#stop asking me why i have so many copies of moby dick

[ashipwreckcoast]

i could, in theory, buy a tofu press

[strangerfictions]

Book Recommendations (Billy Hargrove x Plus Size Reader)

Request: Can I request Billy Hargrove x plus size reader fic? Reader is shy and plus size and is always wearing bright patterned shirts/high waist jeans. She babysits her neighbour's kids who go to the swimming pool a lot. She hangs around the sidelines when she's at the pool, never getting in, just reading. Billy always tries to speak with her because he likes her. Fluff please! Sorry if you're not up for writing a plus size reader

Warnings: Lots of Fluff!

Words: 3045

A/N: Thanks to @morganofthecoves1 for this awesome request. I had a blast working on this! First fic back after a little bit of a hiatus! College has been crazy since mid-March and so I had to push writing to the sideline while I focused on my degree. I am now finished the second year of my degree and honestly, I can't believe it but I loved this request so much so I knew I had to work on this for my first fic back! Also, I want to start writing more plus size fics as I am plus size and love plus size fics so damn much! If anyone has requests for them let me know!

 It was mid-July and the sun had been beating down on Hawkins for months now. You never got used to the heat during this time of year but you still had to work. Every year since Freshman year you had babysat your neighbour's kids and despite this being your final summer before college this year was no different. You didn’t mind because all you had to do was bring them to the pool every day and they were happy.

It was the hottest day of the year and so you knew bringing the kids to the pool was the best idea. You packed your bag to include sun cream, money, and two books to read by the side of the pool. You never really got into the pool as you never really felt comfortable in a bikini or swimsuit, especially around the girls of Hawkins who were considered beautiful because they were thin. It wasn’t that you weren’t confident because you were confident the majority of the time but having so little on in front of so many people made you feel vulnerable in a way. You knew you would eventually have to give in but not today.

You left the house early that morning wearing your usual attire. You loved the recent trend of colourful shirts and so you have been going out and buying them every couple of weeks. You now had an entire collection that you loved. You went for a tropical print shirt along with your blue high waisted jeans.

After you got the send-off from your neighbours you walked the kids to the pool for opening time. It was always best to get there for opening time because it got very busy very quickly. It didn’t take too long to get to the pool as you and the kids talked about random things on the way there. However, you were a bit early and so you all had to stand around in the little shade outside the gates of the pool.

As the opening time came nearer more and more people began to appear outside the pool. Before long you saw the familiar mullet-wearing lifeguard walk towards the gate. You and Billy had always been on different social scales. He was popular and you just about existed in high school. Despite this Billy had been trying to talk to you for weeks now but you were way too shy to say more than two words to him.  You watch as he opens the gate allowing people into the pool. The kids run in front of you to get your usual spot near the back of the pool. Both you and Billy yell at them to stop running at the same time causing you both to smile at each other.

“Morning Y/N!” Billy smiles at you as you walk past him.

“Good Morning Billy” you say quietly as you walk past him and over to where the kids have set up for the day.

The day went by as it usually did, hot and slow. It was mid-afternoon and you were sat at the edge of the pool with your feet dangling in while reading your book. It wasn’t like there was much for you to do by the pool and reading was something you enjoyed.

You could feel a shadow looming over you and you knew who it was. Every day Billy will approach you and ask you what you are reading today you will answer with as little words as possible and he will go back to his post for the rest of the day.

“So what are you reading today Y/N?” You look up from your book as Billy crouches beside you.

“Emma by Jane Austen” You say shyly looking back down at the pages.

“You know I’d love to read more classics but I just can never get into them they are way too wordy you know” You look away from your book and back at Billy surprised.

“You like to read?” You ask shifting a little as you feel the hot tiles beneath your jeans.

“Sometimes, when I get the chance. What would you recommend to start with?”

“Something small maybe. Ease yourself into it. I loved The Great Gatsby, it’s one of my favourites, so maybe that would be a good start?” You suggest as Billy stands up.

“Great thanks! I’ll stop by the bookstore later and pick up a copy. I’ll let you know how it goes.” He winks at you and walks back to his post. You glance around and spot some of the older women staring at you. That was all you needed.

The rest of the day went by quietly. You finished reading ‘Emma’ and spent the rest of the day talking to the kids who’s friends had left early that day. You got home around nine the night and spent the night lying in bed thinking about Billy and the fact that he likes to read. You always found stereotypes weird but one glance at Billy and you would think he would never have touched a book in his life. Although he had done well in English class so you weren’t all that surprised.

The next morning followed the same routine. Like clockwork, the same people turned up at the pool and just before opening Billy’s head emerged from the staff room. This time he was carrying something in his hand. The familiar blue cover standing out to you. He’s been reading ‘The Great Gatsby’ you thought to yourself as you pushed the kids forward so they could get your usual spot.

As soon as Billy opens the gates everyone dashes for their usual spots but you take your time knowing that the kids will save your spot.

“Morning Y/N” Billy says as you walk through the gates

“Morning. Enjoying Gatsby?” You stop beside him to catch his answer.

“You know what I didn’t think I would enjoy it all that much because you know it’s the twenties how great could it be but I am loving it!” He beams at you.

“Oh great, I’m glad you are enjoying it so much! Well, I guess I’ll see you later” You say turning around and walking towards the kids.

After setting up you sit down on the edge of the pool and sit there for the rest of the day reading.

After a few hours, the familiar shadow appears over you.  A little earlier than usual you thought to yourself. Billy crouches down beside you holding his book.

“So, I just finished it…and I did not expect it to go the way it did. Thank you for recommending it!” Billy says as you turn towards him

“Oh yeah, the ending is pretty crazy. I think that’s why I loved it so much. I’m glad I could help!” You smile folding your book across your knee, so it doesn’t fall into the pool.

“Got any more recommendations for me?” He asks

“Have you tried Gothic fiction before?” You ask to see what he is really into.

“Not really. I’ve heard good things though”

“Okay, I would say start with something like Dracula by Bram Stoker or Frankenstein by Mary Shelly” You suggest as you Billy takes in the info.

“Cool. I’ll check them out. I have a question for you?” Billy stands up getting uncomfortable from crouching

“Uhm sure!” You say not knowing where this was going especially since it was Billy.

“Why don’t you get into the pool?” He asks as you squint at him through the sun.

“No reason I just prefer being able to read on the edge and keep an eye on the kids” you lie to him. You can tell that he does not believe you but either way, he accepts it as an answer.

“Alright then well, I will let you continue. See you later.” You watch as Billy walks back to his post knowing that you are being stared at by the older women on the other side of the pool.

The next week goes by similar to this. You now stop at the gate to ask Billy how he is getting on with the book you recommended. He tells gives you his initial opinion and you go to your usual spot. Once he is finished, he will let you know by crouching beside you and talking about it with you for a few minutes and then you both go about your day.

Since you recommend ‘The Great Gatsby’ Billy has now read Dracula, Frankenstein, Moby Dick, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Scarlett Letter, Animal Farm and Pride and Prejudice. You were enjoying talking to him about books. You even let him borrow some and that was something you rarely did! This little routine with Billy went on until the end of Summer. You knew it was going to happen, but you weren’t looking forward to having to give one last recommendation.

You were standing in your usual spot of the kids when you spot Billy coming to open the gates. The kids inch forward so they can make the most out of the last day of summer but you hang back letting the others in Infront of you. You walk in behind a group of older ladies who had stopped to flirt with Billy. You hung back behind them trying to remain as invisible as possible. Billy noticed you standing back and tried to get through the conversation with the women as quickly as he could. You watch as he gets a little irritated as the women keep talking.

“Sorry ladies I wish I could stand around chatting all day but I need to get to my post!” You watch as they walk away and Billy smiles at you.

“Hey sorry I didn’t know how to let them down lightly”

“It's alright. Just wanted to see what you thought of Wuthering Heights?” You ask fumbling with your fingers

“I went into it with an open mind but fuck it was bad. It was all so bad. I see what you mean now!” You both laugh knowing how bad you both thought of the book.

“Right! I never understood why so many people liked it. I guess in a sick way it's romantic but that’s a stretch” You say laughing with Billy. You look over to the kids to make sure they are doing okay but you then spot that you are getting evil looks from Billy’s admirers.

“We better walk towards my post before something turns nasty” Billy smiles at you as you both begin to walk towards the back of the pool.

“Thanks for helping me out by the way! It’s not often I get to talk to anyone about reading because…well, I’m sure you get it” Billy says quietly looking down at the ground.

“It’s cool. It’s something I enjoy and if I get to help someone out with recommendations then even better!”

“So, I’m guessing you are going to college soon?” He asks as he stops beside his chair leaning up against the frame.

“I’m leaving tomorrow. It’s going to be so strange leaving all of this behind” You say sadly shuffling on your feet as the heat burns through your shoes.

“What time do you leave tomorrow?” You look at Billy suspiciously

“I think we leave at about midday…Why?” You ask still giving Billy a suspicious look.

“Perfect! I need you to meet me here tomorrow morning just before opening time” You open your mouth to protest.

“Don’t question it just meet me around the back” He argues back at you

“Fine, I guess I’ll see you here tomorrow morning” You say walking away smiling to yourself.

The next day arrives faster than you would have hoped for. You weren’t ready to say goodbye to Hawkins just yet but NYU was now your home for the foreseeable future. You got up super early and finished packing up the last few things into your dad's car. You told your parents that you wanted to go for one last walk before leaving and so at eight-thirty you left your house and walked the same route you had been so used to walking for the past four years except you now knew that this would be that last time for a while and as you got closer to the pool your emotions began to catch up with you. You had to stop so you could hype yourself up. You knew you would more than likely be back next summer so after a few minutes of hyping yourself up and telling yourself over and over that you would be back you continued down to the pool.

Once you got to the pool you walked around the back to find Billy sitting on a wall cigarette in hand.

“Hi” you call over to get his attention

“Oh hey! I thought maybe you had decided not to show up.” He says throwing his cigarette on the ground and stomping on it.

“Oh yeah sorry, I had to stop for a few minutes…It’s weird knowing I won't see this place again until next summer” You say looking down at the ground embarrassed.

“Yeah, I get it. I was like that when we moved from California. It’s not a fun time but I’m sure you will fit in up in NYU.”

“Well, it’s not like I fit in here…anyways why am I meeting you in the sketchiest part of the pool?”

“Well funny you should ask! I wanted to thank you somewhere that wasn’t going to have onlookers and well the back of the pool never has onlookers so here we are”

“Thank me? For What?” You ask sitting down next to him on the wall.

“For the book recommendations and for talking to me about books. I always feel awkward reading but seeing you read at the pool gave me a little bit of confidence to do it so yeah thanks” With that Billy pulls out something wrapped in brown paper and tied with ribbon and hands it to you.

“I didn’t wrap it Max did.” Billy says as you take from him

“Billy you didn’t have to get me anything you literally could have just said thanks and went our separate ways and I wouldn’t have minded” You said as you slowly unwrapped the ribbon

“Yeah well, I don’t want to go our separate ways. You’ve been a great friend and I genuinely have had such a great time getting to know you the past few months so I would hope that we can stay in touch” You unwrap the brown paper to reveal a limited edition copy of ‘The Great Gatsby’.

“Oh wow. You didn’t have to Billy! I don’t think I can accept this honestly”

“Why did I know you were going to do that! You’re way too humble Y/N just take the damn book, please! I remembered when you recommended it to me you said it was one of your favourite books and well I saw it in the book store and thought you might like it so please just take it!” Billy pleads with you as you smile at him

“That’s sentimental and sweet thank you! I had planned on giving you something but don’t expect it to be something as impressive!” You take your backpack off your back and rummage and grab something out of it. You hand a book flipped over to Billy along with a fancy envelope.

“Okay so I didn’t have wrapping paper, but I saw this and thought you had to read it. It’s not your style at all but I’m sure it sparked something in you when you started talking to me” He flipped the book over to find that you had given him a copy of Emma by Jane Austen.

“Also there is a slip of paper in the envelope that lists about 356 books that I would recommend. Not all of them are classics but I think you will enjoy most of them. Also, there’s a library card in there you should check that out sometime…unless that’s too uncool for you.” You say laughing

“Wow…I didn’t expect anything from you all things considering. I guess we had a similar idea. Thank you I’m very much looking forward to reading this and all of the other books you have recommended. Who knew books could bring people together” You both laugh as you stand up.

“I better go. I still have a few more things to pack up before we leave this afternoon” You didn’t want to leave but you knew you had to

“Yeah of course. You better stay in contact though!” Billy says standing up in front of you.

“Obviously. I need to know what you think of all of the books you read from the list!” You both stand looking at each other awkwardly.

“I don’t want to leave. I know I have to but if I leave I may not ever come back again and that scares me” You say trying not to cry.

“It’s alright it’s time for you to move on and start your life elsewhere. You can’t stay in Hawkins all your life no matter how much you want to.” You feel a tear slide down your face and then all of a sudden you are fully crying. Billy walks towards you and pulls you into a hug.

“Jesus Y/N I didn’t think you were a crier” You eventually stop crying and pull away from Billy

“Sorry I don’t know why I am so emotional today it’s stupid because I’ll probably be back next summer and still have to babysit and do the usual summer activities but I just feel weird leaving” You felt stupid for how you were feeling but you also knew it was normal.

“How about I walk you back to your house that way you will be where you need to be and we can continue to talk?” Billy suggests

“Yeah, that would be great!” you say happily turning to begin walking out of the pool.

You both begin to walk towards your house and spend the entire time talking about books and you almost forget that you are leaving in a few hours.

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[j-elaine-hyde]

The Kiss

-Part One-

He watched her walk into the bar. Actually he and every other man in the joint. She breezed through the door, head held high, and took a seat at the end of the bar. Her long wavy raven black hair shining as she shook it out gently, arching her back as she did. She licked her cherry red lips as the bartender approached to take her order. He adjusted his belt as she slowly moved her gaze to his face. He swallowed hard and rushed off quickly to get her drink.

Henry sat there watching her from the opposite side of the bar. He knew it was only a matter of time before the hapless schmoes would start sauntering up to her and offering to buy her next round. Doing their best to win her attention with a cheesy played out pick up line with zero hope of landing her. She was something else and he along with every other man was captivated.

Sure enough the first contender took his shot. He was a tall well built guy, who clearly worked construction. Tanned and scruffy, he was the epitome of rugged masculinity. He bellied up to the bar next to her and slid her a beer.

“Strike one.” Thought Henry. He didn’t even offer her the same drink she currently had. Clearly this woman who was drinking a vodka drink wasn’t going to accept a domestic beer from the table of this guy.

She finally acknowledged his presence, turning to face him, narrowing her eyes. Silently she pushed the bottle back towards him with a single, perfectly manicured, red polished finger. She turned her attention elsewhere, rebuffing his weak advance. He walked away, beer in hand, back to his table. His buddies were razzing him as he shrugged and chugged his beer.

She was halfway through her drink when the next guy approached.

“He thinks he’s smooth...” Henry silently chuckled to himself.

He sauntered up to her, leaning on his elbow against the bar. Giving a superior glance back at the first guy. He nodded and gestured to the bartender for another round for her. He was bolder. He leaned in closer to her and whispered into her ear. She raised an eyebrow in response to whatever this self proclaimed Casanova was lamenting. Without a word she locked eyes with him. He stood up straight, as if under some kind of trance. She made two slow “no” head shakes and off he went.

“Strike two.” Henry smirked as he continued sipping his drink, enjoying watching these men strike out.

The bartender delivered another drink to her as she finished the first. He awkwardly placed it in front of her before backing away, unable to look her in the eye.

“Here comes strike three...” this one was the least promising, at least in Henry’s mind.

He was young. Cocky. Undoubtedly, a frat boy from the nearby university, his Greek lettered shirt and backwards baseball cap giving him away. He “sup” nodded to her as he approached. Clearly violating her personal space as he brushed her hair over her shoulder and stepped in closer still. She held up a single finger and then waved him away without even looking at him. His head jerked back in disgust. Clearly no one had ever rejected him as sharply as she had. His face contorted and he muttered ‘bitch’ as he walked away. This only made her smirk.

Every man tried to hide the fact that they were staring. She was oblivious and impervious to all of it. After a seductively slow sip of her drink she locked eyes on Henry. A steamy gaze and a lip bite was all it took. She held his stare for what seemed like forever, she never wavered. It was a game of psychological chicken, and she was winning. Without even realizing it, he was walking towards her, never dropping her stare. He stood next to her, sliding his hand on the back of her chair, and the other on the bar, claiming her as his, blocking her from everyone else’s view.

She smiled at him, tilted her head and took a sip of her drink. “Hi there.”

Her voice was sultry, she spoke slowly, hypnotizing him. Her confidence was giving him goosebumps. He wasn’t used to women being calm and unaffected by him. For once he was the one feeling giddy and off his game.

“Can I -“

“I’m leaving.” She interrupted.

Completely caught off guard he took a step back. She slid a $50 onto the bar and slid off her barstool, standing even closer to him. She blinked slowly and licked her lips before turning for the door. He stood there baffled and unsure of what had just happened. He hadn’t expected to strike out like the others.

She stopped halfway out the door, locking eyes with him and nodded for him to follow. Like a puppy on a leash, he bound towards her.

She grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him against her. In one swift motion her hand was around the back of his neck and she was intensely kissing him.

He felt the kiss down to his toes. His whole body felt electric. Her kiss coursed through him like poison.

She slowly slid down his body, placing her feet back on the pavement. A smirk crossed her face as she looked at the excited frazzled look on his face. He was breathless.

“Wha- Who are you?” He stammered, having never stammered before in his life.

She silently gave a laugh, his awkwardness clearly pleasing her.

“I’ll see you around.” She stuck out her hand to shake his, clasping her small hand in his giant mitt, before bringing it to her lips, kissing the inside of his wrist. It left a perfect kiss mark in bright cherry red lipstick. He stared down at it and then wide eyed back at her as she climbed into her black Mercedes.

He stood there, unable to move, completely entranced as he watched her drive away. He hadn’t even noticed Chris pull up in his Jeep from the opposite direction. With a befuddled look on his face, Chris tried getting Henry’s attention.

“Dude. Supe. Hey. Henry!” Chris stood there his hands out waving.

Henry stood there, completely oblivious.

Chris patted him on the arm and waved his hand in front of his face. “Hen. Dude. What the fuck?”

Henry shook his head, shaking off the trance she had placed him under. “Hey man.”

“Dude what are you doing? Why are you just standing here? How long have you been out here?” Chris couldn’t figure out why his friend was acting so strangely. “Dude, lets go inside and get some food. I’m starving.”

“Yea.... ok... let’s go.” Henry was slowly coming around. Still lost in thought about the beautiful stranger who had just blown his mind with a kiss, and clouded his brain so heavily.

Chris was leery, “You ok man?”

“You just missed the most amazing woman I’ve ever seen. She kissed me. I think I’m in love with her.” His own words confused him.

“Ok... well let’s go inside and talk about it over some food.” Chris was exaggeratedly gesturing his friend into the bar.

-

Four days had passed since the mysterious woman had kissed him in the bar parking lot. He couldn’t get her out of his head. He saw her every time he closed his eyes. He had vivid dreams about her in which she was seducing him, but was always just out of reach. It drove him crazy, waking up sweaty and out of breath.

He shuffled out onto the deck of Chris’s beach house. Rubbing his head he craved coffee. Joining Chris for breakfast he plopped into a chair, reaching for a mug.

“Dude... what’s that on your wrist?” Chris motioned with his head.

Henry looked down at his wrist, the kiss was as solid and vibrant as the moment she planted it. He couldn’t figure it out. He had showered and scrubbed. But nothing was removing the cherry red proof.

“It’s from that woman at the bar...it won’t come off.”

Chris furrowed his brow, giving Henry a skeptical look. “That’s weird man. How many days has it been? Four?”

“Yea. Dude I don’t know what she did to me. But I’ve dreamt about her every night since then. I can’t get her out of my head. I need to find her. I have to see her again.”

“Maybe ask the bartender. Maybe he knows who she is.” Chris shrugged and chomped on a piece of bacon.

-

Chris was perusing the stacks of the local library. He secretly loved hiding away in the rows of books. He had been there for an hour, and had made his way to a long forgotten corner. A worn ancient copy of Moby Dick tucked under his arm, he was reading spines unaware of someone watching him from other side of the shelf.

Her dark eyes flashed when she saw his face. He was next. She climbed the rack ladder and knocked a few books on the floor setting her trap. He heard the clamor and rushed around the corner. There she was. A vision of physical perfection. Her lean leg haphazardly balancing on a the step as the other was extended for balance. Her skirt just short enough to stir his manhood and send his imagination into overdrive.

That’s when he lunged. Call it a 6th sense. At that very moment she teetered and lost her balance, falling into the arms of Captain America himself.

“You saved me.” She mewed in her slow seductive tone, even lower now as a whisper.

Their faces were inches apart. Her arms wrapped around him, he cradled her against his chest.

“Hi.” He attempted to give her that Chris Evans smolder, but got lost in her eyes.

As they stood there, eyes locked, that seductive smirk crossed her face. He couldn’t stand it. He leaned in, colliding his lips with hers. Without her feet touching the floor they managed to readjust. Her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist, he held her tightly against his body.

Their kiss intensified as his hand slid into her hair, padding her head from the wall of books as he pushed her back against it. The intense passion of their kiss continued to build. He couldn’t control himself. He’d never felt this way before. The charge running through his body made every fiber of his being crave her.

She reached down between her legs and worked to undo his pants. She watched him as he kissed her. His eyes tightly shut, feverishly kissing her. Without hesitation he undid his pants, positioning himself inside her as he began thrusting deeper and deeper, pounding into her against the wall of books.

She whimpered between heavy breaths as Chris groaned and grunted in hushed tones. He couldn’t stop kissing her as he buried himself deep inside of her, frantically getting closer and closer to completion. She watched him as he buried his face into her chest as his hips jerked and jolted. His body tensing as he climaxed. Finally with a deep sigh he leaned back, seeing a satisfied smile on her face, her eyes dark and intense. He stood there hypnotized, still inside of her.

She kissed him sweetly planting a firm cherry red kiss right below his collarbone as she unwrapped one of her legs from his waist. He shifted, pulling out as she continued to kiss him. Sliding down to her feet.

“Pants.” She said standing there, his jeans around his knees.

“Oh shit. Yea.” He clamored to pull them up, unable to take his eyes off of her.

Once dressed and put back together, he took her hands in his and stared.

“You’re mine.” He said in a deep low voice, his blue eyes intense.

She smirked, brushed down her skirt and walked away without a word. He stood there watching her leave, unable to move or speak.

He didn’t know how long he had been standing there, but his phone ringing pulled him out of his daze.

“Hello?” He rubbed his forehead as he answered.

“Hey Cap. I’m gonna run to that bar to ask about that woman. Wanna grab a drink?” Henry innocently asked with determination in his voice.

A low snarl escaped Chris’s lips. A fire lit inside of him fueling a possessive rage. He gritted his teeth as he seethed, “sure.”

“Cool. Meet you there in 10?” Henry sensed something was off, but decided not to pry.

“Sounds good, bud.” Chris’s response was monotone and hostile as he hung up.

-

Chris was distracted, swerving to maintain his lane. He was obsessed. All he could see was her face, her hushed moans still rang in his ears as he pulled into the parking lot.

He walked in and sat down at the bar. No sign of her. He hoped she wouldn’t show and that the bartender was none the wiser and just as mystified and curious as they were. He couldn’t let Henry find her.

While Chris sat spellbound at the bar, Henry had stopped for gas. As he was about to turn left out of the gas station he saw the blacked out Mercedes speed passed.

He flew into the road, cutting off a Honda Civic, determined to chase her down. He followed the speeding black car all the way to a large solid steel gate. The tall concrete walls blocked out any chance of a view. The car slid inside the narrow opening as it began closing behind her. He pulled his car over to the side of the street and parked. Peering around he tried to see beyond the wall when a very large man dressed all in black knocked on his window. Not wanting any trouble he rolled down his window.

“I’m sorry Sir, but you can’t park here. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“Sure thing. Not a problem.” Henry nodded and waved as he put his car in reverse.

He had found her, but lost her at the same time. He had no idea what this building was, but he was going to find out. He turned the car around and headed to meet Chris at the bar.

To Be Continued...

[kmsherrard]

In praise of roller coaster rides

“...the thousand concurring accidents of such an audacious enterprise….”

-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Despite what teachers of high school science classes solemnly intone, this business of doing science is the least straightforward endeavor that can possibly be imagined. This was brought home to me in a series of unfortunate events that unfolded this week.

At first, it seemed to be that rare triumph where my simple test of a straightforward prediction actually yielded a clear positive result, instead of the more typical back-to-the-drawing board head-scratcher. If this were a story, that the protagonist was a protein named Diaphanous could serve as a hint that the plot would not prove as solid as one might hope. (Like many genes first discovered in fruit flies, Diaphanous evokes the appearance of animals lacking a functional version of that protein).

The backstory: Lately, my research has been on how stress fibers remodel  to accommodate the movements of migrating cells. But as I work on cells in intact tissues, namely the rind of follicular cells that envelops the developing cluster of cells that give rise to a fruit fly egg, I like to consider the natural experiments that unfold in the course of normal development. For example, these follicle cells migrate for a time, going round and round like hamsters running on a wheel, but then they stop and do other things, like flatten out and secrete the eggshell. They still have stress fibers—these are long contractile bundles of a similar composition to muscle, that help attach the cells to the fibrous surface outside them. But these later-stage stress fibers are much stouter and of somewhat different composition.

I had already established that the stress fibers in the migrating cells depend on an unusual partner, amusingly called DAAM, to form. The more typical protein to help build stress fibers is DAAM’s cousin Diaphanous, but I’d done experiments depleting Diaphanous that clearly showed it was not needed in this case. When I depleted DAAM, though, the stress fibers got really wispy. Oddly enough, I’d noticed that in the much later stages, after the cells stopped migrating, had stress fibers unaffected by loss of DAAM.

So the experiment I wanted to do next was to deplete Diaphanous in the later stages. This was not completely straightforward to execute, though, because I had to avoid depleting it too early. I’d already seen that this caused cells to have trouble with their normal round of cell divisions. It’s a common problem in this sort of work that it can be harder to study later processes if you mess things up before they have begun to happen. The solution makes use of the dazzling array of tissue-specific drivers of gene expression that have been invented for fruit flies. They allow you to drive expression of a gene at specific times and places, targeting particular processes you want to study. To keep a gene from being expressed, you can use something called RNAi, which basically makes a cell chop up the instructions for making a protein sent from the DNA so that protein does not get produced.

In short, I needed a driver that acted late in the follicle cells but not early. Our lab did not have such a driver, since we study the earlier stages. But we’d read a paper with some very clever experiments that made use of just such a late driver, one called Cy2. We requested the fly stock from one of the paper’s authors and she promptly mailed it off to us. Fly researchers are awesomely generous. It’s a tradition that goes back to the earliest days of the field over a century ago to share reagents this way.

Chapter the First: Quarantine. The flies arrived and had to be put in quarantine, out of an abundance of caution concerning the possible introduction of mites into our hundreds of lab stocks. In practice, this consists of isolating the vials on the top of the lab refrigerator. All stocks that arrive from elsewhere must be taken through quarantine, save those from the renowned and very reliably mite-free Bloomington stock center. It meant a delay to the start of my planned experiment, until I could obtain 3rd instar larvae and wash them, a rather amusing exercise on which I have previously posted.

So there the flies sat, two healthy vials with clearly written labels: Cy2/(Cyo); Dr/TM6b. This cryptic shorthand conveyed that along with the driver I’d asked for, the flies conveniently included markers on another chromosome, in case I wanted to build more things into the stock. Annoyingly, they were all senescent adults and developing pupal cases—ideal for surviving the mailing process, but the worst possible stage of colony development for obtaining sufficient larvae for my purposes. I would have to wait several weeks for the new generation to produce larvae I could wash.

In pre-covid times, I could have done the cross right away with existing males, dissecting the offspring on a quarantine-use microscope belonging to a neighboring lab. Normally we share a lot of equipment freely in our department. But the physical distancing requirements have temporarily stopped that sort of thing. And we can’t risk getting mites onto the equipment we use for all our normal work.

To shorten the waiting time (a frequent concern of fruit fly researchers, especially I would think those of us who work on adult rather than embryonic or larval structures, meaning our crosses must extend to the full 10+ days of development time beyond any stock-building that precedes it), I planned to wash enough larvae to siphon off a number of males for the experimental cross. To that end, I also began “blowing up” the stocks I would obtain the females from; I could virgin them ahead of time and have them all ready to go as soon as their husbands emerged from their pupal cases.

When you’re waiting to wash a quarantine stock, impatient for the experiment to begin, they seem to take longer to develop, much like a watched pot. The stock contained the mutation Tubby, which makes for shorter flies but a longer developmental time, so that was part of it. Also room temperature (on top of the fridge) slows development compared to the flies’ optimal temperature of 25 C (that’s 77 to your Fahrenheiters...and to be honest, most of us American scientists are very compartmentalized in their understanding of Celsius; outside of the lab context we speak it no better than the average U.S. citizen). So far, then, the slowness makes sense both physical and psychological. But why the quarantined flies should always produce their burst of 3rd instar larvae on a weekend day, and on the one weekend day I don’t pop into the lab, is more puzzling. But it is the rule, I have found.

I wasn’t going to let it happen this time. I watched them like a hawk (a mosquito hawk?) and sure enough, it was a Sunday when all the larvae began to wander. Wandering larvae is the other, more romantic name for the 3rd instar of Drosophila melanogaster, because they have at last eaten their fill of the mushy rotten fruit they have been burrowing through, and there is nothing else for them to do but come out into the light and air and begin to claim their inheritance as winged creatures of the sky. First, though, they must choose a spot in which to prepare their new bodies. Here in that lab, they climb around on the clean walls of the vial, above the caramel-colored dollop of food, fat, juicy larvae as big as a good-sized grain of rice, big enough to grasp gently in forceps and take through the three ritual baths, soapy water, ethanol, and salty water, that remove any lurking mites or mite eggs from their surfaces. After being placed in a fresh vial and wicked dry with a twist of Kimwipe (lab Kleenex), they will crawl around a bit more, mingling with their certified-mite-free compatriots. In a few more hours they will settle down, stop moving, and let their skins harden into bark. Inside that bark, they pretty much dissolve themselves, save for a few set-aside clusters of cells. They go on to rebuild their bodies into the adult form, complete with intricate jointed legs and multitudinously-faceted eyes and iridescent, cellophane-like wings over the course of about a week (at room temperature).

I spent several hours washing more larvae than usual to establish a clean stock, wanting to have plenty of extra males to father the experimental crosses. If I’d had access to the quarantine microscope, I could have selected extra male larvae—you can already distinguish males and females at this stage-- but it would not really have saved time. I played the numbers game instead. It was a Sunday afternoon, quietest time of the week in lab, and very peaceful. I took my time and changed the bath solutions often to make sure there wasn’t too much soapy water in the ethanol or too much ethanol in the final rinse. I wanted this all to go smoothly with no delays.

I put the now-lawful vial in the 25C incubator to develop, after carefully copying the genotype from the original handwritten labels: Cy2/(Cyo); Dr/TM6b. Incidentally, there are lots of markers of chromosomes, many going back to the original mutations described by early fly workers such as Calvin Bridges and Alfred Sturtevant. They let you follow with visible traits the invisible genes that you wish to follow through the generations. Various labs have their favorite markers, but some such as Cyo (which makes for curly wings) are ubiquitous, and Dr and TM6b were familiar to me as well. Dr (short for Dropped, I don’t know why) makes the eyes very slitted, and TM6b is a whole set of markers that comprises what is called a balancer chromosome: a chromosome that has been scrambled and rearranged so that even though it still has all its genes, they are in the wrong places. This means that none of the usual recombination between sister chromosomes that occurs when egg and sperm form can happen. The advantage to the researcher is that this keeps genes segregated in predictable places. Otherwise, all those markers would not be reliable indicators letting you keep track of the genes you put in place from one generation to another. TM6b can actually include various different markers, but one of them is Tb, easy to recognize in both the shorter larvae and pupal cases and to some extent discernible in adults as well.

Chapter the Second: Cross Purposes. Fast forward two weeks (you can—I sadly could not—this being November of 2020, I would certainly have appreciated the distraction). So I waited, none too patiently, for the new adults to emerge. Meanwhile, I tended the stocks I would virgin for females: two different RNAi lines for Diaphanous and one, a control, for its cousin DAAM which I already knew was not required for the later-stage stress fibers. I built up a collection of ladies in waiting, captured shortly after their eclosion and isolated in vials away from all male contact, so I could be sure their offspring would be the genotype I wanted. [A note about the term ‘eclosion’: one might be tempted to call the emergence of the adults from their pupal cases ‘hatching’, but that term is reserved for the larvae coming out their eggshell. You only hatch once, even in the doubled lifestyle of these metamorphosing beasties.]

Finally the washed flies began to eclose. All my usable Cy2 flies were in that one vial. I briefly knocked them out with carbon dioxide gas, used a fine paintbrush to separate the males, and added 3 males each to the three bevvies of expectant females. There were still a few males left, enough to establish the new stock of Cy2 for future use.

At last, more than a month after conceiving it, I’d begun the experimental cross. It would be two more weeks before I had the flies to dissect and the beginnings of an answer. Fly work involves a lot of waiting, and to cope with that we tend to have a lot of irons in the fire. All that juggling can be rather distracting. Sometimes, depending on how other experiments have gone in the interim, I’ve unfortunately moved on from the original urgency of a question by the time the flies are ready to examine. It’s a hazard of the work.

Though I did not yet realize it, I’d made two mistakes. First, I should have looked a bit more carefully at those Cy flies. Second, I should have done the proper control. Sure, crossing them to the DAAM flies was a pretty good control, but there was an even stricter one, that tested whether the driver stock alone had any effect (it should not, but you like to be sure). I should have crossed the Cy2 flies to what we call wild-type, a stock called w1118 that has white eyes, incidentally [link] the first fly mutant ever identified and the foundation of fly genetics.

I hadn’t wanted to use up any more of my precious males, and figured I could always do that control later, if the experiment turned out promising. A lot of us cut corners that way, and it isn’t necessarily less efficient. But sometimes it snarls you up and wastes your time instead of saving it, and makes you go through all sorts of contortions trying to make sense of your data with less information than you should have had.

Chapter the Third: The Experiment. I waited out that two weeks, pursuing other work and trying not to pay too much attention to the news. I wore my mask and stayed in touch with my loved ones over zoom and the like. I hung up bird feeders to entertain my cats and my family alike. I went on long walks by the lake. Time passed. At last the grand day arrived: my experimental flies had begun to eclose. I gassed them and tapped them out of the CO2 pad. Now here was a wrinkle I’d shoved to the back of my mind: those extra markers that I didn’t need, the Dr and TM6b. In a clean experiment I’d have gotten rid of them, but that would have required another couple generations. I’d wanted a quick provisional answer, in order to decide whether it was worth the time and trouble to do the more careful version of the experiment. So: would I dissect the TM6b-carrying flies, or the Dr-carrying flies? It had to be one or the other. The balancer chromosome carries a number of mutations so it would be more likely to do something weird to the cells I was interested in. Not that that was very likely, but I might as well be careful. Dr it was then: that only affected the eyes, as far as I knew. What were the chances it would mess up my experiment on stress fibers in follicle cells?

But none of the flies had Dr eyes. That was odd. I looked closer. Half of them sure looked like Tb flies, shorter and a bit chubbier, though you never want to depend on your ability to discern that marker in adults. The others, the longer ones? They did have some oddly short hairs on their dorsal thorax (around the back of the lower neck, if you want to be anthropomorphic about it), much shorter than the clipped ones you see with the marker Stubble. It kind of reminded me of a marker I’d seen once or twice. Well, that must be what these were; maybe the label had been written wrong.

Impatient to get the experiment done, I swept the short-haired flies into a fresh vial with a bit of yeast. The yeast was to encourage egg production (they’re called fruit flies or vinegar flies, but it’s really the yeast on the rotting fruit that they’re after). I added a few males which were there for the same end. You could say the way to a fine set of ovaries is through both the heart and the stomach. Two more days to go before the dissection. For good measure I put some plain-vanilla w1118 flies on yeast to serve as extra controls.

On the appointed day, I got out my fiercely pointed #55 forceps and began the dissection. I nearly messed up by dissecting the early stages by habit—the technique to do so destroys most of the older egg chambers—but luckily remembered what I was about it time, and switched to the method to optimize acquisition of undamaged later stages. I fixed for 15 minutes in 4% paraformaldehyde, rinsed three times in phosphate-buffered saline solution with Triton-X detergent, and added a stain that would label the filamentous actin, the principle component of stress fibers among many other cellular structures. I put it in the lab fridge (the one where no food is allowed!) to stain overnight. The next morning, early, I came in and rinsed off the stain and made slides. Then I went to the womb-like room where one of my favorite workhouse microscope lives, the renowned Nikon 800 laser scanning confocal microscope. I did the necessary 2020 ritual wipe-down of all surfaces with 70% ethanol, and fired her up.

And oh, it was beautiful. I was so disciplined; I began with the controls to set up the correct laser intensity and gain at which to collect all the images, so the brighter ones would not be out of the range of measurable brightness and everything could be properly quantified. But it was already clear from the what I saw on the computer screen as I centered examples, focused, and took images that the experimental egg chambers had strongly reduced stress fibers. I took lots of pictures, happy that for once my experiment had gone as planned and given me a clear answer.

Also, can I just say how much I love the stain Oregon Green phalloidin? The name itself is lovely: as a native of the Pacific northwest I find it so evocative: the green of deep cushiony moss and ferns and forests of hemlock and douglas firs; and phalloidin itself is a stain derived from mushrooms with which those forests are rife. (Phalloidin, now there’s a scary toxin: it binds so tightly to filamentous actin that it stops your heart. Unlike a lot of other toxins, it doesn’t make you nauseated, so you absorb it until it’s too late for any antidote. But that’s why it’s such a good stain. You just have to wear gloves, or wash your hands after pipetting it. And we all wash our hands so often nowadays it makes no never mind.) There’s red phalloidin, and far-red phalloidin, and even ultraviolet phalloidin (but most microscopes don’t have the right filter sets to light it up very well): but green phalloidin is the king as far as I’m concerned. So bright, and a short enough wavelength (only 488 nanometers, vs. 566 or 647) that it shows up structures the more finely. You can definitely see the difference: it’s sharp as can be.

So, I had the preliminary results I had hoped for: the Diaphanous flies had reduced stress fibers. It doesn’t actually happen to me all that often, that I get a clear answer, either what I predicted or the opposite which is almost as good in science. At least that’s progress, an increase in understanding. No, usually I stumble over these head-scratchers of outcomes. Interesting results, but interesting in a complicated way that require a lot more work to make sense of, if you ever do. It’s partly down to most of my experiments involving imaging with a microscope: you get a lot of unexpected information that way, if you keep your eyes open. But it’s also that I seem to be attracted to the sort of problem that does not yield neat answers—the way some people are attracted to overly hairy guys on motorcycles who are a bit too into mild-altering substances and petty crime. I think I’m the one to straighten them out, but usually I’m the one who gets burned. But this time I had prevailed!

This was just a start; of course I needed to replicate, do some more dissections, get more numbers, reach levels of statistical unassailibility. In particular, I didn’t have as many clear examples of the DAAM control as I needed. Also, I’d do the proper control, and maybe even un-double-balance that Cy2 stock to get rid of the pesky extra markers.

Chapter the Fourth: The morning after. Yeah, and now I’d better take the time to figure out what is going on with that marker that is not Dr. Because, unlikely as it was, wouldn’t it be a shame if it were somehow affecting my results? Worst-case scenario—because that’s how we self-questioning scientists have to operate, ever since the dawn of time or at least the Enlightenment—worst-case scenario, then, is this marker, whatever it is, is the thing responsible for the reduction in stress fibers. Oh, but that’s very unlikely, I tell myself. Besides, the DAAM controls didn’t have reduced stress fibers.

I looked at the original handwritten label, still on the vial of flies on top of the fridge in quarantine. Maybe that D might actually be a P. What was Pr? I’d never heard of it.

I went to the master compendium of fruit fly genetics, FlyBase.org, and looked up Pr. Purple, an eye color gene on the first chromosome. I was looking for a gene on the third chromosome, so that couldn’t be it. I tried a different approach: I DuckDuckWent (DuckDuckGoed doesn’t sound right; if you haven’t heard of it, it’s a more private alternative to Google) images of Drosophila markers. There was that classic poster I’ve seen hanging in various labs, of the most common markers. And there was that marker I’d been reminded of, with the very short hairs. Sn it was called. Could that be my marker? It would have to be some pretty bad handwriting, to make an S look like a D; r to n is easier to imagine.

I went back to FlyBase and looked up Sn. It was the gene Singed. Like if you got to close to the outdoor fire pit on the patio (a way to safely hang out with your friends outdoors even during the Chicago winter), and singed your eyebrows most of the way off (and no, I haven’t done that yet). Also on the first chromosome, though. But look here, this is interesting: Singed is an actin-bundling protein. I read further down the page that summarized the work of dozens or hundreds of researchers over the decades. Yes, it was expressed in the ovaries, and yes, it was known to affect stress fibers. That would be worrying if it were my marker. Lucky it’s not.

I wasn’t getting anywhere. I tried yet another method, going to the webpage for the Bloomington stock center. It’s very well organized, and they have a page showing the details of all the balancer stocks they keep. There ought to be a clue here, for any marker that a researcher could assume another lab would recognize. I go down the list to the TM6b stocks, and find it. Pri, aka Pr, for Prickly. Causes short thoracic bristles. That’s my guy.

Back on FlyBase, I learn that Prickly is one of the classic mutants discovered in the early days of fly research. And this is weird: it has not been annotated. That is, nobody has figured out what gene it is a mutation of, let alone what biological processes it participates in or what tissues it’s expressed in (this matters because if it’s not active in the follicle cells, my experiment would still be valid). They could; it’s a straightforward enough task given that the whole genome is sequenced, but apparently it’s not one that anyone’s found worthwhile. So all we know is it makes very short, deformed bristles that look to me a lot like those of Sn.

Okay, now I am getting worried. What are the chances that this is NOT a protein that affects something like actin bundling and therefore messes up stress fibers? Maybe I had only seen what I wanted to see with the DAAM control. That’s a hazard of doing science, because it’s a hazard of being human. That’s why controls are so important. I consider my experiment in this new and harsher light. Maybe the Diaphanous results are just a phantom of wish fulfillment, summoned by this Prickly hitchhiker I’d never meant to take along for the ride.

I’d already begun the proper control that would answer this question, but meanwhile, while I wait for those flies to emerge, is there anything else I can do? Maybe I should dissect those formerly scorned Tubby flies; at least they lack Prickly. But according to the list at Bloomington, that particular stock has a number of other mutations on its TM6b chromosome, including one called Bri. Bri is a twin of Pri in more ways than one: it also causes very short bristles, and is also unannotated so we have no idea what protein it makes or when or where it acts in the body. Without asking the researchers who sent me the flies, I had no way of knowing if Bri was in there or not.

It would be a bit awkward quizzing them about their flies. We all tend to overdo the shorthand in labeling our stocks, and don’t always remember all the extra mutations lurking there. It’s tripped me up before, when I uncovered interacting mutations I hadn’t known to worry about until they unhinged my crosses. Don’t get me started on vermillian eye color: it’s a real bear. Either way, I’d have to check the controls and unbalance the stock to have a real answer, so probably better not to pester them.

I can’t resist having a quick peek at the TM6b flies though; I’ll be dissecting them tomorrow and should know by Sunday or Monday if the Diaphanous results are evaporating or not...that is, if Bri or something else is not further muddying the waters. A positive result would be definitive; a negative one will require further research. Well, either one will require further research, but one will be more cheerful and the other more like putting nails in a coffin of my hopes one more time. And that, my friends, is what it’s like to do science. (At least I get to see more Oregon green on the confocal, though).

Epilogue. What lessons can we draw from this (mis)adventure, this stomach-churning roller coaster ride of thrills and doubts that is my life in science?

1. Do the proper controls from the beginning. (Although that would have cut out the thrills as well as the doubts, so to be honest, I’m not totally on board with this one).

2. Take the time to look at the flies you are about to cross, and make sure they have the markers you expect. Harder, probably unrealistically hard, is to make sure they don’t have the markers you don’t expect. That would require a Rumsfeldian level of perceiving unknowns unknowns.

3. Remember the limitations of shorthand for conveying a genotype, which like the face we present to the world is invariably far more complex than there is room enough and time to write out.

4. Murphy’s law reigns supreme in this world of ours. What were the chances that the unwanted marker  I’d thought I could ignore for a first-pass experiment would turn out to be a different marker I’d never heard of that might  affect stress fibers in my cells? Still, it made for a good story, which I haven’t come across in all this interminable slog of an Autumn.

[greekowl87]

Fic: After Shock

A/N: I feel like I haven’t had time to breathe since I started the new job and my anxiety has made it so I haven’t been sleeping a lot either. I haven’t been writing either. So decided to rewatch ‘Wetwire’ after some friends were just rewatching and tried to bust out a quick fic. It took two weeks.I don’t know where my head took me with this. Taggin @90saolchatroom because it was one of her comments that started this idea.

P.S. I also make a reference to another fic I wrote called Sure. Fine. Whatever. Also, @90saolchatroom‘s headcanon was also the source of inspiration that well. Heck, she was the inspiration for these fics period.

P.P.S. No beta so mucho apologies for the typos. Between lack of sleep and getting used to the new job, I’m sorry.

Tagging @today-in-fic @baronessblixen @improlificinsarcasm

Scully was free to leave the hospital after a few days of observation with her mother dogging her at each step. She couldn’t blame her, especially after what had happened. Fears of trust and betrayal. Rushing to the only place where she thought she had left. Pointing a gun at her partner. Breaking down in her mother’s arms still grasping her weapon, afraid to give up control. She remembered feeling Mulder’s sad gaze linger as her mother soothed Scully. 

The same moment had entirely had been mirrored months previously with Modell control Mulder and point a gun at her. The pain Mulder realized he couldn’t control his own actions. And then with her, she had shown just the opposite. Fear. True fear. What an odd twist of fate. In shared moments of desperation, both had almost shot their respective partners. Except for this time, something resonated deeply in Scully’s heart. A deep ache that hadn’t healed.

After many promises to call Maggie Scully in the morning and assurances that Scully would be fine in her Georgetown apartment, her mother left shortly before ten. The paranoia was still fresh in her mind, however, that was one side effect she hated from the entire experience. She could remember everything. Logically, she knew there was nothing to be afraid of but that would stop checking the locks on all of her windows and triple checking the lock on her front door. Satisfied that she was safe, Scully retreated to her bathroom to draw a long bath in an effort to relax.

It still bothered Scully that she could have let herself think that: Mulder had betrayed her and broken their deeply earned trust in one another. As she slid beneath the steaming water and bubbles, she flashed back over the past three years. Tooms trying to kill her in her bathroom. Duane Barry breaking through her living room windows that lead to abduction. Then to chasing Mulder down to Puerto Rico and staying with him even after news of Melissa taking the bullet meant for her. 

Scully flinched in memory, a twinge of regret. It should have been her instead of her sister. When Missy and her mother had needed her, she was with Mulder, chasing the Truth with a capital ‘t’, finding her name amongst endless files that should not exist.

But in the hospital room, when Scully arrived at a vacant bed, it was Mulder who wordlessly held her hand in that empty hospital room and then hugged her as she became adrift with grief. But during all this, during these past three years, Scully had come to trust him more than she would have thought possible. But now that regret and anxiety lingered over her current actions. Had she destroyed it? What they had? What was there left to go back to?

Unable to help herself, Scully climbed out to tub, draining the water, and reached for her cordless phone. It was near midnight but she knew Mulder to be up. The man hardly slept. After she dialed his number and reaching is answering machine, she decided to get dressed and drive to Old Town Alexandria, her conscience weighing heavier by the minute. The midnight drive took longer than she would have liked and parking being worse than she imagined. She turned up the radio in an effort to drown out her thoughts as she parked the car. Scully could go back home and pretend she was okay for the next time they saw each other at the office on Friday morning or she could do something.

**************

Scully found herself in front of apartment number 42 with her hand poised to knock but the door was quickly pulled open. “I saw you parking from the window,” Mulder greeted her softly. “Couldn’t sleep either, huh?”

Scully tried to look beyond her tall partner and saw a reading lamp on, heard The Cranberries playing, and no blue tv light. “Um, no.” She refocused her gaze. “Um...I called and it went straight to voicemail. I was, uh…”

“Did you? I must’ve missed it. I ran out to get some food. Are you hungry?”

He stepped away from the entryway and opened the door wider so she could come in. “So no tv tonight?” 

He lowered the volume on his stereo. “I thought I would take a break from watching tv, given recent events.”

She chuckled. “Don’t stop on account of me.” Mulder disappeared into the kitchen as Scully picked the book he had been reading up off the table. “I could tell you the ending to the book your reading, Mulder.”

“I thought I would give it a go since I remind you so much of the title character. You remember our conversation when you wrecked the boat,” Mulder laughed from the kitchen. Scully looked down at the library copy of Moby Dick fondly. “And don’t ruin it.”

“Some coincidence, Mulder.”

“I guess.” He came back out with two cans of soda and one hand and two plates balanced precariously on his other arm like a waiter. “I think I remembered. Beef and broccoli with white rice instead of noodles because you want to be healthier, sweet and sour chicken for me and one single egg roll for you.”

“Mulder, that’s our normal Chinese order. I wasn’t planning on coming over tonight.”

“Call it initiation.” He paused and shrugged. “I must have done it out of habit. Now that I have, we can’t let it go to waste can we?”

“I suppose not,” Scully conceded

“So,” Mulder began, passing her the plate, “are you feeling any better? Not gonna draw your weapon at me if the rice isn’t hot enough?”

“Mulder, please don’t. I feel bad enough as it is what happens.” She sighed, looking at the food. “I still feel ashamed.”

“Scully, you can’t let it eat you like that,” he answered. “You weren’t in your right mind. Just like when Modell controlled me. We had no control over the situation.”

They sat on the leather couch so close that they were touching. Scully moved slightly in an effort to make it less awkward. She shoveled the Chinese around on the plate. “I feel like I did, in some way. Why would it make me believe that you had betrayed me?”

“It prayed on our worst fears. I guess,” he paused in thought, “I guess my betrayal is one of yours.”

“Well, it’s true. I thought you would actually betray me, kill me...I can’t believe I let myself accuse you of those things.” She shook her head in disgust. “Mulder, how can you be okay with this? Be mad. Do something. Anything!”

“Scully,” Mulder sighed, “please don’t.” She set the plate in front of her, unable to eat. He sighed and took her hand without thinking. “Please don’t let us go down that road. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“How could you be so forgiving, Mulder? I pointed a gun at you. I’ve shot you before, don’t forget!”

“Did you forget I did this same to you not a few months ago?” And he smiled sadly. “And you shot me because I was out of my mind. You saved me, remember? Who else could perform surgery both with a pistol and scalpel?” She bit her lip and tried to pull her hand away. Mulder did not let her hand go. “Neither were you. So why do you hold yourself to a set of different standards than everyone else, Scully? I’m allowed to make mistakes but you aren’t?”

“I can’t afford to be,” she answered after a few moments. She gave up fighting. “I can’t afford to be because I have to prove just as much as the next guy.”

“Not to me, remember? You don’t have to prove anything to me.”

“But I accused you of…”

“You weren't in the right state of mind or have you forgotten? Let it go, Scully. Now eat something before your dinner gets cold.”

Mulder forced the plate into her hand and took a few bites of his own meal. After a moment’s hesitation, Scully followed suit. They continued to eat in silence as The Cranberries played. How could he be so forgiving of her?

 “So what’s next?” She asked as she finished her Chinese. “For us?”

Mulder shrugged and picked up the plates. “I’m not letting you travel again tonight, that’s for sure. I know you just got out of the hospital, but it would give me peace of mind. And I don’t fancy your mother’s wrath when she learns you are out and about.”

“You’re no better than my mother. I’m fine, Mulder.”

He knew a losing battle when he saw it when it came to his partner. Her independence and stubbornness matched his own. “Well, at least let me drive you home, using your car and I will catch a cab back here.”

“Mulder, you don’t have to baby me,” she said.

“I’m not babying you. I…” Mulder sighed. “I just worry about you, Scully. And care. That’s all. I’d prefer you stay here honestly. I just want to make sure you are okay.”

For a moment, Scully let her guard down. Maybe she was still tired of everything from the previous ordeal or maybe it was more. Maybe she was just tired of more than the most recent life or death situation. “And what sleep on your couch? It isn’t necessarily that big.”

“I have a seldom-used bedroom, aka the guest room as I call it. You can stay there.”

“Mulder, I’m fine.” She stifled a yawn and wiped the sleep from her eyes. “If you want to mother hen me then come back with me to Georgetown and I will call you a cab. I just want to be in my own bed.”

“Fair enough. I think you may have wasted your gas coming out here.”

“I got a free meal out of it.” 

Scully was mentally panicking. This was not going anyway she had planned. She did not feel any better about the situation. More than anything, she needed to run. Mulder reached for her hand again, and for the second time that night, he grounded her and brought her racing thoughts back to a standstill. “Scully, just stay the night. I won’t bite and you would ease my fears.”

“Mulder, I'm fine.”

“I know you are but I’m not. I worry about you, Scully.”

After a moment’s consideration, she gave into Mulder’s request. Not for her sake of course, but for him. She did remember Missy confiding how much her abduction almost destroyed him. “Okay, Mulder,” she relented. She held up a finger conditionally. “But only for tonight.”

“You got it, Scully.”

He had that boyish smile on his face and nodded towards her. “I don’t suppose you would mind if I run out to my car to grab my overnight bag?”

“Since when did you start carrying an overnight bag with you?”

“When you started to call me at odd hours to travel halfway across the country.” Something flashed in his eyes. “It wasn’t meant as an insult,” she added hastily.

“I know, Scully,” he said softly. “I’ll go make up the bed for you.”

She collected her shoes to grab her bag out of her car before taking the elevator back up to his apartment. In the back of her mind, since she had arrived at Mulder’s apartment, the entire ordeal felt off. She thought driving over Mulder’s apartment would ease some of her own worries and doubt but this entire situation was spiraling out of control. She did not know if she felt comfortable with that at all. 

She turned the doorknob to find the door in Mulder’s living room open. She heard him moving about the rarely sed room. “I hope you don’t mind the clutter,” he called. Scully stood in the doorway and watched him. “Sheets are clean. The bathroom’s through there.” He gestured at the lit doorway opposite of him. “Can you think of anything else?”

“No, I don’t think so, Mulder. I can still go home and get out of your hair.”

“You’ll do no such thing, Scully. If it makes you feel better, I won’t say anything else about the matter.”

He adjusted the quilt on the bed and gave her one last smile. “Goodnight, Scully. And I’m glad you decided to stay.”

She bit her lip as he shut the door behind him. Scully suddenly felt trapped and at odds with the war of doubt that had been brewing in her head. Hell, that was the whole reason why she had made the trek to Alexandria to begin with. Now, here she was, a prisoner in Mulder’s rarely used bedroom. She could make a run for it and go back to Georgetown, but she was tired. Scully decided that she would likely have trouble sleeping even in her own bed and decided to spend the night and try and make the best of a crappy situation.

**************

The second time Scully woke up, she was disoriented and it took a moment for her to gain her bearings. The dimly lit alarm clock revealed it was 3:14 a.m. The unfamiliar bed felt foreign and she could not get comfortable. She tossed and turned before giving up and turning on the lamp. Boxes upon boxes surrounded her and in the dim light, she caught words like textbooks, photos, Samantha, and research. She shifted her attention and saw a dim light coming from the door that separated the bedroom and living room. She couldn’t hear the tv.

With curiosity biting at her, she got out a foreign bed and creaked the bedroom door open. Scully shivered and grabbed a spare blanket off the bed to wrap around her shoulders. She found Mulder wide awake lying on his couch, staring at some fixed point within his fish tank. The mollies swam back and forth and he sighed. “Am I keeping you up, Scully?”

“No,” she answered softly. “I just woke up. You know I have trouble sleeping in different beds sometimes.”

Mulder pushed himself up and patted the leather couch beside him invitingly. “Come sit with me.”

“I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“I was already up, Scully.” He gave her a tired smile. “I can turn on a light or something.”

“No, this is fine.” She sat gingerly on the couch next to him. “I just have been having trouble sleeping since this entire ordeal. That’s why I tried to call earlier tonight. And why I came here.” She shrugged and Mulder tugged at the blanket fondly. “Sorry.”

“You’re fine,” he chuckled. “I remember having the same problem after Modell.”

“What problem?”

“The lack of sleep.” He crossed his legs and rested them on the coffee table. “Well, worse than usual. I kept seeing the gun and your face. More than anything it was your eyes, Scully that always woke me up.”

“My eyes?”

He nodded and glanced at her. “It is what you mentioned yourself. Betrayal of trust. I just remember the pain in your eyes.” Mulder sighed. “I know that this...little crusade of mine has cost us both.”

Scully maneuvered the blanket around her shoulders and cast it over both of them. Mulder smiled gratefully in the dim light. She brought her knees to her chest and rested her head against her bicep. “I know,” she murmured.

“I should’ve have protected you better,” he confessed softly. He reached for her hand and squeezed it. “The night on Skyline Mountain. The light. You were gone.”

“But I came back.”

“Because they decided they could bring you back to prove a point.”

“Mulder,” she whispered, “I’m not Samantha.”

“I know,” he replied. “You Scully. My Scully.” The way he repeated her surname sounded like an endearment. “But still...I can’t help but think that your sister would be alive if it wasn’t for me.”

The silence was deafening. 

“Missy said everything happens for a reason, Mulder. One Christmas, when I was still in medical school, she came home. We went to Old Town Alexandria. Not too far from here. We had a girls' night. I was drunk. She was drunk. We both decided to do palm readings from this little place on the second story off King Street next to a tobacco shop.”

He chuckled. “You, Scully? A palm reading?”

“It was her idea and I was too drunk to disprove it.” Mulder chuckled again. “What?”

“Next time we discuss one of my theories, I’ll bring the whiskey.”

She smiled and moved closer to him to the point they were almost touching. “Missy went first,” she continued, ignoring his loaded comment, “and the fortune she had, well, it was a good thing we were both drunk.”

“What was her fortune?”

“Missy was told she would die young. The fortune-teller specifically said 33 years old.”

“Scully…”

She held up a finger. “But, in the afterlife, she would do her most beneficial work.”

Mulder recalled the night he thought about taking his own life during Scully’s abduction and it was Melissa Scully that had interrupted that horrible attempt. But it was her that made him believe Scully was still there, even if she was in a coma.

“Do you think she is watching over you now?” he whispered.

“I like to think so,” Scully replied. “But what was ironic was my own fortune that strikes a chord...well, at the time.”

“What do you mean?”

“We were both drunk that night and I haven’t actually thought of it until now.”

“What about it?” He moved so he could face her. After a moment, he took her hand and lounged backward. She fought him initially but relented after a few minutes. It was much cozier than just sitting on the couch. “Just relax.”

“This is very unprofessional.”

“Since when is anything we did professional?”

Mulder’s hand drifted to the small of her bag and she relaxed. His fingertips grazed her bare skin giving her shivers. He pulled the blanket up around them. She relaxed. “Tell me what your fortune was?”

“I would meet my other half,” she confessed after a long moment.

“Really?”

“Quit making fun of me.”

“I’m not.”

Scully nuzzled his cotton shirt and breathed deeply. The familiar scent of whatever was ‘Mulder’ wafted through her nose. As she reflected on the fortune she had been told, at the time, she thought it meant Daniel but now, after going through the past few years, and Missy’s prodding. Maybe it meant someone else.

“But yeah. False promises on soulmates.”

“I wouldn’t call it a false promise or false fortunes.” He moved a stray piece of hair out of her face. “Maybe you just haven’t met him yet.”

“Maybe.”

His fingers drifted up under her top towards the rest of her back. “It was the trust,” she whispered. He was distracting her. She couldn’t collect her thoughts. “I feel like, after everything, I can only trust you because you know. You understand. I call you first. Then my mother. Or my brothers.”

“So when you thought I betrayed you, you went to the next place?”

“My mother’s.”

Mulder rested his forehead against hers. “You know that I would never do anything to you, Scully. Right?”

“I know, Mulder.”

She licked her lips and kissed him before she could stop herself. Mulder broke away, smiled, and attacked with renewed vigor. Words were lost between them as useless couch cushions were pushed off and Scully gained leverage to straddle his waist. Wait. No. So many no’s flashed through her head but she could not stop herself. It was an urge to feel safe, to trust, and to know that someone was there for her. Mulder was that person. But she felt the rising pressure between her legs that came from Mulder.

“We shouldn’t,” she warned.

“I know,” he breathed.

“So much could go wrong.”

“I know.”

But neither one of them made an effort to stop themselves. “Scully, we can go a step further or we can stop this. I don’t want it to stop. Tell me what you want?”

She slid slowly off his hips and gathered the blanket. “I should, uh, go back to bed. I’m sorry for what just happened.”

“Scully…” he called. 

She disappeared into the bedroom and shut the door, her last barrier to keep her from losing herself control. After the most recent episode with fearing Mulder’s betrayal and being prepared to shoot him in the face. But to her utter horror, Mulder was trailing her. The door opened with a bang and she jumped. “Jesus, Mulder.”

“Please, hear me out. Is it something I did?”

“No,” she breathed. “We just can’t, Mulder. I had a moment, that is all.”

“A moment,” he repeated. “That wasn’t a moment. You can trust me, Scully. I promise I won’t betray you. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

She brought the blanket around her shoulders instinctively like a shield. Childhood memories of distrust flashed in her head, one of the reasons why she became so private of a person as an adult. But here he was, invading her personal space just like he did the first day they met. He cupped her cheek. Her eyes closed as he gently stroked her cheek with his thumb. “Sometimes, I don’t know who to trust but I know, deep down, I always can trust you.”

“You can trust me now.”

Scully nodded into his hand. Mulder took that as a sign and gently leaned forward to kiss her soundly. The kiss sent electricity through every part of her body and unconsciously, she grasped both of his hands and held on tightly. Mulder deepened the kiss. At that moment, they were both lost. It was something about being able to trust someone with your entirety, body, mind, and soul, and not have to worry about any fears or repercussions. Just because you knew. You trusted them. The blanket fell from her shoulders. Mulder’s warm hands crept under her shirt and she shivered. They were so close to one another.

“Scully, please.” He sounded like he was begging. “I promise I won’t hurt you.”

She closed her eyes, bit her lip, and give him the slightest nod. He was reverent in his movements as he let his fingers trail down her back slowly as if memorizing her. She bowed her head forward and willed herself to move, to do something. Finally, she regained control of her hands and gently peeled off his tee-shirt. She saw the puckered scar on his shoulder that still looked fresh despite it being over a year old.  He smiled slightly and kissed her tenderly. The first time Scully had let herself imagine this scenario, she imagined he would be much more vigorous in his efforts, almost like one of his films. But so fair, he kept surprising her.

“I know,” she whispered.

She walked them backwards until the back of her knees met the mattress. “It’s been a while,” she whispered.

“Same here.”

Scully felt all sorts of insecurity which she thought buried long ago bubble up. As if sensing those insecurities, he kissed her brow encouragingly and she relented. She pulled off her top in one movement and he swallowed hungrily. The small bulge earlier took on a new life. 

 “I know I’m not like…”

“You’re perfect,” he breathed.

She was tired of fighting and without hesitation, she lunged forward to kiss him, and then guide him back onto the bed. Like explorers charting the unknown lands, they began their newest adventure. He left a trail of kisses like breadcrumbs down her shoulder blades and down the valley of her breasts. She shivered at the soft touches from his lips. “I wouldn’t go that far,” she murmured. 

She leaned back into the pillows taking him with her. “I’ve wanted this for so long, Scully,” he breathed. He took a moment to meet her gaze. “I want you to trust me. I want to be the only one that you trust. More than friends.”

“I remember, Mulder.” She played with his hair. “But that was then, this is now. Things have changed between us.”

“That little small town wasn’t that long ago,” he countered.

He was intent on just lazily kissing her right now. She didn’t seem to mind. “But again, neither one of us was in our right mind.”

He paused and rolled to the side so he could watch her. “The planets hadn’t aligned properly.”

“Not then anyways.”

Mulder propped his head upon his left arm so he could watch her. Despite the wall of boxes in the unused bedroom, he had left the sole window free and clear. The blinds were half open and she could see the streetlights and shadows dance across his face. “I know you said you were ashamed during your little episode but you shouldn’t be.”

“How weren’t you affected by it?”

His hand traced down her smooth abdomen in thought and played with the elastic of her pajama pants. “Hmm? Oh. I’m red-green colorblind and according to the Gunmen, it was something like that causing it.” He saw her raised eyebrow. “In one eye. A childhood accident or something?” He switched winking at her with each eye. “My right eye is fine. My left eye...not so much.” He opened both eyes and smiled. “I can still tell you’re hair is red, not green, but it isn’t as vibrant with both eyes versus just my right eye. Now you blue eyes? Those stand out. Isn’t that funny how that is a thing?”

She chuckled. “I can think of any number of reasons how you might have become color blind in one eye, though extremely rare…” She sighed at the sensation as any rational thoughts escaped her as Mulder found her mons. “Jesus, it’s been too long.”

“Good vibrations,” Mulder sang off-key, “I’m picking up good vibrations.”

Scully laughed at Mulder’s horrible rendition of The Beach Boys before she was silenced by one of his kisses. His hand moved with an independent mind of its own as he experimented with a kiss or a slight tug on her earlobe. Each new sensation caused her to gasp and move under him or buck towards him. “Mulder, enough play.”

His fingers dipped into the ‘v’ of her thighs. “Yes, ma’am,” he answered.

They awkwardly peeled away the remains of their clothes and with unspoken communication, they sealed their union. It was quick, awkward, but all at the same time, unforgettable. Afterward, entangled together like a sailor’s knot, beneath the lightly used blankets, they lay together. It started to rain and Mulder nuzzled her neck and whispered. “You can trust me, Scully...if nothing else, we will always have each other.”

“We’ve been some dark roads,” she whispered into the night air. Mulder coiled around her. “I fear it’s only going to get worse.”

“Mmm.” He vibrated all around her and she tried to pull him closer. “While it may, you'll always have someone to trust.”

“Where does this leave us, Mulder?” she whispered.

“We’re good,” he whispered.  “We’re fine. Nothing will change.”

“We just…”

He silenced her with another kiss and she melted against him. She was tired of being unable to trust anyone and the weight of their work felt crushing in moments like this. “We’re okay, Scully. We’re going to be okay.”

“Do you trust me?”

Scully breathed deeply and tried to memorize the moment. Mulder around her. The unused bedroom that had become their private sanctuary. The rain outside beating against the window. The streetlights and the wind moving their branches. He pulled the blankets around them.

“Yes,” Scully answered. “I trust you.”

[frangipanidownunder]

#20 from the angst prompts?

Paradox: fic

20: “Notwith the person from the past in tow.” 

Sorry it took a while to get to this. It’s a bit angsty, a little tiny bit NSFW but not too much and a little bit fluffy? Tagging @today-in-fic

It’s a paradox. That she’s more in love with him now thanshe has ever been. Than she should be. There’s a thesis there somewhere, shethinks, as she’s driving to the restaurant. Something about time dilation andvelocity. How he has propelled her forward and held her back. How he has beenboth a burden and a blessed relief.

She parks and wonders if this is the right move. Or if it’sjust an ill-considered attempt to recapture something from the past, like theX-Files. It’s not the same. It was never going to be the same. It should neverbe the same. Life’s journeys should look and feel different, even if they aretaken on the same path. You’re supposed to learn. Learn something.

It’s a paradox. She knows so much about him, but he’s alwaysa surprise. He’s holding a book in his hands, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief Historyof Time. It’s got a gaudy yellow bow tied around it. And under the ribbon istucked a slip of paper.

“You are now a paid-up member of the Book League ofBethesda. Two years, no less.”

“You bought me a membership to a club I don’t want to belongto.” His arrogance is not even arrogance, it’s just the way he is. His is aspecial brand that has no apt descriptor. Though she does imagine the Germanswould have a word for it.

He holds the door open as though his generosity counters hisego. It’s a paradox.

“You sound like Groucho Marx.” He is grinning. It softensher edges. Every damned time.

She slips past him and the Maitre’D leads the way. The book doesn’tfit on the beautifully-dressed table. She puts it on her lap.

“Their next reading book is Go Set a Watchman.” He is still grinning.She is still softening.

“Mulder, what sort of reading club leaps from an explorationof the structure of the universe to a novel of dubious provenance that isprobably just an early draft of the magnum opus of the author?”

“I don’t know, Scully, but I bought you a copy of A BriefHistory of Time because the one you left at our house got ripped to piecesduring the altercation with those Russians. It’s not on the Book League ofBethesda’s reading list.” He sips water. “Well, not for the next six months.See,” he says, stabbing the paper, “there are the coming titles.”

Our house. Ours. She orders sweet and sour salmon. Hechooses grass-fed beef. As they wait, she watches the orange flame of theelegant crimson candle on the table, wave and snap. Wave and snap. Slow, fast.Slow, fast.

“Something plain, Scully. Sometimes life is so complicatedthat food should just be simple.” He’s back to grinning.

The wine leaves a purple film around the glass. It slidesdown the curved sides and she watches, fascinated by the pattern.

“Wine legs,” he says.

“I’ve only had one glass, Mulder.”

“Or wine fingers, or curtains or even church windows. It’sbecause the alcohol has a lower surface tension than water. Capillary actionmakes the liquid climb the sides of the glass and both the alcohol and thewater evaporate.”

“But the alcohol evaporates faster,” she says. “I know,Mulder. But it’s still a wonder, isn’t it?”

He’s not grinning anymore. He’s serious and her stomachcoils. “Do you ever think about twins, Scully?”

Her mind flashes back to the St Rachel Motel. She fuckedMulder. At the time, it felt so good and it just a bit a wrong. It felt soself-loving and just a bit selfish. Then the bizarre events of Mulder punchingthe daylights out of his other self and her giving her own doppelganger a peptalk about psychic manifestations and latent hostilities. The whole case hadleft her flying on a high and weighted down by guilt.

               “I can’tsay I do,” she tells him, swallowing the flame of shiraz and her lie. She wasfire under his touch that night. That morning.

 ��             His footis tapping the floor. “If twins are separated at birth what makes them seek outlives that are so similar, marry people with the same names, feel the pain of injuriesof the other?”

              “Sometimesthey don’t, Mulder. There have been studies that show…”

              His facesets. His foot stills. She stops talking. An image of him under her, face openfor the reading, lips reddened by hers, hips bucking up so she was filled withhim. She dips her chin to her chest and tries to suck in air without it seemingdesperate.

              “Arethose two people themselves or are they individuals?”

              “Andhere I was thinking you’d asked me out to wine and dine me.” She can stilltaste the salt-tang of his and her own arousal, coating her lips and her throatas she took him in her mouth. Joining.

              “What ifwe have two selves and each grows at a different rate?”

              “Twoselves?” She sips more wine and snaps back to the now. “Is this a pop psychologyquiz?”

              “What ifthe person I was before is not the person I am now but I am still just one?Where does the other self go?”

              “Isn’tthat just experiential learning, Mulder? We all change as we go through life.You can’t separate what you’ve lived from where you are heading.”

              “Andwhat if your future is joined with another?” His hand slides across the tableto take hers. His fingers are always softer than she expects. It’s a paradox,that for all his suffering and pain, Mulder’s touch is so gentle. “What if youwant to shuck off your old self completely so that this other person can seethe new version of you. The one that is better, more fully rendered; the onewho is ready.”

              His eyesclose a moment, flicker shut like he’s waiting, defensive, for the blow. Thearrogant self has disappeared, she thinks. He’s a paradox, this Mulder, thisman she loves too much and not enough. How would she ask him to ever not be hisconfusing, bewildering, multi-faceted self.

              “Then Iwould say that the future looks bright,” she says, drawing herself closer tohim. Wax, transparent from heat, tipples down the side of the candle and theflame flickers. The wax settles at the base like petals. “For this otherperson. And your freshly-shucked self.”

              “Ithink,” he says, “that you are ready, Scully. I know I’m ready. I think it’stime. Come back.”

              She leansback, letting his words sink in. The bow catches her eye and she glances at thebook, solid on the floor. “There’s a section in A Brief History of Time thatdiscusses Feynman’s theory of sum over histories. Where each particle has many histories.”Come back. Come back. To go forward means to go back. It’s a paradox. She feelsa sting of tears and shivers. “If we have many histories, does it not go thatwe have many futures too, Mulder?

              He’salmost back to grinning. Framing the narrative of their relationship in thesafe haven of supposition and theory. “And that we need to start down one pathto see where it goes. But that any number of forces or influences or chanceoccurrences can disrupt that journey?”

              Shenods. “We’ve had a similar conversation before,” she says and thinks againabout bodies joining, about curves and contours and planes and angles. “Aboutfate, about destiny.” He remembers. She can see it in the slight dip of hisforehead, the way his eyes darken a shade in the glow of the candlelight. “Hawkingposits that there are arrows of time. The first is thermodynamic, where theoverall disorderliness in the world increases over time, so despite our bestefforts to create order, the energy used has created more disorder.”

              “Soundslike my life, Scully,” he says, chuckling.

              “But thesecond arrow is psychological, where our sense of time flows in one directiononly – that’s why we only remember the past.”

              “So, that’syour complicated way of saying that we can only go forward if we learn from thepast?”

              “It is,Mulder. Life in the past is complex, but the future is simple. Because we can’tsee it yet.”

              “We cango forward but not with the person from the past in tow?”

              “I trulybelieve that we can go forward safe in the knowledge that wherever that personis, that other self, from the past, they stay behind us. They follow, but they’llnever overtake us.”

              He isgrinning again. Full on wide smile, teeth on show, dimples striped across hischeeks. “I like the thought of you always being on my tail, Scully. Whip inhand, ready to get me up to speed.”

              Shelaughs then. “What would Freud make of us, Mulder?”

              “I’m notsure I’m that ready, Scully.”

She walks up the stairs and checks out the covers of thebooks wedged against the banister. It’s only when she gets to the fourth stepthat she sees they are all the same – different covers, but the same novel. MobyDick. The story of two men: one obsessed with the hunt, the other desperate tounderstand what to make of the prey and the predator.

              “Youknow, Mulder. There are some theories that Moby Dick is much like physics. Ahab’snarrative is linear, his velocity is on a straight, immoveable line and Ishmaelis a force of digression, a disturbance.”

              “And yetit’s a book of everything that makes us human,” he says.

              “It’s aparadox,” she whispers.

              Hesnakes his arm around her waist and kisses her head. “Welcome home, Scully.”

[mischiefiswritten]

Book Club

A shared book is a shared experience. For Sgt. Barnes and a member of the Women's Army Corps, a connection over a good book may be the path to something more.

Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe; set during The First Avenger

Pairings: Bucky Barnes x OC (Carolyn Warren)

Genre: Fluff, Romance (tiny bit of angst at the end)

 Word Count: 3800+

                It was The Great Gatsby first. Then Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, Little Women, and Lord of the Flies. Every time he laid eyes on her, she had a book in her hands. Any time she wasn’t working, that is.

                She was a hard worker if ever he’d seen one. It was enough that a young woman like her – or like he imagined she was – would give up an indefinite length of her life to come overseas, closer to the war than she had any necessity to be, to live on an army base surrounded by strange men. She was always bustling here and there, delivering orders, relaying information, maintaining the accuracy in maps, the list went on and on.        

               He could only imagine what she was like because as of yet, he hadn’t figured out just how to talk to her. Even now she was typing furiously at a typewriter, keys clacking loudly enough to reach his ears across several yards of space. They said she had a college degree, and that she was an officer in the Women’s Army Corps. 

                So she was smart, dedicated, and had a sense of duty. Normally he wouldn’t be intimidated by a girl like that. No. No, no, no, he wasn’t intimidated. That wouldn’t make any sense, of course not. He’d spoken to her, but… He cringed at the memory.

                He’d only been on base four days when he saw her, reddish hair rolled prettily and lips slightly pursed in concentration. And since he was Bucky Barnes, he saw her, liked her, and walked right up to introduce himself. 

                “Now what’s a dame like you doing here?” he’d said, trying out one of his best friendly-but-not-too-friendly smiles.

                 She looked up from the telegrams in her hand, blinking at him as if she was surprised he’d actually said that to her. When the confusion faded from her eyes, the blue took on a sharpness, and he realized his mistake.

                “Trying to win a war. What are you doing here?” Her tone wasn’t quite mirroring the sharpness in her eyes, but it was clearly mirroring the wit and self-assurance she was thinking he meant to patronize. This was a young woman who knew what she was about, and right now – she was certainly not about James Buchanan Barnes.

                He’d stepped on her toes, and he couldn’t backtrack quickly enough.

               “I’m Sergeant Barnes – ,” he’d said, “James.”

               James? Who the hell is James? Your name is Bucky.         

               “I’m Second Lieutenant Warren.” No first name, he’d noted. “Do you need something, Sergeant? We’re not all awaiting orders; some of us have them already.” She gestured to the papers and maps surrounding her. The crisp lines of her uniform made her obvious lack of amusement even starker.                “Uh…” Bucky had trailed off. Where was his usual charm? He was usually so much quicker on his feet. “I don’t… No, I suppose I don’t.”

                Wave that white flag, Barnes.               

                “It was nice to meet you, Sergeant James Barnes,” Miss Warren had said, actually giving him a smile. It was genuine and pleasant, despite Bucky’s distinct impression that she was lying. He’d repeated the sentiment back to her and beat a hasty retreat.

                The moment he’d escaped out of her sight he visibly cringed, raking a hand through his hair. What an utter disaster.

                And he’d been haunted by that disaster ever since. And that was why, three weeks later, he was diving back into that particular battlefield. He straightened his spine and his uniform and trotted across the gravel roadway, preparing himself to be back under fire.

                Clackclackclackclackclackclack – ding! The typewriter whirred as she moved to the next line. She was working in a tent, open to the air but kept cool by the shade. This time, he waited respectfully at what he considered closest to being a door, but she seemed too engrossed in her work to notice. That is, until a gust of wind sent an unweighted stack of her work scattering in every direction.

                With a little noise of distress, Second Lieutenant Warren gave chase. At the same time, Bucky dashed forward, managing to snag one page out of the air. The pair of them gathered papers from the grass and dirt until they crouched down to retrieve the same one and their knees bumped together. As she noticed him for the first time, he got to see the same faint surprise in her eyes as at their first meeting, but this time up close. The sweet, cornflower blue – and perhaps the prior humiliation made fresh – made him forget how to speak for a moment.

                “Sergeant… Barnes, isn’t it?” she ventured, rising in near synchronization with Bucky.

                He nodded. “James.” AGAIN.

                She cleared her throat and diverted her gaze awkwardly to the ground, even though all the scattered papers had been collected.

                “I…” he sighed heavily, glancing down at the correspondence he held in his hands. He shuffled them until the edges aligned. “Look, Lieutenant, I wanted to apologize for that previous conversation. It was never my intention to patronize you, and I have no idea why I said what I said.”

                She met his eyes again, almost cautiously. He laughed a quiet, self-deprecating chuckle and rubbed one hand through his hair. “I really don’t know why I thought that was a good idea.”

                The barest beginnings of a smile started to tug at her lips. “I don’t know why either.”

                He couldn’t keep himself from grinning briefly when she didn’t immediately let him off the hook. “I’m usually smarter than that, I promise. Or, I hope so anyway. Regardless, I wanted to tell you I’m sorry. I respect what you’re doing here, serving your country.”

                When she treated him to a smile, it was thoughtful and maybe, he thought, a tad bashful. “If I’m here, doing this, that’s one more of our boys freed up to fight. And hopefully,” she said, “it’s just that much sooner that this war ends and everybody gets to come home.”

                Another gust of wind stirred her hair, and for a moment, everything else was quiet.

                They smiled at each other in silence until it stretched on just a little too long. Bucky coughed. “So, uh, do you have a paperweight or something for these?”

                “Oh! Yes, I’ll get something.” She started to turn back toward her desk, then twisted back around to Bucky. “Actually, could you hold onto these while I do?”

                “Yes, ma’am,” he answered easily, adding her stack to his and following behind her as she went to her desk, pulling out a drawer and searching through it. He noticed a copy of Emma lying just a ways from the typewriter. A bookmark protruded from the pages, less than a quarter of the way from the end. “Is this a good one?” he asked, tapping the cover.

                Having retrieved the paperweight, she glanced over to see what he was talking about. She said, “I’ve enjoyed it so far, but a lot depends on the ending.”

                “I don’t know. A bad ending doesn’t always have to spoil a good story, does it?”

                She twisted her lips to the side while she considered it. “I suppose not, though you’ll always remember the sadness you felt when it ended the way it did.”

                “That’s when I just start the story over, personally,” he said as she tucked her work safely under the weight.

                "Good point. Thank you… James.” She added the name as an afterthought, and the fact that absolutely no one actually called him that made him smile wryly.

               One mistake at a time, he thought. “You’re welcome. Have a good day, Second Lieutenant Warren.”

               He’d already stepped out of the shade of the tent and back into the England sun when he heard her call out from behind him, “It’s Carolyn. Second Lieutenant Carolyn Warren.”

               He grinned over his shoulder as he replied, “Have a good day, Carolyn.”

               From that day onward, Carolyn acknowledged him every time they saw each other. She would wave across the camp to him, or say a bright, “Good morning, James,” when they passed. If he managed to catch her eye during morning drill, he would give her smile. Their gazes would linger on one another just longer than necessary, longer than mere acquaintances. They both wanted a reason to talk more to one another and something to talk about beyond the one time he’d stopped to tell her to call him Bucky. Perhaps it was the fact that the extent of their relationship included one blunder and one reconciliation – their second conversation had felt like a resolution.

             Like an ending.

            As that thought crossed his mind for the hundredth time, it finally clicked. It was an ending that he didn’t like.

            So he would restart the story.

            And when he saw her come back from town with a new copy of Moby Dick in her hand, he knew exactly how to do it. He must have asked three dozen men in his regiment before he found one who had a copy of the same book, and then he stayed up half the night reading, hoping to catch up to whatever progress Carolyn must have made.

            It was after dinner one day when they were both free for the rest of the evening that he happened upon her, seated on a low retaining wall with her nose in the pages of Herman Melville’s prose. (He’d “happened” upon her, fortuitously having his copy with him, after roaming the base for several minutes hoping for just that.)

          “Call me Ishmael,” he said as he approached.

         There was no surprise on her face this time, only a luminous smile. He pretended not to be pleased at how immediately she recognized his voice.

       “First you can’t decide whether you want me to call you James or Bucky, and now you want to be called Ishmael?” She smirked “You really ought to make up your mind.”

        “Indecision is one of my few flaws. I’ve learned to live with it,” he said and settled beside her. He held his book on his lap so she could see.

         “You’re reading Moby Dick too? How many pages in are you?”

         “Only about ninety. I just started.”

         “Me too! Are you liking it so far?” Truth be told, he wasn’t liking it any more now than he had in Ms. Ledbeddor’s high school English class, but he nodded anyway. As a matter of fact, he didn’t think he’d read all that much of it back then, so perhaps he would actually enjoy it. They talked about everything they’d read so far – the good, the bad, the ugly. Carolyn wove a beautiful fabric of thought out of complex themes and philosophical ideas, and Bucky found himself utterly trapped in it. He listened more intently than he’d ever listened to a lecture in school.

        Their conversation had diverted to numerous other novels by the time they realized it was completely dark out. They were ensconced in a cone of yellowy fluorescent light from the streetlight under which they were seated. A comfortable silence draped itself around the pair, and once again, it seemed as though the world quieted itself just for them.

         After they both rose, telling each other they’d better say goodnight, Bucky couldn’t stop himself from saying, “Carolyn, I’ve got to tell you – the way you talk about literature is special. You’re so passionate and thoughtful that you make me feel passionate about it. And I was not the best English student.”

         Her blush, captured even by the harsh artificial light, made his own cheeks heat up. He hadn’t meant to say that, but judging by her bashful smile, it hadn’t been a mistake.

         “Thank you. I’ve had a really good time, so… if you ever want to hear me ramble more, I’d be more than happy to oblige. We have to keep up with each other’s progress through Moby Dick, after all.”

          “Like a book club.”

          Her face lit up even more, outshining the wattage of the streetlamp overhead.

          “Exactly like a book club,” she said, “So – I’ll see you at the next meeting then.”

           And she did. They met three more times before they’d finished Moby Dick, and then they promptly started A Tale of Two Cities. They made quick work of The Call of the Wild, but reading Gone with the Wind demanded that Bucky take her out to a theater two towns over that was showing the film. Soon they started scheduling book club meetings during dinner, and conversation expanded to much more than just books. They talked about their homes, their friends, their families, what led to them enlisting, life on an army base. Everything under the sun.

          Their every get-together was comfortable. It was effortless and free in a way Bucky couldn’t remember any girl’s company being before. He hoped she felt the same about him.

           They sat side by side, heads bent together over one copy as they discussed a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories they’d just begun, throwing out theories about the solution to the caper. Their shoulders brushed ever so slightly, and their knees bumped together now and again. Carolyn glanced up at him after they did, peering sideways through her lashes and giving him a sweet, natural smile before she looked back to the pages. Bucky slid his foot to the left until it was pressed against the side of hers.

            She pressed back. But her eyes stayed fixed on the book in front of her. Her smile betrayed her, even as she visibly fought it – to say nothing of the girlish pink tinting her cheeks. His own gaze was locked on her face. He couldn’t have looked away if it would’ve saved his life.

           He opened his mouth to speak, having no idea what he was going to say. And in that same moment another member of the Women’s Army Corps walked up and tapped Carolyn on the shoulder. Neither of them had noticed the woman approaching – they’d been too wrapped up in each other.

           In that flirtation that had seemed so much like a question and an answer.

            The woman passed a large manila envelope to Carolyn, who opened it at a careful angle to ensure Bucky was unable to read the contents. She looked it over quietly before nodding to the woman, and the woman left as Carolyn thoughtfully slid the papers back into the envelope and sealed it up again.

           “Something you need to take care of?”          

           “Not right away, no,” she said with a touch of something unidentifiable in her voice. It was probably conceited of him to guess she was as disappointed with the way their spell had be unceremoniously broken.

           Damn the war for interfering.

           ”Another one of those secrets, huh?” It wasn’t the first time she’d received some clandestine communication in his presence, and on a number of occasions when he’d approached her as she was working, she’d covered a map or telegram or two. Once she’d even caught him on his way into the office where she was working and made him wait at the door until she’d hidden away whatever was classified beyond his paygrade – which left a wide realm of possibilities.             

            Her witty, sweet blue eyes were alight, but they betrayed nothing.

             He leaned in close and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial volume. “You’re not one of those code girls, are you?” His eyes twinkled with his joke as he smiled.

             She pressed lips together as she suppressed her own smile. “You know I couldn’t tell you if I were. So perhaps,” she thumped him once on the chest with the book which had been all but forgotten, “you ought to leave the intrigue to the professionals, Detective Barnes.”

                That made him laugh, and before he caught himself, he was already thinking how much better this all would be once the war ended. No orders, no secrets, easier schedules, no gloom of death and tragedy hanging over them. They would be at home in their own country, in real towns rather than an army base. No one would call on him to leave and perhaps never come back. And he would be an even happier man.

                But the picture he painted had her in it. And he realized, feeling rather foolish, that the war was the only thing keeping them in the same place. They didn’t even live in the same state back home. When the war ended, there would be no more book club.

                And that wouldn’t be an ending he liked.

                This had been easy; this had been fun. But they’d need something more than a novel in common to bind them together, so he said, “Why don’t you come out with me tomorrow night? To the Juniper?”

                Carolyn seemed taken aback. The Juniper was a club in the closest village that had surprisingly good jazz and swing bands and a steady stream of soldiers as patrons. “That’s… a little bit loud for book club.”

                “That’s true, but it’s the perfect volume for dancing.”

                Since their disastrous first meeting, he’d strictly prohibited all intentional charm on his part. He’d never tried another line on her, and he hadn’t suggested anything that was so clearly a date. He couldn’t blame her for testing the waters – she probably wasn’t sure he still felt any interest.

                He held his breath until she asked, “What time?”

                                                       -     -    -

                And he felt like he was still holding his breath when he saw her. The color of her dress made the color of her eyes so striking it was as though her gaze was a physical touch. There was a big band playing on the stage, but the music disappeared the second she walked into the dimly lit room. The world, as usual, grew quiet while he fell a little more in love with her.

                He hardly felt his own footsteps as he drifted through the other patrons to join her. When was the last time he’d seen a woman – seen anything – so beautiful?

                The moment she said his name, he knew the answer was never.

                “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said, tapping the earpiece of a phantom headset, “There was an important message that came in just as I meant to be leaving.”

               “Don’t worry about it, doll. You’re well worth the wait.”

                She took his hand when he offered it, and they talked over drinks at the bar until the band started up a big swing number that had both of them looking toward the dance floor. Carolyn pulled Bucky from his seat with both hands, saying, “Come on, soldier. I believe you mentioned dancing when you invited me here.”

                They danced to song after song, finding their skills to be a good match for the other’s. Other couples eddied on and off of the dance floor, but they stayed caught in each other’s currents. From one side of the floor to the other, the tide created by the music, the motion, and the sunny feeling between them kept them trapped. Neither had any idea how much time had passed by the time they collapsed at a table, breathless and with aching feet.

                They were sitting close to each other, enough that one of Bucky’s feet was between hers and his hand nearly brushed her shoulder as he rested his arm across the back of her chair. Her cheeks were flushed, and the club’s lights cast her in an almost ethereal glow. They drifted together until their breath shared the same space.

                “You’re not buzzed or anything, are you?” Bucky murmured.

                “What?” She twitched back in surprise. “No, why would – “

                “Good,” he interrupted, placing a hand on the nape of her neck. In the next second, his lips were on hers. Intent, patient, sweet.

                 There was a heartbeat’s length of time in which she was still – and he was terrified – but when she began to return the kiss, it was as purposeful as every word she’d ever spoken to him.

                 They pulled away enough to take in each other’s expressions, both feeling a little giddy, like anyone experiencing new love should be. “I, um…,” she cleared her throat, looking slightly bashful, “I might be a little bit now.”

                 Bucky only managed to keep from asking her to go steady with him for a week. She said yes, and sometime later, when his regiment had received their marching orders, she was there, tucking into his uniform pocket his favorite photos from the photo booth at the fair. And he was stealing last kisses, and joking that they’d finish their current read more quickly without the other around to distract them. He beamed over his shoulder at her after their final farewell, thinking of how much he’d fallen in love with her.

                 And I’ll tell her as soon as I get back.

                                                       -      -      -

                Her heart was heavy with the number of letters she’d typed beginning with, ‘I regret to inform you…’ They were so overrun with casualties to report that the usual staff couldn’t keep up with all the families that needed to be informed. List after list came in from the front.

                Name after name. Son after son who wouldn’t see another Christmas or birthday.

               “Carolyn, there’s a fresh stack of notices here. The 107th, out of Austria.” Another aide bustled by, dropping the abhorrently thick sheaf near Carolyn’s typewriter. At first, she was so absorbed in the macabre task before her that she hardly even heard, but when it hit her, it sucked the air from her lungs and stilled her heart in her chest.

                Sergeant Barnes of the 107th. The man whose picture was keeping her place in Jane Eyre.

                She murmured an excuse to no one in particular, saying she’d be right back before taking the casualty records from the typing pool and going outside. The less stagnant air did nothing to ease the painful tightness in her chest. Her pulse roared in her ears, even over the din of typewriter keys – like gunfire – in the background.

                Her field of vision narrowed to only the pages in front of her as she scanned desperately for his name – something made more difficult by the trembling of her hands. Nausea rolled like sea billows in her gut.

             For some reason, with every name she passed, every soldier dead, accounted for, or lost, a book title came to mind. Something she’d read with Bucky, some experience they’d shared. 

                The Call of the Wild. Gone with the Wind. The Hounds of the Baskervilles. A Study in Scarlet. A Tale of Two Cities. Moby Dick……

                  Sargent James Buchanan Barnes – missing in action.

                Presumed dead.

[lawyernovelist]

Review: The Last Jedi

At last! No excuses, it's just taken longer than I expected.

This is the first in my series reviewing The Last Jedi, giving a rough overview of the film and my impressions. I have a lot of them, but I'm going to try to keep this general and go into more detail on particular characters and arcs later.

Cut for spoilers for the new Star Wars trilogy (and the original trilogy, just to be safe) and some light spoilers for the Hobbit movies.

First thing to get it said: this was a gorgeous movie. The visuals were stunning; the shot of the fighters going across that salt flat and leaving red trails took my breath away and it was one of so many gorgeous moments. I could see everything in the fight scenes, there was just the right amount of slow-mo to make things dramatic without slowing things down, and basically one of my first comments once the credits were rolling and I'd got my breath back a bit was "That was pretty!". The new critters were great - the porgs weren't nearly as annoying as I was afraid they might be, though I do have to ask who the vegetarian on the writing team was because that scene was viscerally upsetting - and I liked the fact that they weren't purely tacked on to sell toys; there was little relevance to them, but they were there.

Can I just say again how nice it is to watch an action-heavy film with that much colour and such gorgeous visuals? Fie on all of you who say that mature movies can't be a joy to look at!

And damn, this movie was very grown-up. I really liked the themes of consequences and responsibility and trust and the idea that the protagonists can be wrong.

OK, there's a lot to talk about here and I'm having trouble working out where to start, hence the fact that this post - and now this series - is another one that I keep drafting and re-drafting. I think I'll start with the fact that, despite the fact that I've done my best not to expose myself to other people's reviews before writing my own, it hasn't escaped my notice that this film has not been as popular as the last one.

Now, I actually do get that. I really liked this film, but that doesn't mean it wasn't flawed and doesn't mean that the things I liked wouldn't be things that wouldn't upset people. For a start, that thing I mentioned up there about the movie being very grown-up. I don't want to sound patronising, but I do get that someone might quite reasonably protest that they don't come to Star Wars to be made uncomfortable about the nature of heroism, the fading of glory, and the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. It's just that I lap that kind of thing up. Plus, of course, I absolutely get how certain plot developments are, at first blush, a touch anti-climactic.

The thing is, though, that I say those plot developments come across as anti-climactic, but they actually do a lot for some of the themes starting to show up here. I'm going to go more into those shortly, but the first impression I had is that someone knows their Harry Potter with the whole idea of it not mattering where you came from but what choices you make: that was very much what I took away from the reveal of who Rey's parents were (and that it is Rey Random after all - I was rooting for Skywalker, but I'll take it), especially combined with some of the stuff Luke said about Ren and his "mighty Skywalker blood".

Another thing that this movie talked a lot about was new beginnings, and I think some of the stuff they did with that is another thing that some of the really die-hard fans have taken badly. Now, I'm not a die-hard Star Wars fan. I only recently watched Episodes 5 and 6 and haven't seen 4 since I was a kid, I never really read into any of the background information, and in fact it was only when I saw Force Awakens that I realised there might actually be something to this sci-fi movie series that everyone kept talking about.

I know that seems like an obvious conclusion, but popularity is no indication of quality - look at Twilight - and that goes double when it's something that's a massive cultural touchstone that it's blasphemy not to like. On an unrelated topic, Don't try to tell me about the beauty and power of Moby Dick. I don't care if it's a classic of American literature, I would actually rather re-read Twilight than continue to try to get through that book.

Also, side-note, how come nobody ever told me about Leia strangling Jabba the Hutt with that chain?

Anyway, I do get why someone who had grown up with Star Wars might find The Last Jedi difficult to love in a way that I, with my experience of the franchise, don't. However, I make no apologies for the fact that in my opinion this movie was incredible. Another first-impression comment I made (while arguing with someone at work who hated it) was that it was the first time for a while that I sat down to watch a movie and what I was seeing felt fresh. These felt like ideas and characters and arcs I hadn't seen a thousand times before. And that's especially good coming from Star Wars, which kind of has the reputation of being the most classic of the classics in terms of character and story structure.

Now, I deliberately didn't use the word "cliche". I personally think that's a very unfair term to use of things like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, for the same reason as the joke "Oh, I don't like Shakespeare; it's just full of quotes" works: it's the thing everyone's quoting. Works like Star Wars are the same: while they were building on other things, they're such a massive cultural force that they changed their genres and a lot of people now copy things they made popular.

In terms of the rough story structure (girl finds plot-relevant doodad, gets whisked away on adventure with new sidekicks and elderly mentor, mentor dies, girl defeats baddie), The Force Awakens is pretty textbook (and a lot of people complained that it was just ripping off A New Hope, which makes it kind of hilarious when the same people complain that The Last Jedi isn't Star-Wars-like enough). The Last Jedi doesn't have the same classic structure. In some ways that's a good thing - I've not seen a mentor-student relationship like Rey's with Luke, and I certainly haven't seen an enemy relationship like Rey's with Ren - but I'll admit that it isn't always. And... let's talk about Space Monte Carlo.

This was a pretty big plot diversion, and while it had value it's arguably the biggest flaw in the film in my opinion: we spend a very long time off on this side quest with Finn and Rose and it actually turns out to have been a diversion. And I have to apply the same standard to this as I did to Desolation of Smaug: I don't like it when films willingly waste my time.

Now, I have more to say on that, including why that's actually not an accurate comparison (spoilers: at least Space Monte Carlo contributes to character development and theme, which is more than can be said for the Laketown Cul-de-sac because the Hobbit movies couldn't character-develop their way out of a wet paper bag and wouldn't know a theme if it jumped up and bit them).

Another thing The Last Jedi did, and this relates to Space Monte Carlo, was shatter the idea that the protagonists - especially the badass rebellious male protagonists - can't be wrong. It seems cruel, but one of my favourite things in this movie was the repeated cutting-down of Poe Dameron. That and presenting Luke as fallible were two of the gutsiest things this movie did, and thank you for them. Those were awesome, a fantastic subversion of tropes, and one of the major things that actually made this movie feel fresh.

Don't get me wrong - I enjoy Poe, but I liked him so much more once we'd seen that he can massively miscalculate, face consequences, and grow as a person.

What else, what else...

You're quite right, my Vulcan friend.

We got new female characters! One of them got to make an awesome heroic-sacrifice last stand! One of them made a heartfelt speech expressing empathy for the downtrodden and forgotten, prompting the male lead to look past superficial beauty to the seamy underbelly, then said one of my favourite lines in the movie summing up a philosophy of resistance I'd not encountered in any other movie!

I liked Rose. That may become obvious.

Also, Rey continued to develop and be awesome, Leia was great (she was mad broken in terms of stats, but that seems to be par for the course with Jedi and similar), and there were just loads and loads of other minor female characters doing their thing without anyone needing to remark on their gender, which felt great.

Now, take the rough with the smooth, we will talk about Phasma. That was a pretty serious let-down and also pretty poor craft. Like, really, Movie? Come on, just admit you had no idea what to do with that character from the moment you came up with the concept.

Overall, I'll admit that this movie was flawed. Phasma really was a waste of a cool concept, the Space Monte Carlo sequence was a pretty major detour that made it feel a bit like the characters had spent half the film chasing their tails, and a lot of plot threads that had been built up huge were rather abruptly cauterised.

I still absolutely loved it. It was trying new things, it was taking big risks, and I respect that and really enjoyed the results.

That was a touch whistle-stop, but I wanted to go deep on some specific things. Next up, the villains and the concepts of good and evil in "Darkness Rises, and Light to Meet It".

They’re not all titled after quotes, I promise.

[chaoticsentiments]

Meant To Be Yours

Based of the musical, Heathers. Inspired by this animatic. Hope you enjoy ^_^

(AO3) 

How can any of this be happening to her? Is this what her adolescent life will become? A body count at 16 is not right and Rey knows it. And for what, a chance to be a First?

For the majority of her life, Rey Kenobi had always wondered what it would be like to be one of the popular crowd. To stand out and find her place within a society of social norms, ignorant adults and complicated teenage, hormonal issues. To live her high school years as Miss Popular and having her first kiss by a romantic scenery filled with wild promises of the future; stuff like in the movies, you know?

But instead, Rey finds herself not just a tool for the most hated and feared group in all of Republic High, that being the defiant First Order, but also the murderer of their leader, Snoke (god forbid anyone who speaks of his last name). Furthermore, it’s no better with Armitage Hux running about the school like he’s suddenly the new Snoke, as if the “suicide” of his “closest” friend had not even occurred at all.

And now, she’s responsible for not only Snoke, but the deaths of jocks Dopheld Mitaka and Kurt Thannison, and the entire reason why Finn, her most dearest and bestest friend, is bedridden with broken bones and a broken heart after his own failed suicide attempt.

Oh why, oh why did I ever listened to him, Rey whined, I should have known those bullets were real, I should’ve told Finn the truth. Stupid, stupid, stupid…

With nowhere else to turn, Rey rushes straight home where her grandfather is waiting for her.

“Ah, Rey,” he greets as she comes through the front door. “You’re finally back. Where have you been, my dear, I’ve been worried sick.”

“I’m sorry, grandpa. I was just at the hospital, visiting Finn.”

“Heard it on the radio,” he informs, standing up from his chair to hug her. “I just hope that boy’s alright. In any case, your friend, Kylo Ren, came by about an hour ago. He told me about everything, Rey.”

Confused and terrified by the mention of his name, Rey asks, “Everything?”

“Yes,” Kenobi nods. “He told me about your depression, Rey, your-- your thoughts of suicide. He even showed me --” He takes out what looks to be a worn out book with pages folded and colourful strips jutting from the top  “-- your copy of Moby Dick. Oh, Rey, what’s going on in that head of yours. I understand your need to fit in, but this is going a little bit too far for you… You’re not turning to those Darksiders, are you? I’ve heard that band is notorious for their suicidal themes.”

Rey takes the book. Flipping it through, she stumbles on a hidden note stuck to the centre, obviously not seen by her grandfather. Taking it out and reading it, the blood drains from her face.

Recognise the handwriting?

An amorphous voice sounding a lot like Snoke’s, whispers into her ear, “He’s got your handwriting down cold.”

“Rey?”

Rey looks up to meet the concerned gaze of her grandfather’s eyes. “I’m sorry, grandpa,” she mutters, placing the note back inside and making her way to her room, taking the book along with her. “I have to go.”

“Rey?” Kenobi questions, but to no avail. Before he can even inquire her further, Rey has already slammed her door shut. Inside, slumping down to her knees, she takes a breather, her mind a flurry of thoughts swirling inside her head.

What do I do now?! The most popular people are dead, Finn’s in the hospital, K.R.’s psychotic and I’m next on his list! Is this what teen angst was meant to be? This is getting the fuck out of hand!

Unable to think things through properly, Rey gets up and goes to her thinking space - her closet - to clear her head. As claustrophobic as it may sounds, there’s just something about the compact closure that allows for Rey to better focus on a sole objective.  

Turning on the dim light and finding her favourite spot, Rey curls with her knees tucked in, arms crossed and a mantra underneath her breath.

In and out…

In and out…

In… and out…

She looks around her little zone in search for some comfort. What Rey sees, aside from her thrift-store bought clothes, are pointless elementary school notes, treasures from the scavenger hunts her grandfather annually arranged for her birthday parties and many other nostalgic items. For a moment, Rey is reassured that maybe things aren’t as ba--

A lock loudly snaps. It came from the window. “Knock, knock!”

Rey freezes, mentally slapping herself for her inattentiveness. How could I’ve be so careless?

“Sorry to come through the window,” articulates a familiar, dark voice. “Dreadful etiquette, I know.”

Rey, never really understanding why she did it, shouts, “Get out of my house!”, alerting him of her location.

“Hiding in the closet?” K.R. teases, his footsteps approaching the closet door, “C’mon, Rey… Open the door.”

“No, I’ll scream, my grandpa will call the cops.”

“Oh come on Rey, don’t be afraid. I feel it too, y’know?” He mumbles mockingly in a soothing tone. “Look, all is forgiven, sweetheart. Just… just get dressed, you’re my date to the pep rally tonight.”

Pep rally? “What, why?”

“Well, I would answer that if you could just... come out.” As he says “come out”, Rey knows he’s beginning to lose his temper. I can’t believe this; does he really think I’m daft?

“No!” She retorts. “You threatened me and you, what, expect me to go to my doom with you?! Just leave me alone!”

K.R. emits a frustrated sigh. “No, sweetheart, no, I was only teasing you. You know I love you too much to mean it. Sure, I was coming up here to kill you, but I swear, I was gonna try and get you back with my amazing petition first.”

Petition? “What petition?”

Sounding fully smug, a fact that which for a guy like K.R. wouldn’t be too unusual, he replies, “I knew you’d be curious. You see, our classmates thought they were signing for the greater good of a senseless community. But really, listen to this.” Sounds suggesting a piece of crushed paper being smoothed out, K.R. takes a deep breath and starts reading his note, almost like a stage performance, as he reveals to Rey his secret scheme.

“We, the students of Republic High, will die. Our burnt bodies will be the ultimate protest to a society that degrades us and churns only slaves and blanks. No thanks. Fuck you all. Signed, the Students of Republic High. Goodbye… Whatcha you think? I mean, it’s not very subtle but neither is blowing up an entire school.”

Only the pure silence of Rey’s horror could describe how appalling she felt, as K.R. laughs rather humorously to his plot, to have ever thought a girl like her and a guy like K.R. could ever be like a normal teenaged couple. Of course her would-be-but-also-sorta-like-an-ex boyfriend is a psycho-maniac, why wouldn’t he be?

“You’re insane…” she cries.

“No, Rey, you don’t understand,” he assures her, “this is exactly what the world needs. It’s what my grandfather would have wanted from this cold, uncaring and unforgiving world. The only way to get things done around here is by taking the extremes and you know that.”

Rey can only cry a river into her arms further.

“Think about it, Rey. We can still be together, if that’s what you want. Don’t you know you’re the only thing that's right about this broken world? We were meant to be one without anything stopping us. Those assholes at school are the only keeping you away from me.”

Rey covers her ears. “No, shut up, I don’t care what you say to me anymore. You’re a liar!”

The room turns ghost-quiet with the prominent ticking of her bedroom clock outside. Yet it feels like she’s standing near the countdown of a ticking bomb. Never had Rey preferred the bustling of noises over the serenity of the quiet. Rey begins to get up, when suddenly, the flat wooden door of her closet cracks heavily under the pressure of a very impactful weight. She squeaks and gets back down again.

“They made you blind, Rey,” chides K.R. as he tries pushing against the door once more. “Messed up your mind.” Push. “I’m the only one who can set you free from their grasp!” Another push. “I can show you the way.”

Rey’s heart accelerates as she frantically searches for whatever weapon she may find in her close-packed closet.

“We have to finish what we began, Rey,” again another push with a furious heave, and Rey knows the door won’t be able to hold itself for much longer, “And I can’t make this alone without you!”

Her whole body starts to shake like a mad caffeine addict. Eyes shifting up and down again, Rey can only see her old white bed sheets laying haphazardly on the floor. It takes a while, but Rey ultimately decided. It’s the only way.

“I’m all that you need, Rey! Do you have any idea what you’ve done to me?!”

The door is really starting to split and Rey knows he won’t stop until he has her. I have to hurry, she sputters, quickly tying the many knots around herself and on a protruding railing above her.

“I was meant to be yours, Rey! You were meant to be mine!” He pushes again, fury only . “You carved open my heart!” The doors warns her here time is running quick. “You can’t just leave me to bleed.”

“Go away, Kylo!”

“NO! Not until I make you mine!”

After a while, it seems K.R. must have gotten tired from using all his mustered strength and had stopped for a moment. Why, though, Rey does not know. Clearly, he could have just easily finished the job.

She hears him breathing in and out again, like he’s calming himself down (although if anyone should be trying to stay calm, it should be her). “Please, open the door, Rey,” he says collectedly, yet his very evident shuddering does not help elevate the situation at all. “Please, can we just… not fight anymore? I know you’re scared right now, I’ve been there myself. But I can also set you free.”

K.R. hears nothing from the other side. “Don’t make me come in there, Rey,” he warns her and when she persists to remain silent, he cautions her again. “I’m going to count to three now.” Still nothing. He raises his hand.

“One…” No reply or sound coming from Rey is heard.

“Two…” The persisting stillness gets to him too quickly, making his patience run thin until he can’t be bothered anymore. “Fuck it!” And with that, he slams the door wide open.

What greets him though, wrenches a knife deep into to his chest. For there she hangs, motionless, feet floating in mid-air as her neck is supported by the thick rope of her bed sheets, her head sluggish like a comatose muscle.

Rey Kenobi is dead.

“Oh my god… ” Dropping to his knees, K.R. can only watch as the inanimate life, once his fire, sway from side-to-side, his vision becoming blurry as tears begin to make their way down his face. “No… Rey… Why?”

Down on all fours, K.R. tries looking back for a reason, any reason that would make her leave him like this. Did I say something wrong? What did I do wrong? Have I forgotten our anniversaries already?

He looks back up at the hanging body. “Please, Rey… Tell me why… Don’t leave me alone like this… Please,” he sobs. “You were all I could trust.”

Did I scare her too much?

It’s not long before his misery soon becomes his fueled anger. “Damn it, Rey!” He pounds his fist to the floor. “We could have watched the fires and roasted marshmallows together!” Trembling, his eyes watery, he watches her hair-covered face. “I can’t do this-- without you…”

But then his words of promise come back into his mind. Promise of how he swore as his role to obliterate everything and start the world anew with his own new order, his new vision, his new utopia.

And we could have done it together, Rey.

Regardless, K.R. knows where his duties lie. He gets up, coming closer to Rey’s corpse. Eyes down, he falters under his breath, more solemnly swearing to her than to himself, “I will do what I must, Rey. I know you’d agree with me. And then we can be happy together.”

Caressing her cheek, he gives her one last kiss. “Goodbye…”

“Rey?” The voice of Ben Kenobi inquired. “I heard noises, is everything alright?”

K.R. takes his cue and leaves.

One could only pity the soul of Old Ben once he realised his cherished granddaughter had hung herself. He screams in agony at her suicide, a piercing sound in the stillness of the room. “AHHH!!”

Which miraculously awakens Rey.

Coughing, she tries - and fails - to form coherent sentences. “No, grandpa, n--” Another rushed breath. “This-- is not what it looks like-- Grandpa,” she jabbers. “I’m so sorry--” More coughs .“It was just a joke-- I’m so sorry, It-- Was just a-- joke. Just a joke. I’m so sorry...”

Kenobi stands there, held by some unknown force of confusion - or shock - and a whole mix of emotions fighting in his head. He watches as she drops down, opening her blazer to reveal the sheets tied around her waist. Trapped in a state of stupefaction, afraid to shatter the reality he sees in front of him, Rey tries again, more softly this time.

“Grandpa?”

Fortunately, although almost whispered, it manages to shake him out of his numbness and straight into his fury. “It’s not funny!” He nags at her.  “Don’t you dare do that again to me, young lady!”

“Yes-- yes, grandpa” Rey squeaks, greatly ashamed yet necessary.

Satisfied with her word, Kenobi eyes her before bidding her a goodnight and proceeding on to his bedroom. Rey breathes a sigh of relief. That’s one problem handled. Now… How do I stop K.R?

[thesnhuup]

Pop Picks — May 19, 2019

May 19, 2019

What I’m listening to: 

I usually go to music here, but I was really moved by this podcast of a Davis Brooks talk at the Commonwealth Club in Silicon Valley: https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/david-brooks-quest-moral-life.  While I have long found myself distant from his political stance, he has come through a dark night of the soul and emerged with a wonderful clarity about calling, community, and not happiness (that most superficial of goals), but fulfillment and meaning, found in community and human kinship of many kinds. I immediately sent it to my kids.

What I’m reading: 

Susan Orlean’s wonderful The Library Book, a love song to libraries told through the story of the LA Central Library.  It brought back cherished memories of my many hours in beloved libraries — as a kid in the Waltham Public Library, a high schooler in the Farber Library at Brandeis (Lil Farber years later became a mentor of mine), and the cathedral-like Bapst Library at BC when I was a graduate student. Yes, I was a nerd. This is a love song to books certainly, but a reminder that libraries are so, so much more.  It is a reminder that libraries are less about a place or being a repository of information and, like America at its best, an idea and ideal. By the way, oh to write like her.

What I’m watching: 

What else? Game of Thrones, like any sensible human being. This last season is disappointing in many ways and the drop off in the writing post George R.R. Martin is as clear as was the drop off in the post-Sorkin West Wing. I would be willing to bet that if Martin has been writing the last season, Sansa and Tyrion would have committed suicide in the crypt. That said, we fans are deeply invested and even the flaws are giving us so much to discuss and debate. In that sense, the real gift of this last season is the enjoyment between episodes, like the old pre-streaming days when we all arrived at work after the latest episode of the Sopranos to discuss what we had all seen the night before. I will say this, the last two episodes — full of battle and gore – have been visually stunning. Whether the torches of the Dothraki being extinguished in the distance or Arya riding through rubble and flame on a white horse, rarely has the series ascended to such visual grandeur.

Archive 

March 28, 2019

What I’m listening to: 

There is a lovely piece played in a scene from A Place Called Home that I tracked down. It’s Erik Satie’s 3 Gymnopédies: Gymnopédie No. 1, played by the wonderful pianist Klára Körmendi. Satie composed this piece in 1888 and it was considered avant-garde and anti-Romantic. It’s minimalism and bit of dissonance sound fresh and contemporary to my ears and while not a huge Classical music fan, I’ve fallen in love with the Körmendi playlist on Spotify. When you need an alternative to hours of Cardi B.

What I’m reading: 

Just finished Esi Edugyan’s 2018 novel Washington Black. Starting on a slave plantation in Barbados, it is a picaresque novel that has elements of Jules Verne, Moby Dick, Frankenstein, and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. Yes, it strains credulity and there are moments of “huh?”, but I loved it (disclosure: I was in the minority among my fellow book club members) and the first third is a searing depiction of slavery. It’s audacious, sprawling (from Barbados to the Arctic to London to Africa), and the writing, especially about nature, luminous. 

What I’m watching: 

A soap opera. Yes, I’d like to pretend it’s something else, but we are 31 episodes into the Australian drama A Place Called Home and we are so, so addicted. Like “It’s  AM, but can’t we watch just one more episode?” addicted. Despite all the secrets, cliff hangers, intrigue, and “did that just happen?” moments, the core ingredients of any good soap opera, APCH has superb acting, real heft in terms of subject matter (including homophobia, anti-Semitism, sexual assault, and class), touches of our beloved Downton Abbey, and great cars. Beware. If you start, you won’t stop.

February 11, 2019

What I’m listening to:

Raphael Saadiq has been around for quite a while, as a musician, writer, and producer. He’s new to me and I love his old school R&B sound. Like Leon Bridges, he brings a contemporary freshness to the genre, sounding like a young Stevie Wonder (listen to “You’re The One That I Like”). Rock and Roll may be largely dead, but R&B persists – maybe because the former was derivative of the latter and never as good (and I say that as a Rock and Roll fan). I’m embarrassed to only have discovered Saadiq so late in his career, but it’s a delight to have done so.

What I’m reading:

Just finished Marilynne Robinson’s Home, part of her trilogy that includes the Pulitzer Prize winning first novel, Gilead, and the book after Home, Lila. Robinson is often described as a Christian writer, but not in a conventional sense. In this case, she gives us a modern version of the prodigal son and tells the story of what comes after he is welcomed back home. It’s not pretty. Robinson is a self-described Calvinist, thus character begets fate in Robinson’s world view and redemption is at best a question. There is something of Faulkner in her work (I am much taken with his famous “The past is never past” quote after a week in the deep South), her style is masterful, and like Faulkner, she builds with these three novels a whole universe in the small town of Gilead. Start with Gilead to better enjoy Home.

What I’m watching:

Sex Education was the most fun series we’ve seen in ages and we binged watched it on Netflix. A British homage to John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink, it feels like a mash up of American and British high schools. Focusing on the relationship of Maeve, the smart bad girl, and Otis, the virginal and awkward son of a sex therapist (played with brilliance by Gillian Anderson), it is laugh aloud funny and also evolves into more substance and depth (the abortion episode is genius). The sex scenes are somehow raunchy and charming and inoffensive at the same time and while ostensibly about teenagers (it feels like it is explaining contemporary teens to adults in many ways), the adults are compelling in their good and bad ways. It has been renewed for a second season, which is a gift.

January 3, 2019

What I’m listening to:

My listening choices usually refer to music, but this time I’m going with Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast on genius and the song Hallelujah. It tells the story of Leonard Cohen’s much-covered song Hallelujah and uses it as a lens on kinds of genius and creativity. Along the way, he brings in Picasso and Cézanne, Elvis Costello, and more. Gladwell is a good storyteller and if you love pop music, as I do, and Hallelujah, as I do (and you should), you’ll enjoy this podcast. We tend to celebrate the genius who seems inspired in the moment, creating new work like lightning strikes, but this podcast has me appreciating incremental creativity in a new way. It’s compelling and fun at the same time.

What I’m reading:

Just read Clay Christensen’s new book, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty. This was an advance copy, so soon available. Clay is an old friend and a huge influence on how we have grown SNHU and our approach to innovation. This book is so compelling, because we know attempts at development have so often been a failure and it is often puzzling to understand why some countries with desperate poverty and huge challenges somehow come to thrive (think S. Korea, Singapore, 19th C. America), while others languish. Clay offers a fresh way of thinking about development through the lens of his research on innovation and it is compelling. I bet this book gets a lot of attention, as most of his work does. I also suspect that many in the development community will hate it, as it calls into question the approach and enormous investments we have made in an attempt to lift countries out of poverty. A provocative read and, as always, Clay is a good storyteller.

What I’m watching:

Just watched Leave No Trace and should have guessed that it was directed by Debra Granik. She did Winter’s Bone, the extraordinary movie that launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career. Similarly, this movie features an amazing young actor, Thomasin McKenzie, and visits lives lived on the margins. In this case, a veteran suffering PTSD, and his 13-year-old daughter. The movie is patient, is visually lush, and justly earned 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (I have a rule to never watch anything under 82%). Everything in this film is under control and beautifully understated (aside from the visuals) – confident acting, confident directing, and so humane. I love the lack of flashbacks, the lack of sensationalism – the movie trusts the viewer, rare in this age of bombast. A lovely film.

December 4, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spending a week in New Zealand, we had endless laughs listening to the Kiwi band, Flight of the Conchords. Lots of comedic bands are funny, but the music is only okay or worse. These guys are funny – hysterical really – and the music is great. They have an uncanny ability to parody almost any style. In both New Zealand and Australia, we found a wry sense of humor that was just delightful and no better captured than with this duo. You don’t have to be in New Zealand to enjoy them.

What I’m reading:

I don’t often reread. For two reasons: A) I have so many books on my “still to be read” pile that it seems daunting to also rereadbooks I loved before, and B) it’s because I loved them once that I’m a little afraid to read them again. That said, I was recently asked to list my favorite book of all time and I answered Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But I don’t really know if that’s still true (and it’s an impossible question anyway – favorite book? On what day? In what mood?), so I’m rereading it and it feels like being with an old friend. It has one of my very favorite scenes ever: the card game between Levin and Kitty that leads to the proposal and his joyous walking the streets all night.

What I’m watching:

Blindspotting is billed as a buddy-comedy. Wow does that undersell it and the drama is often gripping. I loved Daveed Diggs in Hamilton, didn’t like his character in Black-ish, and think he is transcendent in this film he co-wrote with Rafael Casal, his co-star.  The film is a love song to Oakland in many ways, but also a gut-wrenching indictment of police brutality, systemic racism and bias, and gentrification. The film has the freshness and raw visceral impact of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. A great soundtrack, genre mixing, and energy make it one of my favorite movies of 2018.

October 15, 2018 

What I’m listening to:

We had the opportunity to see our favorite band, The National, live in Dallas two weeks ago. Just after watching Mistaken for Strangers, the documentary sort of about the band. So we’ve spent a lot of time going back into their earlier work, listening to songs we don’t know well, and reaffirming that their musicality, smarts, and sound are both original and astoundingly good. They did not disappoint in concert and it is a good thing their tour ended, as we might just spend all of our time and money following them around. Matt Berninger is a genius and his lead vocals kill me (and because they are in my range, I can actually sing along!). Their arrangements are profoundly good and go right to whatever brain/heart wiring that pulls one in and doesn’t let them go.

What I’m reading:

Who is Richard Powers and why have I only discovered him now, with his 12th book? Overstory is profoundly good, a book that is essential and powerful and makes me look at my everyday world in new ways. In short, a dizzying example of how powerful can be narrative in the hands of a master storyteller. I hesitate to say it’s the best environmental novel I’ve ever read (it is), because that would put this book in a category. It is surely about the natural world, but it is as much about we humans. It’s monumental and elegiac and wondrous at all once. Cancel your day’s schedule and read it now. Then plant a tree. A lot of them.

What I’m watching:

Bo Burnham wrote and directed Eighth Grade and Elsie Fisher is nothing less than amazing as its star (what’s with these new child actors; see Florida Project). It’s funny and painful and touching. It’s also the single best film treatment that I have seen of what it means to grow up in a social media shaped world. It’s a reminder that growing up is hard. Maybe harder now in a world of relentless, layered digital pressure to curate perfect lives that are far removed from the natural messy worlds and selves we actually inhabit. It’s a well-deserved 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and I wonder who dinged it for the missing 2%.

September 7, 2018

What I’m listening to:

With a cover pointing back to the Beastie Boys’ 1986 Licensed to Ill, Eminem’s quietly released Kamikaze is not my usual taste, but I’ve always admired him for his “all out there” willingness to be personal, to call people out, and his sheer genius with language. I thought Daveed Diggs could rap fast, but Eminem is supersonic at moments, and still finds room for melody. Love that he includes Joyner Lucas, whose “I’m Not Racist” gets added to the growing list of simply amazing music videos commenting on race in America. There are endless reasons why I am the least likely Eminem fan, but when no one is around to make fun of me, I’ll put it on again.

What I’m reading:

Lesley Blume’s Everyone Behaves Badly, which is the story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his time in 1920s Paris (oh, what a time – see Midnight in Paris if you haven’t already). Of course, Blume disabuses my romantic ideas of that time and place and everyone is sort of (or profoundly so) a jerk, especially…no spoiler here…Hemingway. That said, it is a compelling read and coming off the Henry James inspired prose of Mrs. Osmond, it made me appreciate more how groundbreaking was Hemingway’s modern prose style. Like his contemporary Picasso, he reinvented the art and it can be easy to forget, these decades later, how profound was the change and its impact. And it has bullfights.

What I’m watching:

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is just exceptional. It’s filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which provides a stunning landscape, and it feels like a classic western reinvented for our times. The main characters are played by the real-life people who inspired this narrative (but feels like a documentary) film. Brady Jandreau, playing himself really, owns the screen. It’s about manhood, honor codes, loss, and resilience – rendered in sensitive, nuanced, and heartfelt ways. It feels like it could be about large swaths of America today. Really powerful.

August 16, 2018

What I’m listening to:

In my Spotify Daily Mix was Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman, one of the world’s greatest love songs. Go online and read the story of how the song was discovered and recorded. There are competing accounts, but Sledge said he improvised it after a bad breakup. It has that kind of aching spontaneity. It is another hit from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, one of the GREAT music hotbeds, along with Detroit, Nashville, and Memphis. Our February Board meeting is in Alabama and I may finally have to do the pilgrimage road trip to Muscle Shoals and then Memphis, dropping in for Sunday services at the church where Rev. Al Green still preaches and sings. If the music is all like this, I will be saved.

What I’m reading:

John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, his homage to literary idol Henry James and an imagined sequel to James’ 1881 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady. Go online and read the first paragraph of Chapter 25. He is…profoundly good. Makes me want to never write again, since anything I attempt will feel like some other, lowly activity in comparison to his mastery of language, image, syntax. This is slow reading, every sentence to be savored.

What I’m watching:

I’ve always respected Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we just watched the documentary RGB. It is over-the-top great and she is now one of my heroes. A superwoman in many ways and the documentary is really well done. There are lots of scenes of her speaking to crowds and the way young women, especially law students, look at her is touching.  And you can’t help but fall in love with her now late husband Marty. See this movie and be reminded of how important is the Law.

July 23, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spotify’s Summer Acoustic playlist has been on repeat quite a lot. What a fun way to listen to artists new to me, including The Paper Kites, Hollow Coves, and Fleet Foxes, as well as old favorites like Leon Bridges and Jose Gonzalez. Pretty chill when dialing back to a summer pace, dining on the screen porch or reading a book.

What I’m reading:

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells of the racial injustice (and the war on the poor our judicial system perpetuates as well) that he discovered as a young graduate from Harvard Law School and his fight to address it. It is in turn heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. It is also about mercy and empathy and justice that reads like a novel. Brilliant.

What I’m watching:

Fauda. We watched season one of this Israeli thriller. It was much discussed in Israel because while it focuses on an ex-special agent who comes out of retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist, it was willing to reveal the complexity, richness, and emotions of Palestinian lives. And the occasional brutality of the Israelis. Pretty controversial stuff in Israel. Lior Raz plays Doron, the main character, and is compelling and tough and often hard to like. He’s a mess. As is the world in which he has to operate. We really liked it, and also felt guilty because while it may have been brave in its treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli context, it falls back into some tired tropes and ultimately falls short on this front.

June 11, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Like everyone else, I’m listening to Pusha T drop the mic on Drake. Okay, not really, but do I get some points for even knowing that? We all walk around with songs that immediately bring us back to a time or a place. Songs are time machines. We are coming up on Father’s Day. My own dad passed away on Father’s Day back in 1994 and I remembering dutifully getting through the wake and funeral and being strong throughout. Then, sitting alone in our kitchen, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence came on and I lost it. When you lose a parent for the first time (most of us have two after all) we lose our innocence and in that passage, we suddenly feel adult in a new way (no matter how old we are), a longing for our own childhood, and a need to forgive and be forgiven. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll understand. As Wordsworth reminds us in In Memoriam, there are seasons to our grief and, all these years later, this song no longer hits me in the gut, but does transport me back with loving memories of my father. I’ll play it Father’s Day.

What I’m reading:

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. I am not a reader of fantasy or sci-fi, though I understand they can be powerful vehicles for addressing the very real challenges of the world in which we actually live. I’m not sure I know of a more vivid and gripping illustration of that fact than N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel The Fifth Season, first in her Broken Earth trilogy. It is astounding. It is the fantasy parallel to The Underground Railroad, my favorite recent read, a depiction of subjugation, power, casual violence, and a broken world in which our hero(s) struggle, suffer mightily, and still, somehow, give us hope. It is a tour de force book. How can someone be this good a writer? The first 30 pages pained me (always with this genre, one must learn a new, constructed world, and all of its operating physics and systems of order), and then I could not put it down. I panicked as I neared the end, not wanting to finish the book, and quickly ordered the Obelisk Gate, the second novel in the trilogy, and I can tell you now that I’ll be spending some goodly portion of my weekend in Jemisin’s other world.

What I’m watching:

The NBA Finals and perhaps the best basketball player of this generation. I’ve come to deeply respect LeBron James as a person, a force for social good, and now as an extraordinary player at the peak of his powers. His superhuman play during the NBA playoffs now ranks with the all-time greats, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, MJ, Kobe, and the demi-god that was Bill Russell. That his Cavs lost in a 4-game sweep is no surprise. It was a mediocre team being carried on the wide shoulders of James (and matched against one of the greatest teams ever, the Warriors, and the Harry Potter of basketball, Steph Curry) and, in some strange way, his greatness is amplified by the contrast with the rest of his team. It was a great run.

May 24, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I’ve always liked Alicia Keys and admired her social activism, but I am hooked on her last album Here. This feels like an album finally commensurate with her anger, activism, hope, and grit. More R&B and Hip Hop than is typical for her, I think this album moves into an echelon inhabited by a Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Beyonce’s Formation. Social activism and outrage rarely make great novels, but they often fuel great popular music. Here is a terrific example.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad may be close to a flawless novel. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer, it chronicles the lives of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caeser, as they try to escape the hell of plantation life in Georgia.  It is an often searing novel and Cora is one of the great heroes of American literature. I would make this mandatory reading in every high school in America, especially in light of the absurd revisionist narratives of “happy and well cared for” slaves. This is a genuinely great novel, one of the best I’ve read, the magical realism and conflating of time periods lifts it to another realm of social commentary, relevance, and a blazing indictment of America’s Original Sin, for which we remain unabsolved.

What I’m watching:

I thought I knew about The Pentagon Papers, but The Post, a real-life political thriller from Steven Spielberg taught me a lot, features some of our greatest actors, and is so timely given the assault on our democratic institutions and with a presidency out of control. It is a reminder that a free and fearless press is a powerful part of our democracy, always among the first targets of despots everywhere. The story revolves around the legendary Post owner and D.C. doyenne, Katharine Graham. I had the opportunity to see her son, Don Graham, right after he saw the film, and he raved about Meryl Streep’s portrayal of his mother. Liked it a lot more than I expected.

April 27, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I mentioned John Prine in a recent post and then on the heels of that mention, he has released a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, his first new album in ten years. Prine is beloved by other singer songwriters and often praised by the inscrutable God that is Bob Dylan.  Indeed, Prine was frequently said to be the “next Bob Dylan” in the early part of his career, though he instead carved out his own respectable career and voice, if never with the dizzying success of Dylan. The new album reflects a man in his 70s, a cancer survivor, who reflects on life and its end, but with the good humor and empathy that are hallmarks of Prine’s music. “When I Get To Heaven” is a rollicking, fun vision of what comes next and a pure delight. A charming, warm, and often terrific album.

What I’m reading:

I recently read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, on many people’s Top Ten lists for last year and for good reason. It is sprawling, multi-generational, and based in the world of Japanese occupied Korea and then in the Korean immigrant’s world of Oaska, so our key characters become “tweeners,” accepted in neither world. It’s often unspeakably sad, and yet there is resiliency and love. There is also intimacy, despite the time and geographic span of the novel. It’s breathtakingly good and like all good novels, transporting.

What I’m watching:

I adore Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and while I’m not sure his Shape of Water is better, it is a worthy follow up to the earlier masterpiece (and more of a commercial success). Lots of critics dislike the film, but I’m okay with a simple retelling of a Beauty and the Beast love story, as predictable as it might be. The acting is terrific, it is visually stunning, and there are layers of pain as well as social and political commentary (the setting is the US during the Cold War) and, no real spoiler here, the real monsters are humans, the military officer who sees over the captured aquatic creature. It is hauntingly beautiful and its depiction of hatred to those who are different or “other” is painfully resonant with the time in which we live. Put this on your “must see” list.

March 18, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Sitting on a plane for hours (and many more to go; geez, Australia is far away) is a great opportunity to listen to new music and to revisit old favorites. This time, it is Lucy Dacus and her album Historians, the new sophomore release from a 22-year old indie artist that writes with relatable, real-life lyrics. Just on a second listen and while she insists this isn’t a break up record (as we know, 50% of all great songs are break up songs), it is full of loss and pain. Worth the listen so far. For the way back machine, it’s John Prine and In Spite of Ourselves (that title track is one of the great love songs of all time), a collection of duets with some of his “favorite girl singers” as he once described them. I have a crush on Iris Dement (for a really righteously angry song try her Wasteland of the Free), but there is also EmmyLou Harris, the incomparable Dolores Keane, and Lucinda Williams. Very different albums, both wonderful.

What I’m reading:

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on Christopher Steele presents little that is new, but she pulls it together in a terrific and coherent whole that is illuminating and troubling at the same time. Not only for what is happening, but for the complicity of the far right in trying to discredit that which should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Bob Mueller may be the most important defender of the democracy at this time. A must read.

What I’m watching:

Homeland is killing it this season and is prescient, hauntingly so. Russian election interference, a Bannon-style hate radio demagogue, alienated and gun toting militia types, and a president out of control. It’s fabulous, even if it feels awfully close to the evening news. 

March 8, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We have a family challenge to compile our Top 100 songs. It is painful. Only 100? No more than three songs by one artist? Wait, why is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on my list? Should it just be The Clash from whom she samples? Can I admit to guilty pleasure songs? Hey, it’s my list and I can put anything I want on it. So I’m listening to the list while I work and the song playing right now is Tom Petty’s “The Wild One, Forever,” a B-side single that was never a hit and that remains my favorite Petty song. Also, “Evangeline” by Los Lobos. It evokes a night many years ago, with friends at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA, when everyone danced well past 1AM in a hot, sweaty, packed club and the band was a revelation. Maybe the best music night of our lives and a reminder that one’s 100 Favorite Songs list is as much about what you were doing and where you were in your life when those songs were playing as it is about the music. It’s not a list. It’s a soundtrack for this journey.

What I’m reading:

Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy was in the NY Times top ten books of 2017 list and it is easy to see why. Lockwood brings remarkable and often surprising imagery, metaphor, and language to her prose memoir and it actually threw me off at first. It then all became clear when someone told me she is a poet. The book is laugh aloud funny, which masks (or makes safer anyway) some pretty dark territory. Anyone who grew up Catholic, whether lapsed or not, will resonate with her story. She can’t resist a bawdy anecdote and her family provides some of the most memorable characters possible, especially her father, her sister, and her mother, who I came to adore. Best thing I’ve read in ages.

What I’m watching:

The Florida Project, a profoundly good movie on so many levels. Start with the central character, six-year old (at the time of the filming) Brooklynn Prince, who owns – I mean really owns – the screen. This is pure acting genius and at that age? Astounding. Almost as astounding is Bria Vinaite, who plays her mother. She was discovered on Instagram and had never acted before this role, which she did with just three weeks of acting lessons. She is utterly convincing and the tension between the child’s absolute wonder and joy in the world with her mother’s struggle to provide, to be a mother, is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. Willem Dafoe rightly received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. This is a terrific movie.

February 12, 2018

What I’m listening to:

So, I have a lot of friends of age (I know you’re thinking 40s, but I just turned 60) who are frozen in whatever era of music they enjoyed in college or maybe even in their thirties. There are lots of times when I reach back into the catalog, since music is one of those really powerful and transporting senses that can take you through time (smell is the other one, though often underappreciated for that power). Hell, I just bought a turntable and now spending time in vintage vinyl shops. But I’m trying to take a lesson from Pat, who revels in new music and can as easily talk about North African rap music and the latest National album as Meet the Beatles, her first ever album. So, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy winning Damn. While it may not be the first thing I’ll reach for on a winter night in Maine, by the fire, I was taken with it. It’s layered, political, and weirdly sensitive and misogynist at the same time, and it feels fresh and authentic and smart at the same time, with music that often pulled me from what I was doing. In short, everything music should do. I’m not a bit cooler for listening to Damn, but when I followed it with Steely Dan, I felt like I was listening to Lawrence Welk. A good sign, I think.

What I’m reading:

I am reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I’m not usually a reader of biographies, but I’ve always been taken with Leonardo. Isaacson does not disappoint (does he ever?), and his subject is at once more human and accessible and more awe-inspiring in Isaacson’s capable hands. Gay, left-handed, vegetarian, incapable of finishing things, a wonderful conversationalist, kind, and perhaps the most relentlessly curious human being who has ever lived. Like his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, Isaacson’s project here is to show that genius lives at the intersection of science and art, of rationality and creativity. Highly recommend it.

What I’m watching:

We watched the This Is Us post-Super Bowl episode, the one where Jack finally buys the farm. I really want to hate this show. It is melodramatic and manipulative, with characters that mostly never change or grow, and it hooks me every damn time we watch it. The episode last Sunday was a tear jerker, a double whammy intended to render into a blubbering, tissue-crumbling pathetic mess anyone who has lost a parent or who is a parent. Sterling K. Brown, Ron Cephas Jones, the surprising Mandy Moore, and Milo Ventimiglia are hard not to love and last season’s episode that had only Brown and Cephas going to Memphis was the show at its best (they are by far the two best actors). Last week was the show at its best worst. In other words, I want to hate it, but I love it. If you haven’t seen it, don’t binge watch it. You’ll need therapy and insulin.

January 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Drive-By Truckers. Chris Stapleton has me on an unusual (for me) country theme and I discovered these guys to my great delight. They’ve been around, with some 11 albums, but the newest one is fascinating. It’s a deep dive into Southern alienation and the white working-class world often associated with our current president. I admire the willingness to lay bare, in kick ass rock songs, the complexities and pain at work among people we too quickly place into overly simple categories. These guys are brave, bold, and thoughtful as hell, while producing songs I didn’t expect to like, but that I keep playing. And they are coming to NH.

What I’m reading:

A textual analog to Drive-By Truckers by Chris Stapleton in many ways is Tony Horowitz’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning Confederates in the Attic. Ostensibly about the Civil War and the South’s ongoing attachment to it, it is prescient and speaks eloquently to the times in which we live (where every southern state but Virginia voted for President Trump). Often hilarious, it too surfaces complexities and nuance that escape a more recent, and widely acclaimed, book like Hillbilly Elegy. As a Civil War fan, it was also astonishing in many instances, especially when it blows apart long-held “truths” about the war, such as the degree to which Sherman burned down the south (he did not). Like D-B Truckers, Horowitz loves the South and the people he encounters, even as he grapples with its myths of victimhood and exceptionalism (and racism, which may be no more than the racism in the north, but of a different kind). Everyone should read this book and I’m embarrassed I’m so late to it.

What I’m watching:

David Letterman has a new Netflix show called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” and we watched the first episode, in which Letterman interviewed Barack Obama. It was extraordinary (if you don’t have Netflix, get it just to watch this show); not only because we were reminded of Obama’s smarts, grace, and humanity (and humor), but because we saw a side of Letterman we didn’t know existed. His personal reflections on Selma were raw and powerful, almost painful. He will do five more episodes with “extraordinary individuals” and if they are anything like the first, this might be the very best work of his career and one of the best things on television.

December 22, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways, a painful inside look at the plight of illegal Indian immigrant workers in Britain. It was shortlisted for 2015 Man Booker Prize and its transporting, often to a dark and painful universe, and it is impossible not to think about the American version of this story and the terrible way we treat the undocumented in our own country, especially now.

What I’m watching:

Season II of The Crown is even better than Season I. Elizabeth’s character is becoming more three-dimensional, the modern world is catching up with tradition-bound Britain, and Cold War politics offer more context and tension than we saw in Season I. Claire Foy, in her last season, is just terrific – one arched eye brow can send a message.

What I’m listening to:

A lot of Christmas music, but needing a break from the schmaltz, I’ve discovered Over the Rhine and their Christmas album, Snow Angels. God, these guys are good.

November 14, 2017

What I’m watching:

Guiltily, I watch the Patriots play every weekend, often building my schedule and plans around seeing the game. Why the guilt? I don’t know how morally defensible is football anymore, as we now know the severe damage it does to the players. We can’t pretend it’s all okay anymore. Is this our version of late decadent Rome, watching mostly young Black men take a terrible toll on each other for our mere entertainment?

What I’m reading:

Recently finished J.G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes, a powerful depiction of a corporate-tech ex-pat community taken over by a kind of psychopathology, in which all social norms and responsibilities are surrendered to residents of the new world community. Kept thinking about Silicon Valley when reading it. Pretty dark, dystopian view of the modern world and centered around a mass killing, troublingly prescient.

What I’m listening to:

Was never really a Lorde fan, only knowing her catchy (and smarter than you might first guess) pop hit “Royals” from her debut album. But her new album, Melodrama, is terrific and it doesn’t feel quite right to call this “pop.” There is something way more substantial going on with Lorde and I can see why many critics put this album at the top of their Best in 2017 list. Count me in as a huge fan.

November 3, 2017

What I’m reading: Just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, her breathtakingly good second novel. How is someone so young so wise? Her writing is near perfection and I read the book in two days, setting my alarm for 4:30AM so I could finish it before work.

What I’m watching: We just binge watched season two of Stranger Things and it was worth it just to watch Millie Bobbie Brown, the transcendent young actor who plays Eleven. The series is a delightful mash up of every great eighties horror genre you can imagine and while pretty dark, an absolute joy to watch.

What I’m listening to: I’m not a lover of country music (to say the least), but I love Chris Stapleton. His “The Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning” is heartbreakingly good and reminds me of the old school country that played in my house as a kid. He has a new album and I can’t wait, but his From A Room: Volume 1 is on repeat for now.

September 26, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It took me a while to accept its cadence and sheer weirdness, but loved it in the end. A painful meditation on loss and grief, and a genuinely beautiful exploration of the intersection of life and death, the difficulty of letting go of what was, good and bad, and what never came to be.

What I’m watching:

HBO’s The Deuce. Times Square and the beginning of the porn industry in the 1970s, the setting made me wonder if this was really something I’d want to see. But David Simon is the writer and I’d read a menu if he wrote it. It does not disappoint so far and there is nothing prurient about it.

What I’m listening to:

The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast. I love this band. The opening piano notes of the first song, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” seize me & I’m reminded that no one else in music today matches their arrangement & musicianship. I’m adding “Born to Beg,” “Slow Show,” “I Need My Girl,” and “Runaway” to my list of favorite love songs.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J from President's Corner http://bit.ly/2EkZOX0 via IFTTT

[time-fury]

Why I did Movember - My Shame

When someone says they have an interest in something, I firmly believe that means the subject has in some way affected that person. For example, if someone were so say they had an interest in feminist studies, the chances are that person has in someway been affected by the patriarchy we find ourselves living in. So when, at the start of this month, I said I would be growing facial hair to raise awareness of the failing mental health of young gay men, my motives were not entirely altruistic. Nor is it simply down to the fact that I am myself a young gay man. I feel the need to preface this with a disclaimer that this is entirely built around my own personal experience, and that nothing I describe here has been in any way verified by an actual medical professional. So if you read anything that causes offence, I did not intend it so. It’s essentially public knowledge now that gay people are actually pretty accepted, and on the whole we know this as well, but there is still a lot that we don’t speak about that, even in todays quite open society. So while yes, gay men have full and unlimited equal rights in law, that doesn’t necessarily make us equal citizens. I came to this realisation on my first walk for Movember. As I walked around the grounds of Llandaff Cathedral, I found myself thinking about my life growing up as a devout Catholic and gay boy/teenager. This was a rabbit hole of thought that led me to come to the conclusion that while gay men have full legal equality, gay boys (especially religious ones) are second-rate citizens. Gay men can get married, whereas gay boys are rarely taught beyond heterosexual nuptials. Gay men can go for regular HIV check-ups, whereas gay boys are barely educated on what HIV is. Gay men can fall in love, but gay boys are almost never taught about even the potential of not dating a woman. Sex is still for man and wife, with the sole purpose of procreation, and anything outside of this is fraught with risks. Gay sex automatically means a higher risk of contracting a deadly disease, and anyone who is gay is signing themselves up for a life apart from everyone around them. Things are getting better, but better doesn’t mean best. So long as this isn’t the best it can be, gay boys will suffer. While the current climate is not overtly homophobic, its institutions are dragging its heels and continuing to force a deeply rooted shame on gay boys that they may never get over. The isolation this system imposes is certainly something that has affected me deeply. As the month went on I looked back over the parts of my life that I can remember, and I found myself noticing just how much I have changed as a result of these factors. I’ll admit I was never the chattiest child, preferring the solitary company of a book or a CBBC drama to playing football with the boys. But I was (despite my eyesight issues) an excellent observer. I saw boys and girls giggling to the side of the playground, kissing each other on the cheek under the stairs in secret, or behind the wall of the older years playground. So, while not understanding what all the fuss was about, I played along. Whatever girl I was closest to was branded a “crush”, which I assumed it must be. This seems to be a common trend, gay boys pretending to like girls until they come out, freed from those lies, but it’s actually incredibly damaging. With myself, I found that I questioned every close relationship with a girl. I would interrogate myself about how I felt, why it wasn’t right, why I wasn’t right, and why I kept looking at that boy over there instead. Every platonic friendship becomes a quest to force a crush, and every crush becomes a quest to force platonic friendship. And if young people don’t allow themselves to feel what they want to feel, it’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, to shake that when they are fully-grown. Every time they fall in love it’s tainted by the deeply rooted shame surrounding their first love. If you want to look at why some gay men take such risks when having sex, that might be a good place to start looking. Another obvious place to look is in the education. While young gay boys are in the throes of puberty, juggling their schoolwork with their own sexual and emotional crisis, they have nowhere to turn for guidance. Now this is of course not the case in many schools these days, so this part is where my own personal experience takes over. It is difficult, sitting in a room of thirty people, being taught about sex, and feeling like the only one not learning anything. The boys are all sniggering about vaginas together, and the girls are grimacing at the idea of childbirth, and none of it really means anything to me. There was brief talk of condoms (Catholic school), and the pros and cons of safe sex. There was a talk on various STI’s and how they’re contracted (all with the Catholic “don’t do this” angle), and there was a lot on the process of pregnancy. The only thing I vividly remember was how my stomach turned when AIDS and HIV were mentioned, which of course meant the introduction of homosexuality to the module. It was blink and you miss it. Gay means AIDS, let’s move on. There was nothing on the mechanics of sex, and certainly no notion that whatever it was could occur in a loving relationship. So what’s a young gay boy to do? Of course, turn to the internet. An introduction to a topic defines someone’s interest. If you gave an infant a copy of Moby Dick, they’d never read again. If your first exposure to sex is two guys meeting in the woods to have casual, unprotected sex, I think you can see how that would define your approach to sex. It’s dirty, it’s sleazy, it’s dangerous, and you put your penis where?! If you want to know how bad sexual education is for young gay people, I’ll tell you this: I didn’t know what lube was or how to use it until the age of eighteen, I didn’t know how to put a condom on until the day before I had sex for the first time, and I didn’t realise there was a way of cleaning your systems out before sex until I was twenty. This lack of education could have led to some serious risks being taken without me even knowing they were risks. My lack of knowledge may come as a surprise to some who once upon a time saw me as an expert, which brings me onto the next topic of how mental health in young gay men is fucked. For most, our limited knowledge has come from the internet, be that porn or Youtubes countless coming out videos, we have no real concept of the LGBT community, and we have been harbouring secret loves since the dawn of our memories. But then the doors to that closet open, the confetti guns go off, you step out into the light, and things just become a different kind of shit. Now, you’re an expert. You’re in the limelight, the gay best friend, and in my case for a couple of years, the only gay in the school. This is immense pressure for a newly out boy, as this is something deeply personal we have decided to share with the world. While the relief is immense, it does take some time to get used to. We aren’t afforded that luxury however, or at least I wasn’t, as the lack of education became glaringly obvious. I wrote a line in a play recently that said, “I had always known I liked boys in the way that other boys liked girls. But being gay? That’s different.” Up until this point, being gay was a petty playground insult, but now it had a face. And as the only gay face in the school, I was the only one to turn to when people had questions. The only problem being I went to the same school as them, so I was as in the dark as a lot of the people asking me. Sometimes I think I came out too soon, but that’s bollocks. I just came out before I realised what it meant. It triggered another personality crisis, as I began to struggle with the idea of living under this label. Another battle to fight alone, as now everyone expected me to be an LGBT expert. Thankfully I was never seriously bullied, but you can report bullies, you can’t report institutionalised abandonment. Something else you can’t report is a broken heart. I won’t talk too much about the first time I fell in love as I imagine it’s a story heard a thousand times before. Ask any gay man and he’ll probably have a story about the straight boy in high school. My own version of this tale is relatively passive, through years of supressing my feelings, before accepting them for what they were, and then still having to repress them as he’s straight. Balance that with those who know telling me to hold out hope, it was an emotional rollercoaster of a few years. It climaxed with a story I am still unable to verify. After six years of evolving feelings, he found out, and apparently showed a side that put me off him forever, as he became enraged by the idea of a boy being in love with him. I will say that on the matter. I was in love. For years of my life I was in love, but the environment I was in forced me to repress those feelings, ones that have thus far not resurfaced. This pressure, along with the conventional pressures of GCSE’s, puberty, and with other events out of my control, I ended up in student support therapy sessions. These sessions were essentially the result of a perfect storm that also involved a heavy dose of toxic masculinity, a broader topic I won’t discuss here. I ended up stopping these sessions after roughly two-to-three months, as I felt they were actually adding to my worries, not eliminating them. By the time I turned eighteen, I feel I’d been officially fucked. I was going to university, a hub of gayness, exams, independence, and sexual liberation, and I was in no way prepared. My exposure to the gay world had been tainted by my education, both sexual and religious, by the continued camp and/or depressing representation in film and TV, online porn, and Grindr. I was caught between two worlds, the heterosexual world I’d climbed my way out of, and the LGBT community that felt too far the other way. I had no home in the Church, and having one foot in the closet at home meant I didn’t really feel comfortable there either. Being eighteen seems a long time ago now. But the effects of my childhood are still affecting me today. The repression of my first love has meant that I find myself incapable of exposing myself to that feeling again. The secrets I have kept throughout my life have left me untrustworthy of anyone, including myself, and has tainted my personality beyond belief. I have become bitter and sarcastic in a desperate attempt to hide my actual personality, something I got a glimpse of for the first time back in February to June of this year. My lack of emotional stability has left me looking for the next best thing on an app that I hate, but have become reliant on for human contact however brief. I find emotions themselves incredibly exhausting, and increasingly the notion of getting out of bed in the morning is becoming an arduous task. My passion for writing is waning, and my personality is increasingly impulsive and addictive. I’m not blaming being gay on these issues, but it has certainly been a contributing factor. I only faced up to my issues at the end of university, forced to admit it by my lecturers. I am ashamed. I love men, but I am ashamed to be gay. But I think more importantly, I am lost. I am still that eighteen year old with nowhere to call home, caught between the world he knew and the world he’s yet to explore. So why did I do Movember? Why do I think the mental health of gay boys is worth the walks? Why is it close to my heart? It’s, selfishly, because of me. And while this post is long and rushed, it’s barely scratched the surface of the issues facing young gay boys. It’s sex, it’s relationships, it’s self-worth, it’s friends and family, it’s education, it’s politics, and most importantly, it’s incredibly personal. So long as I have this beard, I will fight for those gay boys, but first I ‘ve got to fight for this one.

[tanmath3-blog]

Eric A. Shelman is amazing. Not only is he an amazing writer he can sing too. If you haven’t heard him sing check out his YouTube channel. You don’t want to miss it. He has a great sense of humor and an awesome personality. He loves his wife more than anything in the world. You should hear him talk about her it will make you smile. His writing will have you turning pages fast as you can and holding your breath. I highly recommend you reading his books you will love them. His characters are well-developed and the story line solid and flows well. If you haven’t met him you are missing out on a great man, writer and friend. Please welcome Eric A. Shelman to Roadie Notes…..

    1. How old were you when you first wrote your first story?

I had to be 18 or 19 – I had moved to Dana Point, California, into my first apartment on Silver Lantern street. I had a HUGE group of good partying friends, with it being 1978/79, and wrote a story that included all of them called “Joe Toast in Outer Space.”

Joe Toast was what I’d call myself (and my friends called themselves) when we got a little … let’s say, “blitzed.” Somebody’d come up to me at a party and say, “Hey, man, how you doin’?” and I’d say, “Man, I’m Joe Toast.” Meaning … I was “toasted.”

BUT that said, I also wrote poetry when I was a kid – even got a poem about a departing teacher, Mrs. Dunaway, in the newspaper. Some shit about the golden rule, etc. I later wrote a poem called “Bird Talk” that I thought was pretty good – a teacher asked me where I copied it from, not believing I wrote it. Man, that hit me hard. So, that’s about it. I wrote Bird Talk, probably when I was 8 or 9.

2. How many books have you written?

I’m at 18 right now, but am working on #19. 15-1/2 of those books were written since 2010. I had a 12-year gap in my writing, where I just gave it up completely. I blame a cruel, harsh critique group – but they weren’t really that. They helped me a LOT.

3. Anything you won’t write about?

I love horror, so I tend to go that route. I think of something that scares me, and try to approach it from a different direction. I don’t think I’d ever do romance – but I might try erotica under a pen name. I can get as sexy/raunchy/intimate as the next guy. Just never have. I have a lot of stories from my personal life that would make good drama, but not anything I think I’d want to share, and unfortunately, the people in my life would know the story – and they wouldn’t appreciate it.

4. Tell me about you. Age (if you don’t mind answering), married, kids, do you have another job etc…

I’m turning 57 this year, which is just freakin’ baffling to me. I mean, I remember being in my late teens and twenties, never EVER believing I’d live to see 30, much less 40 or 50+. That’s because I was a big partier back in the 70s. I partook in pretty much every recreational drug that didn’t require a needle (never, EVER would I jab a needle in my arm) and I’d wager a guess that when I was young, NONE of my friends would’ve ever predicted I’d become an author and tell stories of zombies, aliens and serial killers.

I’m married for 30 years to my wife, Linda, but we’ve been together since 1983. That’s 34 years together. We live in Cape Coral, Florida, and currently do not have any dogs – but we always have. Greyhounds, Whippets, Chihuahuas, Shelties, etc. We almost seem ready for a new rescue dog.

For my other job(s), I’m an audiobook narrator, and have done work for James Dean, Mike Evans, Thomas A. Watson, Comet Press, David A. Simpson, Dana E. Donovan, and others. I also narrate all of my own novels. I’m also an active real estate broker, and also work in Internet marketing/direct sales.

5. What’s your favorite book you have written?

It’s hard to say, but Shifting Fears is my favorite story. There are some cool intricacies I really like about the story, and those (few) who have read it also love it. Dead Hunger is what put me on the map, which ended at 9 books and a novella. My favorite couple would definitely be Flex and Gem of Dead Hunger.

I really like The Camera: Bloodthirst – it’s a funny/gory story, along the lines of “Reanimator.”

6. Who or what inspired you to write?

Well, despite the fact that I’ve been writing since I was just a young tike, my writing really ramped up when my late brother, Gary, came home sometime in the 1990s and shared a story he’d written. It was a fiction story called “The Gift,” and he was working on another about his life in Juvenile detention called “State Boy.” That inspired me to begin writing short stories. After pounding out 20 of them, I finally decided to write a book. In 1999, Out of the Darkness: The Story of Mary Ellen Wilson was released. That’s what gave me the permanent writing BUG.

7. What do you like to do for fun?

Well, you KNOW I love to sing, so I have over 400 videos on YouTube of me doing just that – yes, to Karaoke tracks. I don’t have a goddamned band, so what am I to do? Plus, Karaoke musicians don’t get drunk and mess up the tune while I’m singing. Sometimes I get drunk and mess it up, though. I also paint stuff occasionally, and I do sing part-time with a band named Shady Deal. Linda and I like to go camping, love to read and listen to tunes. I recommend some Friday or Saturday night, while you’re just mellowing out, to fire up Pandora and create a music station called Melody Gardot radio. You’ll DIG the vibes of that artist, as well as those similar to her. It’s a groooooooooveeeee.

8. Any traditions you do when you finish a book?

Not really – just fret about how to promote it so it doesn’t die on the vine, and begin thinking about my next book or my next audiobook narration.

9. Where do you write? Quiet or music?

Mostly quiet, in my office. I used to listen to rock guitar gods or classical music, but not so much anymore. Not sure why!?

10. Anything you would change about your writing?

If I had the time for the pause, I might seek out a large publisher – not an indy, because I don’t really feel in my bones that they can do as much for me as I would – I often check out their authors’ books to see how they’re selling, and normally, mine are better than theirs. I don’t need to trade this for worse – I’d like to really get with a house that could … you know, make me FAMOUS. (Because RICH usually goes with that.) And we’d all like to be rich, no matter what we say on Facebook.

11. What is your dream? Famous writer?

Hell yes. I’d love to be known as a writer whose stuff you’ll buy just because HE wrote it. And to be happy and healthy as I roll my way towards death.

12. Where do you live?

Paradise, baby. Paradise. Cape Coral, Florida. As I write this, it’s February 8, 2017, and 80 degrees with sun outside. That’s why we live here. We moved here from southern California in 2001. We were there over 30 years, but before that, I was born and raised in Texas.

13. Pets?

Not presently – we’re DOG people.

14. What’s your favorite thing about writing?

The entertainment factor – knowing that you wrote something that people can use to take them away from their daily grind. There is one woman – a fan of mine – whose daughter was killed. She was devastated, and started reading Dead Hunger. She has told me so many times how that book series allowed her to escape her pain while she read it. That is the best feeling. Just the best.

15. What is coming next for you?

Either The Camera II, or a new zombie series. I’ve got some ideas I’ve got to flesh out. I’ve had starts and stops on new zombie series ideas – and then I keep wondering if it’s almost spent! Looking at Tufo’s sales, I have to say it’s not, but then again – maybe that’s just for him! I’ll be working on something else within 30 days of completing Scabs III. I will probably release the entire Scabs Trilogy in ONE book, which will be close to 1000 pages.

  Anything else you would like me to include please feel free to tell me!

Methinks I hate Shakespeare, and I abhor the classics, like the very boring Moby Dick and others. I’m not into “literary” fiction, besides Watership Down, Flowers for Algernon, and some other greats. Give me a fantastic Dean Koontz or Stephen King book – or Ken Follett or Clive Cussler, for that matter. Then … I’m happy.

You can connect with Eric A. Shelman here:

Twitter: AuthorShelman Skype: Shelman9 Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/createyourfate Facebook Author Page: http://www.facebook.com/authorshelman Website: http://www.ericshelman.com My products site: http://the-twisted-products-of-author-eric-a-shelman.myshopify.com/ My books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Eric-A-Shelman/e/B001K91I2Y/

  Some of Eric A. Shelman’s books: 

    Getting personal with Eric A. Shelman Eric A. Shelman is amazing. Not only is he an amazing writer he can sing too. If you haven't heard him sing check out his YouTube channel.

[thesnhuup]

Pop Picks – March 28, 2019

March 28, 2019

What I’m listening to: 

There is a lovely piece played in a scene from A Place Called Home that I tracked down. It’s Erik Satie’s 3 Gymnopédies: Gymnopédie No. 1, played by the wonderful pianist Klára Körmendi. Satie composed this piece in 1888 and it was considered avant-garde and anti-Romantic. It’s minimalism and bit of dissonance sound fresh and contemporary to my ears and while not a huge Classical music fan, I’ve fallen in love with the Körmendi playlist on Spotify. When you need an alternative to hours of Cardi B.

 What I’m reading: 

Just finished Esi Edugyan’s 2018 novel Washington Black. Starting on a slave plantation in Barbados, it is a picaresque novel that has elements of Jules Verne, Moby Dick, Frankenstein, and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. Yes, it strains credulity and there are moments of “huh?”, but I loved it (disclosure: I was in the minority among my fellow book club members) and the first third is a searing depiction of slavery. It’s audacious, sprawling (from Barbados to the Arctic to London to Africa), and the writing, especially about nature, luminous. 

What I’m watching: 

A soap opera. Yes, I’d like to pretend it’s something else, but we are 31 episodes into the Australian drama A Place Called Home and we are so, so addicted. Like “It’s  AM, but can’t we watch just one more episode?” addicted. Despite all the secrets, cliff hangers, intrigue, and “did that just happen?” moments, the core ingredients of any good soap opera, APCH has superb acting, real heft in terms of subject matter (including homophobia, anti-Semitism, sexual assault, and class), touches of our beloved Downton Abbey, and great cars. Beware. If you start, you won’t stop.

Archive 

February 11, 2019

What I’m listening to:

Raphael Saadiq has been around for quite a while, as a musician, writer, and producer. He’s new to me and I love his old school R&B sound. Like Leon Bridges, he brings a contemporary freshness to the genre, sounding like a young Stevie Wonder (listen to “You’re The One That I Like”). Rock and Roll may be largely dead, but R&B persists – maybe because the former was derivative of the latter and never as good (and I say that as a Rock and Roll fan). I’m embarrassed to only have discovered Saadiq so late in his career, but it’s a delight to have done so.

What I’m reading:

Just finished Marilynne Robinson’s Home, part of her trilogy that includes the Pulitzer Prize winning first novel, Gilead, and the book after Home, Lila. Robinson is often described as a Christian writer, but not in a conventional sense. In this case, she gives us a modern version of the prodigal son and tells the story of what comes after he is welcomed back home. It’s not pretty. Robinson is a self-described Calvinist, thus character begets fate in Robinson’s world view and redemption is at best a question. There is something of Faulkner in her work (I am much taken with his famous “The past is never past” quote after a week in the deep South), her style is masterful, and like Faulkner, she builds with these three novels a whole universe in the small town of Gilead. Start with Gilead to better enjoy Home.

What I’m watching:

Sex Education was the most fun series we’ve seen in ages and we binged watched it on Netflix. A British homage to John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink, it feels like a mash up of American and British high schools. Focusing on the relationship of Maeve, the smart bad girl, and Otis, the virginal and awkward son of a sex therapist (played with brilliance by Gillian Anderson), it is laugh aloud funny and also evolves into more substance and depth (the abortion episode is genius). The sex scenes are somehow raunchy and charming and inoffensive at the same time and while ostensibly about teenagers (it feels like it is explaining contemporary teens to adults in many ways), the adults are compelling in their good and bad ways. It has been renewed for a second season, which is a gift.

January 3, 2019

What I’m listening to:

My listening choices usually refer to music, but this time I’m going with Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast on genius and the song Hallelujah. It tells the story of Leonard Cohen’s much-covered song Hallelujah and uses it as a lens on kinds of genius and creativity. Along the way, he brings in Picasso and Cézanne, Elvis Costello, and more. Gladwell is a good storyteller and if you love pop music, as I do, and Hallelujah, as I do (and you should), you’ll enjoy this podcast. We tend to celebrate the genius who seems inspired in the moment, creating new work like lightning strikes, but this podcast has me appreciating incremental creativity in a new way. It’s compelling and fun at the same time.

What I’m reading:

Just read Clay Christensen’s new book, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty. This was an advance copy, so soon available. Clay is an old friend and a huge influence on how we have grown SNHU and our approach to innovation. This book is so compelling, because we know attempts at development have so often been a failure and it is often puzzling to understand why some countries with desperate poverty and huge challenges somehow come to thrive (think S. Korea, Singapore, 19th C. America), while others languish. Clay offers a fresh way of thinking about development through the lens of his research on innovation and it is compelling. I bet this book gets a lot of attention, as most of his work does. I also suspect that many in the development community will hate it, as it calls into question the approach and enormous investments we have made in an attempt to lift countries out of poverty. A provocative read and, as always, Clay is a good storyteller.

What I’m watching:

Just watched Leave No Trace and should have guessed that it was directed by Debra Granik. She did Winter’s Bone, the extraordinary movie that launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career. Similarly, this movie features an amazing young actor, Thomasin McKenzie, and visits lives lived on the margins. In this case, a veteran suffering PTSD, and his 13-year-old daughter. The movie is patient, is visually lush, and justly earned 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (I have a rule to never watch anything under 82%). Everything in this film is under control and beautifully understated (aside from the visuals) – confident acting, confident directing, and so humane. I love the lack of flashbacks, the lack of sensationalism – the movie trusts the viewer, rare in this age of bombast. A lovely film.

December 4, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spending a week in New Zealand, we had endless laughs listening to the Kiwi band, Flight of the Conchords. Lots of comedic bands are funny, but the music is only okay or worse. These guys are funny – hysterical really – and the music is great. They have an uncanny ability to parody almost any style. In both New Zealand and Australia, we found a wry sense of humor that was just delightful and no better captured than with this duo. You don’t have to be in New Zealand to enjoy them.

What I’m reading:

I don’t often reread. For two reasons: A) I have so many books on my “still to be read” pile that it seems daunting to also rereadbooks I loved before, and B) it’s because I loved them once that I’m a little afraid to read them again. That said, I was recently asked to list my favorite book of all time and I answered Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But I don’t really know if that’s still true (and it’s an impossible question anyway – favorite book? On what day? In what mood?), so I’m rereading it and it feels like being with an old friend. It has one of my very favorite scenes ever: the card game between Levin and Kitty that leads to the proposal and his joyous walking the streets all night.

What I’m watching:

Blindspotting is billed as a buddy-comedy. Wow does that undersell it and the drama is often gripping. I loved Daveed Diggs in Hamilton, didn’t like his character in Black-ish, and think he is transcendent in this film he co-wrote with Rafael Casal, his co-star.  The film is a love song to Oakland in many ways, but also a gut-wrenching indictment of police brutality, systemic racism and bias, and gentrification. The film has the freshness and raw visceral impact of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. A great soundtrack, genre mixing, and energy make it one of my favorite movies of 2018.

October 15, 2018 

What I’m listening to:

We had the opportunity to see our favorite band, The National, live in Dallas two weeks ago. Just after watching Mistaken for Strangers, the documentary sort of about the band. So we’ve spent a lot of time going back into their earlier work, listening to songs we don’t know well, and reaffirming that their musicality, smarts, and sound are both original and astoundingly good. They did not disappoint in concert and it is a good thing their tour ended, as we might just spend all of our time and money following them around. Matt Berninger is a genius and his lead vocals kill me (and because they are in my range, I can actually sing along!). Their arrangements are profoundly good and go right to whatever brain/heart wiring that pulls one in and doesn’t let them go.

What I’m reading:

Who is Richard Powers and why have I only discovered him now, with his 12th book? Overstory is profoundly good, a book that is essential and powerful and makes me look at my everyday world in new ways. In short, a dizzying example of how powerful can be narrative in the hands of a master storyteller. I hesitate to say it’s the best environmental novel I’ve ever read (it is), because that would put this book in a category. It is surely about the natural world, but it is as much about we humans. It’s monumental and elegiac and wondrous at all once. Cancel your day’s schedule and read it now. Then plant a tree. A lot of them.

What I’m watching:

Bo Burnham wrote and directed Eighth Grade and Elsie Fisher is nothing less than amazing as its star (what’s with these new child actors; see Florida Project). It’s funny and painful and touching. It’s also the single best film treatment that I have seen of what it means to grow up in a social media shaped world. It’s a reminder that growing up is hard. Maybe harder now in a world of relentless, layered digital pressure to curate perfect lives that are far removed from the natural messy worlds and selves we actually inhabit. It’s a well-deserved 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and I wonder who dinged it for the missing 2%.

September 7, 2018

What I’m listening to:

With a cover pointing back to the Beastie Boys’ 1986 Licensed to Ill, Eminem’s quietly released Kamikaze is not my usual taste, but I’ve always admired him for his “all out there” willingness to be personal, to call people out, and his sheer genius with language. I thought Daveed Diggs could rap fast, but Eminem is supersonic at moments, and still finds room for melody. Love that he includes Joyner Lucas, whose “I’m Not Racist” gets added to the growing list of simply amazing music videos commenting on race in America. There are endless reasons why I am the least likely Eminem fan, but when no one is around to make fun of me, I’ll put it on again.

What I’m reading:

Lesley Blume’s Everyone Behaves Badly, which is the story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his time in 1920s Paris (oh, what a time – see Midnight in Paris if you haven’t already). Of course, Blume disabuses my romantic ideas of that time and place and everyone is sort of (or profoundly so) a jerk, especially…no spoiler here…Hemingway. That said, it is a compelling read and coming off the Henry James inspired prose of Mrs. Osmond, it made me appreciate more how groundbreaking was Hemingway’s modern prose style. Like his contemporary Picasso, he reinvented the art and it can be easy to forget, these decades later, how profound was the change and its impact. And it has bullfights.

What I’m watching:

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is just exceptional. It’s filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which provides a stunning landscape, and it feels like a classic western reinvented for our times. The main characters are played by the real-life people who inspired this narrative (but feels like a documentary) film. Brady Jandreau, playing himself really, owns the screen. It’s about manhood, honor codes, loss, and resilience – rendered in sensitive, nuanced, and heartfelt ways. It feels like it could be about large swaths of America today. Really powerful.

August 16, 2018

What I’m listening to:

In my Spotify Daily Mix was Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman, one of the world’s greatest love songs. Go online and read the story of how the song was discovered and recorded. There are competing accounts, but Sledge said he improvised it after a bad breakup. It has that kind of aching spontaneity. It is another hit from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, one of the GREAT music hotbeds, along with Detroit, Nashville, and Memphis. Our February Board meeting is in Alabama and I may finally have to do the pilgrimage road trip to Muscle Shoals and then Memphis, dropping in for Sunday services at the church where Rev. Al Green still preaches and sings. If the music is all like this, I will be saved.

What I’m reading:

John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, his homage to literary idol Henry James and an imagined sequel to James’ 1881 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady. Go online and read the first paragraph of Chapter 25. He is…profoundly good. Makes me want to never write again, since anything I attempt will feel like some other, lowly activity in comparison to his mastery of language, image, syntax. This is slow reading, every sentence to be savored.

What I’m watching:

I’ve always respected Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we just watched the documentary RGB. It is over-the-top great and she is now one of my heroes. A superwoman in many ways and the documentary is really well done. There are lots of scenes of her speaking to crowds and the way young women, especially law students, look at her is touching.  And you can’t help but fall in love with her now late husband Marty. See this movie and be reminded of how important is the Law.

July 23, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spotify’s Summer Acoustic playlist has been on repeat quite a lot. What a fun way to listen to artists new to me, including The Paper Kites, Hollow Coves, and Fleet Foxes, as well as old favorites like Leon Bridges and Jose Gonzalez. Pretty chill when dialing back to a summer pace, dining on the screen porch or reading a book.

What I’m reading:

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells of the racial injustice (and the war on the poor our judicial system perpetuates as well) that he discovered as a young graduate from Harvard Law School and his fight to address it. It is in turn heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. It is also about mercy and empathy and justice that reads like a novel. Brilliant.

What I’m watching:

Fauda. We watched season one of this Israeli thriller. It was much discussed in Israel because while it focuses on an ex-special agent who comes out of retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist, it was willing to reveal the complexity, richness, and emotions of Palestinian lives. And the occasional brutality of the Israelis. Pretty controversial stuff in Israel. Lior Raz plays Doron, the main character, and is compelling and tough and often hard to like. He’s a mess. As is the world in which he has to operate. We really liked it, and also felt guilty because while it may have been brave in its treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli context, it falls back into some tired tropes and ultimately falls short on this front.

June 11, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Like everyone else, I’m listening to Pusha T drop the mic on Drake. Okay, not really, but do I get some points for even knowing that? We all walk around with songs that immediately bring us back to a time or a place. Songs are time machines. We are coming up on Father’s Day. My own dad passed away on Father’s Day back in 1994 and I remembering dutifully getting through the wake and funeral and being strong throughout. Then, sitting alone in our kitchen, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence came on and I lost it. When you lose a parent for the first time (most of us have two after all) we lose our innocence and in that passage, we suddenly feel adult in a new way (no matter how old we are), a longing for our own childhood, and a need to forgive and be forgiven. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll understand. As Wordsworth reminds us in In Memoriam, there are seasons to our grief and, all these years later, this song no longer hits me in the gut, but does transport me back with loving memories of my father. I’ll play it Father’s Day.

What I’m reading:

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. I am not a reader of fantasy or sci-fi, though I understand they can be powerful vehicles for addressing the very real challenges of the world in which we actually live. I’m not sure I know of a more vivid and gripping illustration of that fact than N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel The Fifth Season, first in her Broken Earth trilogy. It is astounding. It is the fantasy parallel to The Underground Railroad, my favorite recent read, a depiction of subjugation, power, casual violence, and a broken world in which our hero(s) struggle, suffer mightily, and still, somehow, give us hope. It is a tour de force book. How can someone be this good a writer? The first 30 pages pained me (always with this genre, one must learn a new, constructed world, and all of its operating physics and systems of order), and then I could not put it down. I panicked as I neared the end, not wanting to finish the book, and quickly ordered the Obelisk Gate, the second novel in the trilogy, and I can tell you now that I’ll be spending some goodly portion of my weekend in Jemisin’s other world.

What I’m watching:

The NBA Finals and perhaps the best basketball player of this generation. I’ve come to deeply respect LeBron James as a person, a force for social good, and now as an extraordinary player at the peak of his powers. His superhuman play during the NBA playoffs now ranks with the all-time greats, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, MJ, Kobe, and the demi-god that was Bill Russell. That his Cavs lost in a 4-game sweep is no surprise. It was a mediocre team being carried on the wide shoulders of James (and matched against one of the greatest teams ever, the Warriors, and the Harry Potter of basketball, Steph Curry) and, in some strange way, his greatness is amplified by the contrast with the rest of his team. It was a great run.

May 24, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I’ve always liked Alicia Keys and admired her social activism, but I am hooked on her last album Here. This feels like an album finally commensurate with her anger, activism, hope, and grit. More R&B and Hip Hop than is typical for her, I think this album moves into an echelon inhabited by a Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Beyonce’s Formation. Social activism and outrage rarely make great novels, but they often fuel great popular music. Here is a terrific example.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad may be close to a flawless novel. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer, it chronicles the lives of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caeser, as they try to escape the hell of plantation life in Georgia.  It is an often searing novel and Cora is one of the great heroes of American literature. I would make this mandatory reading in every high school in America, especially in light of the absurd revisionist narratives of “happy and well cared for” slaves. This is a genuinely great novel, one of the best I’ve read, the magical realism and conflating of time periods lifts it to another realm of social commentary, relevance, and a blazing indictment of America’s Original Sin, for which we remain unabsolved.

What I’m watching:

I thought I knew about The Pentagon Papers, but The Post, a real-life political thriller from Steven Spielberg taught me a lot, features some of our greatest actors, and is so timely given the assault on our democratic institutions and with a presidency out of control. It is a reminder that a free and fearless press is a powerful part of our democracy, always among the first targets of despots everywhere. The story revolves around the legendary Post owner and D.C. doyenne, Katharine Graham. I had the opportunity to see her son, Don Graham, right after he saw the film, and he raved about Meryl Streep’s portrayal of his mother. Liked it a lot more than I expected.

April 27, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I mentioned John Prine in a recent post and then on the heels of that mention, he has released a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, his first new album in ten years. Prine is beloved by other singer songwriters and often praised by the inscrutable God that is Bob Dylan.  Indeed, Prine was frequently said to be the “next Bob Dylan” in the early part of his career, though he instead carved out his own respectable career and voice, if never with the dizzying success of Dylan. The new album reflects a man in his 70s, a cancer survivor, who reflects on life and its end, but with the good humor and empathy that are hallmarks of Prine’s music. “When I Get To Heaven” is a rollicking, fun vision of what comes next and a pure delight. A charming, warm, and often terrific album.

What I’m reading:

I recently read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, on many people’s Top Ten lists for last year and for good reason. It is sprawling, multi-generational, and based in the world of Japanese occupied Korea and then in the Korean immigrant’s world of Oaska, so our key characters become “tweeners,” accepted in neither world. It’s often unspeakably sad, and yet there is resiliency and love. There is also intimacy, despite the time and geographic span of the novel. It’s breathtakingly good and like all good novels, transporting.

What I’m watching:

I adore Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and while I’m not sure his Shape of Water is better, it is a worthy follow up to the earlier masterpiece (and more of a commercial success). Lots of critics dislike the film, but I’m okay with a simple retelling of a Beauty and the Beast love story, as predictable as it might be. The acting is terrific, it is visually stunning, and there are layers of pain as well as social and political commentary (the setting is the US during the Cold War) and, no real spoiler here, the real monsters are humans, the military officer who sees over the captured aquatic creature. It is hauntingly beautiful and its depiction of hatred to those who are different or “other” is painfully resonant with the time in which we live. Put this on your “must see” list.

March 18, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Sitting on a plane for hours (and many more to go; geez, Australia is far away) is a great opportunity to listen to new music and to revisit old favorites. This time, it is Lucy Dacus and her album Historians, the new sophomore release from a 22-year old indie artist that writes with relatable, real-life lyrics. Just on a second listen and while she insists this isn’t a break up record (as we know, 50% of all great songs are break up songs), it is full of loss and pain. Worth the listen so far. For the way back machine, it’s John Prine and In Spite of Ourselves (that title track is one of the great love songs of all time), a collection of duets with some of his “favorite girl singers” as he once described them. I have a crush on Iris Dement (for a really righteously angry song try her Wasteland of the Free), but there is also EmmyLou Harris, the incomparable Dolores Keane, and Lucinda Williams. Very different albums, both wonderful.

What I’m reading:

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on Christopher Steele presents little that is new, but she pulls it together in a terrific and coherent whole that is illuminating and troubling at the same time. Not only for what is happening, but for the complicity of the far right in trying to discredit that which should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Bob Mueller may be the most important defender of the democracy at this time. A must read.

What I’m watching:

Homeland is killing it this season and is prescient, hauntingly so. Russian election interference, a Bannon-style hate radio demagogue, alienated and gun toting militia types, and a president out of control. It’s fabulous, even if it feels awfully close to the evening news. 

March 8, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We have a family challenge to compile our Top 100 songs. It is painful. Only 100? No more than three songs by one artist? Wait, why is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on my list? Should it just be The Clash from whom she samples? Can I admit to guilty pleasure songs? Hey, it’s my list and I can put anything I want on it. So I’m listening to the list while I work and the song playing right now is Tom Petty’s “The Wild One, Forever,” a B-side single that was never a hit and that remains my favorite Petty song. Also, “Evangeline” by Los Lobos. It evokes a night many years ago, with friends at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA, when everyone danced well past 1AM in a hot, sweaty, packed club and the band was a revelation. Maybe the best music night of our lives and a reminder that one’s 100 Favorite Songs list is as much about what you were doing and where you were in your life when those songs were playing as it is about the music. It’s not a list. It’s a soundtrack for this journey.

What I’m reading:

Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy was in the NY Times top ten books of 2017 list and it is easy to see why. Lockwood brings remarkable and often surprising imagery, metaphor, and language to her prose memoir and it actually threw me off at first. It then all became clear when someone told me she is a poet. The book is laugh aloud funny, which masks (or makes safer anyway) some pretty dark territory. Anyone who grew up Catholic, whether lapsed or not, will resonate with her story. She can’t resist a bawdy anecdote and her family provides some of the most memorable characters possible, especially her father, her sister, and her mother, who I came to adore. Best thing I’ve read in ages.

What I’m watching:

The Florida Project, a profoundly good movie on so many levels. Start with the central character, six-year old (at the time of the filming) Brooklynn Prince, who owns – I mean really owns – the screen. This is pure acting genius and at that age? Astounding. Almost as astounding is Bria Vinaite, who plays her mother. She was discovered on Instagram and had never acted before this role, which she did with just three weeks of acting lessons. She is utterly convincing and the tension between the child’s absolute wonder and joy in the world with her mother’s struggle to provide, to be a mother, is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. Willem Dafoe rightly received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. This is a terrific movie.

February 12, 2018

What I’m listening to:

So, I have a lot of friends of age (I know you’re thinking 40s, but I just turned 60) who are frozen in whatever era of music they enjoyed in college or maybe even in their thirties. There are lots of times when I reach back into the catalog, since music is one of those really powerful and transporting senses that can take you through time (smell is the other one, though often underappreciated for that power). Hell, I just bought a turntable and now spending time in vintage vinyl shops. But I’m trying to take a lesson from Pat, who revels in new music and can as easily talk about North African rap music and the latest National album as Meet the Beatles, her first ever album. So, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy winning Damn. While it may not be the first thing I’ll reach for on a winter night in Maine, by the fire, I was taken with it. It’s layered, political, and weirdly sensitive and misogynist at the same time, and it feels fresh and authentic and smart at the same time, with music that often pulled me from what I was doing. In short, everything music should do. I’m not a bit cooler for listening to Damn, but when I followed it with Steely Dan, I felt like I was listening to Lawrence Welk. A good sign, I think.

What I’m reading:

I am reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I’m not usually a reader of biographies, but I’ve always been taken with Leonardo. Isaacson does not disappoint (does he ever?), and his subject is at once more human and accessible and more awe-inspiring in Isaacson’s capable hands. Gay, left-handed, vegetarian, incapable of finishing things, a wonderful conversationalist, kind, and perhaps the most relentlessly curious human being who has ever lived. Like his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, Isaacson’s project here is to show that genius lives at the intersection of science and art, of rationality and creativity. Highly recommend it.

What I’m watching:

We watched the This Is Us post-Super Bowl episode, the one where Jack finally buys the farm. I really want to hate this show. It is melodramatic and manipulative, with characters that mostly never change or grow, and it hooks me every damn time we watch it. The episode last Sunday was a tear jerker, a double whammy intended to render into a blubbering, tissue-crumbling pathetic mess anyone who has lost a parent or who is a parent. Sterling K. Brown, Ron Cephas Jones, the surprising Mandy Moore, and Milo Ventimiglia are hard not to love and last season’s episode that had only Brown and Cephas going to Memphis was the show at its best (they are by far the two best actors). Last week was the show at its best worst. In other words, I want to hate it, but I love it. If you haven’t seen it, don’t binge watch it. You’ll need therapy and insulin.

January 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Drive-By Truckers. Chris Stapleton has me on an unusual (for me) country theme and I discovered these guys to my great delight. They’ve been around, with some 11 albums, but the newest one is fascinating. It’s a deep dive into Southern alienation and the white working-class world often associated with our current president. I admire the willingness to lay bare, in kick ass rock songs, the complexities and pain at work among people we too quickly place into overly simple categories. These guys are brave, bold, and thoughtful as hell, while producing songs I didn’t expect to like, but that I keep playing. And they are coming to NH.

What I’m reading:

A textual analog to Drive-By Truckers by Chris Stapleton in many ways is Tony Horowitz’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning Confederates in the Attic. Ostensibly about the Civil War and the South’s ongoing attachment to it, it is prescient and speaks eloquently to the times in which we live (where every southern state but Virginia voted for President Trump). Often hilarious, it too surfaces complexities and nuance that escape a more recent, and widely acclaimed, book like Hillbilly Elegy. As a Civil War fan, it was also astonishing in many instances, especially when it blows apart long-held “truths” about the war, such as the degree to which Sherman burned down the south (he did not). Like D-B Truckers, Horowitz loves the South and the people he encounters, even as he grapples with its myths of victimhood and exceptionalism (and racism, which may be no more than the racism in the north, but of a different kind). Everyone should read this book and I’m embarrassed I’m so late to it.

What I’m watching:

David Letterman has a new Netflix show called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” and we watched the first episode, in which Letterman interviewed Barack Obama. It was extraordinary (if you don’t have Netflix, get it just to watch this show); not only because we were reminded of Obama’s smarts, grace, and humanity (and humor), but because we saw a side of Letterman we didn’t know existed. His personal reflections on Selma were raw and powerful, almost painful. He will do five more episodes with “extraordinary individuals” and if they are anything like the first, this might be the very best work of his career and one of the best things on television.

December 22, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways, a painful inside look at the plight of illegal Indian immigrant workers in Britain. It was shortlisted for 2015 Man Booker Prize and its transporting, often to a dark and painful universe, and it is impossible not to think about the American version of this story and the terrible way we treat the undocumented in our own country, especially now.

What I’m watching:

Season II of The Crown is even better than Season I. Elizabeth’s character is becoming more three-dimensional, the modern world is catching up with tradition-bound Britain, and Cold War politics offer more context and tension than we saw in Season I. Claire Foy, in her last season, is just terrific – one arched eye brow can send a message.

What I’m listening to:

A lot of Christmas music, but needing a break from the schmaltz, I’ve discovered Over the Rhine and their Christmas album, Snow Angels. God, these guys are good.

November 14, 2017

What I’m watching:

Guiltily, I watch the Patriots play every weekend, often building my schedule and plans around seeing the game. Why the guilt? I don’t know how morally defensible is football anymore, as we now know the severe damage it does to the players. We can’t pretend it’s all okay anymore. Is this our version of late decadent Rome, watching mostly young Black men take a terrible toll on each other for our mere entertainment?

What I’m reading:

Recently finished J.G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes, a powerful depiction of a corporate-tech ex-pat community taken over by a kind of psychopathology, in which all social norms and responsibilities are surrendered to residents of the new world community. Kept thinking about Silicon Valley when reading it. Pretty dark, dystopian view of the modern world and centered around a mass killing, troublingly prescient.

What I’m listening to:

Was never really a Lorde fan, only knowing her catchy (and smarter than you might first guess) pop hit “Royals” from her debut album. But her new album, Melodrama, is terrific and it doesn’t feel quite right to call this “pop.” There is something way more substantial going on with Lorde and I can see why many critics put this album at the top of their Best in 2017 list. Count me in as a huge fan.

November 3, 2017

What I’m reading: Just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, her breathtakingly good second novel. How is someone so young so wise? Her writing is near perfection and I read the book in two days, setting my alarm for 4:30AM so I could finish it before work.

What I’m watching: We just binge watched season two of Stranger Things and it was worth it just to watch Millie Bobbie Brown, the transcendent young actor who plays Eleven. The series is a delightful mash up of every great eighties horror genre you can imagine and while pretty dark, an absolute joy to watch.

What I’m listening to: I’m not a lover of country music (to say the least), but I love Chris Stapleton. His “The Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning” is heartbreakingly good and reminds me of the old school country that played in my house as a kid. He has a new album and I can’t wait, but his From A Room: Volume 1 is on repeat for now.

September 26, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It took me a while to accept its cadence and sheer weirdness, but loved it in the end. A painful meditation on loss and grief, and a genuinely beautiful exploration of the intersection of life and death, the difficulty of letting go of what was, good and bad, and what never came to be.

What I’m watching:

HBO’s The Deuce. Times Square and the beginning of the porn industry in the 1970s, the setting made me wonder if this was really something I’d want to see. But David Simon is the writer and I’d read a menu if he wrote it. It does not disappoint so far and there is nothing prurient about it.

What I’m listening to:

The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast. I love this band. The opening piano notes of the first song, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” seize me & I’m reminded that no one else in music today matches their arrangement & musicianship. I’m adding “Born to Beg,” “Slow Show,” “I Need My Girl,” and “Runaway” to my list of favorite love songs.

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