#one of my oldest friends was sexually abused by their babysitter as a child and just seeing his name is horribly triggering for them

[wazzuppy]

i remember one time i heard something that was like "most women have been or know someone who has been assaulted and most men know or have known someone whose assaulted a person before" and then all at once every memory of girls and women and afabs and fem aligned people i'd ever known telling me about how a man had abused or assaulted them came flooding back to me and i was like. Oh.

[denishamichelle]

Mercury Retrograde Reflections

I want to be the fun mom again.

This is the shit Mercury Retrograde has me reflecting on. Some where in between having 3 children life got real freaking serious, as expected. But I don't think I could ever anticipate just how real things could or would get.

I had a vision for my life. I had a vision for my life with my kids fathers. Yea, all three of em' got different daddies. Judge me, please lol. Point is, things changed, therefore the vision changed. And when the vision changed, the plan changed. And when the plan changed, the steps to achieve the plan changed.

All of sudden everything that I had given to one child for 9 years became me figuring out how to give it to two and three children, plus the children of my lovers, very quickly. I think it goes without saying I have been stretched. Not just me though, me and every mother or father who has multiple children and/or blended families. Especially, those close in age.

I look back and I'm thankful that it was just my oldest and I for 9 years, before she had to share me. Angel was a very happy and secure child during early childhood (conception/birth to age 8.) I believe her having somewhat (I say somewhat because I've always worked a lot) of my undivided attention had a major impact on her childhood. Angel also had a lot more support from my friends and family and was always showered with love.

She is now 13, but is what I consider a young adult. Our circumstance has caused me to rely on her for help with her siblings. As I watched my two youngest play yesterday, I was convicted in my spirit from taking that away from her. Her life got real serious, real quick too.

Angel is a certified babysitter through the American RedCross. I pay her as a contractor under my business to babysit her siblings. I am adamant about preparing my kids for life in a very practical way. I'm also building generational wealth and plan to teach my children and employ. Angel will have a nice resume by the time she wants to go out and pursue her passions. I am my children's first teacher, and I stand on that. But I don't want Angel to resent me for me needing her.

The effects of having more children has had a major impact on Angel as well. Her father, who she is now building a relationship with, was more absent that present for the first 13 years of her life. This has also had a major impact on her. Angel has experienced family violence as well. Research says she is more likely to experience family violence, because I did, and this is how the cycle continues if we let it.

I say all that to say that for the past five years my life has been a revolving door of survival. Surviving labor and delivery as a black woman feels like an accomplishment by itself, let alone motherhood. Surviving poverty. Surviving domestic and sexual violence. Surviving substance abuse. Surviving death of loved ones. Surviving being a woman. Surviving the system. Surviving failed relationships. Surviving abandonment. Surviving and more fucking surviving.

Yea... looking back, I got a little cold. I got a little harsh. I got a little traumatized lmao. I know it not funny, but I really have to laugh because its the truth and I survived it. It sounds like an episode of Law and Order: SVU. But why is it so many of our lives?

The truth is, "the system" is not set up for people like me to survive AND thrive. It is set up for us to perpetuate a cycle of being abused and being the abuser. It is set up for oppression. Oppression of the mind, body and spirit. Only when one seeks knowledge on their own accord do they really break free from this "system".

That's why I laugh. Because people like me, do the unexpected. We survive all the shit society throws at us, expecting us not to overcome. Yea, we come out with some scars, but we also become masters of transmutation. Transmutation, simply put, is taking one energy and transforming it to another by way of a medium.

The abused is now being used... by the Most High, God, Source, Allah, Universal life force, or whatever you subscribe to. We are speaking, writing, performing, educating, inventing and creating in a number of areas. We are passionate, because we have lived it.

We are busy and we are focused.

Not a bad place to be, but I want to be the fun mom again. And so, doing all of this transmuting and what not requires a lot of energy. It is especially hard for single-parent households.

I am at a place where, the more I pursue higher education, the more I learn about what the research says about OUR people. Exactly what I described is the face of MANY black and brown families, except many of them are not fortunate enough to pursue higher education. There is a deficit in our learning because of the traumatic experiences we have endured as a people. These experiences have shaped our view of the world. We have survived so long, its hard for some of us to imagine what life looks like when your thriving.

For me, thriving means I can have fun with my children again. It means laughing more than crying. It means asking for help from their fathers. It means being forgiving, but not being naive to wrong doings. I have been in protection mode, because one thing I'm not about to play with anybody about, is my kids. They didn't ask to be here. I willingly brought all three of them into the world and wouldn't change a thing. Outside of God, they are my life line. All I felt I had worth living for at many times. So yea, shit got serious. But as we all grow into different versions of ourselves, This version of me is releasing the part of me that says I have to have my kids with me 24/8 in order to be a good mom or for them to have the best outcomes. In fact, research says otherwise. Children who come from two parent households or single-father households have better outcomes.

This is why we need fathers to take back their rightful place as fathers, as protectors, as educators, as caretakers, etc. Black and brown fathers are needed. Not by the women, by the children! Women continue to break barriers and prove that we can survive these experiences, but our children experience the greatest effects of the stress single-motherhood brings.

With love, I am challenging mothers who are survivors to release control, trust the creator and allow the father of your children and/or who ever wants to support you to do so. If the father is active, stable and can provide a safe environment for your child (heavy on the safety), then don't be afraid to ask for shared responsibility despite what society has taught us. Men are just as capable or child-rearing as women. And if its the opposite, apply it as it fits.

Children benefit from being raised by people with varying views of the world. It is a village concept. Fathers, I challenge you to be more active and consistent in your children's lives, if you are not already. Notice, I didn't say financially stable. Although necessary, finances can be built over time. However, you can not get time back with your children. They will only be small once. And you are needed.

I believe now more than ever, black and brown families need to understand that our children are the future. They are also our first assignment. Take time to slow down and be present in raising your kids. Consider their needs, and what is in the best interest of all parties involved.

with love,

Denisha

[mtchstick]

hello all, time to meet my latest nuisance, michelle ‘mitch’ novak, 34, investigative journalist, chaos magnet, megagalactic pain in the ass. full bio + hcs & wanted connections below the cut! 

“ alone in your car, the violence you imagine: it hurts so hard, a memory you can’t forget. wherever you are, why’d you ever concede it? as if, if a god would ever care, and if it did, then nothing unpure is ever complicated, and nothing undone is ever done or said by chance, and nothing unsure has ever resonated — i float through the walls. i float through the walls. ” .  

name : michela michelle maria novak. the last is a taken name: not her birth father’s (pasqualino “lee” ferrante) but the name of the man who married her mother after her divorce with lee. as much of a shithead as he was, sometimes mitch regrets the novak name (only keeps it as a token of her ties with her siblings). her pen name, however, is mitch lennox — a very male, very white name that she believed would help her articles get some credit in the world of journalism (and that helped her distance herself from her red ridge past). age : thirty-four (born october 20th, 1986). pronouns : she/her. gender : cis female. location : red ridge, nv.  occupation : investigative journalist.  sexual orientation : pansexual, demiromantic. religion : agnostic (mostly a non believer, though she tends to find comfort in the thought of a higher power in dire times, and keeps her grandmother’s crucifix in her car). affiliation : none, although she’s never shyed from asking favors to valencia or law enforcement alike (and has often owed favors to both, and more). _________

personality :perhaps in order to understand the full range of mitch’s character one would require a century, perhaps a degree in archaeology. the short version of it is, what you get is mostly an act. not a genuine character, but a persona crafted, layer by layer, for survival, for self-preservation. on the outside, mitch novak is close to a hurricane: can’t be predicted, will show up unannounced, spread havoc all around, disappear again when the sun has set. one might call her volatile, fleeting some, never sticking to a plan but shifting constantly, as if the very essence of staying still was a risk far too big for her to run. it might look like evidence of a poor character, material perhaps — it is instead the proof of her determination, which barely knows any obstacle, surely not one of a human kind. she’s resolute, far too proud of her own beliefs, pushing ever forward with barely any thought over consequences or just the general, common sense awareness of danger. reckless, one might call her, but not for lack of a will to live, rather an attitude she’s developed in being extremely resourceful, constantly finding ways to get out of the corners she’s backed in (so far: there’s no telling how long this will last). this ever changing, constantly moving nature reflects itself in her dynamics with others, too: do not count on her to stick around, whether tied to a familial, friendly or romantical relationship — it is far more likely for mitch to disappear and then return as rapidly as the moon changes. the outer side of her is a shifting tide, never too still, never calm enough for anyone to dive. beyond that layer, however, she is passionate — alive with burning ideals, nursing bravery with seldom any comparison, a protector of those who are defenseless, someone who’s devoted an entire life to the ideal of truth. and yet the choices she’s made, the paths she’s walked in order to get to where her ideals prompted her to be, they have all piled up inside of her: while she’ll appear to have little to no moral compass, little to no care as to the consequences of her own actions, deep within mitch is the harshest of her own critics. she keeps herself busy, constantly moving so that she won’t have to stop and think — reckon with her graveyards of mistakes, deal with her own, deep-seeded self loathing. she’ll much more easily crack a joke instead, defend herself with the use of irony and sarcasm, and at the same time put people to the test, give them the sharpest corners of herself so their allegiance will be proved. but all of this, all her shifting and sharpening nature, it has led to a deep, sometimes unbearable loneliness — it is ever present and still sneaks up on her sometimes, the endless void around her scorched earth, the inability to bridge that gap between her and the rest of the world. perhaps there lies her love for stories: within the distance from her and others, trying to understand them in order to shorten it. but it stays there, separating her from the world, and so self preservation must be the only principle leading her forward. at the end of the day, mitch is as unpredictable as stormy weather: even those who believe they know her, most of the time, only really know the persona she’s allowed them to meet. she can be manipulative, a skilled liar, an unparalleled improviser — perhaps one day she will finally stare in the mirror and ask herself who she really is. positive traits : headstrong, clever, resourceful, brave, protective, witty, open minded, passionate. negative traits : impulsive, proud, self-destructive, fleeting, mutable, unreliable, arrogant, reckless, annoying. ___________

BIOGRAPHY —

trigger warnings : disappearance, death, abuse, child abuse, cults, substance abuse.

red ridge, nv, 1988. pamela rizzo is done with her boyfriend’s antics: never able to hold a job for more than a couple weeks, constantly wasting his pay in booze and boobs and whatever shit he feels like shooting in his own body. her youngest, michela, is two years old; her oldest, tommy, is seven years old: old enough to understand what’s going on. for a while he becomes the man of the house, making sure his little sister is okay when mom comes late from work: for a while, this broken up family makes it work. pamela meets andy novak when mitch is four — four months later they’re married out of a casino’s chapel, and she looks at her kids, bright eyed, and said: see kids? you got a daddy again, now. everything’s gonna change for the better.

red ridge, nv, 1995. everything starts changing for the worse, but none of them can see it yet. there’s two new siblings, jericho and liv, the lovely offspring of the novaks. adjusting to this new family is hard, and mitch sticks around her older brother: he’s good, he’s protective, he watches her back. she picks up from him, her fight and her curiosity and her boyish recklessness — five years apart, yet sometimes they look like twins. she loves her younger siblings, yes, but sometimes she looks at andy’s eyes and remembers this is not my father, and this is not my family, and all i really have is tommy and by tommy i will stand. but over time he gets tired of playing babysitter, one day he simply grabs her and says c’mon mitch, get off my back. don’t you have any friends?

red ridge, nv, 1996. mitch grows restless and reckless, too many hours spent in detention and not enough befriending kids her age. she thinks something’s lacking, a specific code that will allow her to bridge the distance with the other kids: she searches for it in comic books, studying the behavior of characters wondering how a hero is made. she searches for it in other kids, and sometimes she stays out entire afternoons spying on her brother and her friends, wondering what it is that makes people friends, what it is that she’s lacking. that’s when she starts seeing them spending their afternoons in mr. carlow’s house; they say he lets them do some handiwork around the house in exchange for some money, money for tapes, money for gas. tommy comes home full of new stuff every day — one day he brings home a cassette for mitch, jagged little pill. three days later, he goes to carlow’s and never leaves.

red ridge, nv, 1998. thomas j. novak is declared missing on november 1st, 1998. search parties begin, national attention brought to the case. there are errors in the investigation, leads mistakenly pursued. mitch talks to pam, talks to andy, talks to anyone: go to mr. carlow’s, she says, i saw them there. but mr. carlow is an old wealthy man, he’s given more money to the church than the vatican itself: and he was so concerned when they asked him about tommy that he passed out. nobody listens, so tommy isn’t found. they listen to pamela, her face plastered on every news segment, begging for her boy to come home: at night mitch holds her younger siblings close, and fears something will be coming for all of them.

red ridge, nv, 1999. the body of thomas novak, 17 at the time of his disappearance, is found in a ditch three miles out of red ridge, exactly nine months after he was declared missing. the police say he must’ve been trying to leave town when he was robbed, or maybe assaulted, or maybe a coyote got him. nobody seems to have a clear answer, nobody really cares to look for one. pamela finds some comfort in speaking to the nation of her child: every night her face is on tv, until the story of the grieving mother is boring too, and pamela disappears in the background, perhaps like her child did. that’s about the time andy taps into his anger, begins lashing out with his kids, with mitch too. he’s loud, he smells, he comes home and takes it out on the three of them. mitch tries to keep her head up, keep the small ones safe. she keeps yelling, nobody listens. nobody ever fucking listens.

phoenix, az, 2004. she finds another voice. she has parts of tommy that have stayed with her. the curiosity, the bull-headed quest for knowledge. she holds them close to herself, puts them all in the art of the written word, and somehow it gives her a purpose. in her mind remains the need to find an answer, connect the dots around her brother’s disappearance, but they never match to any coherent drawing. still she keeps on, and the moment she becomes a licensed journalist she starts travelling the country chasing stories, chasing mysteries and, above all — chasing answers. 

montréal, canada, 2013. red ridge fades in the background, a dull nightmare unwilling to re-emerge to the surface. she finds new stories instead, she drowns in them. good stories, with martyrs and heroes who die for a  cause (those are the ones she stares at in admiration, wondering if a good spirit is transmittable via osmosis). she finds bad stories, the ways men will make themselves wolves and devour their young (those are the ones she gets deep in, like the bloody entrails of a carcass, turns them inside out until she can make every accurate comparison between them and herself and say it isn’t me, i have nothing to do with people like this). she builds herself a kingdom of sorts, kings and queens and pawns to turn to in her quest for truth. (she asks favors too, sometimes she finds herself under the thumb of criminals and shady characters who can help her quest along, but will ask things of her: her shining moral character begins darkening now, she begins to understand the battle between good and evil must be fought along the line in between). while investigating a dark, morbid story of murder and finance, she meets priscilla — clever, arrogant, bright. selfish enough to drag her out of her own head when mitch lets her investigations swallow her whole. the two get married in a small ceremony with mostly just colleagues from priscilla’s work at the university — for a while mitch toys with the idea of belonging to someone, of a happy life, of a family, of a home.

sam’s cedar, mo, 2017. it lasts exactly four years, though it began rotting right in the honeymoon phase. colliding characters turning to sparks, the fights far outweighing the good they’d found in each other’s company. the crippling blow comes when a story breaks out about an odd, peculiar cult spreading its venomous tendrils around the plains of missouri. an old friend, head of a mainstream newspaper, says it’s just the kind of report she’d be great at. she finds an odd fascination in the idea of entering the cult, seeing evil from the inside: priscilla, of course, thinks it’s foolish, it’s guerrilla journalism, it’s just the pop culture rendition of what a reporter’s work is supposed to look like. her protests echo in the background still, while mitch packs her car and leaves. five days later she is entering the premises of the cult’s church under the alias of rebecca jean wasserman, knowing that this will change things. never once, for her stories, has she gone this deep: there is a fear within her, as she dyes her hair blond and crafts a new identity, that there will not be a way out. 

phoenix, az, 2019. the way out is found by fighting teeth and nails. the way out is found through a dark, morbid journey that spits her out a paler self. her permanence in the cult amounts to eleven months, three weeks, four days: a long time to note down every creepy corner she steps in, every gruesome detail she collects. she sees minds reshaped, she sees crimes committed and barely keeps herself from giving in to the craze like the rest of them. being rebecca wears her out, being rebecca sometimes comes too easy: by the time she’s collected enough material that the point isn’t just an article anymore, but a criminal investigation, she feels herself slipping out of her own mind every night. her reports are so detailed they start a widespread investigation. somehow, she makes it out of the cult into one whole, rotten piece. her reportage gets mitch lennox (the pen name she’d chosen at the beginning, wanting to cut ties to whatever ties michelle novak had been living) two awards, good, it looks, has won over evil. but her mind is frayed, the shadows have come too close sometimes she wonders whether they haven’t gotten in somehow, become a part of her too. at night she lies awake and thinks of tommy: she’s found so many stories, so many villains have been given a name, but her brother’s is still just a ghost story.

red ridge, nv, 2020. sometimes she feels like a pawn on the board of a funny, twisted game. she gets a call one night, about a murder (one in a few) in the town she once badly tried to call a home. by then she’s tired, worn out, overly dependant on liquor and painkillers: but she’s lost herself so tragically she hasn’t thought to look for the pieces of herself back where everything started. she comes back to red ridge on a much too hot day of early may; she wears her identity like a costume, putting on a brave face because red ridge, she knows, has a tendency of swallowing people whole. and she’s been swallowed before, she’s been spat out too. what’s left is a half digested remain of a person. what’s left is someone who’s hungry for truth — and barely has anything to lose anymore. 

_____________________

HCS:

when not undercover for any reason, mitch drives a purplish red ‘83 alfa 6 alfa romeo. not the most inconspicuous car, but a piece of her heart nontheless (stolen from her father as a ‘payback for him being a shithead’, or so she says). she had it slightly altered to fit a music cassette player so she could keep listening to the tapes her best friend sent her.

her biological father, lee, is a rather well known drug dealer in red ridge. he’s also, coincidentally, her main drug dealer.

currently, mitch lives in a motel, refuses to go back to her mother’s house, would rather sleep in her car. 

she absolutely adores spicy food and has been known to have no chill when it comes to deadly spicy peppers, in fact she’s entered at least a couple competitions for pepper tasting and, though never winning, always managed to come up pretty high on the podium.

she’s almost constantly listening to music (mostly blues or grunge), although her heart belongs to alanis morissette, and evidence of that is her vast collection of concert t-shirts and the many cassettes in her car. 

she used to be on the school soccer team but got kicked out after an unfortunate accident with one cheryl d. (the accident being mitch purposefully kicked her in the shins after she called her a psycho bitch).

_____________________

WANTED CONNECTIONS:

below i’ve listed some connections i’d love to get for mitch — if you’re interested in picking any of these up, please don’t be afraid to message me!! 

priscilla — mitch’s ex wife was an academic she met while working on an article in montrèal in 2013. they got married a few months after they began dating each other, but it was short lived. their characters don’t match, they just fought constantly, and eventually mitch left to go undercover in a cult / pursue her career. overall their marriage lasted four years, and it’s safe to say they hate each other now, probably barely tolerate one another at best, and it’s unlikely they’ll ever be together again, but i’d love to explore their colliding, nerve-wrecking dynamic. suggested fcs: ruth negga, lupita nyong'o, leslie ann brandt.

jimmy — her best friend, the one person in red ridge who always knows when she’s coming around again. he used to be one of tommy’s closest friends, which brought him and mitch together once tommy was gone. they dated very briefly, eventually found they worked a lot better as friends. they went to college together for a bit there, he, however, eventually quit college around the time mitch graduated. he owns a record store and is the one who provides her with all the tapes she plays in her car. he’s mitch’s person and the one guy in the world she confides everything to (same goes for him, obviously). they’re kind of in a rough patch right now, considering she never told him about her undercover stint and he ended up not hearing from her for about a year. reconnecting with him is also one of the reasons she decided to come back to red ridge. suggested fcs: joshua jackson, jake johnson, john krasinski.

fwbs — clearly mitch isn’t made for stable relationships but she does have her fair share of one night stands and occasional flings. it would be great if it was something that has happened before, maybe while she was still in college and sometimes came home to red ridge.

fwbs from inside valencia — people she could sleep with that might provide information on valencia’s dealings and just generally be fruitful for her career (of course, they could ask favors of her too; it could be as casual or as tense as we want it to be).

affair (tw: cheating) — i’d love love love for her to have a painful sort of affair with someone who’s already in a relationship with someone. something sad, painful, that they both wish they could do without but can’t. gimme angst.

friends — either childhood friends from before she left red ridge or people she’s just meeting again, she needs someone she can have simple fun with, maybe even someone who can tell her to chill the fuck down sometimes.

enemies — there’s a lot of people who just can’t stand mitch at all, so gimme those. people who find her annoying, people from valencia who find her dangerous, old schoolmates who just never got her thing. give me also people who have stuff they can hold over her head, people who can threaten her and that she generally loathes. 

friends in low places — mitch makes frequent use of recreational drugs and painkillers, plus her job often needs her to find various sorts of illicit goods (be them heavier drugs, weapons, surveillance equipment, etc). she’d need someone who can provide her with these things, maybe even someone she can be friendly with or something.

[mxtons]

        richard  madden  !    |        look  at  those  camera’s  flash  for  bellamy  maxton  (  he  +  him  )  !  the  thirty  year  old  television  star  is  famous  for  their  role  as  sir  erik  in  the  hit  show:  royals.  the  tabloids  portray  them  as  being  frivolous  and  pugnacious,  however  they  are  actually  very  insouciant  and  audacious.  seeing  them  always  reminds  me  of  worn  bomber  jackets,  dark  circles  under  bright  eyes,  and  empty  chinese  food  cartons.

hello  !  my  name  is  cait  and  i’m  always  late  to  the  party  so  this  is  no  surprise  !  i’m  Super  Excited  to  be  here  and  can’t  wait  to  interact  w  all  of  you  !  will  i  be  using  icons  ?  will  i  be  using  gifs  ?  who  knows  !  there  is  ...  a  Lot  to  bellamy  (  who  i  refer  to  as  bell  ,,,  he’s  not  Entirely  happy  that  his  childhood  nickname  got  leaked  a  couple  years  back  ,  since  it’s  what  his  sister  calls  him  ...  but  it’s  caught  on  and  he’s  rollin’  with  the  punches  !  )  so  this  is  just  a  general  rundown  !  i’ll  add  more  to  his  page  at  some  point  ...  but  i’m  impatient  so  here’s  the  need  to  know  !  TW  :  ABUSE  ,  ALCOHOLISM  ,  DEATH  .

one.

full  name  :  bellamy  james  maxton  . nicknames  :  bell  ,  maxton  ,  etc  . age  :  thirty  . birthday  :  tba  . gender  +  pronouns  :  cis  male  +  he/him  . sexual  +  romantic  orientation  :  bisexual  +  biromantic  (  not  public  .  ) birth  place  :  glasgow  ,  united  kingdom  . current  residence  :  santa  monica  ,  california  . spoken  languages  :  english  and  broken  bits  of  scottish  gaelic  . height  +  body  type  :  5'10"  /  athletic  . occupation  :  model  /  actor  . martial  status  :  divorced  . accent  :  scottish  ,  west  central  dialect  . sibling  status  :  middle  child  . faceclaim  :  richard  madden  .

two.

grew  up  in  scotland  ,  youngest  of  three  children  .  father  passed  when  bellamy  was  seven  .  his  father  was  his  idol  and  the  day  he  lost  him  was  one  of  the  worst  days  of  his  life  .  ever  since  then  he  had  to  deal  with  an  absent  mother  with  a  tendency  to  drink  herself  to  a  better  day  .  with  bell  the  spitting  image  of  his  father  ,  his  mother’s  fury  was  taken  out  greatly  on  him  .  the  abuse  continued  from  his  older  brother  ,  ignored  and  looked  down  upon  as  a  stranger  among  family  .  before  his  passing  ,  bell’s  father  dotted  on  him  and  spent  more  time  in  his  youngest  son’s  company  ,  something  his  oldest  son  has  never  forgotten  .  only  his  sister  was  kind  to  him  ,  someone  who  has  come  to  be  one  of  bellamy’s  favorite  people  in  the  universe  .

left  the  house  at  eighteen  against  his  own  desires  .  he  jumped  from  one  friend’s  couch  to  another  ,  eventually  leaving  the  country  at  twenty  with  a  friend  who  had  convinced  him  to  leave  .  it  was  an  impulsive  ,  drunken  choice  he  had  made  but  with  nothing  holding  him  to  scotland  and  a  tiny  interest  in  traveling  ,  he  got  a  visiting  visa  to  the  united  states  .

his  temporary  visa  was  to  last  a  month  .  he  stayed  with  friends  in  santa  barbara  ,  california  .  the  warm  ,  sunny  beach  was  his  favorite  part  and  despite  not  liking  the  big  crowds  ,  he  did  like  the  sound  of  the  waves  outside  of  his  window  .  he  partied  every  night  ,  though  kept  to  himself  unless  he  was  drunk  enough  to  socialize  ,  and  slept  throughout  most  days  .  there  came  to  a  time  where  the  guy  he  was  staying  with  demanded  some  type  of  payment  ---  bell  had  definitely  made  his  share  of  a  mess  .  it  was  then  he  dove  into  modeling  .  something  that  was  done  by  accident  ,  a  way  to  get  a  couple  hundred  dollars  ,  turned  into  a  short  lived  career  .

what  started  as  smaller  brands  ,  a  local  sunglasses  ad  and  hand  modeling  turned  into  much  more  .  he  hated  his  picture  being  taken  but  adored  the  feeling  of  becoming  someone  else  entirely  .  plus  ,  the  money  was  amazing  .  he  turned  his  stay  into  a  work  visa  ,  extended  through  the  year  and  went  where  the  money  took  him  .

shortly  after  his  twenty  third  birthday  ,  he  auditioned  for  what  would  be  his  first  role  .  it  was  through  contacts  ,  someone  he’d  met  while  on  location  for  an  ad  he  was  modeling  for  .  he  expressed  his  desire  for  something  more  when  they  mentioned  needing  someone  for  a  smaller  role  in  a  newer  tv  show  .  bellamy  landed  the  role  ,  though  it  was  short  lived  as  the  show  only  lasted  one  season  .  from  there  ,  he  knew  acting  was  what  he  wanted  to  do  .

modeling  has  somewhat  stopped  altogether  for  him  ,  giving  him  more  opportunities  for  roles  .  while  working  on  a  movie  a  few  years  ago  ,  he  met  a  woman  that  would  come  to  be  his  wife  .  they  had  a  whirlwind  love  ,  something  quick  and  detrimental  to  the  both  of  them  .  the  two  of  them  were  engaged  only  a  few  months  before  they  tied  the  knot  .  though  arguably  in  love  ,  they  just  didn’t  fit  and  the  paparazzi  tore  them  apart  (  rumored  affairs  ,  pictures  of  bell  with  other  woman  ,  etc  ...  ),  among  other  things  .  they  weren’t  good  for  each  other  .  a  fuckin  fool  ,  bell  didn’t  sign  a  prenup  and  she  took  a  lot  from  him  ...  he’s  still  bitter  about  it  ...  REFUSES  to  work  on  a  project  with  her  !  this  is  a  wanted  connection  but  everything  just  ended  badly  with  him  ,  they  shit  talk  each  other  ...  anyway  ...

seven  years  later  ,  bell  has  earned  dual  citizenship  between  the  usa  and  the  uk  and  spends  most  of  his  time  in  california  ,  having  an  apartment  in  santa  monica  .  he  owns  a  flat  in  the  uk  where  his  sister  lives  and  visits  when  he  can  .  he  has  a  black  cat  ,  lovingly  named  nightmare  that  guards  his  apartment  while  he’s  away  for  work  .  he  has  a  neighbor  take  care  of  her  ,  this  is  a  wanted  connection  !  

he’s  currently  on  royals  and  has  been  on  since  the  pilot  !  his  character  is  adored  by  fans  ,  mostly  for  his  heroics  and  charm  !  picture  ...  yeah  ,  yes  ,  picture  robb  stark  but  as  a  loyal  knight  to  his  king  !  bell  shares  the  desirable  bachelor  status  with  his  character  but  that’s  about  all  they  share  .  he  does  not  use  his  accent  on  the  show  ,  but  does  use  a  british  accent  .  he  loves  to  fuck  around  on  set  but  when  he  hears  ACTION  he  immediately  goes  to  work  !  publicly  he  would  Never  be  involved  with  a  costar  ...  but  privately  ?  he’s  probably  fucked  a  good  amount  of  them  ...  wanted  connection  !  same  with  people  from  other  shows  !  

personality  wise  ,,,  bell  is  ...  okay  .  he’s  fine  ,  not  the  best  person  to  be  around  but  he’s  never  fake  !  the  only  time  he  really  tries  to  be  different  is  with  the  press  /  in  interviews  but  with  other  people  he’s  himself  ...  which  isn’t  the  best  thing  ??  he’s  nice  ...  to  a  fault  ...  but  he  doesn’t  really  like  the  spotlight  ,  doesn’t  like  small  talk  and  loves  keeping  to  himself  .  not  good  with  emotions  or  soft  shit  ...  a  broken  man  who  Really  needs  therapy  .  of  course  ,  he  does  like  to  party  and  make  a  fool  of  himself  when  under  the  influence  ...  just  depends  on  the  day  !  

three.

wanted  connections  !!

ex  wife  .  explained  above  !

babysitter  for  his  cat  .  preferably  a  neighbor  or  someone  who  lives  nearby  .  probably  not  someone  nightmare  likes  ,  but  they  feed  her  so  she  tolerates  them  .

costars  (  of  royals  or  other  shows  ,  maybe  they  were  on  something  else  together  ??  )  who  he  slept  with  !

costars  he  either  got  along  with  ,  learned  from  ,  they  learned  from  him  ,  or  competitions  ??  someone  he  beat  out  for  a  role  ??

someone  he  was  involved  in  rumors  with  ??  

a  pr  girlfriend  ---  this  will  be  something  that  is  just  now  starting  ,  probably  in  time  for  awards  season  coming  up  !

anything  !!  hit  me  with  ideas  !!

if  you  like  this  i’ll  tumblr  msg  you  for  plots  !  i  also  have  discord  if  you’d  prefer  that  ,  just  let  me  know  !

[findbeggar84-blog]

The Halloween List: A Quiet Place, Emelie, and Hereditary

I'm kicking off The Halloween List this year with one of my favorite hidden gems, and two of the biggest Horror movies of 2018. 2018 has been so long that it's easy to forget A Quiet Place even came out back in April, right?

All three of these films attack the family in very different ways. A Quiet Place is about family surviving in a country that's destroyed; Emelie is about a family that thinks it's safe until they hire the wrong babysitter; and Hereditary is about a family haunting itself. Each is powerful, but which kind of conflict is the most effective on you?

A Quiet Place (2018)

I have been waiting a damned long time for A Quiet Place. Horror has a troubling history of relegating disabled characters to the roles of villains. I wrote about that phenomenon for Fireside Magazine last year. You can take solace in the well-meaning portrayals of Wait Until Dark and Silver Bullet, but those are moves with abled actors cripping it up, and screenplays that pander. They could never get beneath the surface.

Millicent Simmonds is a deaf actor, and she’s the emotional core of this movie. She plays Regan, the oldest child in one of the few families to survive an invasion of monsters. The monsters hunt on sound; they can hear a toy space ship from miles away, and be there in seconds. Regan has saved the family, because since they all know ASL, they know how to communicate and live without speaking. They walk into town to scavenge on paths of sand to quiet their footsteps. They have adapted.

What’s even more rewarding about this disability rep is that Regan isn’t defined by her disability. If a monster is coming, she can’t hear it behind her, but that’s a peril of a moment, not a constant agony. Regan is defined by her grief that she thinks she was responsible for the loss of a younger sibling, and she has some very creative ways of expressing that. It’s not grief about being disabled, or grief that makes her curse it. This is a relief in contrast to a hundred movies about disabled people who curse being trapped in wheelchairs, or wish they could see the sunrise. Disabled people are going to live lives, and regret openly, not narrowly. A Quiet Place gets this.

The movie is strongly constructed, naturally never giving us an exposition dump on where the monsters came from, or how life has been. We can tell what their lives are like by what they keep around the house, and what chores we see them do. It’s at its best when there’s minimal music, letting us sit in the same terrified silence as the family. They have a baby on the way that won’t be easy to deliver in this world, and the kids are restless to live bigger lives. We see them pushing against the boundaries forced on them with a healthy naturalism.

At under 90 minutes, the movie is tight and knows what it wants to do at all times. Its big set pieces, like the kids falling into a corn silo and the threat of drowning in it, all click. The moment you see a nail sticking out of a step in the stairs of their the basement, you know what’s coming. What comes is harrowing. It’s all worth it, too. It yields one of the most cathartic endings in modern Horror.

Emelie (2015)

   Emelie is a movie good enough to kill your career. It is so unsettling that it might have been more commercially successful if it had been worse. I can see some studios not wanting to work with the people involved because they were willing to make this thing.

Emelie is also a great response to John Carpenter’s Halloween. Halloween is a babysitter’s worst fear: that someone will come in the night when no one older is around to help and attack them and the children. But that isn’t the fear of children. Children’s deepest fear is that the babysitter will hurt them. Emelie is about that fear.

Following a disturbingly casual opening sequence in which a babysitter is kidnapped in broad daylight, we meet a small and intensely believable family. There are three kids, the youngest of which is so naturalistically sweet and excitable that he might just be a six year old that the director gave some sugar to and let roam through the set. Here we have a brooding pre-teen older brother who doesn’t want to spend time with his siblings, and a controlling middle-sister who constantly comes up with costume ideas and games for the youngest and most impressionable of the kids. Their parents are going out for a special dinner. They’ll be gone late. At the last minute their sitter has been replaced, but surely she’ll be fine. What could happen?

From there, Emelie would be a much more comfortable movie if the babysitter (guess her name) whipped out a steak knife and chased these kids. But it’s not a conventional Horror movie. She has the kids pose for photos that seem like a game to them, but are inappropriately morbid to the audience. There’s a scene where she invites the oldest boy into the bathroom with her that isn’t explicitly sexual or violent, but is palpably uncomfortable because even the boy knows this isn’t normal. Scene by scene, the movie pushes you to guess what she’s planning to do to them. The suspense is almost Hitchcockian, except she’s more of a black box than most of Hitchcock’s villains.

The older brother has to pull it together and find ways to call for help when the sitter hasn’t technically done anything explicable yet. It’s surprisingly effective character growth for the kid, who begins the movie as a pouting brat, and who wouldn’t be equipped to stand up to an adult no matter what his attitude was. He’s the only line of protection and he’s intensely vulnerable – perhaps the most vulnerable because Emelie reads him like a book from the minute she steps into the house.

I can’t recommend this to most parents. Many of my friends are having kids now, and for most of them, the natural fear for their children is going to make the tension of this movie too much. Again, it’s not a movie that has them eaten alive or smashed by a hammer. It’s the slow menace that will be too much. It’s easier and more escapist to fear that a werewolf, vampire, or even a serial killer will come in from outside your neighborhood and go after your family. Emelie is a movie about someone you think you can trust.

I spent so much of the ending of this movie yelling at the TV. No movie has sunk its teeth into me like this in years.

Hereditary (2018)

This is Ari Aster’s debut film. You know you’ve done well when critics argue whether the first movie you’ve ever made is a masterpiece. The guy has an entire career to turn in his masterpiece, but sure, let’s work ourselves into a froth now.

Anything Hereditary does well at all, it does masterfully. If it had a different ending, it’d probably be my favorite movie of the year because of how powerful the rest of it is. Instead it’s one of the best movies that I don’t feel like rewatching.

There are few pieces of art in any medium about an abusive family member dying before anyone gets catharsis from them. You probably have someone in your family who died before someone else got closure with them, and if you’re lucky enough not to, you definitely know somebody whose family has that kind of suffering. Hereditary wallows in the discomforting legacy of a grandmother who traumatized both her daughter and granddaughter. She’s dead, and her shadow is still longer than that of any living member of the family. She haunts them figuratively, and eventually we’ll wonder if she’s doing it literally.

Toni Collette deserves all the praise for her performance that she’s gotten. Nominate her for stuff, and write her fan mail. She lays bare this damaged mother who knows she can’t let go, who hates her mother for always interfering in her parenting, and demeaned her daughter for not being a boy. At the same time this life has made her so uptight and repressed that she can’t talk to her kids honestly without exploding. It took one scene to sell me on this movie, when Collette’s character went to a grief support group and her hatred of her own insecurities flowed out of her. This is not a stock Horror character with stock Horror angst. This is something real and festering, that makes you wish exorcisms worked on trauma.

And suspense? The clucking of a tongue here is scarier than the rev of a chainsaw in another movie.

It’s to Hereditary’s credit that act one pivoted the film somewhere entirely different than I’d expected. This isn’t a “and there are also ghosts!” pivot. This is a demolition of the family’s status quo mid-grieving process, which is the sort of curveball I could only expect A24 films to support. Suffice to say that this family goes through a Hell that, even without the eerie and horrific elements, you can’t expect any family to be equipped to deal with.

If this movie had come out in the 1980s, it would be a part of the canon right next to The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby.

It’s 2018 now, and I’m not surprised that mainstream audiences hated it.

It is an unpleasant movie with an unpleasant view of both family and the supernatural. The characters lack agency because the themes of powerlessness before death and grief are so important, and that builds to an ending that is both tricky to understand and, once you understand it, doesn’t feel worth sitting through an entire movie to get to. It has more to say about who we are as people than the average Horror movie, but the actual payoff of its climax is just another example of an overwhelming trend that I’m sick of. No matter how well executed the rest of your story is, the ending needs to satisfy. Hopelessness is not its own answer.

Come back Friday for Slice, Summer of '84, and the new hotness that is Nicholas Cage's Mandy!

Source: http://johnwiswell.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-halloween-list-quiet-place-emelie.html

[newstfionline]

Parenthood lost: How incarcerated parents are losing their children forever

By Eli Hager and Anna Flagg, Washington Post, December 3, 2018

Lori Lynn Adams was a mother of four living in poverty when Hurricane Floyd struck North Carolina in 1999, flooding her trailer home and destroying her children’s pageant trophies and baby pictures. No stranger to moneymaking scams, Adams was convicted of filing a fraudulent disaster-relief claim with FEMA for a property she did not own. She also passed dozens of worthless checks to get by.

Adams served two year-long prison stints for these “blue-collar white-collar crimes,” as she calls them. Halfway through her second sentence, with her children--three toddlers and a ­14-year-old--temporarily under county supervision, Adams said she got a phone call from a family court attorney. Her parental rights, he informed her, were being irrevocably terminated.

Before going to prison, Adams had sometimes drifted from one boyfriend to another, leaving her kids with a babysitter, and she didn’t always have enough food in the house. But she was not charged with any kind of child abuse, neglect or endangerment. Still, at a hearing that took place 300 miles from the prison, which she couldn’t attend because officials wouldn’t transport her there, she lost her children. Adams’s oldest daughter went to live with her father, and her other three kids were put up for adoption. She was banned from seeing them again.

“I know what I did was wrong, and I had to pay the price for my actions,” Adams, now 50, said. “But this is the most extreme price there is.”

Mothers and fathers who have a child placed in foster care because they are incarcerated--but who have not been accused of child abuse, neglect, endangerment, or even drug or alcohol use--are more likely to have their parental rights terminated than those who physically or sexually assault their kids, according to a Marshall Project analysis of approximately 3 million child-welfare cases nationally.

In about 1 in 8 of these cases, incarcerated parents lose their parental rights, regardless of the seriousness of their offenses, according to the analysis of records maintained by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services between 2006 and 2016. That rate has held steady over time.

Female prisoners, whose children are five times more likely than those of male inmates to end up in foster care, have their rights taken away most often.

To some adoption proponents, immediately finding children a nurturing home should always be the priority. Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard Law School, said that while some parents turn their lives around when they leave prison, their children should not have to wait for a family.

“You never know if they’ll just go right back to a life of crime,” she said, “and kids deserve better than that.”

A growing contingent of family advocates, however, say that removing children from their birth families is a destructive act in itself. A prison stint alone, they say, should not be grounds for severing the bond between birth parent and child, which can lead to profound negative effects on children’s mental and physical health.

“The right to your children is the most fundamental one you have, but we strip it from incarcerated parents so casually,” said Kathleen Creamer, a family attorney at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia. “This is the family separation crisis that no one knows about.”

Over the past few decades, the number of imprisoned parents in the United States has skyrocketed. From 1991 to 2007, it jumped by more than 357,000. Today, more than half of the 2.2 million people in the nation’s prisons and jails have minor children.

All the while, lawmakers have taken a tougher stance on troubled and absent parents.

In 1997, with first lady Hillary Clinton’s vocal support, Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which mandated that federally funded state child-welfare programs begin termination of parental rights in most cases in which children had been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months. The measure’s supporters hoped it would pave the way to adoption for kids who had been languishing in temporary, often unstable homes while their biological parents tried to kick a drug habit or find housing.

The legislation also created bonuses for states that facilitate adoptions. Since 1998, the federal government has doled out more than $639 million in these rewards.

But the law’s largely unintended consequence was to make incarcerated parents, who now spend well more than 15 months on average behind bars because of the tough prison sentences of the same era, more vulnerable to losing their children.

According to the Marshall Project analysis, at least 32,000 incarcerated parents since 2006 had their children permanently taken from them without being accused of physical or sexual abuse, though other factors, often related to their poverty, may have been involved. Of those, nearly 5,000 appear to have lost their parental rights because of their imprisonment alone.

No significant racial disparities were found in the relative rates at which these parents’ rights are terminated. But given that African Americans are disproportionately incarcerated--1 in 10 black children have a parent behind bars, compared with about 1 in 60 white children--this phenomenon affects them in outsize numbers.

Family court cases are complicated, all the more so when parents are incarcerated. Inmates are by definition absent, and they sometimes have a history of other child-welfare disputes. Whether to terminate their parental rights is a multifaceted decision made by judges on a case-by-case basis, and the legal grounds for doing so vary by state.

Yet the ways that other parents with child-welfare cases can stave off that outcome--spending time with their children regularly, showing up for court hearings, taking parenting classes, being employed, having stable housing and paying child support to reimburse the government for the costs of foster care--are all next to impossible from confinement. Corrections departments are not obligated to drive inmates to family court, and county child-welfare agencies rarely have the resources to bring children to faraway prisons for visits with Mom or Dad.

Judges, in turn, sometimes make the life-altering decision to terminate imprisoned parents’ rights without meeting them.

“There’s an impression among some in our community that incarcerated folks don’t deserve to have a family,” said Judge Anthony Capizzi, immediate past president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

Malissa Gamble, a Philadelphia mother of two, went to prison for nearly 15 months in 2003 on a parole violation stemming from a charge of receiving stolen property. Within weeks of her release, there was a hearing scheduled to consider terminating her parental rights.

At one point, the judge said, “The mother in this case is not available because she is incarcerated,” according to Gamble.

“No she’s not! The mother is sitting right here! I’m here!” she said she shouted from her seat in the courtroom.

Because Gamble was freed in time to make it there, she was able to keep her kids.

Amanda Alexander, executive director of the Detroit Justice Center and a senior research scholar at the University of Michigan Law School, sees the dichotomy between what’s best for parents and what’s best for kids as a false one. The child-welfare system, she said, certainly must find young people a stable home. But it should also help their mothers and fathers stay in their lives in a productive way, along with siblings and other relatives.

“In most cases, kids are better off by all kinds of metrics when they have a relationship with their birth families,” she said.

Dorothy Roberts, an expert on race, gender and family law at the University of Pennsylvania, said the underlying problem in the child-welfare system is decision-makers’ bias against poor parents, especially incarcerated mothers of color. The just thing to do as a society, she said, would be to better support these families with affordable housing, food assistance, drug treatment and child care, including in prisons.

“Instead of actually responding to the struggles of poor families ... we’ve decided that it’s simpler to take their children away,” she said.

At the very least, said Corey Best, a fate so stark as losing one’s children should not be irreversible.

In 2004, Best was in a bad place: a New Orleans jail cell, facing an aggravated battery charge after getting in a fight with a drug dealer. Before then, he said, he had been close with his 3-year-old son, Corey Jr., practicing counting and reading with him before bedtime. But based on Best’s history of substance abuse and arrests, plus his six months of incarceration and the resulting lack of contact with his son, his parental rights were terminated.

“I needed drug treatment and services to be offered to me while I was in jail,” said Best. “But I love my son.”

Best, 45, has been sober for more than a decade and is a successful consultant and public speaker on child welfare. But he still isn’t allowed to contact Corey Jr., whose teenage years he has only glimpsed on Facebook.

Each year on his son’s birthday, he buys a card, writes a thought or aspiration, and places it in a special box. Corey Jr.’s adoptive mother, who declined to comment for this story, indicated through a friend that she might be willing to introduce the boy to his biological father, but only after he turns 18.

Meanwhile, Best said, he’s devoting himself to his second son, Corvin, an artistic and athletic 9-year-old who loves making paper airplanes.

“Maybe this is God’s way,” he said, “of showing me some kind of redemption.”