she barely got stressed. That took too much energy. "No, everything's great with her." Fuck. she thought. Everything was going so well with June. Stevie couldn't mess this up, she wasn't going to mess this up. "She's here. Juliette." Just saying her name out loud hurt. "Dude, she fucking goes to this school. Did you know?"

Seeing Stevie pace around the room was ... well it was a sign that something was really serious. Last time he had seen her pace was the weekend it had all gone down, she was going to wear the floors down with the energy she had. "Dude, fuck no I didn't know. I would have told you!" said the boy, shocked at the news. His jaw could have been on the floor, "Like she actually goes goes here? Are you sure she isn't visiting Gabrielle, Jonah, or Marina? She might just be stopping by, and you could say hey. Hey wouldn't hurt? Right? Or is this a cold turkey situation?" he asked. He knew about the agreement, but if they were in the same place at the same time they could at least say hello.

"Sorry, I'm just kind of flipping my shit right now." Stevie didn't mean to sound accusatory, she just never thought this was going to happen. Out of all colleges, this is where Juliette was, and she didn't even know how long. "That's what I was thinking, she was with Jonah when I saw her. But he gave that panicked face he makes when he thinks he royally fucked up. Fucking Keller." she sighed. It wasn't a shock that Jonah kept this, she knew how close the two were. He had known Stevie was downtownsasquatch and Juliette was perchancetodream back in the day and kept his mouth shut the whole time. "I know I promised I wouldn't do this, but I unblocked her from instagram to see if I could figure something out. One, she had me unblocked. Who knows for how long. Two, she definitely goes here." she felt like she was talking super fast. Stevie went on Juliette's instagram and passed the phone to Wren. "I don't mind saying hey, it's been so long. I'm sure she's found someone new." she said as calmly as she possibly could.

Wren took the phone and tried to compose himself. He didn't want to add on to any of Stevie's anxiety. He looked at the pictures and found one of her in her dorm here, "I unfollowed her when the ya know, happened. I guess I should refoll- hold the fuck up. Those are Chanel's skates. In the background. And her bedding. Not to sound like a fucking creep, but check this out" said the boy standing up and showing Stevie the phone. "Okay here's the picture of Jules, and here-" Wren pulled up Chanel's instagram and showed a picture of her in her room, "You don't think God would permit the two of them to live together, right?" Wren went back to Juliette's instagram, "oh shit, is Florence like roommate Florence from boarding school. I met her a while back, she said her best friend just transferred. So ..." he continued to put the puzzle pieces together, "she's only been here like three months?" Wren realized that this was an unfortunate amount of time for one Juliette Hastings to be avoiding a Stevie Summers. "Do you know what you're going to do? We could go stare at the door decs and go into an existential crisis? Or we could ignore everything? Or you could go hang with June? I mean ... do you want to say hi? How are you feeling?" said Wren, realizing he definitely forgot to not make her anxious.

Stevie furrowed her brows as Wren started listing off some of Chanel's stuff, "What the fuck, you serious?" she asked. There was no way they had been rooming together. Hadn't those two been through enough? Stevie leaned in closer to look through the girl's instagram. "What kind of sick joke is the universe playing?" she asked in complete shock. This was all getting too crazy, but it didn't stop there. Wren was basically figuring everything out in the matter of seconds. "She's been here this whole time? I mean, I guess it's shorter than I was assuming," Stevie was thinking that Juliette had been here as long as her. "but do you think she's been ... avoiding me? I don't know, maybe she doesn't know I'm here." she quickly shut down her assumption. Why would Juliette still be caught up on Stevie? She probably was already seeing someone by now. "I don't mind saying hi. It's been two years, you know? I've moved on, I'm fine." she said, thinking about how she literally had the journal Juliette gave her tucked away in a drawer. But she brought that before she started talking to June, she had only looked through it once and it was Cody's fault. "If she doesn't wanna talk, that's fine too. But I'm not going to actively ignore her. There's no reason to. I'll probably hang with June later tonight anyways." Stevie was trying to tell herself that everything was still the same. Juliette being here wouldn't change anything. Nope, not at all. "Or do you think saying hi is a bad idea?"

"I mean there's no way to know if that's the Florence, but I remember the pictures from way back then. I was wondering why she looked so familiar" he was a sucker for a conspiracy theory though. Wren always believed the best in people, there was no reason to believe that Juliette even knew that Stevie was here. "She's probably in the dark just as much as you, I mean clearly people were keeping quiet to you about her being here ... and people were probably keeping quiet to her. Jonah definitely knows how to keep a secret to make sure people don't freak" Wren was willing to think of any reason that this was all okay. He wanted to believe the best, and so he did. In line of him believing the best in people, Wren was pretty sure that Juliette wasn't over Stevie. But a lot of that was just him assuming that people didn't get over people, the way he couldn't seem to get over Chanel. "I don't think there's any problem with going and saying hi" said Wren, knowing that she was only talking about it because she wanted to do it. "I think she would be happy to see you, and who knows ... maybe she saw you and is trying to figure out how to tell you" he added.

"No it's gotta be her. I've seen her around here a few times. I've never said hi of course, but I remember all the times I would see her when Juliette and I facetimed back when she was in boarding school." Stevie nodded as Wren spoke, "Yeah, that's true. She'd say hi if she knew." As the words came out her mouth, she thought about how unlikely that was. It wasn't impossible, but it was however, more unlikely than likely. The thought of Juliette hiding away because of Stevie hurt. She was already thrown off to boarding school because of her, she didn't want her to hide during her college years too. Juliette deserved the best in life, and Stevie just always seemed to mess that up for her. "It usually backfires on him, but I guess he means well." she let out a sigh. When was that poor kid gonna learn? "Yeah... yeah maybe." Stevie held back a smile, trying to remain as cool as possible. She had a good thing going with June right now, but maybe there was hope for her and Juliette to be friends. "I'll text Chanel, see if she's in her room. I can always pass by. I'd ask you to text her, but I don't wanna make anything weird for you two. Unless you guys are fucking again?" she asked jokingly. She was just trying to find anyway to calm her nerves at this point.

Wren knew that she was just blowing off steam with the joke, "We have been texting really late at night, but nah" said the boy, it wasn't really the time to unpack any of that. "You should stop by, and oh while you're there can you drop of Chanel's skates for me? And if you see my favorite hoodie, snatch it" Wren made a mental note to get the stuff for her. "You know what, if you're going now you can just walk with me and grab the skates?" he suggested, he wasn't sure how much she needed to prepare for seeing Juliette. He would suggest to her to just rip the bandaid off, but Wren had been a huge weenie lately and also always about acting the way he intended to.

Stevie raised a brow. Chanel Hampton texting late at night? She could only imagine what that meant. "Ahh okay. Well I hope you both are having fun." she patted her friend's shoulder slowly. "I'd love to know the details, but we could save that conversation for band practice. I'd hate to leave Rose out of it." Stevie was visibly taken back when he mentioned going over to her room now, she didn't feel prepared to talk to Juliette right this second. But if she held off now, who knows when she'd actually do it? "Uh, yeah sure. We could go now, I'm down."

They weren't really having fun, but the texts were sometimes a nice distraction from how much he missed her. There were moments where it felt like they had never broken up, "Oh I know she will" said Wren, Rose did love hearing about her teammate and Wren. Wren and Stevie were about to head out the door, "its my gilmore girls sweatshirt. Very hot commodity, Austin got it for me and I think I look like a snack in it" said the boy, bringing some lighthearted vibes into the conversation. She needed a healthy distraction from it, and Wren was here to bring the positivity. He opened up his door and grabbed the skates, "She's around the corner, if you see Chanel too say hey for me" Wren said before adding, "And remember, it's just a hey. She's going to be happy to see you, you're Stevie fucking Summers."

Stevie rolled her eyes and smiled up at Wren, "Oh I know the one. I'm surprised you let her take that one." she teased her friend as they made their way out of the room. She grabbed the skates and nodded once as if she was on some mission. "Will do." Stevie had to keep reminding herself that it was just a hello. A simple hello to a potential friend. "I'm Stevie fucking Summers." she repeated. "I'll let you know how it goes. Thanks, man." she said with a small smile as she headed off to Juliette's room.

[ieltscuam]

100 easy and creative writing prompts to practice your writing on a daily basis

1. Outside the Window: What’s the weather outside your window doing right now? If that’s not inspiring, what’s the weather like somewhere you wish you could be?

2. The Unrequited love poem: How do you feel when you love someone who does not love you back?

3. The Vessel: Write about a ship or other vehicle that can take you somewhere different from where you are now.

4. Dancing: Who’s dancing and why are they tapping those toes?

5. Food: What’s for breakfast? Dinner? Lunch? Or maybe you could write a poem about that time you met a friend at a cafe.

6. Eye Contact: Write about two people seeing each other for the first time.

7. The Rocket-ship: Write about a rocket-ship on it’s way to the moon or a distant galaxy far, far, away.

8. Dream-catcher: Write something inspired by a recent dream you had.

9. Animals: Choose an animal. Write about it!

10. Friendship: Write about being friends with someone.

11. Dragon: Envision a dragon. Do you battle him? Or is the dragon friendly? Use descriptive language.

12. Greeting: Write a story or poem that starts with the word “hello”.

13. The Letter Poem: Write a poem using words from a famous letter or a letter from your own collection.

14. The found poem: Read a book and circle some words on a page. Use those words to craft a poem. Alternatively you can cut out words and phrases from magazines.

15. Eavesdropper: Create a poem, short story, or journal entry about a conversation you’ve overheard.

16. Addict: Everyone’s addicted to something in some shape or form. What are things you can’t go without?

17. Dictionary Definition: Open up a dictionary to a random word. Define what that word means to you.

18. Cleaning: Hey, even writers and creative artists have to do housework sometimes. Write about doing laundry, dishes, and other cleaning activities.

19. Great Minds: Write  about someone you admire and you thought to have had a beautiful mind.

20. Missed Connections: If you go to Craigslist, there is a “Missed Connections” section where you can find some interesting story lines to inspire your writing.

21. Foreclosure: Write a poem or short story about someone who has lost or is about to lose their home.

22. Smoke, Fog, and Haze: Write about not being able to see ahead of you.

23. Sugar: Write something so sweet, it makes your teeth hurt.

24. Numbers: Write a poem or journal entry about numbers that have special meaning to you.

25. Dread: Write about doing something you don’t want to do.

26. Fear: What scares you a little? What do you feel when scared? How do you react?

27. Closed Doors: What’s behind the door? Why is it closed?

28. Shadow: Imagine you are someone’s shadow for a day.

29. Good Vibes: What makes you smile? What makes you happy?

30. Shopping: Write about your shopping wishlist and how you like to spend money.

31. The Professor: Write about a teacher that has influenced you.

32. Rewrite a Poem: Take any poem or short story you find anywhere. Rewrite it in your own words.

33. Jewelry: Write about a piece of jewelry. Who does it belong to?

34. Sounds: Sit outside for about an hour. Write down the sounds you hear.

35. War and Peace: Write about a recent conflict.

36. Frame It: Write a poem or some phrases that would make for good wall art in your home.

37. Puzzle: Write about putting together the pieces of puzzles.

38. Fire-starters: Write about building a fire.

39. Coffee & Tea: Surely you drink one or the other or know someone who does- write about it!

40. Car Keys: Write about someone getting their driver’s license for the first time.

41. What You Don’t Know: Write about a secret you’ve kept from someone else or how you feel when you know someone is keeping a secret from you.

42. Warehouse: Write about being inside an old abandoned warehouse.

43. The Sound of Silence: Write about staying quiet when you feel like shouting.

44. Insult: Write about being insulted.

45. Mirror, Mirror: What if you mirror started talking to you?

46. Dirty: Write a poem about getting covered in mud.

47. Light Switch: Write about coming out of the dark and seeing the light.

48. The Stars: Take inspiration from a night sky.

49. Joke Poem: What did the wall say to the other wall? Meet ya at the corner! Hahaha.

50. Just Say No: Write about the power you felt when you told someone no.

51: Sunrise/Sunset: It goes round and round.

52. Memory Lane: What’s it look like? How do you get there?

53. Tear-Jerker: Watch a movie that makes you cry. Write a poem about that scene in the movie.

54. Dear Diary: Write a poem or short story about a diary entry you’ve read or imagined.

55. Holding Hands: The first time you held someone’s hand.

56. Photograph: Write a story or journal entry influenced by a photograph.

57. Alarm Clock: Write about waking up.

58. Darkness: Write a poem or journal entry inspired by what you can’t see

59. Refreshed: Write a poem about a time you really felt refreshed and renewed. Maybe it was a dip into a pool on a hot summer day, a drink of lemonade, or other situation that helped you relax and start again.

60. Handle With Care: Write about a very fragile or delicate object.

61. Drama: Write about a time when you got stuck in between two parties fighting with each other.

62. Slip Up: Write about making mistakes.

63. Spice: Write about flavors and tastes or a favorite spice of yours.

64. Sing a New Song: Take a popular song off the radio and rewrite it as a poem in your own words.

65. Telephone: Write about a phone call you recently received.

66. Name: Write a poem or short story using your name in some way or form.

67. Dollhouse: Write a poem or short story from the viewpoint of someone living in a doll house.

68. Random Wikipedia Article: Go to Wikipedia and click on Random Article. Write about whatever the page you get.

69. Silly Sports: Write about an extreme or silly sport. If none inspire you, make up the rules for your own game.

70. Recipe: Write about a favorite recipe, or create a poem that is a recipe for something abstact, such as a feeling.

71. Famous Artwork: Choose a famous painting and write about it.

72. Where That Place Used to Be: Think of a place you went to when you were younger but it now no longer there or is something else. Capture your feelings about this in your writing.

73. Last Person You Talked to: Write a quick little poem or story about the last person you spoke with.

74. Caught Red-Handed: Write about being caught doing something embarrassing.

75. Interview: Write a list of questions you have for someone you would like to interview, real or fictional.

76. Missing You: Write about someone you miss dearly.

77. Geography: Pick a state or country you’ve never visited. Write about why you would or would not like to visit that place.

78. Random Song: Use the shuffle feature on your MP3 player or go to a site like 8tracks.com or Songza.com and pick a playlist. Write something inspired by the first song you hear.

79. Hero: Write a tribute to someone you regard as a hero.

80. Ode to Strangers: Go people watching and write an ode to a stranger you see on the street.

81. Advertisement: Advertisements are everywhere, aren’t they? Write using the slogan or line from an ad.

82. Book Inspired: Think of your favorite book. Now write a poem that sums up the entire story in 10 lines.

83. Magic: Imagine you have a touch of magic, and can make impossible things happen. What would you do?

84. Fanciest Pen: Get out your favorite pen, pencils, or even colored markers and write using them!

85. A Day in the Life: Write about your daily habits and routine.

86. Your Muse: Write about your muse – what does he or she look like? What does your muse do to inspire you?

87. Convenience Store: Write about an experience you’ve had at a gas station or convenience store.

88. Natural Wonders of the World: Choose one of the natural wonders of the world. Write about it.

89. Facebook or Twitter Status: Write a poem using the words from your latest status update or a friend’s status update. If you don’t use Facebook or Twitter, you can often search online for some funny ones to use as inspiration.

90. Green Thumb: Write about growing something.

91. Family Heirloom: Write about an object that’s been passed through the generations in your family.

92. Bug Catcher: Write about insects.

93. Potion: Write about a magic potion. What is it made of? What does it do? What is the antidote?

94. Swinging & Sliding: Write something inspired by a playground or treehouse.

95. Adjectives: Make a list of the first 5 adjectives that pop into your head. Use these 5 words in your story, poem, or journal entry.

96. Fairy Tales: Rewrite a fairy tale. Give it a new ending or make it modern or write as a poem.

97. Whispers: Write about someone who has to whisper a secret to someone else.

98. Smile: Write a poem about the things that make you smile.

99. Seasonal: Write about your favorite season.

100. Normal: What does normal mean to you? Is it good or bad to be normal?

[letsgrowhope]

Just Do It For the Memoir

I was hoping when I got married I’d solve the mystery and be able to pass on the secret

On how you actually make relationships work

Because everything prior was the worst

Being single for me mostly felt like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube during a game of Jenga

I read a lot motivational books during that time. A lot of soul searching, find your path, unlock the door into the magic you always imagined, books. One of them said that how you view life says a lot about you

Some people view life like writing a story. Or like playing a game. Like taking a walk in the park or baking a cake

I viewed life like a puzzle

A very confusing, intricate, puzzle run by a sneaky magician who wants to psyche me out by making pieces unmovable, against all logic

There are some major pieces in life that we believe have to fit a certain way in order for the picture to end out at all right. Let’s call them the corner pieces. The framework you have to solidify in order for any progress to be made.

My corner pieces were finding my soul mate and my dream career

And I guarantee you I tried every configuration to make the damn pieces fit

You should be able to just pick one and work it around until it fits the way you want

You can’t tell me I’m the only one who does it. Just think about the last time your single girlfriend texted a guy she liked. Let me guess. She asked you and 6 other girlfriend’s how to phrase it just right. Should I lead with a ‘hey’ or ‘hiiiii' or ‘sup’ or just a waving hand emoji?

Subconsciously we actually believe that if we don’t orchestrate that initial text just right, he won’t bite. And we’ll screw up the whole plan to make this the corner piece that fits dammit!

Are we supposed to wait for him to come around, just give him more time? Or call him out and demand what you want! No, go on more dates, girl you just need to meet more guys. Wait, maybe ask your married girlfriends to set you up, that could work...

I went on 20 first dates in LA

I then moved to London and went on 20 more

And that year didn’t bring me any closer to finding love

I had an old friend come visit me in April

We got engaged in July

And married that October

PC: Jeremiah Warren

And I genuinely don’t know how it happened, what made the pieces suddenly fit

Which bothered me

In the midst of being so excited and over the moon to be getting engaged and married that soon, I found myself trying to blink back the moment that made it all finally work. It happened too fast, I must have missed it! Rewind, go back through it in slow motion. Still can’t find it. The “thing” I did to make it work. The secret I could pass on to my other girlfriends when the guy they last went out with turned out to be another jerk.

When I was single my advice was to go out more cause “he ain’t gonna jump through your window!”

Now, I’m at a loss. Because that’s not how it worked at all.

But it makes for a great story. Another thing I used to always say: “Just do it for the memoir!” Put yourself out there, go for it, say yes- because every experience could be validated in my mind if I learned something from it. No, he didn’t just break my heart. He taught me a great lesson, so surely I can’t regret it or blame him (that was bullshit, don’t listen to it)

I actually really love memoirs. The first memoir I read was when I was a junior in high school. It was Barbara Walter’s, “Audition”. Ever since, I’ve been hooked on bad ass women’s life stories. I used to buy a new, hard backed memoir, before every trip I took. On my flight to Thailand and India I read Diane von Furstenberg's “The Woman I Wanted to Be” and between Cuba and London I read Gloria Steinem’s “My Life on the Road”. I was addicted to hearing the story in reverse. The wise, successful woman that spoke of her past insecurities, heart breaks, and failures with a separation and ease. They were no longer life wrenching anxieties, they were just good stories. All of their lives read like fairytales, because even the rough patches just added glamour to the story.

I thought I could be the same. I distinctly remember sitting in the JFK airport waiting for a flight to Dubai when I was reading Gloria Steinem’s memoir (and simultaneously texting an old friend/crush/lover. Bad old habit of mine, ya know just playing with fire). I took a picture of her words and it is still saved to my phone. Because I thought it was the answer. She said, “I always tried to stay in touch with the people that were important in my life and the people that I loved. Once I love, I love forever, and there is nothing more cozy and meaningful than old friends and lovers. I’m so fortunate that I have had and have so much love in life. Without it, I would never be who I am.”

It made me feel so much better. It made sense to the messy trail of fleeting relationships I was beginning to create. It validated my tendency to draw close to men quickly, get a glimpse of the intimacy I craved, and watch it blow past and never last. I’m sure Gloria didn’t intend for me to turn her words into the permission I needed, but I thought realizing that old lovers made me who I am would allow me to look back on those “relationships” with fondness of sweet memories and lessons.

But those lessons were mostly “let it go” and “don’t get too attached”. Be chill, be free, be the girl that can just enjoy a person in the moment but have no need to make it last.

I would linger around for guys that I knew would never commit, because I prided myself in being able to “just be friends” with someone I used to be “more” with. It felt more mature, more modern, to be able to move on from relationships as a level headed adult that was still able to maintain a friendship. So that’s what I did. I still texted all my old lovers and if we were in the same city, met up with them even. Every new relationship I entered I proudly said that I would have no hesitation to pick up the phone and call any ex’s. Because they were all my friends. There were no hard feelings, I wasn’t jaded. I still cared about them. It was a banner I had to wave to convince myself and everyone else that I was in control.

I even went so far as to convince myself that wanting marriage made me a wimp. I was laying next to someone I knew had no interest in anything serious, and I have the journal entry I wrote about why I suddenly didn’t believe in marriage. I had convinced myself that me wanting commitment was just me being insecure. That maturity would allow me to let lovers come and go.

It’s been a long journey in a short amount of time. It’s certainly been a puzzle. But each twist of the Rubik’s lends a great story. And while I no longer say “just do it for the memoir”, I am grateful for each of those chapters. Because they really do shape you, and ultimately, free you.

But I’ll tell you the end now just so you don’t miss it: it’s not all for the memoir. Don’t do things just for the story. Because you can have a fabulous memoir and still feel empty. You can have fantastic stories about jetting off to new countries and hooking up with beautiful models and still never feel completely validated. The stories are great for learning but they’re no good at fulfilling. But boy do they bring all the feelings…so don’t you worry, I’ll go ahead and still tell the stories.

[lodelss]

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 25 minutes (6,186 words)

Part 1 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB. Catch up on season one of Bundyville here.

I.

When the house around the corner exploded, Richard Katschke and his wife, Karen, were reading scripture. The retired pair looked up from the pages and froze. In another room, a plastic light cover clattered to the floor.

It was a warm Wednesday. Mid-July 2016, about 8 p.m. Outside, a boy rode his bike near South Fifth Street. A man started a lawn mower.  

The Katschkes were seated on a brown leather couch in a room they’d added onto their Panaca, Nevada, house years earlier for Richard’s elderly mother — both he and Karen called her “Mom.” She lived there until the Katschkes made her more comfortable at the nearby hospital in her final days, where a quiet nurse would rub her feet with cream and stay by her side, watching the old woman’s eyes for a sign she was ready to be with God.

The Katschkes never imagined that nurse, 59-year-old Glenn Jones, would, in the last seconds of his life, commit a bombing around the corner from their house — a cataclysmic event that would send a family screaming from their home seconds before it exploded and, even now, three years later, would still have no official explanation from federal authorities. 

Glen Wadsworth was the last person to see Jones alive. He was pushing a lawn mower across the grass at his childhood home. Inside, his elderly father sat in front of the television. 

Ever since Wadsworth was a teenager, he mowed the lawn the exact same way: pushing and pulling the machine from front yard to side yard to back. But for a reason he still can’t quite understand, that July evening he pushed and pulled a different way than ever before: front, back, side.

Wadsworth — a tall man with straight teeth and neatly combed hair who serves as a member of the local volunteer fire department — looked up from his mower to see Jones back a car up to the gray house next door, where Joshua and Tiffany Cluff lived with their three daughters. Jones parked, got out of the car, and waved to Wadsworth. Wadsworth waved back and continued mowing. He didn’t know Jones, but thought he looked familiar from when the Cluffs built the gray house and friends chipped in on the work. 

Wadsworth didn’t see or hear Tiffany and her girls run out of the house, screaming into the telephone.

“911, What is your emergency?” the operator said.

“I … Someone … somebody showed up at my house with a bomb,” Tiffany Cluff panted into her neighbor’s phone. “He’s going to blow my house up.” 

“Ma’am. Ma’am. Take a breath for me, OK? I can barely understand ya. What is happening?”

“We’re running away from my house,” Tiffany, hysterical, choked on her words. “I grabbed my kids and I ran.”

“He said he was going to kill you?”

“He said he was going to blow the house up.”

“OK, all right, take a couple breaths for me,” the dispatcher said. “Are you away from the home?”

“Ye—”

Tiffany couldn’t even finish the word “yes” before the sound of a bomb exploding and the heart-stopping screaming of three little girls flattened any other noise coming through the receiver. 

“Oh my god!” she screamed. “He just blew my house up!”

Down the street, Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee — one of Glen Wadsworth’s oldest friends — was out in his yard with his dog when the blast shook his ribcage. 

Lee smiles a lot for a cop — a wide, friendly grin under a thick mustache and a flat-top haircut. And in Panaca, he wears a lot of hats: He’s the sheriff, but he’s also the chief of the volunteer fire department and the county coroner. By July 2016, he’d been in law enforcement for nearly 30 years, and he knew that in Panaca, loud noises are often easily explained: a sonic boom from a military aircraft flying low around Nellis Air Force Base or the Nevada Test and Training Range. 

But this was different. Normal noises don’t shake you from the inside. The sheriff yanked his dog into the house, grabbed the keys to his patrol rig, and sprinted back out again. He paused, trying to understand why, all around him, it sounded like a hailstorm was falling from the clear blue sky: “I knew something wasn’t right.” 

Wadsworth was still mowing. He didn’t hear Jones shoot himself as he sat in the front seat of the car. Maybe the mower drowned out the sharp pop of the gun, or maybe he’d just fired so many gunshots of his own across the dry desert that he had conditioned himself not to flinch at the sound. But when he looked up from his mower and saw the house next door on fire, he sprinted toward it, believing the family was inside. He ran toward the house, but at the front door, it was as if he ran right smack into the palm of an invisible hand. “It was just like a wall. I just couldn’t.” 

Another explosion sounded on the 911 call.

Sheriff Lee could see a mushroom cloud billowing when he looked down South Fifth Street. He assumed it had to be a fire, a gas explosion, an exploded transformer. A bomb? Here? In Panaca? Never crossed his mind. 

The windows of the Wadsworth home exploded inward and a hunk of Jones’s car rocketed straight toward the old man sitting in his chair, landing just short at his feet. Glen Wadsworth, somehow, wasn’t hit by a thing. 

The chipping house next door to the Cluff home inched sideways on its foundation. A chunk of shrapnel careened toward the boy on his bike, hitting him so hard in the shoulder that it knocked him to the ground, but miraculously, only left a small bruise. 

The two explosions sent hot metal shrapnel flying upward, curving in long arcs over the remote desert town. A half mile away, debris rained on the high school. The football team, outside doing drills, dropped to the ground. Daggers of shrapnel stabbed into the sides of nearby houses. One piece punched through the roof of a garage, piercing the hood of the car parked inside. 

In a town where nothing ever happens, a town where there are no secrets, suddenly there was mayhem. 

“It was Glenn Jones,” Tiffany Cluff cried to the 911 dispatcher. “He said he was going to kill himself and blow up our house.”

As Sheriff Lee drove closer, he could see the destroyed house: It looked like a giant had mashed the house with colossal fists and twisted a car into a grotesque tangle of metal, leaving a deep crater in the pavement. 

“Cars blow up like that in a movie,” Lee said. “They don’t normally blow up like that.”

Neighbors who’d gathered at the corner of Fifth and Hansen waved the sheriff down. “Stop! Stop!” he remembers them shouting as he pulled up to the scene. “You’re running over body parts!” 

Sure enough, there on the ground lay a pair of legs. 

It would be 14 hours before investigators would find the rest of Glenn Jones. His torso had flown out of sight, high into a neighbor’s tree.

Though the investigation was transferred to the hands of federal authorities, Sheriff Lee — in another of his roles, as county coroner — inspected the top half of the body when it was fished down from the branches. He was surprised to see two tattoos on the chest. 

One clearly read DNR — medical code for “do not resuscitate.” The other was a phone number for the man whose house he had just exploded: Joshua Cluff.

***

A gravelly town on the sinful side of the Utah-Nevada border, the desert outpost of Panaca was established in the 1860s by Mormon pioneers whose legacies live on in the few street names here and in the last names of the people who still call this place home. 

Today, Panaca is like a peninsula of Utah: the only town in Nevada that is dry, and one of just two in the state where gambling is prohibited. If you want a beer, you’ll have to drive 15 miles to Caliente — pronounced around these parts as “Cal-yen-ee” — to get one, at a smoky bar along a peeling downtown strip. Panaca, Caliente — they’re what you picture when you think of a Western town: At night, tumbleweeds blow down the middle of empty streets, coming to rest against a hardware store with deer heads and bobcat pelts on display in the window. 

It’s a place where you know your neighbor, and you know that really knowing him means understanding what’s your business and what isn’t.

On Thursday, July 14, 2016, the day after the bombing, shrapnel lines a previously quiet street in Panaca, Nevada. (Brett Le Blanc/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)

Most Panacans worship together at an LDS church right smack in the center of town. A single market sells snacks and produce. The streets are pocked and rough. Chickens hustle busily in some yards, horses graze in others. Here and there, piles of junk look like they’ve been battered by desert winds for decades. Next to the high school, a massive mint-green rock formation called Court Rock bubbles skyward, named for the way young folks traditionally have “courted” there; on my visit, a condom wrapper stomped into the silty mud at the rock’s foot suggested that’s still the case.

A sign displaying the Ten Commandments guards the town, as if its presence will keep the Devil out. Panaca may have a Nevada zip code, but Lord knows it’s God’s country. 

Panaca is the birthplace of John Yeates Barlow, one of the most influential leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — a group that still practices polygamy. LDS folks here are adamant that they would never want to be confused for FLDS, but most don’t mind having them as neighbors.

Mormonism, after all, is what built Panaca, and polygamists historically have had a place in Lincoln County. In the mid-2000s, essentially with the blessing of the FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs, a group that operated a 3,000-acre ranch more than 40 miles north of the town. The Caliente-Panaca area was a special place for Jeffs: At the Caliente Hot Springs Motel, Jeffs reportedly held underage wedding ceremonies at a moment’s notice. 

When the FLDS farm sprung up, Sheriff Lee said the group was clear that they didn’t want the police in their business. So he drove up to introduce himself, shook their hands, and assured them they could call if they needed help. They were “good, good people,” he said, who were living under the direction of Jeffs: “A bad guy. A bad man.” (After a conviction on charges of felony rape was reversed by the Utah Supreme Court, Jeffs was sentenced by a Texas court to life in prison for sexually assaulting two followers — age 12 and 15 — in what his church deemed a “spiritual marriage.”)

Living here means looking the other way sometimes. Picking your battles. More than one Panacan told me they wouldn’t want to speculate about why a bombing occurred in their town, but then offered an opinion anyway: A lot of people here think the bomb was simply a loud, messy expression of a workplace grievance between Glenn Jones and Joshua Cluff. 

Jones, for years, did live in Panaca, and worked under Joshua Cluff as a nurse at the Grover C. Dils Medical Center in Caliente — just across the highway from the Caliente Hot Springs. Records from the Nevada State Board of Nursing show Jones’s license was revoked after he failed to “document administration or waste” of three separate doses of morphine in a two-month span. Messages left for Grover C. Dils Medical Center staff for this story went unreturned, but in 2016 one administrator told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that Jones left his job there voluntarily and on good terms. Even so, some Panacans think maybe Jones blamed Cluff, and that’s enough explanation for why he bombed him. Sheriff Lee is skeptical of the whole workplace grievance theory. “I don’t think that was a major reason for the bombing,” Lee said.

After leaving his nursing job, Jones moved several hours south to a blue-and-white-striped mobile home in the Zuni Village RV Park in Kingman, Arizona. His camper, parked in Space #69, was at the center of the park, surrounded by homes with mostly graying retired folks. 

Upon entering Jones’s RV the day after the explosion in Panaca, bomb technicians found multiple devices, several of which were “fully functional,” one officer wrote in his report. A neighbor told police they’d seen him carrying a large artillery shell into his RV, but Jones was known to buy items like it in the area, restoring and reselling them to other collectors. So most people didn’t bat an eye.

But police accounts paint a picture of a trailer brimming with bomb-making materials: metal containers, fuses, power tools, smokeless powder. Ammo cans were stacked under his dining room table. Even his shower had projectiles inside. 

On a nightstand, investigators found three spiral-bound notebooks each with Jones’s name written on the front. Inside one, he had drawn diagrams for a bomb, which gave investigators reason to believe the devices were originally intended for a different target. 

“The entries indicated that Glenn Jones had been approached [by] a subject identified as ‘Josh’ who offered to pay him to construct an explosive device,” wrote one detective. 

“The intended target of the device was identified on one page as ‘Forth of July BLM Field Office,’” the detective continued. “The journal entries indicate that there was a falling out between Jones and ‘Josh,’ and that Jones instead decided to target ‘Josh’ with his explosive device, or ‘bomb.’

“Jones went on to document that ‘Josh’ is the cousin of LaVoy Finicum and seemed to indicate this was a possible motive for the planned attack on the BLM Field Office.”

In his office, up the road from Panaca in the town of Pioche, Nevada, Sheriff Lee keeps a large chunk of the bomb — one of the pieces the FBI didn’t seize. Just touching a finger to its razor-sharp edges is enough to draw blood. “These bombs were actually bomb artillery shells made to make shrapnel,” he said, “made to kill people.”

Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval and Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee outside the destroyed Cluff home on July 15, 2016. (Brett Le Blanc/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP.)

****

At the heart of what little is known about the events in Panaca was the handwritten documentation left behind by the bomber. It makes clear that Jones had an interest in Finicum — one of the central figures in the so-called Patriot movement, a collection of anti-government groups that includes the conspiratorial militia-types and sovereign citizens who flocked to the anti-government standoffs and way of thinking popularized by the Bundy family. Finicum was only ever in the movement at the end of his life, but he became a martyr for it in his death in January 2016, when he was shot and killed by law enforcement. He was fleeing a traffic stop in Oregon during which authorities intended to arrest the leaders of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation.

The car Jones blew up in Panaca was a rental. When police entered the dark green 2007 Saturn Ion that Jones owned, parked in an Avis rental car parking lot, inside they found out more about Jones and Cluff. There was a 2014 contract for a land purchase with both of their names on it and an agreement for Jones to pay Cluff $50,000. 

Two years before the bombing, Jones also deposited $9,000 into an interest-bearing bank account that would mature in one year and, ultimately, be payable at the time of his death to one person: Cluff. 

Much like in the rest of the U.S., people in Panaca don’t talk much about domestic terrorism these days. They likely have a better reason to talk about it than other Americans, but Panacans explain the bombing away — that what’s important to remember is that some  gesture of holy providence saved them that day. 

At the town’s only bed and breakfast, the mother of the kid on the bike — the only person to be hit by shrapnel — served me pancakes and eggs in the morning and mentioned she thinks “angels of our ancestors” were watching over the town that day the bomb went off. 

Panacans believe their collective faith in God bent the trajectories of shrapnel to miss Wadsworth and his father. That faith kept shards of glass out of eyes, harnessed flames and surging power lines, and kept the Cluff family alive. 

If God saved this town, why think about the bad parts of the story anymore — even if there’s never been an official explanation for what happened? Besides, could domestic terrorism really happen in a place like this, where everyone knows everyone else, where every house is a home? 

People laugh darkly about the bombing now: The way, a few days later, a lady caught her dog gnawing on an unfamiliar bone and realized his snack was actually human. The way people still find odd remnants and assume they’re pieces of shrapnel. The way dozens of birds, for weeks, pecked away at some of the Chinese elm trees where Jones’s body parts landed.

Every spring, when Richard Katchske plants a line of flowers along his fence, he digs out twisted nobs of shrapnel from the dirt. Katchske showed me a piece, holding a brownish-black gnarl in his palm. I could have it if I wanted. I declined.

“It’ll be a legacy I pass on to my kids,” he laughed.

  II.

Last year, when Bundyville came out, I felt satisfied that I’d found the answers I’d come looking for about the Bundy family and the Patriot movement, and I felt I had a sense of their place in America’s long-standing anti-government movement. 

The Bundys created flash points members of those movements could rally around: Their very public confrontation in 2014 near their Bunkerville, Nevada, ranch was borne out of long-simmering discontent with how federal agencies have treated rural people in the American West. In the case of the Bundy family, that was combined with specific gripes about how Mormon pioneers, who tried to flee America in the 1800s to create a new homeland, were treated. Then, in the 1950s, those same people in Nevada, Arizona, and Utah were showered with nuclear fallout without any warning from the government. But the 2014 standoff was also based on a conspiracy theory being pushed by the Bundys: that the feds couldn’t actually own land, and that the Bundys were entitled to graze cattle on public land for free.

So by 2014, when Bureau of Land Management agents came to collect on long-unpaid federal grazing fees — racked up by the family patriarch, Cliven Bundy, as his cattle lived on public land without a BLM permit — the family combined forces with anti-government militia groups willing to point guns at those officials. And it worked. They kept their cows. The Patriot movement declared victory. The feds turned tail. 

Then, in 2016, when two of Bundy’s sons, Ammon and Ryan, helped lead the 41-day armed takeover of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, it was the sequel to Bundy Ranch. Anti-government groups looking to stick a finger (or a gun barrel) in the government’s eye convened in one location, as if to dare the feds to chase them out. They talked about Waco and Ruby Ridge. They said they were ranchers upset over grazing prices and the arrest and conviction of Dwight and Steven Hammond, two Oregon cattlemen who’d gone to prison for setting fire to federal land. But really, it was an event that brought out kitted-up militia guys and kitted-up guys who wanted to look like militia guys, sovereign citizens, jaded veterans, Islamophobes, white supremacists, and fringe politicians out in force.

One of the few actual ranchers who did come to the Bundys’ side at Malheur was Finicum: a 54-year-old Arizona rancher who assumed a leadership role at the Oregon occupation and was killed there. But in his death, the Patriot movement got a new martyr. 

Last year, I thought I knew what that meant, how this concept of “Bundyville,” to me, was a state of mind. You believe whatever you want about the world, even if you know very well it isn’t true — as if by thinking this way you will manifest it into existence. And that felt like a way of understanding the deep divides in America right now. 

But then, something I didn’t expect happened. 

After we released Bundyville, these conspiracy theories I’d heard about in the Patriot movement — ones that were always there, but never central to my reporting on the Bundy family — started popping into the headlines more and more. The Guardian reported that investigators, upon looking into motivations for why Stephen Paddock committed a deadly shooting spree in Las Vegas, encountered stories of his supposed sovereign citizen ideology and a purported belief that FEMA runs concentration camps meant to round up Americans.

Then, in March 2019, a Florida man named Cesar Sayoc Jr. pleaded guilty to mailing 16 explosives to a dozen prominent Democrats and billionaire investor George Soros. Within the Patriot movement, talk about Soros — who has been the target of conspiratorial rhetoric by Trump — was something I’d heard more than once. But now the President of the United States was known for floating conspiracies about Soros. Last fall, he told reporters he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the caravan of migrants approaching the southern border were paid to come to the U.S. He added, “a lot of people say” the migrants were funded by Soros.

Back in 2016, when I covered the Oregon Standoff trial, I spent a lot of time talking to Patriot Movement supporters outside the courthouse. Our conversations, often, would feel normal until, quite suddenly, they’d take a hard turn; conversations about federal overreach would turn to conspiracies about the so-called New World Order, shadowy cabals of “globalist” leaders, implementation of sharia law, and supposed terrorist training camps in the U.S. They told me about Agenda 21 — a United Nations plan of action, which they believed would use sustainable development to redistribute wealth and turn the U.S. into a communist state. They talked about Uranium One, a conspiracy in which Hillary Clinton supposedly sold uranium to Russia in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation.

I wrote them all down, but then threw those notepads into a blue Rubbermaid bin in my office and mostly forgot about them.

But those conspiracy theories kept resurfacing. The day after Sayoc was arrested, another conspiracy theorist was in the news: An antisemite named Robert Bowers, who’d been posting to a social media site largely populated by racists, and stands accused of opening fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue, murdering 11 and injuring 7 — motivated by his apparent belief that Jews are “children of Satan” and were to blame for any problems in the United States. 

I’d heard things like this before, too, when learning about how Christian Identity — some followers of which believe that Jews are the spawn of Eve and Satan — drove people to form the Posse Comitatus movement, which considered the northwestern United States as a possible outpost for an all-white nation. People like that have found a home, too, within the Patriot movement. 

When I asked Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League, about conspiracist thinking, he offered that a conspiracy theory develops as a way of fitting in with someone’s worldview. Or it can explain a dramatic event with an equally dramatic theory. He uses President John F. Kennedy’s assassination — and more than 50 years of conspiracy theories about what occurred that day — as an example of how the psychology functions. “It’s a psychological thing where what actually happened is simply too simple for someone to be satisfied with,” he said. “The idea that one person killed the president is just not satisfactory to some people. For such a big event like that they seek an equally big and complex explanation.”

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Pitcavage sees conspiracy theories as the beating heart of the anti-government movement: “All the main movements in the Patriot movement are dominated by conspiracy theories.”

Suddenly, these ideas I’d scribbled down a few years ago were becoming a key conversation in America, and they gave me a sense of what the fringe edge of the far right was willing to believe. So when the president floated half-baked stories to push his agenda, they were willing to hop on board.

As steam built during the government shutdown in the winter of 2019 around President Trump’s plan to build a border wall along the southern edge of the United States, I felt like I was watching a Patriot movement passion project come to fruition. Trump, by then, was justifying the wall’s construction by telling tall tales that cartels were sending drugs over the border and terrorists were streaming into the country. Even Rep. Will Hurd, a Republican representative from Texas called bullshit.

One of the Bundys seemed to be talking relative sense on this topic. Throughout the past few years I’ve heard the family continually explain their unsubstantiated interpretation of the United States Constitution — and now Ammon Bundy, of all people, was telling his acolytes that Trump’s rhetoric about “the wall” wasn’t real. He called for compassion for people fleeing persecution, poverty, and fear. Trump, he said, “has basically called them all criminals,” and Bundy urged his followers to see that the president was peddling conspiracies.

Ammon Bundy in a video posted to Facebook in 2018, which made some internet commenters joke that he was becoming “woke.”

“What about individuals? What about those who have come for reasons of need for their families?” Bundy asked in a Facebook video. “The fathers, the mothers, and the children that come here and are willing to go through the process to apply for asylum so they can come into this country and benefit from not having to be oppressed continually?” Bundy scoffed that anyone could actually believe migrants had been paid by George Soros.

Some of his followers were outraged. Chatter went around online about Ammon Bundy being “woke.” My head spun. I called Ammon Bundy at his Idaho home as news outlets were breathlessly reporting that Cliven Bundy’s most well-known son had left the militia movement. I, too, was interested. Here he was, dividing himself from a group of people from which he’d so clearly benefited. Suddenly, the most anti-government of his followers needed to choose who to believe: Bundy, a man who had twice led them in confrontations with the feds, or the commander in chief himself, the literal embodiment of the government. Many chose the president. Even if what Trump was saying wasn’t based in reality, he was pushing an anti-immigration stance they could get behind.

Maybe Ammon Bundy realized that and saw it was a good time to bow out. His family was free. The Hammonds — the other ranchers at the center of the Bundy-led Malheur standoff — got a pardon from Trump last summer. Anti–public lands figures cycled in and out of the Department of the Interior. Bundy’s brother, Ryan, ran and lost his bid for Nevada governor, but otherwise, things were coming up Bundy. 

Over the phone, Ammon claimed never to have been in the militia movement, and he told me people with fringe ideas have always been the minority of those who come to his family’s side. “Ninety-eight percent probably or better are people that are very peaceful people,” he said. “At Malheur, we considered ourselves to be on the people’s land, and who am I to say [militias] could come or couldn’t come? That makes it difficult to police yourselves.” 

So I asked him: OK, what’s next? 

“I had a reporter a few months ago come to my house and he said, ‘I hear you’re building a 100-man army. No! It couldn’t be farther from the truth,” he said. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what I would do with an army.’” 

Would he make a “hard stand” again? 

“I certainly would if there was an individual or family that I felt would benefit from it. But heavens no,” he said without hesitation. He said he’s “not afraid to do what’s right,” but that as far as another standoff is concerned: “I have no desire, I don’t believe that is where change will be made.”Maybe the Bundys are only anti-government when it’s convenient for them. But — and this sounds crazy even to me — I have to hand it to Ammon Bundy for trying to talk some sense into a historically itchy movement, to use his position to call for calm and normalcy. 

And that’s why I realized we had to make more Bundyville. We are living in Bundyville. The truth is not winning. The center is not holding. The anti-government is now pro-president. And as I continued to report on the stories that make up this series, blood kept being spilled around the world in the name of conspiracies. In Pittsburgh, in New Zealand, in Southern California.

The president of the United States is floating conspiracy theories shared by the most radical members of the anti-government movement I’ve been reporting on. By February 2019, at a rally, Trump enthusiastically acknowledged the founder and several members of the Oath Keepers — an anti-government militia — who were standing directly behind him in the front row, grinning underneath their signature black-and-yellow logoed hats. 

Maybe even Ammon Bundy doesn’t know the true reach of who came to his family’s side, or who they might have emboldened. The Patriot movement has been violent before, and violent people came to the family’s confrontations with the government, but didn’t get a fight.  

So what’s to say the Patriots won’t be violent again, especially if — under federal prosecutors’ scrutiny and an opposing House — Democrats try to impeach Donald Trump? What then?

  III. 

Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee, to this day, has never gotten a closure report from the FBI or an explanation for why Glenn Jones did what he did, and why, in the days and weeks after the 2016 explosion, Joshua Cluff never provided insight either.

The Cluffs were clearly victimized: Their family barely made it out alive, their house was destroyed, their children were traumatized. They don’t even live in Panaca anymore. 

When the media tried to speak to him about what happened, Cluff was confrontational — saying reporters were revictimizing his family. When a TV reporter approached, Cluff jumped into a car that drove away. He gave one “angry telephone interview” to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, in which he told reporters that he didn’t have any idea why Jones did what he did: “Do you know why crazy people do crazy things before they do them?” he asked. He told those reporters the FBI “fully exonerated” him, but my multiple requests for clarification from the FBI went unanswered.

In Kingman, Arizona — where Glenn Jones lived at the time of his death — he was as well-liked by the people there as he was in Panaca, remembered for his deference more than anything else. In fact, no one in Panaca said a bad word to me about Jones; though most wouldn’t even say his name. They referred to him as “the suspect” or “the person.” On the other hand, a few people had choice words about Cluff — the victim of the bombing.

Jones “was a quiet unassuming guy. Never gave us any trouble,” said Kevin McCumber, who has managed the Zuni Village RV Park, where Jones lived, for the past five years. “In fact if you were having a bad day, he would come tell you a joke.”

In the days before the bombing, McCumber said, Jones came to his office and made a surprising offer. “There was a gentleman who lived near him who was suffering and was going through chemo. Jones came over and paid this guy’s rent,” he recalled. Jones was clear: If the guy asks, say you don’t know who paid his rent for him.

The Panaca investigation, within hours of the explosion, became the jurisdiction of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, among other agencies. Soon, even Lee wasn’t sure what to tell people about what happened on his own street. All he had to go on was a severed torso with a strange tattoo and what he read in the newspapers. 

And Cluff wasn’t cooperating either. Lee didn’t know Cluff well — but his mind went to an incident years earlier, when he’d asked him, in his capacity at the hospital, to help with an individual who needed medical attention. 

For reasons Lee declined to detail, the state needed to intervene, but that enraged Cluff, who made it clear to Lee that he didn’t think the government should make decisions for people — even if they needed help. “I got a little bit of an eye opening about how Josh felt about government overreach,” Lee told me, picking his words carefully. 

In the six months between the Oregon standoff and the bombing at his home, Cluff actively posted on Facebook about his support of the Bundy family and shared posts about the death of Finicum, his cousin. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Cluff, at one time, shared several posts from anti-government militia groups.

At one point, Cluff changed his profile picture to Finicum’s signature “LV” cattle brand — something that’s worn on bumper stickers and shirts of Patriots and even tattooed on the bodies of some. Cluff was raised in the same town where several members of the Finicum family live: Fredonia, Arizona — a tiny town on the Arizona-Utah border. 

Today, the area where Cluff’s house used to be is just an empty lot filled with mud. I walked the whole perimeter of it, stared at it on a cold winter morning thinking some answer to what really happened there would present itself. But all I got were muddy shoes and nervous looks from a guy standing quietly on his porch across the street, watching. 

Earlier this year, I reached out to Cluff on Facebook, and asked for an interview. After a couple of messages, Cluff wrote back: 

“We are just happy and not trying to dig up the past,” he said.

I typed out a message immediately — that I wasn’t trying to compromise that happiness, but that it seemed like his side of the story hadn’t come out. What, in his mind, was the truth? Why did Glenn Jones have his phone number tattooed on his body? What did the FBI ask him and Tiffany when they interviewed them? And why — if the answer was so clear that Jones was suicidal and crazy — was the investigation still open? I hit send. 

But by then, Cluff had blocked me. 

***

The way Sheriff Lee sees it, there are things the federal government could do better. The last time it was measured, in 2010, about 98 percent of his county was federal land — and, because of that, people there brush up against federal agencies more than most Americans. But that’s not to say they’re anti-government — far from it. 

But even Lee can partially understand where the Bundys’ arguments about the feds come from: Lee’s dad’s was a rancher, and the way the BLM decides to handle where they can graze their cattle, what water they can drink, can be frustrating. But people work with the BLM to figure out solutions. 

“I feel like we get so tied down with government regulation and oversight that we feel like nothing gets done,” he said. But to take up arms? To point guns? To flee from a traffic stop? That’s crazy. 

But that’s the confusion of the Patriot movement, he said.

“You have both in the Patriot movement. I feel like I think you have the normal Joe blow guy [that thinks] the government’s way too big,” he told me. “And then I think you have the one that’s like … ‘We shouldn’t even have the government.’”

Cluff was vocal about his views on Facebook — but did that make him a member of the Patriot movement? Was he the “Josh” Jones was referring to in his journals, in the same breath as bombs and blowing up BLM facilities? Why would Cluff go into business with the man who would bomb him — and then write that off to reporters as the work of a crazy person? 

In June 2016, just before the bombs detonated at Cluff’s house, a militiaman in LaVoy Finicum’s inner circle, named Bill Keebler, thought he had a bomb on his hands, too. And he thought he got away with destroying a federally owned BLM building, far out in the Arizona desert.  

I asked Sheriff Lee about this — how three weeks before Cluff’s home blew up, believed he had bombed a federal property. “Two bombs go off in the same summer,” I said. “It seems kind of strange.”

Lee leaned back far in his chair and smiled. “Makes a person think doesn’t it?” he said, hands behind his head. “That’s all I really can say is it makes a person think.”

***

Leah Sottile is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in theWashington Post, Playboy, California Sunday Magazine, Outside, The Atlantic and Vice.

Editors: Mike Dang and Kelly Stout Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk Fact checker: Matt Giles Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Special thanks to everyone at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

[denisalvney]

How Jennifer the Photographer Discovered a Love of Strength Training, Lost 20 Pounds, and Leveled up Her Life.

“This is why we do this.”

When I heard Jennifer’s story, I knew I had to share it.

She’s a member of the Nerd Fitness community who for years struggled with things most of us can relate to:

Seeking comfort in sugary foods and alcohol.

A lack of energy and all around feeling of fatigue.

An eating disorder as a teenager that created an unhealthy relationship with food.

Not knowing her next step towards a healthier lifestyle.

Jennifer found herself stuck in this pattern until rock bottom presented itself: divorce.

When bad times strike, it becomes easy to slip further into bad habits and vices.

Jennifer knew this and realized she had to turn her life around.

Six months ago, she did just that.

Today, Jennifer loves strength training and is the strongest she’s ever been. She changed her views on food and nutrition and is no longer intimidated by the kitchen. Jennifer recently completed her first 8k, something she couldn’t have dreamed of doing before.

And oh, Jennifer just came back from an epic photography trip where her new found stamina and strength allowed her to hike mountains to capture some awesome shots:

That’s her!

I’m honored that Jennifer has been a member of our 1-on-1 Online Coaching program since August, and has used our guidance to level up her life!

While strength training and getting comfortable in the kitchen are important, the real success for Jennifer has been with her mindset. She knows she can’t change everything at once and is using one small change to spring into another change and then another, using each as a stepping stone to the next.

This new frame of mind is something we can all learn from.

It’s how Jennifer was able to transform so quickly and lose 20 pounds in a healthy, sustainable way. While it seems like changing everything at once is the quickest way to success, it’s often too stressful and thus abandoned.

However, if you do what Jennifer did, and start with one simple habit like a food journal – it can start improving other areas of your life too.

You don’t need to hear it from me though…

Let’s bring in Jennifer!

HOW JENNIFER THE PHOTOGRAPHER LOST 20 POUNDS AND LEVELED UP HER LIFE

STEVE: Hi Jennifer! Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me.

I’d love to hear from you about your past – can you describe a normal day for you before you joined NF Coaching?

JENNIFER: My day was pretty random, with no real set schedule. It would be hard for me to get up in the morning, and then I’d have an unhealthy breakfast – the American South is full of delicious things like biscuits and fried foods. Later in the day, I’d often find myself needing to take a long nap.

Looking back, I did not have any sort of set schedule and spent my days with a foggy brain and zero energy.

STEVE: I hear ya. A super carb heavy and sugary breakfast can send your blood sugar on a rollercoaster for the day. Sometimes a nap is the only way off of it.

What changed? What made you invest in yourself by joining Nerd Fitness Coaching last summer?

JENNIFER: I had a really horrific divorce and hit an all time low. I moved out of my home in Seattle, WA, back to my hometown in North Carolina. Sometimes you just have to escape your surroundings.

I found myself comforting with sugary foods and alcohol. You know, totally healthy antidepressants.

This really started to take a toll on my body.

I had a moment of clarity then, as I realized I just didn’t have enough knowledge or drive to make changes on my own. I’m a believer in the “spoon theory,” which is a metaphor you see around the internet, which helps explain the limited amount of energy we face.

Imagine having twelve spoons handed to you each morning. Every task or difficult scenario takes a spoon from you. Often at the end of the day, you have no more “spoons” to give.

I knew I’d be much more successful with a routine that didn’t require any “spoons” to get to the gym. Instead, I could just start with workouts from home.

It was right about then I decided to give the Nerd Fitness Coaching program a try. I decided I wanted to be told exactly what to do, which again would require less “spoons” from me.

STEVE: I love the analogy of “spoons!” We’ve talked here in the past that willpower can be a finite resource for many. By the end of the day, you really can just be drained. Our philosophy on the subject matches your thoughts on spoon theory. That’s why we always encourage people to design systems that have the least amount of friction and require the least amount of willpower, or “spoons.”

I’m glad you realized this and wanted to create a system where you could start working out from home. You can grow the practice into a gym routine (or not) later. The important thing is finding a system that allows you to start TODAY.

You’ve been with coach Evan now for six months. Can you talk to me a little bit about what he had you do?

JENNIFER: Evan started me out just counting calories, learning about the foods I ate, and getting used to comfortably logging my meals.

I had an eating disorder as a teenager. Hyper-focusing on everything I was eating and logging it all was really starting to trigger a lot of anxiety and bad memories in the beginning.

But I told Evan all of this at our first meeting and he has been very good about helping me completely turn my perspective around about tracking my meals. He told me not to have any judgment about what I was eating, and to view the practice as a scientist collecting data.

That perspective helped (Steve’s note: woo! Science rules!)

For exercise, Evan started me out just taking a walk every day, followed shortly by some basic bodyweight exercises. At first, these were really tough, because I was really out of shape to start. I’d end most sessions a sweaty exhausted mess on the floor.

Then Evan added in more dumbbell exercises (I have a small set at home and borrowed a bench from my family) and I instantly fell in love with those exercises! Evan made sure to add more of those into my routine as well.

STEVE: That’s great to hear Jennifer. It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of strength training.

What’s your routine like now? What else is Evan having you do?

JENNIFER: 5 months in, I’m even more of an avid walker. I walk daily, sometimes over 5 miles, or sometimes shorter if my walking buddies bail on me.

Total flakes (j/k, I love you guys).

I do strength training 3 days a week with a combination of bodyweight and dumbbell exercises.

We just introduced some yoga routines to both help with stress relief and to help with stretching and mobility. I have had some issues with cranky muscles and joints on occasion, which yoga is helping with.

The whole experience has been crazy to me.

I’ve gotten to the point where I enjoy some kind of physical activity every day of the week.  

And fell IN LOVE with lifting weights.

It is damn satisfying to see myself becoming a chick with “guns.”

At this point, I have bigger biceps than my father and brother, haha. I am loving every second of that. It feels so good to be strong and be able to handle things on my own.

As a female, that is even more important to me because society is pretty much built around telling us women that we can’t be strong enough and we cannot do things on our own. I am fed up with that cultural stereotype!

As an aside, prior to joining NF Coaching, I was greatly inspired by Staci’s story and transformation. I like to think I’m following in her footsteps.

STEVE: Yes! I love it. I think everyone should follow a strength training practice: man, woman, child, grandparent, self-aware robot… all of them! I’m really glad you found this new passion.

Also, I’m glad you found inspiration from Staci! Many a rebel around here have also changed their lives after reading about Staci.

You sent over some awesome pics of a recent trip in Scotland. Can you talk to me a little bit about that?

JENNIFER: It was my goal in 2018 to do a hiking trip in Scotland. With Evan’s help, I got enough strength and endurance to do exactly that!

I went on a photography workshop on the Isle of Skye and completed the most difficult hike I have ever done up to a rock structure called the Old Man of Storr. It was one of the proudest moments of my life. I couldn’t have done it without Evan’s help. So I am quite grateful.

I wanted to be able to do the mountain hikes with all my heavy camera gear on my back, without being assigned to the group of folks who couldn’t do as much. I knew I was in no shape to do it originally.

However, Evan and I created a plan, executed it, and boom! Up the mountain I went.

I can do so many cool things with my body that I wasn’t able to do 5 months ago! I power walked my first 8k about a month after starting with Evan. It was hard but I had built the endurance from walking every single day before it.

STEVE: I think it’s so great that you worked towards a goal and then hit it. I often encourage people to try and build up strength for an event. Something like a marathon, a ski trip, or in your case a photography workshop on the top of a mountain.

It gives you something to shoot for, something to motivate you to work out when it seems so much easier to skip it. I’m glad you created a goal for yourself, made a plan with your coach, and then nailed it!

Your physical appearance has changed. What else has changed about you?

JENNIFER: I’ve had vast improvements in my posture which I think in turn has improved my self-confidence.

There’s something about standing straight and tall with your shoulders back that makes you feel a bit like a badass. Someone who can conquer anything the day will throw at you.

I’ve also battled depression for most of my adult life. And while it by no means is cured, the severity of it has been lessened by the daily physical activity and improved nutrition.

All around, today I have the general ability to do more things because I have more energy and focus than I used to.

I still have days when I get overly stressed out and go a bit off the rails with my nutrition and make unhealthy choices. However, I appreciate Nerd Fitness for the “never twice in a row” mindset. It keeps me from feeling like an utter failure if I have a day with too much pizza or delicious cake or something. I just know the next day, it’s time for me to get back on track.

STEVE: That’s so cool! I’m happy “never twice in a row” resonated with you. I think it’s an important tool for preventing bad habits from developing. When people slip up (and we all slip up), it can become so easy to continue. Having a motto that stops this trend from continuing is a game-changer. I’m proud of you Jennifer.  

You mentioned a need to adjust your relationship with food. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? What’s your nutrition strategy like now?

JENNIFER: I’m proud to say I’ve changed my relationship with food. I’ve always used food as a comfort. Knowing this, I was really nervous about even just logging my food. Looking back though, it was such an important first step.

Tracking everything I was eating was eye-opening.

It helped me see what I was putting into my body, which gave me more confidence and determination in the kitchen. As of today, I’ve conquered cooking all kinds of foods, founds healthy recipes I enjoy, and am beginning to work on meal prep. Evan has a strategy for me to plan ahead on food preparation.

Healthy eating really has been a game changer. I am much more clear-headed today than I was six months ago, and I credit nutrition as a huge reason why.

I don’t really follow Paleo or anything like that.

Coach Evan has introduced me more into a “If It Fits Your Macros” style of eating. He really hammered in the thought that I had to eat protein with every meal.

I’ve also drastically reduced my sugar and alcohol consumption, although I’ll still indulge from time to time. Going back to “If It Fits Your Macros,” if I know I’m going to be eating dessert or having some drinks, I’ll plan for it and reduce my calories and carbs beforehand. Again though, I’m doing this less and less. I actually prefer healthier foods now, to be honest.

STEVE: That’s great to hear you say that. We here at Nerd Fitness continuously remind everyone that 80-90% of the weight loss comes down to nutrition. Not only that, but REAL food just makes you feel better. Which will give you more energy to workout. I’m glad that Evan has helped you see a plate of food differently.

What are you still working on? What new habits are you trying to develop?

JENNIFER: I am still establishing a fixed routine for sleeping and waking up, which is definitely something that has been a struggle to do. I have seen improvements though.

I’ve created a pretty solid breakfast routine, prioritizing protein. Oftentimes it’ll be cottage cheese, which I never realized I’d like!

I also have a glass of water upon waking up, which has been a good change.  

Earlier I mentioned I started doing yoga. I’m experimenting with doing it first thing in the morning.

My biggest challenge for creating a successful morning routine is going to bed on time. I would say this is still a work in progress. One habit at a time.

STEVE: Getting to bed on time can be such a critical step. I’ve struggled with being a “morning person” myself, but it really is worth pursuing the routine. Keep at it, Jennifer!

Do you have any words of advice for somebody who hasn’t invested in any program and can’t seem to make any progress?

JENNIFER: Don’t fall into the perfectionistic trap that I did and feel like you have to do ALL the things at once or you are a total failure. No human can dive into deep water before learning to swim.

Trying to do that is like taking a starter character in World of Warcraft and heading straight to a high-level dungeon: you’ll get trampled.

If you cannot commit to a program or feel overwhelmed that’s completely okay. Start small. Pick a small change and stick to that and build onto that routine once you’ve gotten comfortable. This way you slowly mold yourself into the person you want to be.  

I loved RPGs and grew up during the NES and SNES era and building good habits and getting healthy feels exactly like those games in a way. You don’t start at level 99,999 doing max damage to everything. You level up from the beginning and gain spells and abilities along the way and your character slowly evolves into the one you want it to be.

I think the Nerd Fitness “Level Up Your Life” motto is incredibly accurate.

Great change is made by accomplishing many smaller changes. And you’re so much less likely to become discouraged and just rage-quit if you go about change this way.

STEVE: That’s amazing Jennifer. You nailed the whole philosophy on “Level Up Your Life.” Start small, and before you know it you’re a top-level mage slaying dragons with ice spells. Or in your case, climbing up mountains.

Alright, one last question: you’ve already used some of our language, but what makes you a nerd?

JENNIFER: I consider myself a multi-dimensional nerd! If that’s not a phrase I am deeming it thus. I’ve loved video games since I was very small. Loved all the NES and Mario games, as well as the Zelda series and RPGs like Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy series.

I’ve played World of Warcraft with an awesome guild of all women for over 10 years.

Shout out to Daughters of the Alliance!

Comics are also a love. My absolute favorite is Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, and pretty much anything else he or David Mack have been involved in. I pretty much love all things nerdy.

STEVE: I do love me some Neil Gaiman too – I actually have Vol 1 of Sandman sitting on my coffee table! Thank you for taking the time to speak with me, Jennifer! All the best!

THE SIX KEYS TO JENNIFER’S WEIGHT LOSS AND LEVEL UP SUCCESS!

In speaking with Jennifer, I realized she had a few great traits which helped her succeed.

Lots of people embark on a fitness journey. Unfortunately, many of them are exactly where they started six months later.

Jennifer is different. In half a year, she’s changed her relationship with food, begun strength training, and has taken an epic trip.

After a rough patch, she used hitting rock bottom to turn her life around.

In speaking with her, and analyzing her choices and decisions, I think there are six traits that set Jennifer apart.

Here’s what we can learn from Jennifer’s success:

#1) JENNIFER STOPPED RELYING ON WILLPOWER

I love Jennifer’s “spoon” analogy. She knew she only had so much energy, only so much willpower, to get things done. So she sought a system that would require the least amount from her:

Instead of buying a gym membership she would never use, she started working out from her home.

Jennifer started with simple bodyweight exercises, a solid strategy to build momentum

Once she got a little more comfortable from working out at home, she starting using dumbbells and a bench press that she had access to. Again, all from home.

Working out and going to the gym are not tied together. If you have limited experience and/or motivation, start by doing simple bodyweight exercises at home. This is what Jennifer did!

Second, know that working out gives you more energy. Which can help give you more willpower. Which can help you embark on other habits like cooking or meal prep.

If you want to head to a gym for exercise, great! I do. However, if you have a hard time motivating yourself to leave the house, it doesn’t have to be the only option.

Starting small requires less willpower, which can help make your actions more likely to become routine.

#2) JENNIFER INVESTED IN HERSELF AND ASKED FOR HELP

Continuing on the theme of limited willpower, Jennifer knew she needed to do things differently. She saw herself with destructive habits that needed to be changed.

Doing it alone seemed impossible. It was hard enough for Jennifer to get out of bed and face the day. She knew that creating a plan and then sticking with it would require a lot of energy. Energy and willpower she was already having trouble coming up with.

So she asked for help. Jennifer wanted “Someone in MY corner to help cheer me on and guide me into a better way of living.” I’m proud that she reached out to us for that someone, and that she made a connection with her NF Coach, Evan.

It’s okay to ask for help! Knowing what to do, how to do it, and how to tell if it’s working requires a lot of energy. Some can do it alone. But many can’t. Asking for help, and then being willing to invest in that help can be a life-changing decision. Jennifer knew this and was willing to take the step to hire someone to create a plan and help her execute it.

I’ve had an online coach myself for 4 years and it has changed my life.

#3) JENNIFER HAD DRAGONS TO SLAY

I love that Jennifer planned a photography workshop in Scotland that required some physical strength and endurance. Hiking up a mountain with camera equipment isn’t easy, and Jennifer knew she’d have to train if she was going to make it.

So she asked for help, developed a plan on how to do it, and followed the plan. And boom! She was able to hike up her equipment for her class.

Having a goal gave Jennifer her “Big Why.”

When Jennifer started logging her food, it gave her anxiety. When she first started working out, she would be exhausted. When her walking buddies bailed on her, she went anyway.

Jennifer did these things because she knew they were part of a plan to get her up the Old Man of Storr in Scotland. Without doing the work, she would never get to the top. She would have to be part of the group that stuck to the sidelines.

Having a goal can provide the “Big Why.” When things get tough (and they will get tough), knowing “why” you are working hard can make all the difference.

Perhaps you want to go skiing with your kids and don’t want to be exhausted halfway through. Maybe there’s a marathon your friends are doing, and you want to go with them. Perhaps it’s practicing pull-ups so you can go tag along with your spouse who loves rock climbing.

Having a “Big Why” can be the key to making or breaking a fitness journey. And what happens after you slay a dragon? You go find a bigger dragon!

4#) JENNIFER STARTED HER JOURNEY WITH SMALL STEPS

Jennifer began with two small habits that most people can start today:

Jennifer started logging her food.

Jennifer started taking a daily walk.

We often advise people to pick a small habit they can imagine sticking with permanently. Once this becomes part of a normal routine, they can think about picking another.

This can be better than planning on “Going full Paleo, start rock climbing, and beginning a ballroom dancing practice.” If you don’t do any of these things currently, it could be very tough to start doing them all at once.

And we all know temporary changes produce temporary results. We want results that last!

That’s why Coach Evan had Jennifer start with small changes she could actually sustain.

For nutrition changes, Evan just had Jennifer track her food.

No judgment. No “eat this, not that.”

Just a log of everything she was consuming. Once Jennifer got comfortable doing this, and only once Jennifer became comfortable doing this, did Evan start to make recommendations for adjustments.

Jennifer also started small with exercises: just a walk.

Walking is a great start for a fitness journey (it’s also a great way to get to Mordor). It’ll get your heart rate up and your muscles moving, and it’s something you can do around your neighborhood. Even just a five-minute walk is a great start. Once you get in the habit of that, you can make take it to 10 minutes or even a full mile. If you start this way, eventually you can be like Jennifer and crush miles each and every day.

After you get in the habit of walking, you can switch to picking up some weights every other day. The habit of walking is easy to adapt to another exercise practice, like strength training.

“Instead of my 2pm walk, it’s now my 2pm bench press time.”

Be like Jennifer and start small. Once the habit is built, you can work to grow it from there.

5#) JENNIFER PLANNED ON WHAT TO DO WHEN SHE FELL DOWN

It brought a smile to my face when I heard Jennifer say “never two in a row.”

It’s a great frame of mind to keep.

Things will come up. You will miss a workout. You will have some beers and eat pizza. You will sleep in and miss your walking groups AM meeting. Your kid will get sick.

When you miss these things consistently, you start creating bad habits. And what you do most of the time is how you create a healthy life.

Missing one workout is okay. Missing two is bad because then it’s really easy to miss three.

Eating pizza is fine. But “once and a while” can quickly become an “everyday” thing. Continue this for too long and then you’re just living off pizza!

“Never two in a row” provides a framework for making sure bad habits don’t develop:

“If I miss today’s workout, there is no way I’m missing tomorrow’s.”

“If I eat pizza tonight, it’s eggs and a little bit of fruit in the morning.”

Create a mindset of stopping these things before they get out of hand. Be like Jennifer and create a plan on what to do when you inevitable stray from the path.

6#) JENNIFER IS HAVING FUN ALONG THE WAY

Jennifer considers herself a work in progress. When you think about it, we’re all works in progress!  She knows this. But she is having fun now, which makes the days ahead seem sustainable.

We are not on a month-long journey. We are in this for the rest of our lives. To make sure we stick with it, we need to have fun! And as I say in this video: we stop thinking in terms of “weeks and months,” and instead start thinking in terms of “days and years”

Jennifer legitimately loves strength training. You can tell she’s looking forward to one day doing pull-ups.

Jennifer likes eating nutritious food and loves how much energy she derives from those meals.

My favorite part: she views where she’s at as an experiment. She highlights this when she talks about her morning routine and yoga. She’s still not sure how to get the AM just right and thinks a little yoga in the morning might help. She’ll try it to see if it works. If it doesn’t, she’ll try something else.

IN SIX MONTHS, CAN YOU TURN YOUR LIFE AROUND LIKE JENNIFER?

All of us will hit tough spots in life.

Maybe it’s losing a job. Perhaps it’s a sick family member. Or a child that’s struggling in school.

For Jennifer, it was a nasty divorce. At first, she coped in the ways many of us cope: food and alcohol.

Jennifer decided this couldn’t continue. So she sought help. And in six months time, Jennifer has leveled up her life. She can pursue her passion for photography and not be afraid of the literal mountain ahead. She knows the shot at the top of the climb, is not only worth it, but doable.

Where will you be six months from now?

It’s enough time to build some great healthy habits as Jennifer did. However, it’s also a short enough time which can fly by if you’re not looking.

If you’re standing in the same place you were six months ago, think about what you can learn from Jennifer:

Don’t rely on willpower, build systems. Take the path of least resistance. Instead of starting with an hour-long workout program at the gym, start with exercises you can do at home.

Ask for help. You are not the first person who has tried to get fit. It’s okay to reach out to those who’ve had success, or those who have helped others. You don’t have to do this alone.

Have a goal. A “Big Why” can be critical when things get tough. When everyone is ordering pizza, or the gym seems so far away, having a goal can help you remember why you are putting in all the work.

Start small. Don’t try and change every aspect of your life tomorrow. Some can handle this approach, but most can’t. Adopt one habit you can see yourself sticking with and grow it from there.

Plan for failure. Things will come up. Having a motto like “never two in a row” can help prevent one instance of a slip up into turning into a reoccurring habit.

Have fun. Getting fit is not a 30-day experiment. It really is about a lifestyle. Pick and choose things you have fun doing. This will help ensure your new habits are sustainable.

If you relate to Jennifer and find yourself in a tough spot, we can help you turn it around.

Depending on your current situation, our 1-on-1 NF Coaching Program might be just what you need. We help people everyday complete life overhauls.

If you’re trying to get in shape, searching for a new way of eating, or want help developing a strength training practice, we know exactly how to get you there. You can learn more by clicking on the big box below and scheduling a free call with our team!

The next six months will come and go no matter what you do today.

I’d love it if half a year from now, you tell me Jennifer’s story was something you related to. Which inspired you to make some changes.

You started walking every day. You began a food journal. You finally decided to ask for help.

As always, if you do need somewhere to go for help, you know Nerd Fitness will be here.

For the Rebellion!

-Steve

PS: I want to give a special shout out to Jennifer’s Coach Evan, who has been the Dumbledore to her Hermione over these past 6 months. And I’m proud of Jennifer’s success and can’t wait to see what she does next.

If you are somebody that wants to have your own Yoda guiding you in the ways of the Force, check out or 1-on-1 coaching program, and I could be sharing YOUR story six months from now!

PPS: Speaking of success stories…If you’ve had success with any aspect of Nerd Fitness, whether it’s our free workouts, Academy, or Coaching, email us! Send your story to contact(at)NerdFitness(dot)com and let us know so we can share your adventure with the galaxy!

PPPS: We are very grateful to Guinevere’s Mirror, who provided some epic shots of Jennifer for this article.

How Jennifer the Photographer Discovered a Love of Strength Training, Lost 20 Pounds, and Leveled up Her Life. published first on https://www.nerdfitness.com

[lodelss]

Bundyville: The Remnant, Chapter One: A Quiet Man

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 25 minutes (6,186 words)

Part 1 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB. Catch up on season one of Bundyville here.

I.

When the house around the corner exploded, Richard Katschke and his wife, Karen, were reading scripture. The retired pair looked up from the pages and froze. In another room, a plastic light cover clattered to the floor.

It was a warm Wednesday. Mid-July 2016, about 8 p.m. Outside, a boy rode his bike near South Fifth Street. A man started a lawn mower.  

The Katschkes were seated on a brown leather couch in a room they’d added onto their Panaca, Nevada, house years earlier for Richard’s elderly mother — both he and Karen called her “Mom.” She lived there until the Katschkes made her more comfortable at the nearby hospital in her final days, where a quiet nurse would rub her feet with cream and stay by her side, watching the old woman’s eyes for a sign she was ready to be with God.

The Katschkes never imagined that nurse, 59-year-old Glenn Jones, would, in the last seconds of his life, commit a bombing around the corner from their house — a cataclysmic event that would send a family screaming from their home seconds before it exploded and, even now, three years later, would still have no official explanation from federal authorities. 

Glen Wadsworth was the last person to see Jones alive. He was pushing a lawn mower across the grass at his childhood home. Inside, his elderly father sat in front of the television. 

Ever since Wadsworth was a teenager, he mowed the lawn the exact same way: pushing and pulling the machine from front yard to side yard to back. But for a reason he still can’t quite understand, that July evening he pushed and pulled a different way than ever before: front, back, side.

Wadsworth — a tall man with straight teeth and neatly combed hair who serves as a member of the local volunteer fire department — looked up from his mower to see Jones back a car up to the gray house next door, where Joshua and Tiffany Cluff lived with their three daughters. Jones parked, got out of the car, and waved to Wadsworth. Wadsworth waved back and continued mowing. He didn’t know Jones, but thought he looked familiar from when the Cluffs built the gray house and friends chipped in on the work. 

Wadsworth didn’t see or hear Tiffany and her girls run out of the house, screaming into the telephone.

“911, What is your emergency?” the operator said.

“I … Someone … somebody showed up at my house with a bomb,” Tiffany Cluff panted into her neighbor’s phone. “He’s going to blow my house up.” 

“Ma’am. Ma’am. Take a breath for me, OK? I can barely understand ya. What is happening?”

“We’re running away from my house,” Tiffany, hysterical, choked on her words. “I grabbed my kids and I ran.”

“He said he was going to kill you?”

“He said he was going to blow the house up.”

“OK, all right, take a couple breaths for me,” the dispatcher said. “Are you away from the home?”

“Ye—”

Tiffany couldn’t even finish the word “yes” before the sound of a bomb exploding and the heart-stopping screaming of three little girls flattened any other noise coming through the receiver. 

“Oh my god!” she screamed. “He just blew my house up!”

Down the street, Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee — one of Glen Wadsworth’s oldest friends — was out in his yard with his dog when the blast shook his ribcage. 

Lee smiles a lot for a cop — a wide, friendly grin under a thick mustache and a flat-top haircut. And in Panaca, he wears a lot of hats: He’s the sheriff, but he’s also the chief of the volunteer fire department and the county coroner. By July 2016, he’d been in law enforcement for nearly 30 years, and he knew that in Panaca, loud noises are often easily explained: a sonic boom from a military aircraft flying low around Nellis Air Force Base or the Nevada Test and Training Range. 

But this was different. Normal noises don’t shake you from the inside. The sheriff yanked his dog into the house, grabbed the keys to his patrol rig, and sprinted back out again. He paused, trying to understand why, all around him, it sounded like a hailstorm was falling from the clear blue sky: “I knew something wasn’t right.” 

Wadsworth was still mowing. He didn’t hear Jones shoot himself as he sat in the front seat of the car. Maybe the mower drowned out the sharp pop of the gun, or maybe he’d just fired so many gunshots of his own across the dry desert that he had conditioned himself not to flinch at the sound. But when he looked up from his mower and saw the house next door on fire, he sprinted toward it, believing the family was inside. He ran toward the house, but at the front door, it was as if he ran right smack into the palm of an invisible hand. “It was just like a wall. I just couldn’t.” 

Another explosion sounded on the 911 call.

Sheriff Lee could see a mushroom cloud billowing when he looked down South Fifth Street. He assumed it had to be a fire, a gas explosion, an exploded transformer. A bomb? Here? In Panaca? Never crossed his mind. 

The windows of the Wadsworth home exploded inward and a hunk of Jones’s car rocketed straight toward the old man sitting in his chair, landing just short at his feet. Glen Wadsworth, somehow, wasn’t hit by a thing. 

The chipping house next door to the Cluff home inched sideways on its foundation. A chunk of shrapnel careened toward the boy on his bike, hitting him so hard in the shoulder that it knocked him to the ground, but miraculously, only left a small bruise. 

The two explosions sent hot metal shrapnel flying upward, curving in long arcs over the remote desert town. A half mile away, debris rained on the high school. The football team, outside doing drills, dropped to the ground. Daggers of shrapnel stabbed into the sides of nearby houses. One piece punched through the roof of a garage, piercing the hood of the car parked inside. 

In a town where nothing ever happens, a town where there are no secrets, suddenly there was mayhem. 

“It was Glenn Jones,” Tiffany Cluff cried to the 911 dispatcher. “He said he was going to kill himself and blow up our house.”

As Sheriff Lee drove closer, he could see the destroyed house: It looked like a giant had mashed the house with colossal fists and twisted a car into a grotesque tangle of metal, leaving a deep crater in the pavement. 

“Cars blow up like that in a movie,” Lee said. “They don’t normally blow up like that.”

Neighbors who’d gathered at the corner of Fifth and Hansen waved the sheriff down. “Stop! Stop!” he remembers them shouting as he pulled up to the scene. “You’re running over body parts!” 

Sure enough, there on the ground lay a pair of legs. 

It would be 14 hours before investigators would find the rest of Glenn Jones. His torso had flown out of sight, high into a neighbor’s tree.

Though the investigation was transferred to the hands of federal authorities, Sheriff Lee — in another of his roles, as county coroner — inspected the top half of the body when it was fished down from the branches. He was surprised to see two tattoos on the chest. 

One clearly read DNR — medical code for “do not resuscitate.” The other was a phone number for the man whose house he had just exploded: Joshua Cluff.

***

A gravelly town on the sinful side of the Utah-Nevada border, the desert outpost of Panaca was established in the 1860s by Mormon pioneers whose legacies live on in the few street names here and in the last names of the people who still call this place home. 

Today, Panaca is like a peninsula of Utah: the only town in Nevada that is dry, and one of just two in the state where gambling is prohibited. If you want a beer, you’ll have to drive 15 miles to Caliente — pronounced around these parts as “Cal-yen-ee” — to get one, at a smoky bar along a peeling downtown strip. Panaca, Caliente — they’re what you picture when you think of a Western town: At night, tumbleweeds blow down the middle of empty streets, coming to rest against a hardware store with deer heads and bobcat pelts on display in the window. 

It’s a place where you know your neighbor, and you know that really knowing him means understanding what’s your business and what isn’t.

On Thursday, July 14, 2016, the day after the bombing, shrapnel lines a previously quiet street in Panaca, Nevada. (Brett Le Blanc/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)

Most Panacans worship together at an LDS church right smack in the center of town. A single market sells snacks and produce. The streets are pocked and rough. Chickens hustle busily in some yards, horses graze in others. Here and there, piles of junk look like they’ve been battered by desert winds for decades. Next to the high school, a massive mint-green rock formation called Court Rock bubbles skyward, named for the way young folks traditionally have “courted” there; on my visit, a condom wrapper stomped into the silty mud at the rock’s foot suggested that’s still the case.

A sign displaying the Ten Commandments guards the town, as if its presence will keep the Devil out. Panaca may have a Nevada zip code, but Lord knows it’s God’s country. 

Panaca is the birthplace of John Yeates Barlow, one of the most influential leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — a group that still practices polygamy. LDS folks here are adamant that they would never want to be confused for FLDS, but most don’t mind having them as neighbors.

Mormonism, after all, is what built Panaca, and polygamists historically have had a place in Lincoln County. In the mid-2000s, essentially with the blessing of the FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs, a group that operated a 3,000-acre ranch more than 40 miles north of the town. The Caliente-Panaca area was a special place for Jeffs: At the Caliente Hot Springs Motel, Jeffs reportedly held underage wedding ceremonies at a moment’s notice. 

When the FLDS farm sprung up, Sheriff Lee said the group was clear that they didn’t want the police in their business. So he drove up to introduce himself, shook their hands, and assured them they could call if they needed help. They were “good, good people,” he said, who were living under the direction of Jeffs: “A bad guy. A bad man.” (After a conviction on charges of felony rape was reversed by the Utah Supreme Court, Jeffs was sentenced by a Texas court to life in prison for sexually assaulting two followers — age 12 and 15 — in what his church deemed a “spiritual marriage.”)

Living here means looking the other way sometimes. Picking your battles. More than one Panacan told me they wouldn’t want to speculate about why a bombing occurred in their town, but then offered an opinion anyway: A lot of people here think the bomb was simply a loud, messy expression of a workplace grievance between Glenn Jones and Joshua Cluff. 

Jones, for years, did live in Panaca, and worked under Joshua Cluff as a nurse at the Grover C. Dils Medical Center in Caliente — just across the highway from the Caliente Hot Springs. Records from the Nevada State Board of Nursing show Jones’s license was revoked after he failed to “document administration or waste” of three separate doses of morphine in a two-month span. Messages left for Grover C. Dils Medical Center staff for this story went unreturned, but in 2016 one administrator told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that Jones left his job there voluntarily and on good terms. Even so, some Panacans think maybe Jones blamed Cluff, and that’s enough explanation for why he bombed him. Sheriff Lee is skeptical of the whole workplace grievance theory. “I don’t think that was a major reason for the bombing,” Lee said.

After leaving his nursing job, Jones moved several hours south to a blue-and-white-striped mobile home in the Zuni Village RV Park in Kingman, Arizona. His camper, parked in Space #69, was at the center of the park, surrounded by homes with mostly graying retired folks. 

Upon entering Jones’s RV the day after the explosion in Panaca, bomb technicians found multiple devices, several of which were “fully functional,” one officer wrote in his report. A neighbor told police they’d seen him carrying a large artillery shell into his RV, but Jones was known to buy items like it in the area, restoring and reselling them to other collectors. So most people didn’t bat an eye.

But police accounts paint a picture of a trailer brimming with bomb-making materials: metal containers, fuses, power tools, smokeless powder. Ammo cans were stacked under his dining room table. Even his shower had projectiles inside. 

On a nightstand, investigators found three spiral-bound notebooks each with Jones’s name written on the front. Inside one, he had drawn diagrams for a bomb, which gave investigators reason to believe the devices were originally intended for a different target. 

“The entries indicated that Glenn Jones had been approached [by] a subject identified as ‘Josh’ who offered to pay him to construct an explosive device,” wrote one detective. 

“The intended target of the device was identified on one page as ‘Forth of July BLM Field Office,’” the detective continued. “The journal entries indicate that there was a falling out between Jones and ‘Josh,’ and that Jones instead decided to target ‘Josh’ with his explosive device, or ‘bomb.’

“Jones went on to document that ‘Josh’ is the cousin of LaVoy Finicum and seemed to indicate this was a possible motive for the planned attack on the BLM Field Office.”

In his office, up the road from Panaca in the town of Pioche, Nevada, Sheriff Lee keeps a large chunk of the bomb — one of the pieces the FBI didn’t seize. Just touching a finger to its razor-sharp edges is enough to draw blood. “These bombs were actually bomb artillery shells made to make shrapnel,” he said, “made to kill people.”

Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval and Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee outside the destroyed Cluff home on July 15, 2016. (Brett Le Blanc/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP.)

****

At the heart of what little is known about the events in Panaca was the handwritten documentation left behind by the bomber. It makes clear that Jones had an interest in Finicum — one of the central figures in the so-called Patriot movement, a collection of anti-government groups that includes the conspiratorial militia-types and sovereign citizens who flocked to the anti-government standoffs and way of thinking popularized by the Bundy family. Finicum was only ever in the movement at the end of his life, but he became a martyr for it in his death in January 2016, when he was shot and killed by law enforcement. He was fleeing a traffic stop in Oregon during which authorities intended to arrest the leaders of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation.

The car Jones blew up in Panaca was a rental. When police entered the dark green 2007 Saturn Ion that Jones owned, parked in an Avis rental car parking lot, inside they found out more about Jones and Cluff. There was a 2014 contract for a land purchase with both of their names on it and an agreement for Jones to pay Cluff $50,000. 

Two years before the bombing, Jones also deposited $9,000 into an interest-bearing bank account that would mature in one year and, ultimately, be payable at the time of his death to one person: Cluff. 

Much like in the rest of the U.S., people in Panaca don’t talk much about domestic terrorism these days. They likely have a better reason to talk about it than other Americans, but Panacans explain the bombing away — that what’s important to remember is that some  gesture of holy providence saved them that day. 

At the town’s only bed and breakfast, the mother of the kid on the bike — the only person to be hit by shrapnel — served me pancakes and eggs in the morning and mentioned she thinks “angels of our ancestors” were watching over the town that day the bomb went off. 

Panacans believe their collective faith in God bent the trajectories of shrapnel to miss Wadsworth and his father. That faith kept shards of glass out of eyes, harnessed flames and surging power lines, and kept the Cluff family alive. 

If God saved this town, why think about the bad parts of the story anymore — even if there’s never been an official explanation for what happened? Besides, could domestic terrorism really happen in a place like this, where everyone knows everyone else, where every house is a home? 

People laugh darkly about the bombing now: The way, a few days later, a lady caught her dog gnawing on an unfamiliar bone and realized his snack was actually human. The way people still find odd remnants and assume they’re pieces of shrapnel. The way dozens of birds, for weeks, pecked away at some of the Chinese elm trees where Jones’s body parts landed.

Every spring, when Richard Katchske plants a line of flowers along his fence, he digs out twisted nobs of shrapnel from the dirt. Katchske showed me a piece, holding a brownish-black gnarl in his palm. I could have it if I wanted. I declined.

“It’ll be a legacy I pass on to my kids,” he laughed.

  II.

Last year, when Bundyville came out, I felt satisfied that I’d found the answers I’d come looking for about the Bundy family and the Patriot movement, and I felt I had a sense of their place in America’s long-standing anti-government movement. 

The Bundys created flash points members of those movements could rally around: Their very public confrontation in 2014 near their Bunkerville, Nevada, ranch was borne out of long-simmering discontent with how federal agencies have treated rural people in the American West. In the case of the Bundy family, that was combined with specific gripes about how Mormon pioneers, who tried to flee America in the 1800s to create a new homeland, were treated. Then, in the 1950s, those same people in Nevada, Arizona, and Utah were showered with nuclear fallout without any warning from the government. But the 2014 standoff was also based on a conspiracy theory being pushed by the Bundys: that the feds couldn’t actually own land, and that the Bundys were entitled to graze cattle on public land for free.

So by 2014, when Bureau of Land Management agents came to collect on long-unpaid federal grazing fees — racked up by the family patriarch, Cliven Bundy, as his cattle lived on public land without a BLM permit — the family combined forces with anti-government militia groups willing to point guns at those officials. And it worked. They kept their cows. The Patriot movement declared victory. The feds turned tail. 

Then, in 2016, when two of Bundy’s sons, Ammon and Ryan, helped lead the 41-day armed takeover of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, it was the sequel to Bundy Ranch. Anti-government groups looking to stick a finger (or a gun barrel) in the government’s eye convened in one location, as if to dare the feds to chase them out. They talked about Waco and Ruby Ridge. They said they were ranchers upset over grazing prices and the arrest and conviction of Dwight and Steven Hammond, two Oregon cattlemen who’d gone to prison for setting fire to federal land. But really, it was an event that brought out kitted-up militia guys and kitted-up guys who wanted to look like militia guys, sovereign citizens, jaded veterans, Islamophobes, white supremacists, and fringe politicians out in force.

One of the few actual ranchers who did come to the Bundys’ side at Malheur was Finicum: a 54-year-old Arizona rancher who assumed a leadership role at the Oregon occupation and was killed there. But in his death, the Patriot movement got a new martyr. 

Last year, I thought I knew what that meant, how this concept of “Bundyville,” to me, was a state of mind. You believe whatever you want about the world, even if you know very well it isn’t true — as if by thinking this way you will manifest it into existence. And that felt like a way of understanding the deep divides in America right now. 

But then, something I didn’t expect happened. 

After we released Bundyville, these conspiracy theories I’d heard about in the Patriot movement — ones that were always there, but never central to my reporting on the Bundy family — started popping into the headlines more and more. The Guardian reported that investigators, upon looking into motivations for why Stephen Paddock committed a deadly shooting spree in Las Vegas, encountered stories of his supposed sovereign citizen ideology and a purported belief that FEMA runs concentration camps meant to round up Americans.

Then, in March 2019, a Florida man named Cesar Sayoc Jr. pleaded guilty to mailing 16 explosives to a dozen prominent Democrats and billionaire investor George Soros. Within the Patriot movement, talk about Soros — who has been the target of conspiratorial rhetoric by Trump — was something I’d heard more than once. But now the President of the United States was known for floating conspiracies about Soros. Last fall, he told reporters he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the caravan of migrants approaching the southern border were paid to come to the U.S. He added, “a lot of people say” the migrants were funded by Soros.

Back in 2016, when I covered the Oregon Standoff trial, I spent a lot of time talking to Patriot Movement supporters outside the courthouse. Our conversations, often, would feel normal until, quite suddenly, they’d take a hard turn; conversations about federal overreach would turn to conspiracies about the so-called New World Order, shadowy cabals of “globalist” leaders, implementation of sharia law, and supposed terrorist training camps in the U.S. They told me about Agenda 21 — a United Nations plan of action, which they believed would use sustainable development to redistribute wealth and turn the U.S. into a communist state. They talked about Uranium One, a conspiracy in which Hillary Clinton supposedly sold uranium to Russia in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation.

I wrote them all down, but then threw those notepads into a blue Rubbermaid bin in my office and mostly forgot about them.

But those conspiracy theories kept resurfacing. The day after Sayoc was arrested, another conspiracy theorist was in the news: An antisemite named Robert Bowers, who’d been posting to a social media site largely populated by racists, and stands accused of opening fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue, murdering 11 and injuring 7 — motivated by his apparent belief that Jews are “children of Satan” and were to blame for any problems in the United States. 

I’d heard things like this before, too, when learning about how Christian Identity — some followers of which believe that Jews are the spawn of Eve and Satan — drove people to form the Posse Comitatus movement, which considered the northwestern United States as a possible outpost for an all-white nation. People like that have found a home, too, within the Patriot movement. 

When I asked Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League, about conspiracist thinking, he offered that a conspiracy theory develops as a way of fitting in with someone’s worldview. Or it can explain a dramatic event with an equally dramatic theory. He uses President John F. Kennedy’s assassination — and more than 50 years of conspiracy theories about what occurred that day — as an example of how the psychology functions. “It’s a psychological thing where what actually happened is simply too simple for someone to be satisfied with,” he said. “The idea that one person killed the president is just not satisfactory to some people. For such a big event like that they seek an equally big and complex explanation.”

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Pitcavage sees conspiracy theories as the beating heart of the anti-government movement: “All the main movements in the Patriot movement are dominated by conspiracy theories.”

Suddenly, these ideas I’d scribbled down a few years ago were becoming a key conversation in America, and they gave me a sense of what the fringe edge of the far right was willing to believe. So when the president floated half-baked stories to push his agenda, they were willing to hop on board.

As steam built during the government shutdown in the winter of 2019 around President Trump’s plan to build a border wall along the southern edge of the United States, I felt like I was watching a Patriot movement passion project come to fruition. Trump, by then, was justifying the wall’s construction by telling tall tales that cartels were sending drugs over the border and terrorists were streaming into the country. Even Rep. Will Hurd, a Republican representative from Texas called bullshit.

One of the Bundys seemed to be talking relative sense on this topic. Throughout the past few years I’ve heard the family continually explain their unsubstantiated interpretation of the United States Constitution — and now Ammon Bundy, of all people, was telling his acolytes that Trump’s rhetoric about “the wall” wasn’t real. He called for compassion for people fleeing persecution, poverty, and fear. Trump, he said, “has basically called them all criminals,” and Bundy urged his followers to see that the president was peddling conspiracies.

Ammon Bundy in a video posted to Facebook in 2018, which made some internet commenters joke that he was becoming “woke.”

“What about individuals? What about those who have come for reasons of need for their families?” Bundy asked in a Facebook video. “The fathers, the mothers, and the children that come here and are willing to go through the process to apply for asylum so they can come into this country and benefit from not having to be oppressed continually?” Bundy scoffed that anyone could actually believe migrants had been paid by George Soros.

Some of his followers were outraged. Chatter went around online about Ammon Bundy being “woke.” My head spun. I called Ammon Bundy at his Idaho home as news outlets were breathlessly reporting that Cliven Bundy’s most well-known son had left the militia movement. I, too, was interested. Here he was, dividing himself from a group of people from which he’d so clearly benefited. Suddenly, the most anti-government of his followers needed to choose who to believe: Bundy, a man who had twice led them in confrontations with the feds, or the commander in chief himself, the literal embodiment of the government. Many chose the president. Even if what Trump was saying wasn’t based in reality, he was pushing an anti-immigration stance they could get behind.

Maybe Ammon Bundy realized that and saw it was a good time to bow out. His family was free. The Hammonds — the other ranchers at the center of the Bundy-led Malheur standoff — got a pardon from Trump last summer. Anti–public lands figures cycled in and out of the Department of the Interior. Bundy’s brother, Ryan, ran and lost his bid for Nevada governor, but otherwise, things were coming up Bundy. 

Over the phone, Ammon claimed never to have been in the militia movement, and he told me people with fringe ideas have always been the minority of those who come to his family’s side. “Ninety-eight percent probably or better are people that are very peaceful people,” he said. “At Malheur, we considered ourselves to be on the people’s land, and who am I to say [militias] could come or couldn’t come? That makes it difficult to police yourselves.” 

So I asked him: OK, what’s next? 

“I had a reporter a few months ago come to my house and he said, ‘I hear you’re building a 100-man army. No! It couldn’t be farther from the truth,” he said. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what I would do with an army.’” 

Would he make a “hard stand” again? 

“I certainly would if there was an individual or family that I felt would benefit from it. But heavens no,” he said without hesitation. He said he’s “not afraid to do what’s right,” but that as far as another standoff is concerned: “I have no desire, I don’t believe that is where change will be made.”Maybe the Bundys are only anti-government when it’s convenient for them. But — and this sounds crazy even to me — I have to hand it to Ammon Bundy for trying to talk some sense into a historically itchy movement, to use his position to call for calm and normalcy. 

And that’s why I realized we had to make more Bundyville. We are living in Bundyville. The truth is not winning. The center is not holding. The anti-government is now pro-president. And as I continued to report on the stories that make up this series, blood kept being spilled around the world in the name of conspiracies. In Pittsburgh, in New Zealand, in Southern California.

The president of the United States is floating conspiracy theories shared by the most radical members of the anti-government movement I’ve been reporting on. By February 2019, at a rally, Trump enthusiastically acknowledged the founder and several members of the Oath Keepers — an anti-government militia — who were standing directly behind him in the front row, grinning underneath their signature black-and-yellow logoed hats. 

Maybe even Ammon Bundy doesn’t know the true reach of who came to his family’s side, or who they might have emboldened. The Patriot movement has been violent before, and violent people came to the family’s confrontations with the government, but didn’t get a fight.  

So what’s to say the Patriots won’t be violent again, especially if — under federal prosecutors’ scrutiny and an opposing House — Democrats try to impeach Donald Trump? What then?

  III. 

Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee, to this day, has never gotten a closure report from the FBI or an explanation for why Glenn Jones did what he did, and why, in the days and weeks after the 2016 explosion, Joshua Cluff never provided insight either.

The Cluffs were clearly victimized: Their family barely made it out alive, their house was destroyed, their children were traumatized. They don’t even live in Panaca anymore. 

When the media tried to speak to him about what happened, Cluff was confrontational — saying reporters were revictimizing his family. When a TV reporter approached, Cluff jumped into a car that drove away. He gave one “angry telephone interview” to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, in which he told reporters that he didn’t have any idea why Jones did what he did: “Do you know why crazy people do crazy things before they do them?” he asked. He told those reporters the FBI “fully exonerated” him, but my multiple requests for clarification from the FBI went unanswered.

In Kingman, Arizona — where Glenn Jones lived at the time of his death — he was as well-liked by the people there as he was in Panaca, remembered for his deference more than anything else. In fact, no one in Panaca said a bad word to me about Jones; though most wouldn’t even say his name. They referred to him as “the suspect” or “the person.” On the other hand, a few people had choice words about Cluff — the victim of the bombing.

Jones “was a quiet unassuming guy. Never gave us any trouble,” said Kevin McCumber, who has managed the Zuni Village RV Park, where Jones lived, for the past five years. “In fact if you were having a bad day, he would come tell you a joke.”

In the days before the bombing, McCumber said, Jones came to his office and made a surprising offer. “There was a gentleman who lived near him who was suffering and was going through chemo. Jones came over and paid this guy’s rent,” he recalled. Jones was clear: If the guy asks, say you don’t know who paid his rent for him.

The Panaca investigation, within hours of the explosion, became the jurisdiction of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, among other agencies. Soon, even Lee wasn’t sure what to tell people about what happened on his own street. All he had to go on was a severed torso with a strange tattoo and what he read in the newspapers. 

And Cluff wasn’t cooperating either. Lee didn’t know Cluff well — but his mind went to an incident years earlier, when he’d asked him, in his capacity at the hospital, to help with an individual who needed medical attention. 

For reasons Lee declined to detail, the state needed to intervene, but that enraged Cluff, who made it clear to Lee that he didn’t think the government should make decisions for people — even if they needed help. “I got a little bit of an eye opening about how Josh felt about government overreach,” Lee told me, picking his words carefully. 

In the six months between the Oregon standoff and the bombing at his home, Cluff actively posted on Facebook about his support of the Bundy family and shared posts about the death of Finicum, his cousin. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Cluff, at one time, shared several posts from anti-government militia groups.

At one point, Cluff changed his profile picture to Finicum’s signature “LV” cattle brand — something that’s worn on bumper stickers and shirts of Patriots and even tattooed on the bodies of some. Cluff was raised in the same town where several members of the Finicum family live: Fredonia, Arizona — a tiny town on the Arizona-Utah border. 

Today, the area where Cluff’s house used to be is just an empty lot filled with mud. I walked the whole perimeter of it, stared at it on a cold winter morning thinking some answer to what really happened there would present itself. But all I got were muddy shoes and nervous looks from a guy standing quietly on his porch across the street, watching. 

Earlier this year, I reached out to Cluff on Facebook, and asked for an interview. After a couple of messages, Cluff wrote back: 

“We are just happy and not trying to dig up the past,” he said.

I typed out a message immediately — that I wasn’t trying to compromise that happiness, but that it seemed like his side of the story hadn’t come out. What, in his mind, was the truth? Why did Glenn Jones have his phone number tattooed on his body? What did the FBI ask him and Tiffany when they interviewed them? And why — if the answer was so clear that Jones was suicidal and crazy — was the investigation still open? I hit send. 

But by then, Cluff had blocked me. 

***

The way Sheriff Lee sees it, there are things the federal government could do better. The last time it was measured, in 2010, about 98 percent of his county was federal land — and, because of that, people there brush up against federal agencies more than most Americans. But that’s not to say they’re anti-government — far from it. 

But even Lee can partially understand where the Bundys’ arguments about the feds come from: Lee’s dad’s was a rancher, and the way the BLM decides to handle where they can graze their cattle, what water they can drink, can be frustrating. But people work with the BLM to figure out solutions. 

“I feel like we get so tied down with government regulation and oversight that we feel like nothing gets done,” he said. But to take up arms? To point guns? To flee from a traffic stop? That’s crazy. 

But that’s the confusion of the Patriot movement, he said.

“You have both in the Patriot movement. I feel like I think you have the normal Joe blow guy [that thinks] the government’s way too big,” he told me. “And then I think you have the one that’s like … ‘We shouldn’t even have the government.’”

Cluff was vocal about his views on Facebook — but did that make him a member of the Patriot movement? Was he the “Josh” Jones was referring to in his journals, in the same breath as bombs and blowing up BLM facilities? Why would Cluff go into business with the man who would bomb him — and then write that off to reporters as the work of a crazy person? 

In June 2016, just before the bombs detonated at Cluff’s house, a militiaman in LaVoy Finicum’s inner circle, named Bill Keebler, thought he had a bomb on his hands, too. And he thought he got away with destroying a federally owned BLM building, far out in the Arizona desert.  

I asked Sheriff Lee about this — how three weeks before Cluff’s home blew up, believed he had bombed a federal property. “Two bombs go off in the same summer,” I said. “It seems kind of strange.”

Lee leaned back far in his chair and smiled. “Makes a person think doesn’t it?” he said, hands behind his head. “That’s all I really can say is it makes a person think.”

***

Leah Sottile is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in theWashington Post, Playboy, California Sunday Magazine, Outside, The Atlantic and Vice.

Editors: Mike Dang and Kelly Stout Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk Fact checker: Matt Giles Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Special thanks to everyone at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

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