#me seeing this right in the middle of our modern talk… that’s history

[dulcewrites]

Who else was gagged…

[alpaca-clouds]

About the Development of Myths

Okay, I will talk about more of the specific gods tomorrow again (starting first with the other gods from Stray Gods and then just looking over a variety of gods - I might start just with the greeks and then... venture into other mythologies). But first let me talk about the entire basis of what I have been talking about so far with the origins of Pan and Persephone: Their mythology is not a fixed thing.

Something that I would say education in general really fails on is properly expressing the amount of changes that cultures go through. I wrote about this before just in terms of history: There is not THE middle ages, not THE ancient Egypt, not THE ancient Greece and so on. All of those historical periods lasted for at least a thousand years. Now imagine that in like 500 years someone goes and looks at the 20th and 21st century as: "The World War and Globalisation period". Which I think there is a good chance this will at some point be known at (assuming we do not manage to eradicate our species before that, that is). Yet, you and I both know that if we were talking to someone from 1923 there would be very little we had in common.

Sure, this effect got massively accelerated thanks to the internet. But... You gotta have to assume that the Roman dude from 100 BC would also live in a very different world from the Roman dude of 200 BC. Because a hundred years is always going to involve a lot of change.

The reason we look at those old cultures as unchanging is, that they do not change anymore. And everyone who is neither working with that kinda stuff, nor is a complete geek, will just look at that culture as ONE FIRM THING rather than something fluent.

This is also true in terms of religion and related traditions, though we in the west are even more prone to it than other cultures. Because we do assume Christianity as this one thing. And the bible as this one unchanging thing. Hence the core believe is the same and, so the reasoning goes, was always the same. In fact, if you went to a religious school it is kinda how you were taught. The bible is one thing and always was the same thing. Only... It wasn't and even the basic we hve now does not matter.

Just look at the many Christian subreligions. They all in some way or form believe in Jesus, the one big God and all of that - but what they take from that widely differs. And the bible really does not have a big impact onto what ideals they hold and how they hold mass and how they pray and what not. If you think about it, you will easily see that, right? And if you just look a bit into what you might have learned about history in relation to Christianity, you will also know that this has changed. The role of Jesus has changed. How much the Holy Spirit is looked upon as an active actor. Which saints get venerated. All of that has changed a lot in just the last 50 years. And has changed a ton between the different countries.

And what I now need you to keep in mind that this was the exact same with the Ancient Gods and the religion attached to them. That holds true for the Greek Gods, the Roman Gods, the Egyptian Gods, the Norse Gods... all of them. The way they were worshipped changed over those thousand(s of) years they were worshipped.

So, let me once again talk about the Proto-Indo-European culture. Which is always a doosy and I love it.

The Proto-Indo-Europeans originates probably in the areas of modern day Ukraine and/or Romania and/or southern Russia some time around 5000 BC (scholars argue a bit about the exact temporal placement, just that it was somewhere between 7000 BC and 4000 BC). We do not really know a lot about them, because they did not write stuff down. But we do know that they had horses, were patriarchal, and that they worshipped a polytheistic pantheon that at least involved a Sky Father as one of the highest gods, who controlled the weather and was especially associated with storms and lightning.

These Proto-Indo-Europeans started breaking apart and travelling. Some into Asia, some into Europe and the Arabian/Persian areas. They brought with them their language and religion.

Now, it should be noted that they were not the "original humans" or anything. And that whereever they went... in most areas there were already other people living there, with whom they intermingled. Also whatever land they ended up settling was different, had different environments and this was included into their religious practice. Which made their religion over the years differ bit by bit. So from their pantheon sprang a lot of the pantheons we know today.

But... again, a lot of places they settled had already people living there. Who had their own worship. And that stuff often was also included and merged. Sometimes those other worships were very far reaching, sometimes very local. But some of those deities were picked up and either made part of whatever pantheon was there to come or was merged with an already existing god. And this happened again and again during the time that whatever pantheon was prayed to.

How do we know that, if it was not written down?

Well, mostly due to some archeology, but mostly due to comparative mythology and comparative linguistics. Two fields of science that basically involve people going over a lot of languages or mythologies (which, by the way, at times also includes fairytales and other oral narratives that are not necessarily held as "true", but still told) and basically finding things the reoccur. As well as going back over whatever written stuff we do have and noticing the shifts happening between a text written in 600 BC and a text written in 200 BC.

Now, for all the stuff we have two things that help a lot: a) The old Hindi writings and b) the written stuff from Egypt. Because both go really far back and were very well documented in writing. So basically we always can compare stuff to that and see shifts more clearly.

But, yeah... Technically all the pantheons are very much related. At some point Zeus, Jupiter, Diespiter, Thor, Tinia and Tian originated from the same character. You can even kinda see it in how similar the names are. Susanoo in Shinto-Mythology probably came from this, too, at least in the iteration we actually know about. (There can be some arguments made that a lot of the Shinto gods were shifted through the Buddhist contact, as the original indigenous Japanese cultures were very likely not Indo-European in origin. But given that the Ainu are the only culture whose oral tradition managed to survive this long, while the others either vanished or merged in a way influenced by Buddhism, which comes from Indo-European culture... yeah, it is there now.)

So, what I am saying: Mythology is shifting and always has been shifting. Same goes with religion. Hence the evolution of the Greek Pantheon.

Fun fact: Through comparative mythology we can also find the origins of YHW, the Abrahamitic god. Or God, as you might know him. He is a fascinating one, as he probably started out as a local god associated with harvest and weather in Southern Egypt and was then picked up by the Semitic cultures. He got a more pronounced role in the Canaanite pantheon, where at some point he merged with Baal, the war god. And through some trials and tribulations he finally ended up merging with El(hoim), the top god of the pantheon, with a part of the Canaanites splitting from the culture and developing into what would become the Jewish culture.

Super fascinating stuff. I love it.

[comfycuddles]

You know what I think...

It's time we start talking about Peter Capaldi.

When we talk about Doctor Who and our favourite modern doctors, we always go round and round in the same circles:

"David Tennant is the greatest Doctor!"

"No way! Matt Smith brought this goofy nature to the character, while maintaining the Doctor's eternal darkness!"

"Please! Nine was funny and sassy and just overall great. He deserved more credit. Eccelston was the best Doctor!"

And sometimes even a:

"I think that although she had to endure poor writing, a female Doctor was refreshing!"

I agree with this of course, and every Doctor brings something with them, you know who we don't post enough about? Or even generally talk about enough?

Peter fucking Capaldi. I seriously think he might be one of the most underrated Doctors of the modern era and It's a WASTE.

From the very beginning he was just amazing. "Do you know how to fly this thing?" ICONIC. His first episode was pure crack in the very best way. (The way he flirted with the dinosaur, anybody?)

Capaldi had this amazing connection with Jenna as Clara (Although I am a Clara stan idc so I might be a little biased about that) and their dynamic was so much fun to watch.

Not unlike David Tennant Peter is such a fan of the show. (As was confirmed by Jenna) But is also nice about it too. He doesn't go around just correcting everyone, but he wants everyone to know what an amazing show it is and wants people to love it just as much as he does.

Also 12 was so iconic??? Fighting fucking Robin Hood with a spoon? Awesome! Rolling into the middle ages on a fucking tank, calling people "Dude", making puns and dumb jokes and above else SLAYING that guitar?! Yes! A thousands times Yes! Just the best space grandpa ever!

Capaldi is so unhinged and has this chaotic energy while still appearing as the sanest person in the room. Just look up some stories about him fucking around on the set.

It was also very refreshing to see an older Doctor. I mean, I think Capaldi wad the oldest guy to play the Doctor since HARTNELL. He still had this youthful energy, but he just seemed so DONE with everyones bullshit. 12 handled things with a certain maturity that I kinda loved.

Like he has life experience, he KNOWS what his actions will cause and that's GOOD to see of the Doctor. And at the same time he's also forgiving himself for all the things he's done, which is even BETTER.

And don't even talk to me about his relationship with his companions and Missy. First of all the latter gives me life. And his relationship with Bill was so good y'all. I mean, he punched a racist in the face for her. (ICON!!!!) And were just adorable.

And my final point, the biggest point: Peter Capaldi is just an AMAZING actor. We all love "Heaven sent" and It's just the greatest episode EVER and this is party because Moffat wrote it so beautifully, but also because of Capaldi's Jaw dropping performance!!! If he wasn't SUCH an amazing actor the episode would have never worked. And I am certain of this fact. He did that y'all! HE. DID. THAT.

Capaldi gave some of the best speeches and performances in Doctor Who history. And everyone sleeps on it, and I say "No more!" Also his line. "Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?" DONE, SOBBING ON THE DAMN FLOOR. I need to say with this that I'm NOT an emotional person at all. But somehow that line hit me right in the feels and never stopped.

So yeah

Eccelston was hilarious and fun and amazing

David was awesome and I think It's definitely deserved that he goes down in history as one of the greatest Doctors.

Matt had some heartwrenging moments that I'll never get over, was as cool as bowties and just lovely

And Jody was unique and ADORABLE!

But y'all are SLEEPING on Peter Capaldi and 12 and that is SO undeserved.

Mister Capaldi Sir, if you ever see this, (You probably won't, but that's okay. I hope it does though) just know, that I love and adore you so much and think you are one of the greatest actors and human beings in the history of everything. And you DESERVE to know that. I will forever be proud to say that 12 that is my favourite Doctor of all time. And I say this without half a doubt in my mind. I'm a proud Peter Capaldi stan until the end of time. And just know that I and so many more people along with me have so much LOVE for you. (Most of us not in a creepy way though) and you are CRIMINALLY underrated.

Thank you so much for reading my rant.

This has been a Peter Capaldi/12th Doctor appreciation post. And I invite you to reblog this and show your love for the best Doctor. Only positivity though, stay nice.

[illtakeyoutowonderland]

I can see you (Part 2)

Modern!Aemond x Reader

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Almost a week had passed since your first encounter with the Targaryean brothers and you weren't exactly sure how to feel. You didn't tell anyone, not even Kate. She was great and you love her as your friend but didn't exactly knew her that well and after all the personal things those men had said in front of you, you weren't sure how she would react and you didn't feel right spreading all those personal details about them

You did, in fact, googled them. You read almost everything you could find, even finding their social media pretty fast. It was hilarious how cliché the brothers were. While Aegon was the party boy and scandalous, brought up by the media pretty often, usually drinking and with friends and some women, Aemond was the most quiet one. With a degree in both law and history (you tagged him in your mind as a nerd, just for the pleasure of it) always attending more formal and business events and only one romantic relationship confirmed by the media with Maris Baratheon who you had no idea who she was and couldn't find anything about

You were now in the middle of your third meeting of the day, completly (not) focused on what anyone was saying when the screen from your phone lighted up with a message from an unknown number and as you read the text, only one person came to mind

Xxx: Thought you said you had a fanbase? And still you hadn't uploaded a photo on your feed in months

Xxx: Not even a few stories? That's not very Insta Girl of you

You: Aegon?

Xxx: The one and only 😏

You: How did you get my number?

You saw the three dots that indicated he was writing a response when Kate's elbow next to you gently found your side bringing you back to the meeting. You looked at her and then to your boss who luckily for you did not see you texting

Almost another more hour went by before the meeting was over and you walked to your desk and plop down with a sigh "Thought it would never end" You said to Kate as she sat in her own desk across from you "Lucky for us only half an hour to go home"

"You weren't even paying attention" She laughed "Who you were texting anyway? You looked preocupied"

"Oh, uhm... no one important" You said shrugging as you took you phone from your pocket "Just an unexpected text, no more" She replied with a hum that indicated she didn't truly believe you but didn't push any further as you read Aegon's reply

Xxx: I have my ways...

You: You found me on insta but now also have my number? It's a little creepy if I'm being honest

Xxx: Wasn't the intention. I promise!

Xxx: I just really wanted to keep talking to you before my brother interrupted us at the party. Thought I might keep in touch, you know?

You: I'm going to choose to believe you. But just this once...

Xxx: Fair enough

You: So what's next? You are going to pop up in my office unannounced or something? 😅

Xxx: About that...

Xxx: Look up from your phone

And you did only to find the blonde man standing a little far from your own desk chatting with your boss, his father and another man you didn't recognize

"Is that Aegon Targaryean waving at you?" Katie asked you in shock and you felt how your cheeks reddenen at being caught "He was your unexpected message wasn't he?" You looked at her but said nothing and that said everything "He was!" She scream whispered and laughed "Then why are you here still in your chair? Go say hi!"

"I'm working!" You tried to excuse but she only laughed harder

"Oh, please! It's friday, our shift is over in fifteen minutes. No one is working" She scoffed as she started tu put her things away "If you don't go, I'll go over there and tell him to come over to your desk" She said using her mom's voice and you believed her. You still couldn't believe how someone your own age could have a kid. You felt like a kid yourself, how was a kid supposed to raise another as beyond your knowledge. 

"Fine" You said rolling your eyes as she laughed at your childish behaviour. You walked over to the group of men praying the earth would swallow so you wouldn't have to face this

"Y/N! Hi!" Aegon said as you approach and you smiled at him. He walked to you but the other men saw your little interaction

"I wasn't aware you knew Y/N" Your boss said and you just wanted to kill Aegon right in the spot

"We met at the party last week" He said smiling but not failing to notice how much you wanted to murder him "We talked breifly" He scratched the back of his neck

"The social one of the family, my son" Viserys said with a laugh and it took everything in you not to slap him for being such a hypocrite "Always admire that from him" Aegon smiled nervously at that and the man offered you a hand shake as he introduced himself "I'm Viserys, Aegon's father, owner and CEO of Targaryean Law Firm. And this is Criston Cole the vicepresident" He said with a smile which replied with one of yours and a little hello and the men nodded at you. And that's when you saw from the corner of your eye a second blonde man and of course it had to be fucking Aemond followed by another man probably the age of Viserys "Great timing! This is Otto Hightower my most loyal friend and president and my youngest Aemond" He said introducing the two men and Aemond's eyes went wide as he spotted you

"It's nice to meet you all" You said with a smile trying to ignore Aemond's eyes on you

"Y/N here is our newest addition" Your boss said proudly and you were ready to dig your own whole on the earth. You looked over at Aegon who looked at you like a puppy that was well aware it was guilty and he mouthed a sorry "New to the company and to town"

"Where are you from?" Criston asked you and you tell them where you used to live "That's a lovely place, I went there over a summer a few years ago" 

"And why the sudden change? If I may ask" Otto asked you curiously and barely hidding the fact he was trying to gather some information about the new Aegon's friend

"Just needed some change of air" You shrugged being as vaguely as you could and the man smiled at you knowing what you had done to not say anything personal. Your phone started to buzz with a call from your father and you hesitated for a second "Sorry, I have to take this" You excused yourself as you walk a little farther from the group of men as you said hi to your father. You both talked for a couple of minutes as you told him you were still at work and he said he only called you to say hello and ask you about the Holidays. You missed him a lot, but still weren't sure if you could go back town to visit. He made you laugh on one final comment as he said his goobyes and you did the same "Bye, love you!" Which he replied with one love you more and then hang up as you walked towards your previous group and you noticed how both Aegon and Aemond looked over at you "Sorry, it was my father" You said to the men ignoring the brother's stares

"Ah, family, the most important thing in life, righ?" Viserys said to you and you smiled not sure what to respond to that "We should headback anyway. It was a pleasure to meet you Y/N" He said to you and you said your goobyes to the men as your boss also went back to his office to finish the day

"You have ten seconds to explain what the hell was all of this" You said to Aegon when he stay behind with you and he put his puppy face again as he stared at you for a few seconds

"And you just lost half of it" Aemond snorted from behind you. You hadn't noticed he also had stayed behind with his brother

"What are you even doing here?" You asked him annoyed and he looked up from him phone to you bored

"Business" He shrugged and went back to his phone and you rolled your eyes at him "Your ten seconds are over" He said to his brother

"Are you always this annoying?" You asked Aemond crossing your arms over your chest

"Are you always this moody?" He replied with a frown as he copied you and cross his own arms over his chest and now you could see how the fabric of his suit tensed with the movement only to reveal the muscles of his arms and shoulders. Of course he also has muscles you thought as you blushed a little noticing you stared at him for a little too long

"I'm sorry Y/N. Truly I am" Aegon's apologize brought you back from your thoughts "Wasn't my intention to make you uncomfortable. I just thought it would be good timing to contact you today since I was coming over"

"So you stalked me over instagram and magically got my personal number. Makes sense" You sarcastically said but you saw the genuine apologize on Aegon's words, and you knew half of you annoyance was due to the neverending week you just had. And Aemond's presence for some reason. So you tried not to be too harsh on him as you softened your tone "Couldn't just ask me for my number like a normal person?"

"My brother is a lot of things, normal not being one of them" Aemond snorted and smirked at his brother when he looked at him a little hurt

"Takes one to know one, I guess" You snapped at him and it was your turn to smile as you watch his smirk fade away

"Let me invite you a drink? And I'll explain everything" Aegon said breaking Aemond's and yours childish behaviour "Please?" Why are his puppy eyes so convincing?

"Fine. Just one" You agreed and Aegon smiled "Let me grab my things and I'll meet you outside" He agreed to your plan and you walked over to your desk where a very excited Kate was waiting for you for what just happened "He invited me for a drink and his brother is an asshole" You said summing everything up

"Aemond?" You hummed a yes as you put your things in your back "The one that stared at your ass all your way back here and keeps staring at you?" 

"What?" You said looking up at where he was standing and you did in fact catch him staring with a smirk just as he turned to leave with Aegon to the elevators "Fucking idiot" You whispered to yourself and heard Kate laughing as you felt how your cheeks were turning red

"I'm expecting a full and very detail report about whatever happens with those two by monday fisrt thing in the morning" She said to you as you both made your way out of the building and you rolled your eyes at her but laughed anyways

"Only if you buy the coffee"

"Deal" She said as she hugged you goodbye for the weekend and left you alone with the Targaryeans

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@anehkael

If you wanna be tag, let me know! 💜

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

reading update: March 2024

March was so !!!!!! so fucking long, but that means that I got to read a lot of books - more than I did in January or February. they're pretty all over the place in terms of quality, but I think they're also all going to be pretty memorable in one way or another. shall we discuss?

what have I been reading?

The Ballad of Perilous Graves (Alex Jennings, 2022) - I bought this novel at Crescent City Books in New Orleans last June, then tucked it away to wait for exactly the right moment. and I'm so glad I did, because it was a gorgeous little flash of NOLA in the middle of a gray midwestern winter funk. this novel is so, SO steeped in celebrating the art, history, and culture of New Orleans, creating a version of the city filled with talking animals, living songs, and moving graffiti that hardly even feels that different than the real New Orleans. and in this book, Nola is distinct from New Orleans; there's some interesting multiverse stuff going on in the city that might be really interesting to my fellow fans of Dimension 20's Unsleeping City and N.K. Jemisin's City We Became. not every part of the book totally worked for me: the parts of the books following the kids - the titular Perilous "Perry" Graves and company - are definitely the strongest, and the actual details of how the plot got resolved got a little muddled for me before the surprisingly abrupt end. but! it must be said that the vibes are immaculate, and vibes will get you really far with me. I want to see a thousand more stories set in this world.

Thank You For Sharing (Rachel Runya Katz, 2023) - with god as my witness this was one of the most boring romance novels I've ever read, and that's saying something considering I literally just read Red String Theory. what I really adore are romances that take place at around an 11 on a scale of 1-10, under circumstances where absolutely no normal person should even be able to contemplate fucking but our protagonists power through because they're horny to a degree that renders them clinically unwell. this book was hovering somewhere around a 2; it's literally just two adults having jobs and hanging out in pretty mundane circumstances. the only thing that really strains my belief is that an otherwise well-adjusted woman is still upset about something that happened at summer camp over a decade ago, but I guess if she wasn't mad about something then the protagonists wouldn't be able to have a conversation about their feelings to show off how good they are at therapy speak.

Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent (Dipo Faloyin, 2022) - genuinely one of the most excellent pieces of nonfiction that I've read in a hot minute. Faloyin's book consists of interconnected essays that just dazzlingly brilliant, in turns solemn, sardonic, and sly, always ready to offer the audience a little wink as it subverts expectations. Faloyin walks the reader through the history of several African countries, from colonial looting to rocky political regimes to the common tropes that plague modern media with depictions of Africa as universally backwards, impoverished, and struggling. I really felt like I was *learning* while I was reading this book and learning the specifics of so many places that are often portrayed as interchangeable in American media. I really sincerely can't recommend this enough, it's an excellent read.

That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon (Kimberly Lemming, 2024) - I can't in good conscience say that I enjoyed this book, but it is kind of a great read if you enjoy updating your housemates on the latest bullshit in your horny fantasy romance. Lemming's in a weird middle ground where she's putting a lot of effort into the backstory of the world that justifies our protagonist (who's named CINNAMON HOTPEPPER!!!!) meeting and hooking up with a demon (who's also a dragon, because all monsters are just a subspecies of demon. I'm not crazy about that but the worst part by far is definitely that his dragon form has hair) but also stops giving a shit about it the second it's not necessary. like (spoilers) but all of the human characters are REALLY chill about finding out that the goddess they've been worshipping for CENTURIES is actually an evil lich? and there's another human character who pretty casually watches the city where she's spent her entire life get razed to the ground by monsters with absolutely zero remorse, which is genuinely bananas. also this book misses SOOOO many opportunities to be really nasty horny because it's so focused on hyping up Cinnamon and Fallon's all-consuming five day spiral into unhinged magical demon marriage. even the "light bondage" promised in the content warning was disappointing; the emphasis was definitely more on the "light" than the "bondage." what does a bitch have to do to find a decent monsterfucker book. for the love of god please.

It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (ed. Joe Vallese, 2022) - I've heard a lot of hype about this book, an anthology of queer writers musing about the queerness that draws them to the horror genre. I was expecting the essays to be of an analytical nature, but it turns out they're much more personal. that's not necessarily a bad thing, but some of these essays ended up falling SUPER flat for me, with weak analogies that felt like the result of authors remembering at the last second that they were supposed to be relating their life to a horror movie somehow. which isn't to say that there weren't high points as well, but overall the collection was low lows and medium highs for me.

Sex Criminals Volume One: One Weird Trick (Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky, 2014) - I'm trying so hard to remember to read comics that aren't 30 year old Batman stories, and my friend Emily lent this to me months ago when I helped them move, so it seemed like high time to get around to checking out Sex Criminals. the premise is fun! what if time stopped when you had an orgasm? then what if you met someone else with the same ability and the two of you could have sex and run around in a time-stopped world together? and then what if you robbed banks? and I'm a huge fan of that. the writing isn't the most gripping thing in the world, and now that it's a decade old I find that it feels very emblematic of the kind of aggressively offbeat, Whedon-ish writing style that felt like it was really unavoidable in the 2010s, which I can't say has aged MAGNIFICENTLY for me. but I'm willing to read more, see where this series goes, and give it the chance to really win me over. stay tuned for Volume Two!

Rental Person Who Does Nothing (Shoji Morimoto, trans. Don Knotting 2023) - I can't decide if I want to sit Morimoto down for dinner to pick his brain or just skip the niceties and put his brain in a jar to study it, but either way this guy definitely has something fascinating going on. tl;dr: in this memoir Morimoto recounts his experiences using Twitter to let other people hire him out as a person who will do nothing. "doing nothing" covers all kinds of things: accompanying people to eat a meal that they felt too self-conscious to eat alone, keeping someone company so they don't get distracted while they should be working, or waving goodbye to a stranger at a train station. he's not paid for this, either, or at least doesn't charge a fixed rate; all the Morimoto asks for is the price of his train ticket to meet clients, who sometimes buy him extra gifts as a thank you. there are so many FASCINATING ideas presented in this book about work and value and interpersonal connection, and yet the book clocks in at under 200 pages. Morimoto isn't here to tell you how to feel about anything he's done, only to present some experiences and let you unravel the meaning for yourself. and I guess that's sort of brilliant. throughout the memoir he's adamant that Rental Person doesn't offer advice or tell anyone what to do, offering only basic responses when prompted. telling someone else what to think or attempting to offer up any wisdom gleaned from his rental work would count as doing something, wouldn't it? I really recommend checking it out for yourself and deciding what you think, especially if you're in a slump seeking something quick, engaging, and easy to read.

[emarasmoak]

The Rings of Power showrunners discuss, at length, that huge Sauron reveal

JD Payne: [Vickers] did eventually know. We kept it very close to the vest for a while. He read a monologue from Richard the Third. At certain points he suspected [Halbrand was Sauron], he was putting it all together like, ‘Okay, they're having me read deep English canon villains.’ We didn't tell him from moment one that this was what was happening. We let him discover it.

Patrick McKay: Charlie's amazing and enormously talented. And we were thrilled to get him. He actually read originally for Elrond. But this character was always Sauron. One of the initial sparks and ideas and, in our opinion, right or wrong, a reason to do the entire show, is that Galadriel talks about Sauron in the books in a way that indicates that she knew him really well.

JD Payne: [Quoting Galadriel in Fellowship of the Ring] ‘I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all of his mind that concerns the Elves, and he gropes ever to see me and my thoughts. But still, the door is shut.’ The idea of ‘still the door is shut’, that he's been reaching after her for a long time, and there's this sense of back and forth between them – we found that endlessly fascinating. And we said, ‘There's an entire history between them. He's not just some eye in the sky, who's looking at it from afar, there's a relationship. And so, how could you have a relationship between the Dark Lord and Galadriel, in a way that lets them get to an interesting place? If she knew it was him from the beginning, obviously she would reject him out of hand, because we know from the legendarium that he was responsible for her brother's death. We know that he has this desire to heal the world, and she has this heroic desire to fix the world. So if we could put them in parallel to each other without exactly knowing who he was, there was an opportunity there.

Patrick McKay: Two other things to add. There’s this whole idea from Tolkien's letters and other writings where he talks about how Sauron wasn't evil in the beginning. Elrond says in the book: ‘Nothing is evil the beginning, even Sauron was not so.’ Immediately, we're thinking about [the TV series] Breaking Bad. We're thinking about Tony Soprano [from The Sopranos], these characters who are these enormous, larger-than-life modern villains, but have this other side. You go back and forth: do I hate them? Do I love them? Are they seducing me? We thought that was really rich terrain. And then, Tolkien had this idea of chance meetings throughout his books – that chance meetings are preordained in Middle Earth. So, what if Sauron is in a place where he's repentant and lost? And Galadriel’s in a place where she's desperate and obsessed. What might happen if they meet? Maybe they'd be friends? Maybe they’d get along? The idea of a non-romantic, cosmic connection seemed so pregnant with possibilities. That was by far the hardest thing that we worked on. We have this idea that, if you watch it again, every single thing he says is not a lie. This isn't like a rug poll. We're not trying to shock people. We want to hopefully reward close viewing if you’re suspicious of him early. That's a whole valid version of the show, we felt.

JD Payne: There’s something in him that is sort of vaguely reminiscent of Gollum, when you watch it again, where you see these two forces driving within him. In some ways, Gollum is to Sauron as Sauron is to Morgoth, a little bit. The One Ring is operative on his consciousness at all times. And even maybe if he tried to turn away from it and be Mairon, the Maiar, who, in the beginning, was good, there's this shadow that has operated upon his soul that he is enslaved to, that you always see, every decision he makes, takes him, in one way, towards the good, but it also takes him towards power. And power is his addiction. Watching back, with that in mind, it's fun to pick apart everything he says, or if he does retreat from the decision he makes.

Source: https://www.gamesradar.com/rings-of-power-sauron-halbrand-episode-8-showrunners

[beesmygod]

BLOODBORNE LORE Q+A PART 6: the founding of pthumeru, the discovery by byrgenwerth, and the fishing hamlet

part 1

part 2

part 3

part 4

part 5

---

BLOCK #LONG POST/ TO NOT SEE THESE HUGE POSTS

shawn asked me a question about the mensis ritual and mergo and the process of trying to answer it in short became a catastrophic failure.

this is going to be a nightmare (hehehuhehehe) to try to explain in broad strokes to people who don't know bloodborne or even to people who do, but i'm going to do my best. anyone who tells you they know what happened or they have "solved" the mensis ritual is a liar. the timeline is muddy and deliberately vague, up to and including how long ago everything happened. i have educated guesswork but that's it.

i will post pure speculation in italics and important nouns in bold. i am peppering this with as many wiki links as possible to back up my claims. not gonna lie this looks like a fucking MAD magazine editor went to town on it or like the timecube website submitted a guest article.

but much like how you need to first make the universe in order to make an apple pie, we must first talk about the history of yharnam before we can talk about its newest resident, mergo.

---

untold eons ago, a race known as the pthumerians served the great ones as they slumbered. after becoming exposed to the deliberately vague notion of "the eldritch truth" (it is unclear if this is a specific phenomenon, like the secret to their longevity, or simply the knowledge of the great one's existence), they developed a unique and startling appearance: pallid skin, black eyes, and slacking jaws. i mean, they also lived underground so they look like underground creatures do. either way, they are distinctly inhuman humanoids.

this civilization became lost, but did not die; they continued to serve the "gods" underground, excavating tombs and chambers without rest. over time, they elected a leader, yharnam, pthumerian queen, who was given a ring imbued with special meaning by the great ones indicating her commitment to bearing a special child, a child of blood (the ramifications of this are not known). she still wears the ring today.

arguably, a civil war breaks out in pthumeru, (as evidenced by the armors left by what must have been early cainhurst knights, but i have not looked into this enough to be satisfied) that results in a schism that pushes some pthumerians to the surface, where they become the modern day royalty of cainhurst. the cainhurst royalty and the pthumerian royalty both aspire to have a child of blood and have knights that work explicitly to further this goal, putting them at odds with each other. today's cainhurst royalty maintains some of the "pthumerian look" but not to such an exaggerated degree, with the resemblance fading with each removed generation.

pictured above are the canonical cainhurst royalty and their descendants in order of relation from left to right: annalise, queen of the vilebloods (top left), lady maria (top middle), arianna, woman of pleasure (right; she is also the most distant descendant). the bottom image is concept art of lady maria during her boss fight with a more exaggerated look that did not make it into the game.

---

anyway: a bazillion years later or whatever. the cainhurst royals rule over a land that includes the victorian england-ish city of yharnam, named for the forgotten queen of pthumeru. the main appeal of yharnam is its proximity to a university of bold, weird research.

the school of byrgenwerth and its scholars were once an archeological and historical research center. however, during the course of their studies they discovered a vast labyrinth beneath the school where (if the first location they discovered was the same as ours this would be the pthumerian labyrinth) they encountered ancient humanoids, women with the ability to re-animate corpses, an perpetually burning dog who somehow still lives and, most intriguing of all, a creature that defied all understanding. further investigation revealed an unspecified "holy medium", ritual blood, which does not coagulate. this is the ritual blood found in old yharnam on the altar.

further investigation of the labyrinth was halted by the first encounter with a beast. here is a longer post about that encounter and my evidence that leads me to believe it occurred.

this is where things get really fuzzy as to which event happened first. im going to post this part without italics because all the events do happen. its just not clear in what order.

in order to combat these newfound beasts gehrman, a student of byrgenwerth (as he has dialogue where he refers to willem as "master"), took up self-styled arms (the first trick weapons) and became the first hunter. he was followed by a collection of self-styled mercenaries that would come to be known as "the old hunters". there is evidence of the old hunters having once been in the labyrinth as you can summon one to help you fight and the bell descriptions reveal that they were used by the first hunter after discovering them in the labyrinth.

the miraculous healing abilities of the old blood (the origins of which are not specified but i can show you my guesswork later lol) in the labyrinth became known to the students at byrgenwerth. the blood is used to combat the beasts by use of invigorating injections. blood is plentiful and works quickly to heal.

byrgenwerth also begins study and collection of the "phantasms" present (or were once present) in the labyrinth. the discovery of the augur of ebrietas, a slug that summons flailing tentacles of unknown origin, and the arcane properties of pearl slugs drives the school's continued plunges into the depths in spite of the danger posed. part of this research involved discovering the parasitic qualities of these creatures, which could inhabit eyes.

while continuing to investigate the ruins, byrgenwerth became aware of a fishing village where a washed up carcass of a monster was teeming with otherworldly parasites and a stillborn fetus. the parasites had caused the villagers to transform into fish-like monster people not dissimilar to the monster on the coast. the villagers seem alright with this change and actively cultivate millions of the parasites for daily use, such as especially potent lamp oil [1].

upon arrival to the village, the school and its hunters helped themselves to a little bit of genocide just for fun. villager's heads were treppaned open in the search for "eyes on the inside" (a visual metaphor for insight as well as a literal phenomenon) and the monstrous corpse was desecrated by the byrgenwerth researchers who took her child (as the villagers of the fishing hamlet chant) and one of the orphan's three umbilical cords, the one lined with eyes.

i know we find this in a weird place later. we'll get there.

but this wasn't just some pile of fish goo they were fucking with, it was the corpse of the great one, kos (or as some say, kosm). kos's wrath and retribution would come in due time. this event triggered the creation of the hunter's nightmare, a sort of eternal, bloody hell for hunters who participated in the massacre and those who become "blood drunk" where the must relive the event for all eternity. notable hunters trapped in the nightmare from the time of the old hunters include ludwig (not yet notable), laurence (looking awful but he had a busy couple of years before he wound up there), some named NPC hunters such as yamamura and gratia, and lady maria.

lady maria, gehrman's apprentice, could not tolerate her role in the fishing hamlet massacre and threw her beloved weapon into the fishing village well. she, with others, joined laurence when he split from byrgenwerth to found the healing church. its not explicit that the fishing village massacre was the reason for the split, as there were ideological differences (and family matters) brewing that also came to a head, but a one sided genocide seems like a matter that would cause a splinter between one faction that is ruthless in its methods and another that appears to be in the business of healing.

but thats a whole other post.

---

uhhh this took a very long time but once im done with this i will never have to type it ever again. the next one covers the healing church in its entirety and should end with the arrival of our hunter in yharnam as the city fully slides into chaos. thank you for reading. or not. its none of my business.

---

https://www.reddit.com/r/bloodborne/comments/3uq6wq/interesting_lamp_in_the_hamlet_spoilers_maybe/ which leads to this image: https://i.imgur.com/zVJbcJ2.jpg

[winvyre]

[Valerie's Story] Chapter 1: Omie (1/6)

“Valerie, you are on sweeping duty today.”

“But I’m always on sweeping duty!”

“This is history that we are preserving,” The old lady smiles, “Careless hands…”

“Doom the world.” I begrudgingly take the broom. I’m ten years old, not an idiot. My older siblings are already at work maintaining foliage and restoring art. Well, two of them. Even with Maurin missing I’m still stuck with the broom.

For as long as I can remember, Bernadette has dragged us to Omie’s temple on the sea cliff once per month to help her keep it from falling into ruin. To be honest, it’s already pretty ruined.

It’s a small building, especially when compared to other temples in the region, about the size of a sloop. There’s no door; I don’t think there ever was. Faded murals run along the inside but you can’t see the entire picture because parts of the walls are missing. The arch roof caved in before I was even born and when you walk through to Omie’s statue on the other side, there’s a specific path you have to take to avoid cutting your foot or falling through the floor. The back is open so ocean spray keeps the back side of the statue permanently damp. Plants grow through every crack and hole, wrapping around pillars and obscuring the details in the white stone.

We’re the only ones who ever come up here if you don't count the teromynies, rabbits, or many, many insects. They’re going to be worse this summer because winter was so short. Omie’s worshippers mostly attend the Megachurch in the capital. No one cares about a shrine in an outskirt village that even the locals have forgotten. Bernadette is an exception. She probably lives here. She talks about Omie like she created humanity.

I kick up dust near Omie’s feet. She’s twice as tall as our mom and looks a lot like her. Mom has long, curly hair so blonde it’s almost white kept out of her face by a bandana. Omie has the same style but a much more elegant headband. She wears an off-the-shoulder dress with a collar low enough that her hands clasped over her heart touch her bare chest. Her downturned head makes it seem like she’s looking at you but her eyes are always closed. Bernadette says that Omie’s watching over us.

I hope she’s watching over Maurin. It’s too quiet here without him. Usually he’d be cleaning the grime off the statue but since he’s gone Bernadette’s doing it. The only other person she lets touch Omie is him.

When I’ve swept every part of the temple Bernadette hands me six red candles to place at Omie’s feet. I’m not allowed to light them, though. Bernadette sets her cane against the wall and hobbles through the temple with a thurible, muttering to herself. She’s not praying. That old lady might treat Omie like Francesca treats the young watchman stationed by the docks but she’s not a Believer. The candles light on their own when she’s done. Witch magic is uncanny.

I scan the mural on the right wall. It shows various images of Omie interacting with humanity. Healing the injured, officiating weddings and blessing babies, singing and dancing in a large group. We do the same dance during Omie’s Festival accompanied by a song that she apparently wrote. Kell hangs up the red banner with Omie’s symbol, a human heart made of fire, that fell off the middle pillar.

The left mural is more about how Omie fits into the Six Immortals. It depicts things that they did together like establishing the United Regions, Demon's Lock, and taming dragons. Modern temples are built to hold service but this one, like most older temples, was built to foster a personal connection with its deity. There are no pews and no altar, just stories up to interpretation.

Francesca peeks through one of the holes in the wall, “I finished trimming the bushes.”

“Good. Kell, Valerie, help Francesca pick the hearthblooms.” Bernadette gathers her things.

I can't look at the flowers without feeling nauseous. They remind me too much of him. “If the wreaths are so important why don’t the other villagers grow hearthblooms themselves?” I cross my arms. “Why are we the ones who always have to do it? For once it’s actually warm enough to go swimming in early spring and we’re stuck making wreaths!”

“C’mon, Valerie, don’t be like that. We all want to go swimming but these flowers aren’t going to crown themselves.” Kell offers a smile.

“Well said, Kell. We have responsibilities that we must uphold. Supplying the festival with hearthbloom wreaths is one of them.”

“Guts! Why are you so obsessed with Omie? You’re not even religious! You-“

“Valerie, that is enough. I have my reasons. You would not understand.”

“Because you never explain anything to us! It’s always ‘Time to visit the temple,’ ‘Be careful around the statue,’ ‘Omie watches over you!’ We know nothing about you aside from the fact you’re friends with our mom. You just show up every once in a while to gush about your celebrity crush then disappear again. I witness enough of parasocial relationships when Francesca rambles about that stupid watchman!”

“Hey, I love him!”

“He doesn’t even know who you are!”

“It’s true love!”

“That’s dumb!”

“I’m going to marry him one day!”

“You’re an idiot! All of you suck! I want Maurin back!”

Silence. “And there it is.” Bernadette mumbles. “Why don’t the two of you head home? We can visit Graciela later.”

Francesca and Kell take one last glance over their shoulders before descending the hill. Fran’s face scrunches in anger. She tosses her hair and leaves with her nose in the air. Kell’s eyes dart between me and the witch worriedly but he still follows.

I can’t stop shaking. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep myself from crying but tears have already blurred my vision. Bernadette is a colorful blob as she cups my cheek with her hand. I swat her away when her thumb sweeps across my skin. There is an energy burning inside me and I’m not sure if I can keep it in there.

“Maybe nothing I say will ease your pain but just know that it is okay to feel this way. Your grief is valid in whatever form it takes.”

A sound catches in my throat and I feel that ember surge. “GUTS!” I whip around and punch the tree behind me, regretting my decision immediately as I buckle, cradling my fist as the sobs break through my throat.

Bernadette gently takes my hand in hers, “It is broken. Let us get you to Oakley.”

When Mom sees my sorry state through the window of the healing room, she rushes to the door. “Goodness! What happened?”

“I can heal it myself.” I grumble.

“This is too severe for you, darling. Now, tell me, what did you do?”

“I hit a tree.” I take a seat at the dining table with my lip out.

Mom sighs. “Fran said that you’ve been having some big feelings, is that right?” She definitely didn’t say it that nicely. I nod. “You miss Maurin, don’t you?”

I feel the tears return but the ember is finished. “Yeah.” I choke.

“The Crown is doing everything they can to bring the missing children home. We’re all sad, we’re all scared,” Mom’s glistening eyes meet mine, “But we have to have faith. Your brother… is okay. He’s smart and he’s strong. We’ll all be reunited soon.” She lets go of my hand, now all better. “I have to get back to my other patients. Please, go with Bernadette and finish the wreaths.” Mom goes back to the sitting-room-turned-workshop, leaving us to return to the temple.

----------

Hello! Winvyre here. I thank you for your faith and patience even when I have nothing to show for my progress so to express my gratitude I will be posting the entirety of this draft's [Valerie's Story] chapter one on my page today in segments scheduled to upload on the hour. Stay tuned and please feel free to ask questions!

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

[semper-legens]

176. The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, by Brandon Sanderson

Owned: No, library Page count: 364 My summary: You know how it goes. Sometimes, you wake up in the middle of a field, surrounded by burned grass, with no idea who or where you are. It's medieval England. And you might be some sort of wizard? But you have no idea where you are or what you're doing, and there seem to be some men searching for you. It's gonna be a long day... My rating: 5/5 My commentary:

Well, this was an impulse grab. If you've been following this blog a while, you'll know that I read through all of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn books at the end of last year and the start of this one, and I thoroughly enjoyed the entire series. So when I saw this on the new book stand at work, it piqued my interest - not least because of its title. Is it a fantasy book? Not really, though it has some fantasy elements. It's actually more sci-fi, confusingly. And more specifically, something of an isekai. But Sanderson's trademark wit and vibrant characters really brought this book to life - while I had some niggles with the writing, not least because it fell into Sanderson's usual 'dashing rogue/woman who is Done With Him' kind of pairing, that didn't stop me from thoroughly enjoying everything this book had to offer. Kudos!

First, let's talk about our protagonist. John, alias Runian in this dimension, is running from a life filled with failure. Not that he knows anything about it. See, the 'medieval England' of the title is actually an alternate dimension, one of many that are on sale from the Frugal Wizard company. Transferring to the alternate dimension cost John his memories, meaning that he has to rebuild himself from the ground up, assuming who he is and what he's good at. He has augments that make him stronger and hardier than the average person, some of which are standard in his twenty-minutes-into-the-future style home world, some of which are very illegal there. He has a tendency for wisecracking and dad jokes and tries to get out of situations by talking rather than fighting, and usually screws up whatever he's trying to do.

The thing I really liked about John is that he's a trier. Even when he remembers his history of failure, he keeps trying and trying to help people and to do the right thing, regardless of if he succeeds or not. As someone who's not particularly good at things, I can relate to this isolating feeling of just being a laughingstock no matter where you go or what you try to do, piggybacking on other people's ideas and clinging to them out of a desperate sense to not be alone. I've seen some people saying that John is an unlikeable protagonist, but I don't get it? His heart's in the right place, and he grows and matures a lot over the course of the book. The other thing that really endeared me to him was how quickly he integrates to this world - the titular handbook and the attitudes of the other modern humans implies that people are meant to see these worlds as little more than playgrounds for the rich who can afford them, but John treats the other people here like people, and has a huge empathy for them. He even is ready to accept that magic is just real in this world (so maybe it's a little fantasy) unlike his counterparts, who try and steamroll all over it with their guns and superior knowhow. John adapts, and that's what I like about him.

Speaking of the world, however, let's talk about the setting! This is a sci-fi comedy, with much of the exposition being done in the style of pages from the titular handbook in between chapters, taking corporate nonsense and tempering it in this dubiously ethical practice of selling alternate dimensions as, essentially, theme parks - patrons are encouraged to live out their saviour complexes, including packages where you can cure the Black Death or participate in major wars of the time period. The modern day is much like today, but with a bit of advanced tech - that isn't the focus of the story, however, but for the augments John has. The dimension we see is based on pre-Viking England (sidebar, John is unfamiliar with the Anglo-Saxons, which had me taken aback for a second - but then again, I shouldn't expect people from another country to be intimately familiar with my country's history) with some differences, and to my eye it's a pretty credible version of that time. I particularly enjoyed the battle-boasts used by the skops, Anglo-Saxon poetry used as a weapon is a cool idea.

As this is a comedy, the writing style is loose, informal, and jokey. I get that the constant puns and dad jokes might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I personally lapped it up, I love that kind of stuff. John's POV really endeared him to me, seeing him work out the details of his life was really engaging and I felt drawn into the mystery alongside him. Seeing the other modern humans interact with him, and learning new context for his history, was also interesting. But even though it was a comedy, there was a sincerity beneath it too, which acted as a good balance. John's still treated as a real person, with real character growth and motivations, not just a one-dimensional comedy protagonist, which I really appreciated. This was a fun read, and I'm very glad I picked it up!

Next up, a local story, as a teenager discovers he's not like other girls.

[triflesandparsnips]

Would you mind me asking What kind of soap recipy uses a morter and pestle? It looks super nice and fluffy and fun tho. My wife and I mostly make regular cold process soap.

HELLO FRIEND

Not to get overly excited about this, but you have ACCIDENTALLY STUMBLED upon my NOT-SO-SECRET LAIR of HYPERFIXATION GLORY.

...which is to say, for about a year now I've been fucking around with turn-of-the-18th-century (pre-1718 being my arbitrary Our Flag Means Death cutoff) household and pharmacological manuals for the purpose of experimental archaeology.

With regard to soap in particular, the very very short version is that Nice, Scented, Solid Soaps, during this very particular time period, were basically dried/grated Middle Eastern (hot process) olive oil soap that was then reconstituted in Western kitchens/stillrooms/apothecaries. Mortars and pestles were the basic go-to for it, though bain-marie's were also on occasion utilized.

(For the longer, more fun version, see my link list below or click here.)

While the majority of my shit can now be found under my #funky little alchemist with funky little interests and #trifles the amateur history enthusiast strikes again tags, we all know that tumblr is nonsense, so here's a brief link list:

It started with "a pomatum for the lips" -- i.e., lip balm, from the 1711 English translation of Nicolas Lémery's Arcana Curiosa

I then went on to the significantly more complicated and in-depth matter of SOAP --

     -- My long post regarding a great deal of research and first attempts (encompassing: "Update 1: Let's Talk about SOAP", "Update 2: Cursed Once Again with a TERRIBLE DISCOVERY", and "Update 3: Sometimes Science Gets Ugly")      --My still-ongoing follow-up post (encompassing: "Update 4: Return of the Soap King")      --Several mini-updates that take place between those two posts

     --Aaaaand this post answering someone who asked about infused oil versus essential oil in these soap recipes, which eventually turned into a whole thing about HUMORALISM

And I've just started poking at the matter of "another fine pomatum for the face" -- i.e., a pearl-powder face cream, which is still early days with "Update 1: A Brief History of PUTTING PEARLS IN THINGS (IN EUROPE) (AND MY KITCHEN)"

...With regard to soap in particular, I am super aware that I'm playing around from the opposite end of most modern soapmakers -- there may be very obvious ways to accomplish the stuff I'm trying, or there may be very known reasons for why the stuff I'm doing is or isn't coming out right. But since my entire vibe is """What If: Shenanigans,""" I'm trying to suss my way through all this via just the manuals and receipts I can find, and seeing what happens based on that.

If you want to play along, soap-wise, I do link to several recipes as I go, but here's what I've referenced so far:

"Balles of fope for barbers of diuerfe fortes and favours" (Balls of soap for barbers of diverse sorts and savors), The secrets of the reverend Maister Alexis of Piemont (1595)

"A delicate wafhing ball." (A delicate washing ball), Delightes for Ladies (1609)

"Of Soaps that Beautifie", Cosmeticks or, the beautifying part of physick (1660)

"CHAP. XVIII. Of perfuming Soaps", Polygraphice (1685)

"A delicate washing-ball", The Accomplish'd ladies delight (1686)

"To make excellent Washballs", Pharmacopaeia Bateana (1694)

"Of Wash-balls", The French Perfumer (1696)

✨ ENJOY ✨

[queenkoalas-corner-of-hell]

Well the Tobirama characterization poll for Useful (working title) is doing better than I thought, as far as like interacting goes. Ok, so while that does its thing lets talk “Tobirama's Dowry Issue”, I'm once again asking to pick the masses' collective brain to like fact check me and spot the issues I'm not seeing anymore.

Here’s the problem/solutions I'm settling on (well the multiple problems in one mathematical issue, I asked historical reddit but no dice)… it's lengthy, but maybe it'll help someone not writing Tobirama/Madara bc this stuff was a task to figure out.

Yuinou. Like a bride price + food and drink + engagement party but where the family taking whichever spouse is paying for the other family’s investment in the kid. Its almost like a retirement fund for the family whose kid left bc that kid won’t be there to help their elderly parents as much. From what I can tell, it was determined based on how much the that investment was. Now it seems like it's a salary's worth multiplied by the region's exception. (n x salary = yuinou). SO I need Madara's and Tobirama's wages. Easy peasy right? Right?

Ninja Salary. How much everyone makes in Naruto is actually impossible to figure out. Because of the many factors that go into how the economy works in Naruto, you also have the pseudo benefit to have it connected to real world currency. The whole 1 ryo -> 10 yen all well and good but if you know even a passing whiff of an idea of Japan's economic history you begin to see the issues (rant for another day). The only solid thing we have in prices is how pricey the reward for a completed mission is. (Which actually sucks as far as info goes because it implies either an ungodly inflation rate, taxation to the high heavens, and/or ninja are responsible for their own retirement pension.) If we use Itachi's numbers for missions completed that are weighted toward the middle-higher scale and his freakishly well documented amount of time he took to do said missions, dump his D into A we have about 3,300,00 ryo a year/275k a month for a well to do ninja. But what about the warring period?

Wages for our old timey boys. Our best real world example is samurai were paid a nebulous annual 200 koku by their daimyo. If we pretend that the ryo was worth a koku as intended, without the drama of Japan's banking, then he should only be making 16 ryo a month. OBVIOUSLY that's not going to be it in modern standards because the Senju and Uchiha are well off enough to feud. You can't feed and clothe an army on 160 yen a month unless inflation actually hit the Naruto world like a freight train. (Honestly, possible, those wars had to be doing something). So the Ryo had to have lost value before Kishimoto decided the 1 ryo = 10 yen thing or whatever Narutoverse's equivalent of a koku was is vastly different. But if we take the actual worth of a koku in modern terms we can guess the Naruto ryo's worth. To clarify 1 koku should be enough rice to feed a man a year, about 150 kg/330 lbs. If 1 kg of rice is 463 yen then 1 koku would be 69,450 yen aka 6,945 ryo. Make that 200 koku and you get 1,389,000 "ryo" a year, 115,750 a month. It may not be 3m. But! What we get from that is real world historical buying power... which I can use to do some typical writer BS. If a clan of 200 had an active 50 ninja, consumed 200 koku minimum then the income of the clan as a whole would be around 66,561,000 ryo a year from ninja alone. Not counting purchasing metals or cloth or livestock that can be refined by the non shinobi or already processed things and luxuries like spices and medicines. The civilians would make a generous 7k annually (some likely not making anything because they're children and some being too old to work) so all together they'd add 1,225,000 ryo which again would likely go towards food and clothing costs but it would lessen the burden on the shinobi being bread winners (even though they are), it'd keep a certain level of luxury to the main clan's living conditions.

All these factors considered it'd make 200k ryo a month for an heir, maybe 250k for a leader. (2-2.5 million yen (14,880-18,600 USD or 13,496-16,870 EUR as far as conversion goes today)) So now we got (n x 200k = yuinou), what about this region number? Well, I can can be completely arbitrary with this since the only examples I have are modern. 3 or 4 wouldn't be a strange number, so let's say the low end is 3 x 200k and the extreme high end would be 4 x 250k. Making a yuinou between these clans a whopping 600k ~ 1m "ryo", this number would work for most of us in the Warring Clan corner of Naruto. It's an obscene amount considering 72% of people following the tradition now is half or lower as much. It does work though when you consider how old money both clans are. Madara/Izuna marrying Hashirama or Tobirama. Hashirama/Tobirama marrying Madara or Izuna, heck, it's a good estimate for how much yuinou was paid for Mito.

But then... what is Tobirama's dowry? Yuinou isn't dowry, it's coming from the Uchiha... and there are manuals for appropriate items to take from your parents home to where you're marrying into (I just can't read or find them so second hand sources are my main). Amount though... Basically I'm going to fudge it after looking at the buying power of the clan and Tobirama himself. Then fudge it more to fit the story I'm concocting. Will anyone care? Probably not. But I spent the last two days down this rabbit hole simply because I needed to know what was within Tobirama's monetary means. The driving point of my yaoi slash fic is the man doing everything he can to be useful.

(Also if you found this doing a deep search for Naruto economics or Japan's traditional marriage practices, I am so sorry.)

[spennsrs]

(\ (\ („• ֊ •„) ━O━O━━━━━━━━━ ・:。ALLONS-Y. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ︳chuckleduo + slimecicle + tubbo x reader ︳platonic angst </3, romance inferred with schlatt ︳have an old writing of mine while i work on requests <3 also this is so incredibly niche but its my niche

ted nivison.

when the doctor met ted, he was... well, he was rather well off. his youtube channel was taken off, he was doing what he loved! what he wasn't expecting was a blue police box in his front yard. confused, the tall male heads outside to knock on the door, only for it to swing open. he definitely wasn't expecting to be met with a human looking figure. they were... significantly shorter than him. he studies them quietly, before the figure gives ted a bright smile, pushing past him. "aha! finally! not in greece anymore! from the looks of it... california? you! what year is it?" it takes him a moment before shaking his head.

"hold on.... just- uh... it's twenty twenty four." he replies hesitantly, eyeing them up and down. they didn't seem like a threat...

"how truly amazing! such a difference between ancient greece and the modern day!" did they just say ancient greece? "oh! how rude! i'm the doctor, or [y/n]! and you are?" the person, simply known as the doctor, turns to ted and holds their hand out, giving him a flashy grin. ted only shakes their hand, giving a soft smile in return.

"call me ted." 

"ted... how would you like to travel... literally anywhere in time and space?"

. . .

he remembered the day so vividly. watching the doctor walk away into the ocean of los angeles people, ted desperately trying to find them...

but they were gone. years of memories, years of travelling with them, only to be left. the only thing that remained of the doctor was a note addressed to ted, a note he kept under his pillow.

my dear ted,

time flies when you travel with friends. and i'm sorry to do

this to you... but it is my time. my time to move on, to 

regenerate. i know this will hurt you, as it hurts me too.

but, this is for the best. you're still breathing, so i must

leave you behind. go on with your life, forget about our

time together. spend your time with shae and your friends.

always,

your doctor

ted hadn't told anyone about the doctor. he feared they wouldn't believe him... so he was content with keeping the note as his one memory from that raggedy doctor... maybe that's all he needed.

schlatt.

seeing is believing... that's what schlatt had been told. so when a weird maniac dressed as if they were a curator in a museum showed up at his door, talking about some stupid tar-dis bullshit and how it was bigger on the inside, he had to see it to believe it. now, the new yorker prided himself on being rather hard to surprise. boy howdy did he not expect the person to be right.

"what. the. fuck?" he asked as his caramel hues stared past the doorway into the tardis, frozen in shock. but the mystery person only squealed with delight and ran into the police box as if they ahd not a care in the world.

schlatt took note, envying the way they were so... positive. 

"man, i love it when people see this for the first time." they cackle, walking up to some sort of control panel in the middle of what schlatt could only call a main room. he slowly follows after, still skeptical. that is, until, the figure (they call themselves the doctor, which schlatt takes a mental note as weird, and he told them they would have to pick a more... human name if they wanted to blend in) turns to schlatt. "where do you want to travel to first? the dawn of time? pompeii? you name it, we can go."

and the rest was history.

. . .

it had been a month since. since their departure, since the day they left. 

and schlatt couldn't bring himself to do anything. the doctor was... his everything. they were so close. he always hated the old saying, if you love someone let them go. what's the point of letting go something so amazing? why did the doctor leave him? was he not enough? did the doctor grow tired of him?

schlatt had stayed awake all night, as evidence by the early morning sun pouring into his room and his clock flashing 7:37 am as a taunt. the male turns his head to gaze out the window, taking a moment to simply enjoy the beauty of the morning. usually, he'd watch the sunrise with good ol' [y/n]... a small smile tugs at his lips at the fond memories flooding his brain. maybe this was why the doctor left. to teach him a lesson.

he couldn't stay mad at that weirdo, wherever they were in the world. schlatt just hoped they didn't forget about him and hopefully they come to visit.

(read: they do.)

slimecicle.

he found it so cool that this stranger invited him to travel basically anywhere his heart wanted. he could see anything he desired. "let's go to rome! no! i know... revolutionary war time! no, wait! can we go back an assasinate like... someone who killed a president and save them? would the future be different?" he would ask, well- basically ramble on.

he was so glad the doctor didn't seem to mind. if anything, they were just as excited. it was just a matter of where charlie wanted to go first. the whole day- week? few minutes? he would never understand...

but he was just excited to be there, with someone who seemed truly as excited to be there.

. . .

and then it all came crumbling down. charlie simply... watches as the doctor stares at him, before closing the doors. the sounds of the tardis whizzing and disappearing from his gaze. 

the tears came soon after. a ahnd comes up to wipe them away, only to angle his head to his hand. his eyes observe how the salty tears wetted his fingers, silently crying. it was a good thing the doctor left him in front of his place, he thinks to himself before turning and unlocking the door. entering his place, charlie closes the door before sighing.

what now?

what was he to do? just go back to his normal life?

"charlie?" he looks up to see his girlfriend, grace. a concerned look on her face gave it all away.

"they're gone." he mutters, his girlfriend approaching him to give him a comforting hug. they remain silent, only hugging as charlie let his tears fall.

tubbo.

why he was up in the middle of the night, he doesn't know. but what he does know, was there was a stranger in his house.

and he was making them food.

pancakes, to be exact. 

once they were served up, the stranger scarfed them down like they had never had it before, grinning with a mouthful. "thanks again, kid! what's your name?"

toby hesitates before sighing out a soft, "toby." the stranger holds their hand out, and toby takes it gently with a firm shake. the two continue the night with small talk, with the stranger (named [y/n], or the doctor, apparently) soon standing.

"crap, i have to go! i'll be right back, give me like... five minutes!" toby follows the doctor out the door, watching as they disappear into the tardis, which poofs into the night. toby stares a bit, before closing the door.

. . .

a week went by, then a month, then a year, then two years...

toby had given up hope. was a minute different to the doctor? did the doctor have any concept of time? he sits on the small step out front of his house, staring at where the tardis sat at two years ago. for some reason, he held hope. he wanted to see them again. wanted to see the tardis whizz back into his vision, to see the doctor, to hear more about their crazy antics.

but nothing. another day with no sign of the police box or the doctor. toby stands, brushing off his jeans, before heading back inside.

maybe it was a dream. a stupid little imaginative scenario he made in his head.

was he that desperate? but he was sure they were real... it was the night he had the house to himself... surely they were real... but it didn't matter to toby anymore. apparently never mattered to the doctor.

with one last sniffle, toby wipes any tears from his eyes. no crying...

not anymore.

[embryhallowed]

I finally posted something on my main socials in vocal support of Palestine, outlining the history and violence of the Nakba, listing various sources including many anti-zionist Jewish voices.

I got one comment, from a woman I went to college with, who is Jewish, and who moved to Israel after Trump was elected.

Her response was pretty much what I expected. She said it seems like my only point is that the Israelis deserve the violence and had it coming, that I'm spewing revisionist history, asking where my essays about Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and so on are, and that I'm writing all of this from the safety of America, which is a country that is "worse than Israel by every metric" and she ends with telling me to fuck off.

So yeah, pretty much what I expected, if not a little weak sauce?

Like, it is not revisionist to tell the history of the Nakba. 750,000 people displaced, 15k killed, 500 villages destroyed. It's not revisionist to talk about the massacre of Kafr Qasim where Israeli police killed 48 unarmed civilians, 23 of which were children and the youngest was 8 years old, and then an officer responsible for the murders was put in charge of "Arab Affairs" in a nearby city. It's not revisionist to say Israel funded and supported Hamas to crush secular progressive movements in Gaza. Those things happened. It is well documented. They happened. They did. You can Google it and it will be the first result you see. And these things have continued to happen ever since.

I've been vocal for years about how it's fucked that America killed a quarter of a million Afghans, how Obama bombed the middle east so much that children in these countries grew to fear says with a clear sky, because the drones could fly on those days. I've talked about Yemen and Syria, I've talked about how AMERICAN influence made all of these situations worse. I've talked about Saudi Arabia and how they murdered an American journalist and nothing was done about it, but the reason THIS gets an essay right now is because it feels like we are witnessing genocide in real time, and most of the people in this country seem fine with it.

And like. "You're sitting there safely in a country worse than Israel."

Ma'am, idk what to tell you, you chose to move from America to Israel. Dunno what to tell you there. Otherwise, I HAVE BEEN VOCALLY CRITICAL OF THE USA FOR YEARS. I've openly said that the CIA, the industrial war complex, and American capitalism, has been the single greatest source of evil and suffering on the globe in the modern era. Like, I hate American government, politics, and the influence we have on the globe. We ARE the evil empire! WE'RE the baddies! I've been saying this for AGESSSSS.

IDK guys. I just gotta spew my feelings out here so I don't pop off to her. I have my sympathies for her, because she moved to flee from Trump and to ensure her mother had the healthcare she needs to live. She's married and now has a baby, she lives in Haifa. I understand why she's angry and defensive, I fully sympathize with how scary it must be for her.

But like. That doesn't change history. It doesn't change the fact that zionist military forces violently forced people out of the city of Haifa and cleared it for new Israelis. I've wondered, how old is the building she lives in? Did Palestinians live there once before her? I've never said the Israeli civilians "had this coming" but this situation IS a ticking time bomb, which is what leftist voices have been saying for ages.

She also said "we've offered peace and they never take it!" Iirc Israel hasn't actually met to negotiate with Palestinians for like a decade?? And like. WHAT HAVE YOU OFFERED?! "Hey guys, stop resisting us and we promise to stop taking your land and bulldozing your homes. I know we already did that like 70 years ago and completely ignored the borders we, Israel, agreed to, but believe us! We'll for sure hold up our end of the bargain this time! Also no we still want to have an ethnostate and we still want to treat you as second class citizens." WHAT PEACE OFFERINGS???

She said "you haven't offered any solutions!" I'm not here to offer the perfect solution for peace in the middle east, I'm here to say genocide is wrong, I'm here to elevate the voices of Palestinians and anti-zionist Jews. You already had the bones of a "two state solution" when the UN carved up the land, and Israel didn't respect that (not that it was great to begin with). And honestly, if you say "I kinda think a single secular state where everyone gets equal rights regardless of religion or ethnicity" you will get crucified??

Anyway. I'm just ranting at this point. I knew I'd get blow back for speaking out, but it honestly wasn't as bad as I expected.

I just hearted her comment and will reply later, though idk if she'll see it, since she promptly unfriended me. Also unsurprising.

Anyway, free Palestine

[bugtransport]

oh geez guess who remembered they can actually explain the thought process behind Whatever The Fuck The Rothko Comic Is look don't ask me let's just let me talk about art for a minute that's probably easiest

"nooo aha dont write a fucking novel about your favorite piece of art haha youre so sexy" shut up! my meat is huge. AND i'm sexy as hell. thank you.

let's talk about Clothespin by Claes Oldenburg.

my favorite piece of art of all time. this isn't a joke actually. this 10 foot tall clothespin has made me feel just about every emotion in existence. there's a larger (i think about 45 ft?) version in philadelphia somewhere that i'm aware of but i haven't actually gotten to see that one in person (maybe someday) so we're just going to be talking about the smaller one. which is still quite large. i think to actually explain myself and this one i need to take you through my history with it and how i originally saw it, because that really plays a lot into how i view it. maybe more so than the actual piece itself.

i'm just going from memory here so bear with me... this story takes place back in middle school when i lived in the midwest. i was a young dumb kid who liked drawing stuff so my parents would just sign me up for whatever art classes they could find (i took botanical art with a bunch of middle aged ladies once which fucked severely) and, since we were in the burbs just a train ride away from chicago, one of the options available was to take kids classes at the art institute. so i took some digital art classes there.

enter me: 12 years old and just wanting to learn how to draw anime girls on the computer. at this point i have not thought about art beyond knowing superficially that i enjoy Some Paintings and that certain narrative works have whipped my nuts off and sometimes i would look at pics on deviantart and get emotions i was unable to describe but i have not really, at this point in the story, thought to question why i feel that way.

there's one other important thing to know to make this whole experience make sense. the timing of me attending these classes was right around when the art institute opened up their modern wing! brand new wing + taking a digital art class = i spent so much time in there i cannot even begin to describe it. i wouldn't necessarily say that i like modern art more or less than anything else... but i can say that by sheer volume alone, no question, it is the majority of museum art i have consumed.

anyway, for those unfamiliar: the art institute has two entrances (well, that i know of). there's the main one with the lions that you've probably seen in ferris bueller's day off, and the second one is through the modern wing. here are some pictures i found online showing what the main hall is kind of like:

that glass wall in the far part of the picture is where the doors are. it's a really nice space; there are galleries both upstairs and downstairs. this is also the same place that i saw Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA) but that's really neither here nor there. i've just seen it brought up before here and thought i would mention that it was a very cool experience. one of those things again where i saw it way before i could comprehend why it made me feel the emotions it made me feel... and then i got hit with The Understanding years later like a cartoon anvil. i couldn't actually find any pics in the 5 minutes i had to spend on google with Clothespin actually displayed, but here it is with a different statue in roughly, to my recollection, the same place:

that is a really dramatic place to put a sculpture.

okay well, anyway, the first time i saw this piece, i did not think it would rock my shit. i actually thought it was just kind of funny. i still remember it - our little group was walking to go take a look at a specific piece and of course, had to go through the lobby to get there. i saw Clothespin for the first time and went "haha, that one's kinda funny, i wonder what that means?" and someone shot back "i don't know, maybe a giant lost it doing laundry." that exchange tickled me so much that i spent the rest of the day and into the next week thinking about it.

the second time i saw Clothespin i was mostly just confused. in the same way that today i can still remember my first interaction with it but not any of the other pieces of art i saw that day, i was confused as to why this thing was leaving such a large impression on me compared to everything else. i did look at it for a while and then just kind of left. and came back to it. and left again. and came back to it.

that dance continued for a couple visits until i finally got the chance to sit down and watch it for a while. there were some benches under the stairs for people to rest; i took one of those and started to people watch. and brother... suddenly i began to get it, i think?

[to be read in the tone of someone who has been haunted by these thoughts for over half their life] see, i think the real genius in the way this was (and the really large one is) displayed is that they're in thoroughfares. they're both in high traffic areas where people are mainly trying to get from one place to another more interesting place, right. people entering a museum usually have a starting point in mind that they're looking to get to and go from there; people exiting a museum are usually kind of wiped and probably not really looking to look at much more art at that point. it's not quiet in a lobby like you get when going through an exhibit - it's not loud, but there is a constant background hum. there's a café upstairs and people checking tickets and families and school groups chatting and, of course, in the middle of that, a 10 ft tall steel clothespin, being largely ignored.

yeah, okay, not totally ignored. people would stop and look at it for a second or make a comment about it maybe or glance at it in passing. but people didn't really tend to look at it like they would if it would have been displayed in a room. maybe that was because they didn't want to hold up the flow of traffic going through (it was always pretty packed on the weekends) or maybe the display location inherently lowered the perceived value of the piece as art - it's not "enough" to be put on display in one of the collections specifically, it's just a clothespin. but it was big and quite impressive and in the middle of the floor and not something you could easily ignore, really. the juxtaposition between the impact it had on me and the way it was being treated by the visitors en masse... you know what? it is kind of being treated with the same thought that you would give an actual clothespin.

it might seem like a pretty base level concept. and it is! of course everything that has ever been made has been made by someone. but this was the first time that thought had really occurred to me in a way where i actually grasped the impact of that statement. somebody out there designed the clothespin and put thought into how it worked and felt and looked. even the most utilitarian designs are still designed. Clothespin my beloved is a reminder to myself to appreciate and recognize the beauty in the little things in life that people might not otherwise think about and i cannot overstate the impact that way of thinking has had on my life. some pieces of art i think definitely are better learning things about the artist but i've never looked anything up about Clothespin - i don't think this is necessarily the impact that the artist set out for it to make, but it alone and regardless of intent obviously has done one hell of a number on me.

"julia that fucks but what does that have to do with sonoi tarou" i'm getting there i'm getting there. god!

i think the important and relevant part of that story isn't at all what i ended up getting out of that piece. the important and relevant part is the confusion i felt leading up to the realization. i am not looking to get into a debate about What Makes Art but i think that we could probably agree on a baseline statement that one of the things that may make something art is the ability to elicit emotions from the viewer.* while yeah sure probably not what i think most people would anticipate or look to get out of art, frustration at your own lack of connection and understanding is an emotion. being unable to understand the artist's intention and experiencing connections but taking those connections you make completely off book is still experiencing an emotion. simply enjoying something superficially is as well an emotion. sonoi is so painfully close to getting things in my Humble Onion and goddamn that really makes me feel some kind of way. he just has to unclench about it.

for someone who has a stick so far up his ass ("integrity and perfection personified," cannot stand the bitch) i can understand why the concept of allowing himself to relax and consider how he is already obviously being impacted by art and what that means is hard. to focus on the correct way to view and create art is... well, how many duels have he and tarou had? how long have they spent trying to do things "right" and get the "correct" feelings from it? i mean, it makes sense for his character. i know a lot of people who feel the same way looking at art. i totally experienced adjacent feelings before the cataclysmic earth-shattering world-busting event known as Clothespin. ooh i just want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. introspection! it's uncomfortable but that's the joy in it! i want to psychoanalyze him so bad.

fuckin, to conclude: MY moral of the story is that there's no right or wrong way to look at art. and i dont think there's any wrong way to love someone either.

*"julia are you arguing that fat anime milf tits are art" fuck yeah i am because they make me feel an emotion: HORNY. sorry i had to add that joke into this otherwise dry ass essay.

p.s. it's my life goal to make everyone look at Clothespin. i have a picture of it at my desk. again i have never made a joke in my life

[firstumcschenectady]

“Seeking Peace” based on 1 Corinthians 6:1-6 and Luke 6:43-45

I tend to believe the the quote from Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” This makes me quite skeptical of both-sides-ism. To be fair, the primary justice issue I've worked on in my life is justice for LGBTQIA+ people, and the difference between teenagers committing suicide because they're told they're not loved and straight cis-people feeling uncomfortable is a great example of things NOT being equal.

However, today a part of my heart is in my throat, thinking about the conflict in the Middle East, and I can't make sense out of it. There aren't easy answers in Palestine and Israel. There is pain and suffering of generations, and worldwide context, and vulnerable people everywhere. And there are clear and abundant violations of human rights and human dignities. This is a case of both/and, I think.

I have been reminded this week to hold the history of Israel in context. Of course, I thought I was doing that, and I wasn't. Modern Israel was created out of the need for a space for Jewish people to have self-determination after Christian neighbors and so-called Christian Countries proved themselves unwilling to hold Jewish life as sacred. This, of course, culminated in the Holocaust, which Elie Wiesel survived, but the Holocaust was an single extreme expression of the constant antisemitism of the world.

I wonder, from the perspective of 2023, if the choices made to create modern Israel were less supportive of Jewish life than they seemed at the time. A friend told me this week that if Israel's neighbors laid down their weapons, there would be peace, but if Israel laid down their weapons, there would be no Israel. Because the powers of the world made decisions to create modern Israel, but did so without the cooperation and consent of the other nations in that region, and without an adequate plan for the people who had already been living in Israel. How did they think this would play out? Did they care?

There isn't much space in our lives for context, and nuance, and careful conversations. There isn't space for both/and. There isn't a lot of space for acknowledging that Hamas was definitely, completely wrong in their attacks – it was barbaric terrorism AND that the blockades and attacks on Gaza are excessive and inhumane. We're told we have to pick: be for one side or the other, either forget the centuries of antisemitism that our own faith tradition created and nurtured and stand for the downtrodden Palestinians OR forget the consistency of inhumane treatment of Muslims and Christians in Palestine, and stand for the Israelite state.

For those of us who believe they're ALL God's people, ALL God's chosen, ALL God's beloveds, Israel and Palestine looks like pain and horror right now. In trying to find the balance in this sermon, I sought wisdom from others whose eyes see what I fail. They reminded me that one way to stand for Israelis and for Palestinians is to stand against Hamas, who not only brutally attacked innocents, but also did so knowing the response would kill Palestinians in large numbers. Can we stand for our Jewish siblings here, around the world, and in Israel while standing for our Palestinian siblings? I believe we can, but it takes a willingness to look deeply, to be uncomfortable, and to shy away from fast talking points.

The Mennonite Church of Canada wrote a prayer lament and intercession for Palestine and Israel and I invite you to join me in the spirit of prayer1:

God of love and justice, our hearts are perplexed, paralyzed and broken at the recent carnage in Palestine and Israel. We lament the loss of life and the suffering of so many people. We are shocked at the inhumanity of violence, terrorism, and war.

Our prayers for peace seem to go unanswered. We wish you would intervene. We cling to your promise of a different world, but we see so few signs of its fulfillment. We do not understand.

Still, we continue to believe that you desire life and peace for all people. 

Holy Spirit, strengthen our resolve to advocate for peace, justice, equality, and compassion for all.   Don’t let us turn away.

Comfort all who are overwhelmed with loss—loss of life, loss of homes, loss of safety and security. 

God of the vulnerable and the oppressed, renew the energy and creativity of those committed to nonviolent resistance and change. 

We pray for the communities in the land where our shared faith was born and nurtured. May your love remain bright among your Jewish, Christian, Muslim and people. May they recognize your hand in their lives, even amidst the suffering. We pray for your peoples around the world, wishing hope, health, safety, and abundance for all.

God of all nations, guide our own government to respond in ways that support the legitimate rights of all, especially those who are most vulnerable, those who continue to suffer after generations of occupation, dispossession, and denial of basic human rights and those who fear for their safety.

May your kindom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Yours is the kingdom, the power, the glory, now and forever. 

Amen

You may have heard in our Epistle lesson this morning, a call from Paul for good conflict resolution. And you may have heard in our Gospel lesson this morning a reminder that we are not know by our intentions, but by our fruits. Come to church, hear hard things ;)

All I can offer the Middle East right now is my heartfelt prayers, and my profound compassion. What I can offer in the here and now is a refusal to participate in violence, even in my language. I can affirm the humanity of our Jewish and Muslim siblings in faith, I can acknowledge how horrifying and terrifying this is for anyone with family or friends in Israel and Palestine. And I can hold multiple truths – that Christianity has created the conditions by which Jews are dehumanized and live in fear around the world AND – hey look at us – Christianity has done the same to Muslims and many Christians do the same to Palestinians. Here, in the US – and around the world – I want Jewish people to be SAFE, whole, and assured that we'll have their back. And I want the same for Palestinians of all faiths and for Muslims everywhere. Right? I've been thinking about what God might feel about it all. My best answer is “heartbroken.”

When the Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA) Board did an intense study of anti-racism, we were given a list of values in anti-racism institutions. One of them was “both/and thinking” and “moving toward collective action.” To be more direct, the training claimed that either/or thinking was a tool of oppression and both/and thinking was needed to make space for all people to be collaborative.2

I think about that a lot. I've noticed in my life that when I'm stuck between a THIS and a THAT, and I notice it, and take time to consider it, and even pray about it, that there is always an undiscovered THIRD WAY I wouldn't have found unless I considered the important parts of THIS and the important parts of THAT together, and realized why I couldn't let either one go. That God is in the both/and, and it can take me a while to find it, but it is always worth finding.

I've heard stories of those who have worked for peace though, have you ever heard them? Those who God has called to be peace-makers who have entered spaces with both sides of this conflict and found ways to let each side be actually heard? To even grieve together? The stories are always of small intentional groups, of people willing to participate, usually not of people in leadership who are most profoundly fixed in their positions (although in this conflict few people are easily moved.) But miracles have happened. People have heard each other. People have cried for each other. People have APOLOGIZED.

This work is being done RIGHT NOW. I learned this week that “one of the crucial movements in the peace space in Israel/Palestine now is the historic partnership between Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun; the latter organization was founded in the summer of 2021, and is comprised of Palestinian women working for peace in the West Bank and Gaza. Women Wage Peace was founded after the Gaza war of 2014, is comprised of Jewish and Arab women who live inside the State of Israel, and has the two primary objectives of 1) Getting Israeli/Palestinian peace negotiations going (and to eventually achieve a "bilaterally acceptable political agreement") and 2) guaranteeing that women are part of the negotiation process.”3 4

Let's hear one story about peace, right now, huh? There is a group called the Parents’ Circle Families Forum—formerly the Bereaved Parents’ Circle. The organization is comprised of Israelis and Palestinians who have lost a family member in the ongoing violence. Their work is the slow work of trust building and creating connections.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg tells, and reflects on this story: On October 7th, Hersh Goldberg-Polin was kidnapped by Hamas and brought into Gaza. Shortly before the abduction, he lost his arm while protecting his friends from Hamas bullets and grenades; as far as anyone knows, he is badly wounded if he is still alive. He has not been heard from since being taken.

Last week, his mother, Rachel, wrote:

Time is slowly ticking into the future, with these hostages approaching a week in captivity. If he is still alive, how much longer can he survive? His wounds are grievous. I hope someone somewhere is being kind to him, caring for him, attending to him.

Hersh is my whole world, and this evil is the flood that is destroying it. I really don’t know if anything can save it. If anyone knows, please tell me. To save a life, our sages taught, is to save a world. Please help me save my son; it will save my world.

Every single person in Gaza has a mother, or had a mother at some point.

And I would say this, then, as mother to other mothers: If you see Hersh, please help him. I think about it a lot. I really think I would help your son, if he was in front of me, injured, near me.

And that’s the whole of it. “I would help your son.” Your daughter. Your child. Your beloved. Yours.

I understand that yours matters infinite worlds to you, because mine does, to me, and I hope that you see that, too.

I can see the infinity in yours, in fact, if I’m willing to look.1

What incredibly holy work is being done in seeing each other as beloveds. The article that shared that story, framed it in the lens of the holy work of mothering/parenting – and in seeing all the world's children as “yours”. Dear ones, I think that's where the pain comes from when we see brokenness in the world. Because we know all children – all people – to be God's children, in need of good care, and worthy of good and abundant life.

So we seek peace. We seek peace through love by loving all people. This maybe doesn't seem radical enough, or new enough. Maybe it isn't new, but the world has proven to us time and time again, it is radical enough. Let's work on it until we get it right. Then we can try to pull Christianity along ;)

Amen

1https://www.mennonitechurch.ca/article/16090-prayer-of-lament-and-intercession-for-palestine-and-israel, accessed 10/19/2023 Edited.

2Work of Crossroads Antiracism Organizing and Training. I attended in 2017.

3https://lifeisasacredtext.substack.com/p/a-peacemaking-lens?fbclid=IwAR1y50dbv2q-VxQQ_o1elI_-5UNYuOAEoMIMsEe9Tcg0gGNzHe44TvOKmMA

4The thoughts and concerns of Alice Gomstyn and Elliot Olshansky are peppered throughout this sermon, and I thank them for not letting me bumble along like an idiot, even when it is my job to be informed and not their job to inform me. I'll also note that while they helped me, they can't fix me ;) so mistakes remain my own.

1https://lifeisasacredtext.substack.com/p/a-peacemaking-lens?fbclid=IwAR1y50dbv2q-VxQQ_o1elI_-5UNYuOAEoMIMsEe9Tcg0gGNzHe44TvOKmMA

Rev. Sara E. Baron  First United Methodist Church of Schenectady  603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305  Pronouns: she/her/hers  http://fumcschenectady.org/  https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

October 22, 2023

[mikecuenca]

Trash Heap Souvenir No. 8

Borders, Love & Rock & Roll

“Don’t judge a book by its cover”.

My ass, don’t judge a book by its cover. I ordered tons of albums from Columbia House just because of their cover. Pere Ubu’s MODERN DANCE? Because of the cover. Bauhaus SINGLES? Because of its cover. Pulp? Because the DIFFERENT CLASS cover looked so damn rad.

There was no way of sampling this stuff. And as history proved, if a band cared enough about its visual representation then chances are it matched their sound. And sometimes a great album cover enhances the music. It affected everything. This whole package. And Pulp. Looked. Rad. As. Fuck.

As soon as I got the CD I flipped through its booklet. The sets the band mates posed in were in color, the members themselves were in black and white. And wore sharp suits. Well, not Candida Doyle. She was pale with dark hair and wore a skirt and a long-sleeved top. I played the thing a thousand times. Jarvis Cocker was so fucking cool, man. And all his songs were about boning. And as a performer he acted out his lyrics with his hands. Not corny but slick. I wanted to be that guy. Move aside, Brodie Bruce.

But Candida Doyle. What came to my attention was this: I definitely had a type. Don’t ask me where this came from; I don’t know. Maybe because of Snow White. The Wicked Queen? Disguised as an old hag? My goodness. I’m kidding. No, the Wicked Queen as is. Kill. Me. I later read that for Martin Scorsese, growing up in an Italian dominant neighborhood meant that blondes were incredibly exotic. Well, pale girls with big light eyes and dark hair were my Achille’s heel. And none were ever interested in my dorky ass. These gals I never could build the courage to talk, turned out, also loved Pulp. They were arty, well-read, had impeccable style, liked foreign cinema, and duh, had great taste in tunes.

Wasn’t always that way. I liked blondes as a kid. One of my biggest crushes that would send my pre-adolescent heart fluttering was a dirty blonde. She lived right across the street from my brother’s house. We’d play wrestle on his yard and I’d spend all night replaying our encounters in my head. By thirteen I had a Nicole Kidman poster on my wall. Even a Jenny McCarthy one where she’s naked, sprawled on a pink silk sheet. I’m not attracted to any of these women now but back in junior high? Mama mia. My mom hated the McCarthy poster. She’d ask me to take it down. I wouldn’t. One afternoon I come home from school and it’s gone. “What happened to my poster?”

“You’re too young to have that on your wall!”

The next day I come in. The poster is back up. I furrow my brows. I walk into the entertainment room and there’s my brother Luis Osvaldo. He glances at me with a smirk, nodding his head and then winks.

Back to Pulp.

So on the AOL chat boards hoping I would meet the love of my life I would search for local gals who dug that band. I became online friends with them. And a couple I met in real life. Shared very brief platonic friendships and they introduced me to more music and enlightened me with finer points: “Did you know that Pulp was originally a goth band?”

Jumping back in the timeline:

I’m hanging out with Chris and Deez in the Crystal Court branch of the South Coast Plaza Mall… the part of the mall that sucked ‘cause there was nothing fun there. We notice a new bookstore. A two-story bookstore. It’s called Borders. I see that they’re hiring. I was working as a telemarketer with Chris and Deez and it was so mind-numbing. We had to get people to do these surveys and they’d cuss you out, slam the phone on you, flirt with you, ignore you, blast the radio in your ear. It was a drag. I wanted out. Here was a chance. I filled out the application. Turned it in. And then I got a call.

I was over it. Over basic schooling. I did one year at Middle College High, learned that I could do independent studies and continue taking my college classes. By the middle of my Junior year I will have graduated. But with this program I could work in the mornings and continue my courses at night. Independent studies gave me so much freedom. I went from a very “brilliant but lazy” student nabbing C plusses and B minuses to getting straight As. Independent studies let me be inventive. And I actually learned shit. And retained it. I continued making short films on my camcorder, cutting them via equipment on the college campus. I was taking introduction TV/media classes while devouring whatever my film history professor tossed my way: THE ROARING TWENTIES, BONNIE AND CLYDE, DO THE RIGHT THING, etc. etc. Ahhh! What a breath of fresh air!

My first day of class he showed us a doc with a narrator going over the birth of cinema. I had never paid attention to a silent film before. And then the footage comes on: this guy, very gothic-looking, resembling the vampires that starred in the plethora of stolen vampire books I’d lug around as a Freshman, is still with his eyes closed. And his make-up is stunning. A showrunner, Caligari, is spouting words depicted on a title card. The gothic man is Cesare. And he’s a somnambulist. He’s opening his peepers for the first time in X amount of years. Slowly, slowly he peels his lids open to reveal big, wide maddening eyes. My own eyes were in a trance. What is this? Movies can do this?? It just clicked. It clicked for me. It reflected all the shit I was into at the time. I learned all about German Expressionism, I jotted a list of titles to seek, and then we watched THE GOLD RUSH, my first Chaplin. Film was never the same for me. It was right there and then that I went: I am going to make movies for a living.

Ha! Have fun with that shit, pal.

I needed money. And I wanted to save up. But I also wanted to move out of my parents’ house because I had had it. I was tired of fighting with my dad and being called a loser all the time and a waste of space, to put it nicely. Man, I just wanted to be left alone. It was like school, what do people want from me? Leave me the fuck alone. I don’t bother you, don’t bother me. But my dad consistently bullied me. I can now see why he handled things the way he did but me in my late-teens couldn’t. Borders seemed like a good opportunity to not only have access at a discounted rate to a world of books that could really teach me something, but I could start saving up to move out.

The first job I ever had was as a cashier for Luis Osvaldo at his car alarm & radio shop. But I didn’t want to be working for my brother. I wanted independence from my family.  

To contradict, the other gig I had for a very long while was as an unorthodox server, if you will. My mom, fed up with my dad’s gambling plights, lashed at him. As a treaty my dad started hosting bookmaking nights for his acquaintances out of the garage. And these excursions were just like the ones Tony Soprano was involved in on THE SOPRANOS: they’d last all weekend, into all hours of the clock. And these men would get hungry. We didn’t have any of those online door delivery food services like everyone has now. My dad would buy an ass-load of groceries, my mom would cook all weekend, and we’d feed these derelict men, charging each by the plate. Un cafecito? I would walk from the kitchen through the backyard with a tray full of mini coffee shots into this smoke-filled, booze drenched den. And the gamblers would tip me. Outrageous money for a thirteen-year-old. By the time I was seventeen I had about five-thousand-dollars stored in my savings account. Eventually my mom had enough and was tired of casseroling over a hot stove all weekend and the dominos at Cuenca’s came to an end. I wrote this into SCENES FROM OBLIVION as the lead character’s (Misha’s) source of income.

I go to Borders for my job interview. I luck out. Matt, one of the managers, is a musician. He interviews me and the interview shifts into us talking about punk bands (his favorite is X). Another time punk rock abetted my life.

“So, Mike, what instrument do you play?”

“Uhhh… bass.” And this is something I used to say all the time without realizing what I was saying, “But I don’t know how to play chords.”

This was always met with a puzzled look. You don’t need to know chords to play bass. You just need to know the notes. Ask Joe Strummer. He showed Paul Simonon how to play bass by taping the notes on his fretboard.

Matt just laughed and went, “I play bass! Why’d you pick it?”

Because I loved Crass and Joy Division and the bass made those bands, that’s why. “It sounds cool!”

“Right! It’s the instrument that always stood out for me. It just spoke to me, you know?” Hey, he said what I was thinking.

Matt hired me. And when I went into this job interview, as Yvonne Trinh will verify, I was dressed as one would for a chance at employment. But on my first day at Borders? I came in with liberty spiked hair and a torn-up blue shirt held together by safety pins and band patches. And this was my truck-to-floor/inventory gig.

Yvonne was one of the booksellers at Borders. She was into rockabilly. And the color green. Sweet and very friendly. Maybe trying to insinuate a conversation she politely tells me that the books I’m about to stock on a shelf aren’t books that belong on said shelf. I snap at her, “I know!” and she backed away. Little could we foretell that we’d become very close and she’d be one of my longest, dearest and best friends.

Pictured: me and Yvonne in 2001 or 2002. In the background that Fakes/Fuzz Guns poster I put up at Geez Louise plus the metallic blue bass I got at of Out of Vogue.

First day on the job I’m filling paperwork next to the other new hire who’s about a decade or so older. Dave “The Mod” Durling was from Boston. Hilarious like a Seinfeld character. But subtle. Not cartoonish. We became immediate friends. Just one of those people you click with in a second. Dave’s one of the best people I’ve ever met and someone who’s knowledge of films and music I greatly admired.

Check out Dave’s story: he gets a call that his mother has passed, he packs, leaves the lights on and everything at his Boston apartment as is, flies out here for the funeral, ends up reacquainting with Liz, one of his sister’s friends who he had met the prior year while she was visiting Boston, they go home together, a month later and they had gotten married because why not? Now he’s here in Orange County, broke, married, with his electric bill running amuck at his apartment back home. This is 2000. It’s 2022 and Liz and Dave are still married.

But, man, did we get along. And we initially bonded over our love of Kevin Smith movies, particularly CLERKS. Day in, day out, Dave and I would communicate in CLERKS and Tarantino movie quotes. Dave had been an aspiring filmmaker and musician and things just didn’t pan out.

Dave gave me a list of his favorite movies. Or maybe movies I should watch. I checked out every single one of those. Movies that are my all-timers now. Movies I watched repeatedly like TREES LOUNGE and DIRTY HARRY, just to name two. He also gifted me a stack of filmmaking books and director bios including REBEL WITH A CREW, Robert Rodriguez’s story on how he made EL MARIACHI for nada. Dave was a huge Beatles fan. Huge Britpop fan. Former suited Mod. Hence, Dave the Mod. We both loved Blur and The Who (particularly the first three albums) and when I’d mention some ‘80s band I really dug he’d turn to me and go, “Kid, how the hell do you know about all this?”

I was a nerd! A vampire (lmao) preying on any overlooked tune, comic, or movie.

My schoolmate Kat comes over. First time over to my parents’ house. She takes a look at my room and all my stuff and she goes sourly, “Must be nice to be rich.” That’s always stuck with me. Rich? We weren’t rich. Sure, the furniture in my room was bought by my dad but all my media shit I bought with my own savings or damn right stole from Columbia House. Rich? Are you kidding me? But Kat came from a large Mexican family all sharing rooms in a small house. I told myself I would never take any handouts from that point on. Well, save for the times I was flat broke and had to crawl on my hands and knees.

Through Kat I met Luis Navejas at Santa Ana College. Luis was friends with Kat’s sister. Dude. Was. Cool. Luis had shaggy hair and thick sideburns and wore ‘70s style shirts and bell-bottom like pants and Wranglers. A little hunched over, always with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, eyes hidden behind aviator shades. He was a musician and in a band with the rest of his brothers and they were called Enjambre. Enjambre means swarm in Spanish and avejas means bees and their last name is Navejas. Get it?

Luis loved the shit out of FIGHT CLUB. And Brad Pitt. That was his idol. And he emulated him a bit. And I in turn saw Luis as my role model and emulated him. Gone was my black attire replaced by colorful vintage tees (the ones I could find to fit me, I was lanky and short and hadn’t hit my growth spurt) and tracked down Wrangler polyester pants in all shades. Wore ‘em for years.

Luis was taking film courses too and he had just moved from Mexico. We’d toss movie ideas back and forth. One came to me while I was stuck in traffic, I told Luis and we expanded upon it. That’s one of my many dream projects I have never tackled because it needs a budget. But there was this other script I had written and I gave it to him. I wanted Luis to play the lead because I dunno. And he drew a character sketch.

I had horrible acne. Always have had bad acne until fairly recently but goddamn, it was horrible. Chunks of puss-filled dangling flesh. I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror. I just couldn’t. Bad self-esteem. I started writing a story about a man, a very lonely man who walked around with a mysterious briefcase and just observed people from a distance, the bottom of his face wrapped in scarves. This man was the narrator and watched several one-setting scenarios on his route to work, seven total, each one very loosely based off one of the deadly sins. Through them you got to learn a little about him. What I revealed at the end, in a very Cesare the Somnambulist unwrapping, is that he is horribly scarred underneath. And he had to go around smiling like nothing was wrong, as his questionable profession called for. I worked intensely on the script for a long while and it’s the first script I ever completed. This was the movie I wanted to make. My first feature film.

At Borders I had now made friends with Dave and Yvonne and was friendly with Peter K (of the future Aaron/Lloyd/me crew). And then I saw her… Roseanna.

Now this kid here, me? Always had crushes on girls. Huge crushes. But I was too shy. In second grade two gals complimented my eyes and I nervously cussed them out because I didn’t know what to say. It’s taken me years to feel comfortable accepting a compliment. So when I saw Roseanna and she told me she dug one of my band pins my heart did sixty-eight cartwheels. I got lunch with her once at the Del Taco nearby. I was trembling. She then mentioned her creepy, annoying boyfriend who wouldn’t leave her alone. My heart sank. But then my spirits were lifted when she brought me burned CDs of artists I had never heard of.

“Oh, you love Pulp? Well, I love Pulp. And if you love Pulp you’re gonna love these.”

I was way into Britpop at this juncture.*

*The scenesters at this point tend to eschew people who don’t stick to one subculture. I fucking loved/love it all. But isn’t that what punk’s all about? Acceptance and growth? You would think. So who’s the poseur, I used to say. Or as I wrote on a chalkboard at Borders: Who watches The Watchmen?

If THE CROW soundtrack got me into the Mary Chain and The Cure, and the RUSHMORE soundtrack got me into The Creation and the Kinks, well, the TRAINSPOTTING one made me a full-fledged Britpop fan. Not only was Pulp on the soundtrack, but Blur too. And I became a massive devotee. TRAINSPOTTING was a huge influence on me. I started dressing like Marc Renton and his crew and paid a shit ton of money to import from the UK the exact same purple with yellow stripe sambas Renton wore. I even started using heroin. I’m kidding. No heroin. I was also big into Radiohead. THE BENDS and OK COMPUTER were on constant rotation in my room. I used to wear a green-sleeved baseball tee with the words “Fake Plastic Trees” scribbled with a sharpie on its chest that got a ton of approval from Borders folks older than me.*

But for some reason I had never heard of Suede (known in the states as The London Suede). Suede aside, not sure if I see the correlation between Pulp and the other bands Roseanna introduced me to. But she burned me Suede’s HEAD MUSIC. “Everybody hates this album and they say only girls like it but those people are stupid. They’re just mad Bernard Butler’s no longer in the band. But it’s great!”  HEAD MUSIC along with Modest Mouse’s THE MOON AND ANTARTICA and LONESOME CROWDED WEST, The Birthday Party HITS and Bikini Kill SINGLES.

I couldn’t believe this girl I had a crush on was introducing me to all this rad music. I later did a CD swap with Yvonne. I lent her Bikini Kill SINGLES and she lent me a burned CD of X’s first two albums, LOS ANGELES and WILD GIFT, which were super tough to get a hold of at the time. And that’s how Yvonne and I started to bond. I used to confide to her all my girl problems (as depicted in next week’s stunning chapter) and she used to tell me all about this skinhead/Mod dude she was seeing who was starting to grow cold.

Nothing ever transpired between Roseanna and I and she ended up quitting, or getting fired, and taking off with her sometimes stalker boyfriend who wouldn’t leave the store. But she set a precedent for the sort of girls I would be interested in: women with awesome taste in music who wanted nothing to do with me romantically. And you knew they were into cool music because of how they dressed. It all went hand-in-hand. This is all before alt-culture appropriation, of course, a topic I let the protagonists in BOYS ABOUT TOWN do a deep-dive on. Why was that important to me? I didn’t relate to my Cuban culture, it didn’t accept me, and had found my own.

But Pulp. Pulp. Pulp. All roads lead to Pulp.

I tell Dave that I’m going to form a band. Because you wanna know what I had just learned? I read somewhere (or maybe misread) that Jarvis Cocker had initially formed Pulp in order to become famous enough to be a director. That was his passion. And I took inspiration. I didn’t want be in a band to be a rock star to hook up with people like everyone else. I wanted to garner enough attention in order to be able to pursue what I really wanted to pursue: making movies.  

I started writing songs. They would just come out of nowhere. I didn’t put much thought into them. Once I learned how to play and sing simultaneously, and boy, that took a minute, I would just mumble a melody as I played whatever on my bass and the melody would guide whatever note I’d move to on the fretboard. It’s still how I write music. A made a whole demo tape. Ten, twelve songs. A demo tape I don’t have any more and would love to give a listen to. Guitarist Monica and Luis’s brother Rafa and I would try to play them as we auditioned random drummers off Craig’s List. It never went anywhere. And I gave up on all that.

But in true me fashion one thought lead to another. The next time I see Dave I go, “Wait. Forget the Jarvis Cocker route. I got it. I know what I’m going to do.” I had been going to so many music festivals, why don’t I host my own? And I’ll use the benefits from the festival to fund my movie! I’ve read REBEL WITHOUT A CREW! I can do this! I can do it!

“You can do it? How are you going to do that? You’re seventeen!”

Roseanna was gone now. And the doomsday clock at Borders continued to chime. Eventually they, meaning upper management, had to separate Dave and I. He was the best friend I could have at that age and we spent our Monday through Friday shifts yapping and laughing our asses off relentlessly via a horde of inside jokes. Dave kept his position. And I was moved to the registers. I hated it. I’d close my eyes at night and all I would see was the cash register opening and shutting. I was stuck behind the counter. And I wasn’t allowed to read. The shifts were slow as hell and you’re telling me I’m at a bookstore with my thumbs up my ass and I can’t read? I mean, I did anyway. Underneath the camera. Couple pages at a time before I’d get caught. Penny Rimbaud’s remembrance books. An Andy Warhol book. THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. Bob Dylan’s TARANTULA. An outlaw poetry book. I felt so motivated.

Soon Dave quit because he and Liz were moving back to Boston (“Gotta take care of that electricity bill now”). I was so bummed. Just wasn’t the same. I too quit Borders and wound up hired at the corporate 100 Virgin Megastore.

But I was focused. That festival. It’s gonna happen.

The people who I admire, who I personally believe in, who I see so much potential in, I’ve always wanted them to succeed along with me. I got Alex Guillen to say yes to being on the bill. I got the neighbor down the street in a band to say yes to being on the bill. And I nearly got Weezer and Green Day to be on the bill. “Your band will get all this recognition,” I told Alex and my neighbor. I was on the phone at all hours of the day talking to agents and managers and venue owners. This kid. This kid who could only stutter every time he got on the phone. I tried to get Placebo, no dice. I went to their show at the Palladium, somehow got backstage and I’m seeing Eric Erlandson and Sofia Coppola around me and I’m going holy shit and there’s Brian Molko and I go up to him and vomit all the information about my benefit festival and he tells me to shut up and like a diva, walks away. We crept into UCLA with Jacob for this Hank Williams tribute concert to try and talk to Beck. Security caught me in the wings and when I tried to escape I flew back against Elvis Costello, spilling his drink. DUDE, ELVIS COSTELLO!

Jacob was in that last minute One Minute Rice band that Alex Guillen and I threw together for that one birthday party. And Jacob was Jackie’s brother.

March 5th, 2000. I’d never been up to LA before. Not on my own. I didn’t have a car quite yet. Guitarist Monica and I are given a lift by her dad and we’re dropped outside the Virgin Megastore that was over by Fairfax and Sunset. A line is starting to form. It’s very early in the day. The Smashing Pumpkins are playing a free show in support of their new MACHINA album. I’m not entirely into it although I kinda dig some tracks. There’s no promise we’ll get in. And have no idea how we’re going to get back to Santa Ana. We get in. We watch the show from the third floor. A clear view. They play in the outdoor plaza. On our way out, I see these kids that I know for a fact go to our school district. They can squeeze us into their car. One of them is Jackie, this girl I’d gone to elementary school with. These kids are Pumpkin-heads and I’m just thrilled to meet folks who are the into the same band! Monica aside, I didn’t know any Pumpkins fans.

Jackie loved My Bloody Valentine and Catherine Wheel and PJ Harvey and Jacob disliked female singers and was really into Fugazi. Through Jackie I met Alex Guillen and his brother Gio. Alex and Gio were currently in a band and would later form Deathday. I was really into Jackie. Mainly because of how she dressed and her taste in music. I wanted her Pumpkin-head friends to adopt me as one of their own. But they were a very tight group. Months later Jackie and I very-very briefly casually dated. She got me into shoegaze and more into Sonic Youth (my original intro had been the JUDGEMENT NIGHT soundtrack like a ton of folks my age). But I did treat our fling like a therapy session in which I recounted my dark days at Saddleback high as I have here. This was a bad pattern of mine for years in relationships. And because I could only hang out with her at night, this guy right here, stupidest thing I could have done at that point in my life, dropped out of my evening college courses. All for a girl. All for a fling. Dropped out and never went back.

Jackie and I wound up having a falling out. I flipped out on her one day when I was working at Virgin. Well, I treated her callously when ringing her up. We hadn’t seen each other in a long minute and, I’m not here to call people out, but someone who fancied me didn’t want me seeing her, got jealous, and started spreading rumors that she and her friends were talking shit about me and my rambling ‘therapy sessions’. I believed said person and coldly took it out on Jackie during business hours. I could have just called her and inquired but, no, I blew up, cussing her out, accusing her of things. She yelled at me that I’m crazy. And I sure was acting nuts. The manager on duty laughed and then threw on Prodigy’s “Smack my Bitch Up” loudly on the speakers. Crudely funny to me now. Not funny at the time. Jackie and her friends reciprocated by hurling a rock through the back window of my car. That whole situation was handled immaturely but what do you want? We were teenagers. But my general mistrust in people and why the ending of MANHATTAN had me break into tears later on in life, the seed of it was planted here. You just can’t trust people but you gotta have a little faith in ‘em. Which is what my debut feature JERRY POWELL is really all about. Beneath it all.

I stopped hanging out with the gossiping admirer. I now couldn’t get a band together. I was finally in with the cool Pumpkins loving kids but now they hated me. Dave had moved away. I wasn’t taking film courses anymore. Deez and Chris? We had drifted. And this corporate fucking job at the Virgin Megastore was killing my spirits. My acne got even worse. Flaring up. I looked like a ripped-tomato. Went into deep depression. I had been struggling with dejection briefly as a tormented teen but now here it was full-force. I suck. I’m fucking stupid. My fucking dad is fucking right. I shouldn’t have been born.

One night I’m with my two buddies Leeno (a stoner who didn’t care for rock music but loved Portishead) and Michelle (an elementary school and MCH schoolmate). We meet with Alex Guillen at the Block, outside the Starbucks. Leeno and Michelle have been very supportive. I was very sad. Feeling in the dumps. Cheeseball, but on the drive over there The Beatles “Yesterday” comes on. I look at Michelle and tell her this song is how I feel.

I had told Guillen a while back about my filmmaking pipedreams.

“If Jarvis Cocker can do it…”

“Yeah, well, you’re not Jarvis Cocker.”

Rafa (Luis Navejas’ brother who used to jam with Monica and I) used to tell me, “You can’t sing.”

“Punk rockers don’t have to sing!”

I played him “Orgasm Addict” by the Buzzcocks. Rafa listened and looked at me, “That guy knows how to sing.”

He was right. I couldn’t sing. But who cares!

Guillen, “I like your demo tape. But you need to work on your lyrics.”

Fuck my lyrics! Lyrics don’t matter!

I didn’t want to hear it. I had dreams, man. I had drive. I was stubborn and I didn’t want to hear it. But this night Guillen put it bluntly: it’ll never happen. He was right. “Despite all the computations…” I needed to hear it. This stupid festival plan was now falling apart. I had no assistance. I couldn’t keep it together. He gave me suggestions. I still didn’t want to hear them. I stopped hanging out with him too. I distanced myself from everyone. Leeno, Michelle, Luis. All of them. Another bad tendency of mine.

What am I going to do?

That night I tried to kill myself.