#we are in the great lamentations part of Gabriel memory

[linipikk]

They really spent a lot of time pointing to the second coming for Apolaypse 2 electric boogaloo

all 3 minisodes are about ... humans dying and being brought back to life, or more like, how that is not possible...and how Heaven and Hell have worked around that

In A Companion to Owls, Job kids never died even when they should have, Heaven didn't know enough to distinguish that they were the same children and Sitis quickly got that the miracle was... that their children didn't die to begin with. Once they are dead it is game over and Crowley and Aziraphale refused to let them die

In The Resurrectionists (it is literally called The Resurrectionists!!) and it is how one girl is shot and they can't do anything once she is dead. And Crowley still goes off of his way to make sure the other one doesn't kill herself, risking everything. And we know hell's extreme sanctions are probably what makes him ask for insurance, for holy water. On the other hand, this episode is called The ResurrectionistS, plural, but we meet only one of them ..while in the other side of the sign is Christ himself.

THEN in 1941, we have ZOMBIES, the literal living dead walking around, and Furfur states that he can't make them living people again due to a clause and just leave them as zombies to roam the earth. We see how cursed they are, rotting and bound to eat brains but not human.

EVEN! From episode 1, we get a big Clue: miracles are measured in lazarii, and resurrecting someone is no easy feat. They were telling us to watch out about coming back to life... and how only the mightiest of archangels are able to use that amount of power (or an angel and a demon holding hands...)

and I do want to point out that part of the things Gabriel remembered was this line

Job kids didn't die, in victorian england Wee Morag died falling in the hands of a resurrectionist, and the Germans died and came back- just not quite alive. Every day it is getting closer,

... they are telling us that the second coming is afoot, but they are also showing us that there is no second opportunity on this earth. Once you are dead, you are dead.

and Crowley, in the direst time when Aziraphale is breaking his little demonic heart, says

And now, the plan to resurrect one human to make the end of the world happen is in Aziraphale's hands.

[eveningstar1516]

Rise of the Demon King ~ Chapter 8

Rise of the Demon King

Fic: Multi Chapter Paring: MC x Everyone (Mostly Lucifer) Type: Angst with a Happy Ending Total Word Count: 26,758 TW: Major Character Death, Reader gets stabbed with a sword through their chest so..., Abusive Parents, Past Child Abuse, Demon Hunters, Loss of Control Summary: You’ve done it. You’ve finally done it. You’ve managed to anger the demon king. Now you hold your head high as he hands down your sentence. AO3 Portal: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27065362

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Previously:

His brothers would always know whenever he went to see her as he’d always come back with a content smile on his face. Deep down, he wished that Y/N could’ve met Cynthia. They would have made great friends as they were the only 2 people who could make him smile like this. Mammon may not have been able to save Y/N, but he swore that he would protect Cynthia, no matter the cost.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CHAPTER 8 - The Great Pancake Debate (2261 words)

It’s been almost 6 months since you arrived in the Celestial Realm. Needless to say, you are quite certain that these last 6 months have been the craziest and stressful months of your life! When you told Simeon and Luke about you staying here, to say they were ecstatic would be an understatement. Luke jumped for joy and wouldn’t stop rambling about all the fun you were going to have. When you told them about God appointing them to help teach you about the Realm, Luke practically did a double take and it took an hour to calm him. Now you have Simeon teaching you about politics and Luke about how to use your wings and powers. On your second day there, Michael woke you up, or well came to get you as you didn’t get any sleep. Turns out, while the Devildom is constant at night, the Celestial realm is constant day and thanks to the floor to ceiling windows, there was no way for you to stop sunlight from coming in. You were introduced to the council at breakfast. Note to self, the brothers breakfasts are QUIET AND PEACEFUL compared to Archangels off duty. The first thing you saw were 2 angels passionately arguing over which pancake topping was the best, strawberries or blueberries. At some point a third angel cut in claiming chocolate chips were the best and all heaven (would you replace hell with heaven here? idk) broke loose. As for me, I just started chuckling in disbelief while making my way over to pick up a pancake of my own when the angel arguing on behalf of the strawberries saw you.

“Hey kid, what topping do you prefer, strawberries, blueberries, or chocolate chips? It’s strawberries right?”

“Actually, I prefer them plain with maple syrup. Although if Satan was the one making it, I’d go for the one with poison berries. Contrary to their name, they’re not actually poisonous and quite sweet.” All the angels present looked at me with a mix of shock and disbelief, save for Michael who just sat there eating his breakfast hoping to leave soon and get to work.

“Kid, did you say Satan?” The angel arguing on behalf of blueberries asked. “Yeah… Blond hair, teal eyes, Avatar of Wrath, Luci’s son? Ring a bell?” Turning to Michael, blueberry angel asked,

“Micheal, who are they and why are they wearing Lucifer’s old get up?” “This is Y/N. They will be staying here and taking Samael’s spot on the council until their agreement with Father ends and they return to the Devildom. Father has asked us to teach them about how our Realm operates and how to successfully fulfill Samael’s former position flawlessly, unless they want to return now and leave heaven early?” Michael turned towards you with a smirk on his face as he asked the last part.

“Very funny Mike. You and I both know I won’t do that no matter how bad you want me to.”

“What did I say about calling me that?!” Micheal’s smirk turned into something short of a snarl.

“Well, if you won’t take me seriously, neither will I. You want me to call you by your name, earn it and stop being an butt… I meant an butt… Why can’t I swear?!”

“This is the Celestial Realm Y/N. Angels don’t swear.” Michael said smugly over the rim of his cup of coffee.

“God Dang it! Argh! Fudge!. Dang it! Ya know what, forget it, my entire mood is ruined. Thanks Michael!”

“Anytime.”

Shooting Michael one last glare, I sighed and turned to the rest of the baffled angels in the room.

“Yes, what Michael said is true. Stuff happened in the Devildom which I will not get in too-”

“The demon king made Samael kill them.”

“Ok, Mike, first off, he didn’t, I ordered him too, second, I thought I said I didn’t want to talk about it. What gives you the right to tell them huh?”

“I felt like it.”

“You son of a beach.” I turned back to the rest of the angels. “Not a word about it. Anyway, due to some personal issues, I made a deal with Father to stay here on the condition that I take over Lucifer’s spot on the council until he either kicks me out or until our agreement has ended.”

“If I may, when will this agreement of yours be over?” The blueberry angel asked.

“I will be returning to the Devildom once Lord Diavolo has been crowned king and his father is 100% out of the picture. Now if you don’t mind me asking, could you introduce yourselves?” “Oh how rude of us, I’m sorry, I am Gabriel.” Gabriel had chestnut brown medium length hair, reaching shoulders. His eyes were a dull green. He wore a white turtleneck and had a light green shawl with golden tassels. He pointed to the strawberry angel. “This is Raphael and he’s Uriel.” He pointed to the chocolate chip angel. Raphael had long reddish-orange hair put up in a high ponytail. His eyes were a stormy gray. He wore a simple light gray half sleeve with an off the shoulder white cape and little decor. Uriel had short gray hair and golden eyes that almost seemed to sparkle. He wore something that reminded you of an off white scholar's robe with gray accents. “These are Saraqael, and Raguel.” He pointed to 2 of the quieter angels who didn’t participate in “the great pancake debate”. “We make up the Archangel council and we’re happy to have you Y/N.” Gabriel finished off with a smile. You were just barely able to make out a little “Not all of us” from Michael. You decided to ignore it, and then, like all the decisions you’ve ever made, it was the wrong one. Sitting back down you asked,

“So, quick question. What started The Great Pancake Topping debate?”

.

.

.

.

Breakfast ended 2 hours later with upset angels, and pancakes, everywhere…

In the Devildom. After they lost Y/N

Levi went straight to his room as soon as they got home. As soon as he closed and locked the door he went straight to Henry’s fishbowl, picked it up and sat in his bathtub, hugging the bowl as he cried. ‘Why do I feel like this?! I only like 2D characters and Ruri-chan, not 3D people. How do I miss them?... Why did they leave me? They were my player 2.’ “Well it makes sense, no one would want to stay with a worthless shut in of an otaku like me” he said to the empty room. Henry 2.0 glubbed a bubble in response. “You wouldn’t leave me, would you Henry?” *Glub* “No you wouldn’t… I miss them.” Levi stayed in his tub hugging Henry 2.0 until he fell asleep.

Present

It was another late night, Levi was bingeing a new anime ‘I fell in love with a 3D girl but I’m afraid she’ll leave me after finding out that I’m an otaku who rarely leaves their room’ . He was halfway through the 9th episode when he got a notification from Mononoke Island. One of his raid mates was stuck and needed some help. He paused his marathon to help his fellow mate and stayed up until the early hours of the morning switching between playing Mononoke and watching his anime. Stumbling into the dining room for breakfast the next morning, he was met with complete silence. Lucifer had left early, Belphie was asleep, Beel was too absorbed in eating, Satan in his book and Asmo on his phone to even notice him enter the room. Mammon was busy in the human world helping out sone witches. Levi sat down in his normal spot, taking whatever was left as he mentally prepared himself for the day. As soon as the bell rang, signaling the end of the day at RAD, still dressed in his uniform, Levi left as quickly as he could. There was an anime expo happening in the human realm right now and there was some ultra-rare limited edition Ruri-chan merch being sold there. He had gotten Lucifer’s permission to attend the expo so long as he was back by 11. Existing the portal and making his way to the expo, Levi thought about the last expo he attended with Y/N. They cosplayed as Erin and Levi from Attack on Titan and spent the entire day surrounded by fellow anime nerds. They had also booked a room at a nearby hotel. It was 3 days of bonding time for them. Entering the expo, Levi decided he would get something for them as decor for their headstone put in memory of them in the backyard of the House of Lamentation. Nearing the line for Ruri-chan merch, Levi noticed someone staring intensely at him. He decided to ignore them but keep a loose eye on them, just in case. He got to the front of the line and purchased 4 of the Ruri-chan collection kits. One for use, one for display, one to keep and sell in the future, and one for Y/N. He decided to wander around a little more to see if anything else would catch his eye while he was here. He spotted a Black Butler station and remembered the jokes he and Y/N would crack about Barbatos and Sebastian. He passed a Fate/Stay Night stand and remembered their conversations on which heroic class they would belong to. Levi would have been the perfect Lancer. He passed countless other stalls, each of them holding a memory he made with Y/N. Distracted by his trip down memory lane, Levi forgot all about the person stalking him. He went and purchased some dinner from one of the stalls before sitting down and pulling out his DDD and looked at some pictures of Y/N and him at their last expo. He didn’t look up from his phone until he felt someone sit opposite of him. Levi looked up to see some middle aged man just sitting there on his phone. He didn’t have any food, merch, or even look like someone interested in an anime expo. Feeling an uncomfortable aura emitting from this man, Levi got up and left. He took a quick look over his shoulder and saw that the man wasn’t following him. He left the expo and went down an alleyway to open up a portal back to the Devildom when he accidentally bumped into someone dropping his purchases.

“S-sorry”

“That’s quite alright.” The stranger extended a hand out to let him up. “Say, I’d love to know where you got your uniform from. No schools around here have uniforms like that one.”

Looking up, Levi saw the same man that was watching him with a twisted smile. Masking his fear, he mumbled an excuse about being in a rush and tried to dash around him. Before he could get 2 steps down the alley, the man grabbed him and pushed him further into the alleyway. Levi’s head struck the wall hard leaving him dazed for a moment.

“I didn’t think my intel about finding a RAD attendee at the expo would be true but whaddya know? Seems I caught myself a demon.”

Levi, now more aware of his surroundings, realized he was cornered by a demon hunter. Despite being in an alleyway, there were too many people around for him to do anything rash. Without missing a beat, the hunter pulled out an enchanted dagger aiming straight for Leviathan’s heart. Levi rolled and dogged last minute before colliding into someone’s chest. That person in question wrapped his arms around Levi’s chest and put their own dagger to his throat.

“I know you’re there! Come on out and I might spare your friend's life!” The hunter holding Levi yelled. When no one stepped out, the dagger held by Levi’s neck began pushing on his skin. Levi felt a flare of pain and against his better judgement, transformed. His tail wrapped around hunter 2’s leg and flipped him over while the first hunter charged at him, only to be blown to the ground as a powerful gust of wind knocked him over.

“Jeez Levi, you’re lucky I was here. Seriously, why didn’t ya do somethin’ earlier? Maybe then I wouldn’t have ta save yo ass.” Mammon stepped out from the darkness with a bored look on his face.

“Come on, Lucifer’s waiting for ya back home. LOOK OUT!” Levi turned around just in time to see Hunter number 2 taking a swing at his neck and managed to duck just in time. Mammon then charged over punching the hunter square in the face, knocking him out cold.

“T-thanks M-mammon.”

“No problem. Come on, let’s get ya back home before any more of them show up.”

Stepping through the portal, a question plagued Levi’s mind.

“Mammon, how did you know I was in trouble?”

“Some witches summoned me. I overheard them talk about some hunter group getting a tip about a possible demon being at some expo. Then I realized that it was the same one you were going to, so I decided to go there myself to make sure ya weren’t followed. I’m glad I did too.”

“Th-thank you Mammon. Really.”

“Of course, what are big brothers for. Anyway, about my payment, maybe you can forget about the money I owe ya?”

Groaning, Levi started walking faster, leaving Mammon and his whining behind as he made his way back to the safety of his room.

[akimmito]

I’ll still be with you

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Master List

Chapter 2: The blue of the sky

Maybe, I can never see this sky again...

The raindrops fall in silent lament, drowning out the noise of the city that is prey to its tears. He just watches the clouds above him, ignoring the water and allowing himself to soak, the white uniform shirt sticks to him defining the muscles he hides underneath, the hair almost covering his eyes as it drips following the rhythm imposed by the sky.

"From here, I can't tell if you're crying or not."

Damian looks away from the dark sky and meets his best friend's vibrant blue, a brilliant color among all the gray that surrounds him. Since that fateful night everything has lost its meaning, didn't he want to make his father proud? Didn't he want to show that he could do great things? Didn't he want to find his own way?

"You're going to get sick, let's go to class."

"No, I'll stay here..."

"Shall I call Alfred or Dick? You don't look good. ”He keeps staring at the blue, sees it blur with the boy's conflicting emotions. Jon is still three years younger than him, it doesn't matter that he's already nearing puberty. His features are still childish, he still lights up as if he were his own sun without needing the star that revitalize him.

"I'll be fine, I just need time..."

Why do I feel this way?

Jon just watches him before nodding, doesn't say anything else, and walks away. He gives him little glances the further he walks back to the classroom, for several days he has been that way, sad. And as if the skies of Gotham felt it, the same amount of time it has been raining, shedding the tears that the teenager is not able to let go.

Damian looks back at the clouds, feeling his eyes sting. In an attempt to contain the sensation, he closes his eyes and just lets himself be felt, the drops soaking him even more, knowing that Alfred won't be happy when he sees him dripping so much water that he could give a whole neighborhood drink. But the rain stops falling on him and he opens his eyes again, a black umbrella protects him.

"I extended a permit to your teacher, come with me."

Damian feels the return of the rain abruptly on him and sees Drake walking towards the main entrance, unlike him, his brother is so neat that he doesn't seem to be walking in the rain. He looks at him for just one more moment before walking behind him.

Before, when he first arrived, he saw Drake as someone inferior, as a piece to be eliminated from the board in order to achieve his objectives, he earned his contempt and a cold shoulder that prevailed until now. Drake is the hardest to read, always hidden behind a sympathetic image, easy to ignore, easy to underestimate and forget that, of all the Wayne family members, he's the most dangerous. He runs Wayne Enterprise better than Bruce, everyone says, the efficiency of the company grew as soon as he got the full job a year ago. Drake is nineteen years old and it's already everything Bruce never asked for, but is proud to have.

If I were like him would my father be proud? Would he love me more?

They move silently through the damp streets of the city, Damian has his eyes fixed on the drops that crash against the glass of the window. There was no comment, Drake just handed him his jacket and now it's just as wet as the rest of him.

He don't want to keep thinking, he just want your mind to push all the thoughts that drown him and let he breathe easy. He feels tormented by not being able to fulfill his father's expectations, by the quiet years in the company of Richard and that were broken by the abrupt return of Bruce, by the time it left and will never return, by the lost happiness, for the torn illusions and for the dreams that are impossible to reach on a horizon that recedes with each step he takes.

"I'm Sorry."

Damian turns to Drake immediately, he's suddenly with the blue of the sky that is dimmed by sadness.

"Why?"

"It's my fault, I brought Bruce back."

He doesn't say anything, maybe that's enough, because his brother returns all his attention to the streets.

The sound of the rain envelops them and the cold is almost welcoming. Damian closes his eyes and leans against the glass, he doesn't care about the destination as long as it's as far as possible from the mansion, the school and everything that haunts him. Because he failed.

I just have to resist… it's the only thing I can do.

I'll not change my father's mind.

I'll not change overnight...

The lack of movement brings him back to reality, the noise of the drops hitting the car is not heard either. They are under cover.

"Where we are?"

"My home."

Sure, Drake lives in the city. Like Todd, he follows the patrol routes imposed by Batman, but no longer lives in the mansion. It's just Bruce, Alfred and him...

A sense of tranquility floods him, it's not the mansion. It's a place without shadows, but neither with a light that he doesn't deserve. Follow Drake up to the tall silver, barely noticing the details of the apartment, though it0s more of a complete building. He vaguely remembers that it's the old theater near the alley where his grandparents died, it was not important and still is not, it is almost surprising how detached he feels to the whole thing, when that event was the first and great event that he brought to life to Batman. He could say, without shame, that he feels closer to the death of Richard's parents, because he always spoke to him about them and made him part of those moments, he made them his family.

"Why are we here, Drake?"

He sees him wandering aimlessly until he stops in front of a door, gives him a glance before entering the new environment. Damian follows him, assuming the answer to his question is there.

A room so small that it could be a matchbox, at odds with the large space enjoyed in the previous room. Stacked books and scattered papers are the main decorations, but the most important are the two computers. Drake works in that little 4x4 space? The place is visibly uncomfortable.

"Drake."

"Bruce is being unfair to you." Damian frowns, his brother doesn't face him, he can only see him in profile while he turns on one of the two computers. The light illuminates his face, making his dull expression better to see. "I was also unfair to you six years ago and I remained so for a long time, I was stuck in your version of ten years. I'm sorry for that too, you deserved more. We're family."

It was never a secret that Drake held a grudge against him and to receive such a sincere apology, admitting that it wasn't just Damian who made mistakes, it's a new and unfamiliar feeling. It's not exactly unpleasant, although it does cause him some discomfort.

"I know it was an accident. I can't judge you for that, I've been close to passing that line… ”He falls silent and begins typing, opening files and an email. Damian begins to suspect that those computers are not for work, he looks for the switch and when the whole room is properly lit, he can see everything in greater detail.

Stacked books are magic, since when has Drake been interested in magic? It's no secret that he feels rejection towards it, so it's strange. The scattered papers, for some that he can read, are bank accounts and other documents related to a certain Gabriel Agreste. On the far wall are a couple of photographs, guarded as if they were a secret. Red Robin and a spotted heroine, Drake and a young girl with bright blue eyes and a kind smile. He can only assume that it's the same woman.

"What is all this?"

"The memories of my trip."

Damian doesn't make sense in his words, but doesn't push. He's tired of pushing.

Just hold on... this place is at least much better than the mansion.

"I'll go."

"Hm?"

"I'll leave Gotham and I'll not return." Only until then does he look at the screen, there is another photo of that same woman, but in the design of a French Marie Lenoir passport, he's sure that this is not her real Name. Next to it's also one of him, Timothée Rothchild. That just confirms it's not her real name. "There is something I must do and it will take me a lifetime."

"Why are you telling me?"

"Do you want to come?"

Damian just watches him open another document and this time, it's his photo with a blank passport.

I wanna go?

Maybe that's the time to go back and find my way...

---------

I don't know if I managed to express well the feeling of melancholy and of being... lost, yes. I hope I have made it.

What did you think?

[belphegor1982]

…it’s done. Finished. My monster Mummy fic, the one I started in 2003, started publishing in 2004, and left dormant since 2008 – I finally completed it o.O Weirdly (or not), this is the chapter which gave me the most trouble, if you don’t count chapters 16 and 17 (which took me 2 and 16 years to write, respectively). It was hard to say goodbye to this story and these characters, even though I knew I literally just had to get an idea for another story :-/

FAIRY TALES AND HOKUM

Summary: 1937: Two years after the events of Ahm Shere, the O’Connells are “required” by the British Government to bring the Diamond taken there from Egypt to England. In Cairo, while Evelyn deals with the negotiations and Rick waits for doom to strike again, Jonathan bumps into an old friend of his from university, Tom Ferguson. Things start to go awry when the Diamond is stolen from the Museum and old loyalties are tested… (story on AO3; on FFnet)

(Chapters on Tumblr: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23)

Chapter 24: Departure (on AO3 here; on FFnet here)

London, September 1937

A little off Paddington Station, almost in Marylebone, was a small pub called the Stars and Crown, its red brick façade almost exactly similar to the others along the street. It was an unassuming little affair Jonathan liked to patronise every now and then, and not just because it happened to be situated not too far from his flat.

It was a balmy mid-September late afternoon and one of the double doors was wide open on the quiet street. Jonathan and Tom were seated by one of the stained-glass windows, drinking – G&T and a ginger beer, respectively – and talking. Jonathan, remembering the promise he’d made after blowing up Hamilton’s lorry, had bought the rounds.

But for small details like the mostly healed-over scratches on Tom’s hands, the old scar in Jonathan’s left palm, and all the subtler little ways the past two decades had changed them, they might as well have been twenty year old students again.

Well, apart from the subject of their conversation.

“I got off easy, if you ask me.”

“Nonsense. You were the only one who tried to fix this bloody disaster. It’s only fair that you didn’t… You know.”

“…Pay for my mistakes?”

“That is not what I meant and you know it.”

Tom gulped a mouthful of ginger beer, still looking glum.

“I suppose – I know – I should be grateful I didn’t end up like Hamilton, at least.”

Jonathan winced.

Charles Hamilton had made it back to England in a slightly better state than he had made it out of the pyramid, but that wasn’t saying much. From what they had heard, he was lucid for about an hour a day, and that was it – and not very coherent at that. Which made the fact that he allegedly hung himself in his cell a week before his highly sensitive trial very suspicious indeed. The man didn’t appear capable of putting on his trousers on his own, let alone do anything as complex as a slipknot.

The Lord Chancellor’s Department had issued a statement half-heartedly lamenting Hamilton’s demise, the newspapers had stayed surprisingly quiet about it, and Evy had fumed for an entire fortnight. And that had been it. Hamilton had taken the gentleman’s way out. Case closed.

At least Gabriel Baine had been tried, convicted, and sent behind bars for a lengthy period of time. Jonathan didn’t particularly care where he was, as long as he could be elsewhere.

Baine had stated a few times that there hadn’t been anything personal about shooting and ordering his men to shoot Jonathan, Rick, and Tom. Jonathan had silently begged to differ. Baine’s shouts of “Kill them” followed by the sudden excruciating pain in his back, not to mention the confusion and terror as he fought not to die and lost, had felt pretty damn personal.

Tom stared into his glass for a while, then looked up with a brighter expression.

“But enough about this fiasco. How’s your family? I seem to remember your sister’s birthday was coming up, you were lookin’ for a present when we bumped into each other at that bazaar. Did you find one, in the end?”

Jonathan perked up. “I did, actually. Got her a signet ring. She seemed to like it.”

Now that memory he would treasure as long as he lived.

An inventory of his pockets had revealed a hodgepodge of small trinkets which he was still trying to trace. The little medallion with the amethyst cameo must be early Regency, stolen by the pygmy mummies from some unfortunate Napoleon soldier’s corpse; the lapis earring was probably from the Ramesside period (a few Rameses had sent their armies to find or reclaim Ahm Shere, Jonathan had found); the couple of gold and silver rings bearing the Roman SPQR were a little incongruous but easy to chalk up to Julius Caesar’s expedition. There were also some 4th Century Persian coins, proving Alexander the Great’s men had also reached Ahm Shere – the Oasis, anyway – and a number of little amulets from various Egyptian expeditions, mostly heart scarabs made of red and green jasper, copper, quartz, bronze, or gold. He hadn’t determined the nature of the green gemstone yet, saving it for last.

Jonathan had been so excited by his find that he hadn’t gambled a single object. Tracing their origins took time, but he had not even told Evy about it yet. Instead he had not only called on every scrap of expertise he had concerning treasure, but also on every book he could lay his hands on. Evy would have been very surprised – not to mention highly suspicious – if she learned how much time he had been spending at the British Library lately.

He had always enjoyed a good riddle. For some reason this one looked promising enough to justify doing some actual work for. Besides, having the artefacts authenticated meant he would be able to get a much better price selling them.

The only thing he had parted with was the (probable) Napoleon coin, the soft gold nibbled almost beyond recognition by the pygmy mummies’ teeth. Another look at it the morning after his resurrection had given him an idea.

Before they left the Medjai camp, Jonathan had obtained from Ardeth a sketch of Nefertiri’s personal cartouche and the address of a talented goldsmith in Cairo; once back in the city, he had wandered down to Kerdasa, the coin and the folded paper safe in the inside pocket of his (whole and clean) jacket.

Just before he reached the little shop, however, he heard a yelp and a startled cry, and was knocked off his feet by something large and hairy. His vision was filled by long camel’s lashes and lips drawn back on long yellow teeth in what Jonathan might have taken as a smile if he hadn’t known better.

Why did every single camel have to have such foul breath, he wondered.

“ʾAhlan1, Djem,” muttered Jonathan with a sigh that was half annoyance, and half amused resignation.

And was astonished when the camel immediately disappeared from view, replaced with a familiar face. Satiah’s big brown eyes went wide when she saw him.

“Oh, it’s you, bāša2. Hello,” she said with a smile.

Jonathan got up and dusted himself off, irritation quickly fading away. The jacket could survive a little dirt; besides, Satiah’s smile as she hung on to Djem’s bit had lost some of its previous shyness. Considering how fearful she had been the last time – and who could fault her for that, really – it almost made getting knocked over by a foul-smelling bag of hair and wind worth it.

“Good morning, Miss Satiah,” he said in Arabic, picking up his hat from the ground so he could salute her with a flourish. Her hand flew to her mouth to hide a giggle. “It’s a stroke of luck finding you, really. I wanted to thank you for your help the other day, and for, er…”

He reached his limits of the language, and finished in English, “I mean, thank you for returning my wallet to my sister. That was very kind of you.”

“You’re welcome,” Satiah said in Arabic, her cheekbones a little pink. “I’m glad you and your friends got away from those men.”

Jonathan’s smile slipped a notch or two, but he rallied quickly enough.

“Yes,” he said just a little wryly, “we did, at that. In the end.”

He cleared his throat. “Well, I’ve just reached my destination,” he added, pointing to a door above which hung a sign saying something about gold in painted Arabic script, “so I’m going to wish you a—”

“You’re going to see Cousin Ashar?” Satiah interrupted, her eyes shining. Immediately afterwards she clamped both hands on her mouth and cringed. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right. Small world, eh?”

She gave a small smile and led the way into the shop, stopping only to tie Djem to a post.

Ashar – the goldsmith Ardeth had recommended – was a tall, wiry man with a long face, his hair going grey at the temples. He welcomed Satiah warmly and sent her to the backroom to get what she came for. Before she closed the door, she gave Jonathan a little friendly wave, which he returned with a smile. Ashar gave him an odd but not hostile look, eyebrows raised.

Jonathan placed his order, left the coin, and was about to leave, when Ashar called him back, frowning slightly.

“You’re one of the O’Connells, aren’t you.”

Jonathan’s mouth opened and closed as though of its own accord.

“You could say that, yes,” he said finally. “Why?”

“Because word of the second raising of Anubis’ Army made it to Cairo recently.”

This time Jonathan’s mouth dropped open and remained like that for a handful of seconds. Ashar gave something that was almost a smile.

“Not all of us wear the ritual tattoos, you know.”

“I do know,” Jonathan articulated with only the slightest difficulty. Dr Hakim was a Medjai, and his face was devoid of any tattoo as well. Dr Bey had been the same, now that he thought of it. His gaze went to the door that led to the backroom. “Satiah, too…?”

“Yes. But her mother’s family has lived in Cairo for fifty years. The girl has never seen the desert. She will get good schooling and find a trade, inshallah3. The time for living legends is coming to an end.” Ashar looked at the cartouche Ardeth had drawn for reference. “I know what this says. Who the name belonged to. Your commission is either a hollow trinket or a great gift.”

Jonathan drew himself up and said, as dignified as he could, “I’m rather hoping for the latter.”

His own signet ring had been gambled and lost in some card game or another, years ago. His parents would have been so disappointed had they still been alive. The least he could do was make sure his sister had a ring of her own, one that paid tribute to the woman she was and the woman she had been, three millennia ago.

Evy’s reaction when she opened his present proved him right, and even surprised him.

She stared into the box long enough for Jonathan’s brain to go into overdrive. Her silence made him panic ever so slightly. Then she looked up at him, her eyes very bright, lower lip trembling.

Jonathan barely suppressed the need to shuffle like a schoolboy and buried his hands into his pockets, hoping his face didn’t give too much away.

“I know I wasn’t… there – or, you know – then,” he said, almost sheepishly. “But I thought… Well. I hoped you’d like it. The cartouche must be right, I got it from Ardeth, and the goldsmith was a bloody good artist, as it turned out, but—”

Evy cut him off by launching herself at him and flinging her arms around his neck, throwing him off balance. As usual, Jonathan stumbled, but managed to catch her in the end.

“It’s perfect,” she whispered into his neck. “Thank you, Jon.”

If his smile was a little wobbly, his eyes a little moist, nobody seemed to notice. Rick and Alex had picked up the little box; Rick’s face lit up in strange recognition, while Alex deciphered the cartouche slowly and grinned.

“Nice one, Uncle Jon. That’s a pretty good present.”

“Yes, about that,” said Jonathan irrepressibly while Evy broke away and wiped her eyes, “I hope you realise that this is the last birthday present you’ll ever get from me, old mum. Since – judging by your reaction – nothing I could give to you could ever top this, I have decided to simply refrain from trying.”

Evy had slapped his arm and called him an idiot with a big smile, then hugged him again. And he had hugged her back, just because he was alive and able to.

The ring hadn’t left her finger since.

“Jon?”

Jonathan was abruptly pulled back to the present, the Stars and Crown, and Tom’s curious smile across the table.

“Hm?”

“You were a thousand miles away.”

“Sorry about that. What about you and Lizzie? Dorset been treating you well, I hope?”

Tom shook his head with a smile.

“It has, sort of, but we’re moving to Oxford. Did Liz tell you she’d been replaced while she was gone?”

Jonathan nodded. Lizzie disappearing for two weeks had not gone unnoticed in her little town, but since the police didn’t have the beginning of a clue and nobody was able to reach Tom, they had moved on to other things and her boss at the telephone exchange had hired someone else. There had been a subtle but definite irony in Lizzie’s letter as she described her and Tom’s return and the scrutiny they’d had to stand up to in order to prove her husband hadn’t killed her and stashed her body away – or vice versa – before his former Chamber of Horus hierarchy stepped in to explain things.

“Well, they needed an operator at the exchange on Pembroke Street. And you know the interview I had this morning at Whitehall? I won’t be too far, as it turns out.” Tom took a deep breath, then said with one of the goofiest smiles Jonathan had ever seen on his face, “I’ll be workin’ from the Bodleian.”

This could only mean one thing. Jonathan grinned.

“The British Antique Research Department accepted your application, didn’t they? Congratulations, old chap. That’s fantastic.”

He downed a mouthful of his G&T and laid an elbow on the table, his chin in his hand.

“Haven’t been to Oxford in almost fifteen years,” he said thoughtfully. “Not since Evy finished her degree. I wonder if the city’s changed.”

“It’s Oxford,” said Tom quietly, looking like his mind was straying down the same path Jonathan’s thoughts were. “I can’t imagine it’ll ever change that much.”

Jonathan smiled quickly into his palm. Then he raised his glass.

“To the two of you, then. And to publicans hopefully not holding grudges, otherwise we’re still banned from half the pubs in Oxfordshire.”

Tom snorted and raised his own glass, now almost empty. “To the three of us, and testing that theory sometime. And let’s not wait two decades this time,” he added with a twinkle in his eyes.

The two glasses clinked.

For just a second, the decades fell away, and Jonathan was twenty years younger.

Lizzie was already waiting for them on the platform by the time they finished their drinks and walked back to Paddington. She carried a shopping bag that looked entirely too small compared to what should be expected of a woman who’d just spent a few hours in the old metropolis. Tom raised an eyebrow.

“Didn’t you say you planned to go to Harrods while we were in London?”

“I also said I only needed a new suit and the latest Agatha Christie novel,” she said, light teasing in her tone. “The next one will be out sometime in November, I think. Have you heard what the title will be? Death on the Nile, of all things.”

Jonathan gave a mock shudder. “I might just give this one a miss, then.”

The train’s whistle pierced the air, cutting the rest of the conversation short. Tom picked up his wife’s bag and Lizzie turned to Jonathan with a smile.

“Goodbye, Jonathan,” she said softly.

The use of his first name had always been a signal that the game was paused and the masks were off, as clear as a referee blowing halftime. Jonathan answered in kind, his throat just a little tight.

“Goodbye, Elizabeth.”

They hadn’t even actually said ‘goodbye’ last time. They had just stood there, she leaning out the train window in her brand-new nurse’s uniform, he and Tommy on the platform amidst the soot, the steam, and the throng of people, until the train departed. The memory was an old hurt that still twinged sometimes, like his left shoulder when the weather was bad.

He cleared his throat and smiled.

“See you on the next Christie novel, then?”

What Lizzie did next might have shocked twenty year old Jonathan, who thought he knew her well, and as such very much surprised his current self, who had a little too much experience of the world to truly get shocked anymore. She took his hands in hers, flying in the face of propriety and what had been her rules of conduct in public, and kissed him on the cheek near the corner of his mouth with an aching sweetness. The old Lizzie, so shy and unsure of her self-worth that she was terrified of what people may think, would have been appalled.

It had taken a while for Jonathan to truly grasp how much the years had changed Tommy and start thinking of him as ‘Tom’ to account for that change. Through this apparently simple gesture – simple only to someone who didn’t know Elizabeth Ferguson, née McAllister – Lizzie became ‘Liz’ in an instant.

“I can’t bear to think you died,” she said, her voice shaking ever so slightly. “When I think… Without that – that book…”

She took a deep breath. Tom caught Jonathan’s eye and gave a small nod. Of course he had told her. Knowing Liz, she’d take the secret to her grave anyway.

“Take care of yourself, Jonathan, please. The world would be so dreadfully dull without you in it,” she added with a tentative smile, to which he replied with a smile of his own, one that hopefully looked steadier.

“Likewise.”

Her hands tightened around his. Just for a second or two, he softly ran his thumb on the back of her hand, an echo of the old intimacy that used to bind them; then their gazes fell away, their hands separated, and the moment was over.

Tom held out his hand with a smile, and Jonathan’s mind was whisked back to that sunny afternoon in Cairo, almost two months ago, and a chance encounter that had reshuffled the cards in a major way. Tom’s handshake was slower this time, steadier, warmer.

“Bye, Jon.”

“Cheers, Tom,” said Jonathan, determined but failing to swallow the lump in his throat. “Have a pint at the Oxford Arms for me.”

Tom nodded, and added his left hand to the handshake, not saying anything. He didn’t need to. As usual – almost – everything he meant to say was on his face and in his eyes for the world to see.

The train let out a burst of steam. Tom hastily let go and made for the train door, stopping only to help Liz aboard. Jonathan looked wistfully at the train for a minute and was about to turn around and go home when he heard his name being called over the din of the locomotive and the running gears chugging into motion.

Tom and Liz were leaning out of a window, wearing identical wide smiles. Liz was waving, her other arm wrapped tightly around her husband. The light in her eyes and her curly hair whipping around her face made her look like the girl from Jonathan’s memories.

“Send my love to Evelyn!” she called. “And say hello to your brother-in-law for me! You’re all welcome anytime for tea!”

“I’ll make sure they know!” shouted Jonathan as the train gathered speed.

The blatant disregard of platform etiquette made several passers-by turn and stare at him with a touch of glower. Jonathan ignored them and kept his eyes on the departing train. Tom’s and Liz’s beaming smiles remained in his head a long time after they had gone back inside the carriage.

He would see them again. This time he was determined not to leave the possibility of a reunion to chance and the vagaries of life. They had been through too much – both twenty years and two months ago – to just go their separate ways.

Besides, Jonathan mused as he left Paddington behind to wade through the bustling streets, he still had some research to do before he set out to sell the objects he had found at Ahm Shere. The Bodleian Library was as good as the British Library; at least he didn’t risk meeting Evy there and being subjected to her prodding curiosity, which he wasn’t ready to face yet. At least not before he unravelled the mystery of the little gemstone. It looked like an emerald and felt vaguely familiar, as though he had seen it somewhere or heard a story about it.

This required some investigation, if only to be prudent.

After all, he was particularly well placed to know that you can only go so far on fairy tales and hokum alone.

THE END

.⅋.

1(أَهْلًا): informal “hello”, “hi”.

2باشا (bāša): “sir”, “mister” in Egyptian Arabic.

3ʾin šāʾa llāhu, (إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ‎) – literally “if God has willed it”, “God willing”

Don’t look for the Stars and Crown in Paddington, or the Oxford Arms in Oxford. Unlike the Turf Tavern they’re entirely fictional.

Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile was indeed published on 1st November 1937. I couldn’t resist, I mean, come on ;o)

The Bodleian Library is the main research library in Oxford and one of the oldest in Europe.

If you’re wondering, yes, that little gemstone might be the basis for a sequel of sorts, but I haven’t really started to plot it. Considering my track record for these things you might see that story sometime in the next decade and a half :P

Writing and publishing Fairy Tales and Hokum has been such an adventure. I was 21 when I started writing it; now I’ll be 38 in four days. Much as I miss the old crowd of 2003-2006, reposting and updating the story here on AO3 allowed me to know some awesome people. I’m so glad these characters somehow – FINALLY – sneaked back into my head and my heart again with their quirks, their (updated) backstories, and their voices and allowed me to finish this story the way I wanted to. Like I’ve said before, whenever you started reading this, I hope you had a good time now that you’ve reached the end. If you’ve read and left a signed comment – if you’ve read and left an anonymous comment – if you’ve read and left no comment at all – know that I wrote this for you and I hope some of it made you smile.

Take care of yourselves, love you all, and see you on the next fic? :o)

[kolbisneat]

MONTHLY MEDIA: November 2019

Whoa November is over! So I didn’t see any movies this month but there are so many I want to check out. Parasite! Knives Out! Jojo Rabbit! Maybe December.

……….TELEVISION……….

Daybreak (Episode 1.01 to 1.03) This seems like fun so far! Characters are great, the world seems well-established and feels like it’s been lived in for a while, and it’s really just the plot that I’m not clicking with. Most of the stuff works until it goes back to “gotta find dream girl!” It just feels...dull. Especially when compared to all the other far more interesting stuff going on. Gonna keep watching but hot dang I hope they move on from the “where’s Sam?” stuff soon.

The Good Place (Episode 4.01 to 4.05) I’m not ready for this series to end but hot dang does it feel like it knows where it’s going and how it’s going to get there. I’m just happy to be along for the ride.

Queer Eye: We’re In Japan! (Episode 1.01 to 1.04) I appreciate that they addressed the magic of translators at the end of the first ep and I wish they would’ve gone into more of it. Their “guide” was likely a choice based on social media influence and bilingualism, but it seemed like a missed opportunity to have a gay Japanese man introduce the Fab 5 to the culture. Even the comedian from Episode 3 seemed like a better fit. I just don’t know if I got the right introduction into various nuances of the culture, you know? Also this article says a lot more and in a much clearer way. 

……….READING……….

Emperor Mollusk Versus the Sinister Brain by A. Lee Martinez (Page 191 of 293) Very breezy and easy read but for an interplanetary romp with a hyper-smart squid as the protagonist, it isn’t quite connecting. The book is full of alien tropes and the premise is fun, but the lead character doesn’t really get challenged and there’s little impact from events as they happen. It feels pulpy but doesn’t seem to have the melodrama that makes it read like the author couldn’t commit to the bit.

A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony (Complete) I have a vivid memory of seeing this cover when I was a child and really wanting to read it. So when I saw it at a thrift store I immediately picked it up. There were some fun magical ideas in here but it is dripping with so much 70s sexism that I can’t, in good faith, recommend this to anyone. If it was maybe one or two moments then you could maybe give some leniency to the era, but every chapter has at least one moment where the author takes a shot at women. It’s real bad. 

Silver Surfer Omnibus by Dan Slott, Michael Allred, Laura Allred, and many many more (9 issues/chapters in...sorry this book doesn’t really have page numbers) Okay I love it. I didn’t know what to expect but you know when you just have a gut feeling that you’ll like something? Exactly this. I knew nothing about Silver Surfer but the book catches you up and then takes you on a fun series of intergalactic adventures. When I realized it was essentially Marvel Doctor Who, I knew this was for me. I’m really taking my time with this cause I think it’s something special.

James Bond Origin by Jeff Parker, Bob Q, Roman Stevens, Jordan Boyd, Jordie Bellaire, and Simon Bowland (Complete) Pinpointing what makes a Bond story a “Bond” story is tricky. This series is a fun and engaging spy narrative, but I think showing the early days of Bond makes it read the same way Young Indiana jones felt: you know where they’re going but they’re not quite there yet. That isn’t to say it’s not great, cause it is. I suppose I’d just recommend this to those who like spy stories, narratives set during the second world war, or a combination of the two. Those are likely the same people as those who like James Bond as a character, but I think it lends itself more to the genre than the character. Great start to the series.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 6 by Ryoko Kui (Complete) Still fantastic. It took a weird turn in the middle and I was worried it was moving away from the characters to focus on big fantastical monsters and melodrama, but it quickly corrected course. I can’t not recommend this to anyone who likes small fantasy with a gimmick.

The Tomb of Black Sand by Jacob Hurst, Gabriel Hernandez, and more! (Complete) This was mostly for research and I love this D&D module. It’s a fun concept with nuance and one of my favourite fundamental details: the characters are doing their own thing with their own goals and have been doing things before the party shows up. If you’re okay with spoilers, check out this review.

The Wolves in the Walls by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean (Complete) It’s interesting reading a true picture book by Neil Gaiman. I enjoy it as an adult, but I wonder if it connects well with its target audience. With that said, I loved the craftsmanship of the story and seeing Gaiman’s work stripped down to its essentials really helps to understand his approach to writing.

……….AUDIO……….

The Adventure Zone: Graduation (Podcast) Back to D&D and having Travis DM is a great change up! With that said, I’m having a hard time getting past the first ep. It introduces so many characters and so much world-building that I’m not really getting into it.

……….GAMING……….

Untitled Goose Game (House House) Fantastic, silly fun. I love the concept and the execution is perfect. I wish the game was maybe...2 levels longer, but what we do have is fantastic. Highly recommend.

Maze of the Blue Medusa (Satyr Press) The group just sorted out a major threat that has been following them throughout the dungeon. A peek behind the curtain: I’m not sure this module is connecting with the group. I don’t think there’s a clear goal and the party hasn’t really taken the initiative to make their own goals. Maybe that’s my fault and I think part of it has to do with our previous adventure being fairly bespoke and rather on rails. They loved it, but I also think it set a precedent. I need to pull back and chat with the players to see how they’re feeling.

A Red & Pleasant Land (Lamentations of the Flame Princess) We don’t get to play often but when we do, it’s a great time. The party stumbled into a genuine warzone and had their first taste of real danger. But they also landed their first true kill and it really had a lot of impact! Up until now, enemies have been whimsically changing when they “die” so to kill someone really meant something. It was a moment that really stuck with me.

And that’s it! As always, Let me know if you have anything you think I should check out and happy Saturday.

[alittlealien007]

This is a, uhh, rant from a person who cannot sleep because not everyone is blessed with the ability to sleep when needed.

I can't sleep. It's not like I can sleep normally. Obviously, I can't. That's the kind of fun (read: insomniac and depressed and medicated) life I live. Anyway, I'm having a serious post series withdrawal after watching Touch Your Heart which is adding to my I-can't-sleep thoughts. While thinking about Lee Dong Wook's character, Kwon Jung Rok, and how much I'm probably in love with him because I really fall hard for fictional characters (hello, Gabriel from LJ Smith's Dark Visions; I love him so freaking much, I told the books' story, point-by-point, from memory to my cousins after reading them once; I have an okay to good memory, but did I burn every scene of those books in my memories, and I haven't forgotten Gabriel since - a character from my own unfinished novel series is actually roughly based on him. Heh.), I was reminded of my other fictional Kdrama crush that made me crush hard on the actor as well. (This is related-ish because I think I'm having a crush on LDW even though I never really had a crush on him before. I know he's handsome and all, and I did ship him a lot with Park Bom when Roommate was airing, but that was pretty much it.)

Drum roll please - it's Kim Nam Gil's Bidam from The Great Queen Seon Deok. I had a huge crush on KNG, that I was literally in tears after watching his very questionable (read: salacious) movies prior this Kdrama because 10 years ago, I was just a pure child who wants my crush to be pure as well (we can all laugh now). And was in more tears, I'm practically drowning, when he announced his military enlistment. I even swore I'll wait for him to be discharged.

And I did wait... for a year at least. After that my fangirl heart decided to move on because hello I'm a fangirl through and through, and I'm also easily distracted. While I do fall hard for characters I like, it sometimes hurt bad whenever I realize the actuality that they don't exist irl which means I can't even really root for them and watch them from afar (this reality was another inspiration for writing another unfinished novel. Gahd, I'm good at plots and starting weird stories but really bad at finishing them, huh.), I really like the part where I can move on pretty easily or relatively easy. I mean, I did have a huge continuous crush on KNG for about 2 years (and while I do have an impressive (it is impressive, methinks) more-than-a-decade crush on Kim Jaejoong and more-than-two decades-practically-my-whole-life crush to very serious admiration and adoration for Jackie Chan, I will be honest and say those emotions were not continous because hello we live in a world of entertainment and general sadness so we're kinda forced to choose between facing or escaping our realities in order to deal. As an escapist at heart, I chose escapism so I end up liking a lot of things. It's not a good choice, but it lets me survive.), and I think that's a feat. Anyway, this also reminded me of a promise I made that when I find out KNG is getting married, I will drink a bucket of beer even though I don't drink beer to lament his getting hitched and celebrate it as well. And from that I made the same promise for Jaejoong's own marriage (yes, it's not a good thing to promise, but let us all be weird in our own ways without harming anyone).

After being reminded of my past feelings, I went to YT to search for this specific Seon Deok x Bidam video that I used to watch about ten years ago, and apparently it can still make me cry so bad I started wishing there's an alternate universe where those characters had a happy ending. It turns out even though I've moved on from my KNG crush, I still have not move on from my Bidam crush. Again, world, why isn't Bidam real? Asking for a friend.

P.P.P.S. I just thought of something. Did I really cry again because of Bidam or was it tears for the past me that I lost? On the other hand, my past memories reminded me that even then, I was already looking for "me" so I didn't lose me after that; I lost me way way way back. When? I have zero idea.

P.S. I write weird shit when at the brink of getting sleepy.

P.P.S. I met Anggun because of the background song "Want you to want me" which makes this video more memorable.

P.P.P.P.S. I should sleep. I'm getting more nuts by the second.

[badleafsickjokes]

Thrice Bitten, Forthwith Forevermore Shy.

Prologue:

Ruminations, or The Morality of Conflict.

What is a man?

Is he defined by his physical design, or the soul bound to it? Is he merely the sum of his parts, or the culmination of his achievements? Dare one even assume he is nothing more than a miserable pile of secrets? Consider, if you will, that the subject of what a man is, is secondary to what defines a man. For we rarely focus upon the material, the stone from which grand marvels are carved, but rather upon the method, and the skill of its creator.

A century past, there was one such man whose soul was tempered in the fires of the greatest conflict one might face; The conflict of good, and evil. For it was unto him, a trained knight of the Brotherhood of Light, a grand task was cast down: To reconnect the land of man to that of the angels, and of the Father Himself. In such regards, he had felt justified in his actions, however cruel, or greedy, or vengeful. There was no moment of remorse when his barbed whip sawed through the jugular of the Lycanthrope Lord, nor did he shed a tear when he cast his crucifix deep into the ribs of Camilla, Queen of the Vampires. No second of remorse for his brethren who had died upon similar quests, only a passing glance to reach amidst their rotting corpses to tear free their most treasured belongings. As his power grew, and his will hardened yet more and more with each slain foe, he remained assured that his actions were still justified.

But in the real world, the lines of morality are blurred, and memory a plaything of those that would deign themselves gods. For it is unto this end that even at the end of everything, that the land of man was rejoined rejoicefully with the golden gates of God, that Satan, the serpent himself, had humbled himself in haughty indignation before Gabriel’s hand, that he was denied his one true wish: The return of his wrongfully taken beloved. Nor was he even offered a secondary wish, that being to ascend with her in heaven. Instead, he was left below, amidst the animals, and the beasts, in the chaos and devastation that he had sewn upon the earth.

In an ironic sense, upon the mountain of the Necromancer’s land, where the sun and moon and stars were mere tools of mirrors and broken dreams, all that was good in Gabriel ascended to the heavens, much like the founders of his order. While all that remained below was a husk of a man, and even that turned to ash as the cold corpse of a child, though plagued with vampiric ailment, hung limply in his arms. Gabriel was no more, and what stood over the smoldering corpse of one who would see himself strike the word of God, and all life, from the annals of history, was delegated evil manifest.

Now, it is understandable that without conflict, one finds themselves discontent, and disheartened. Within the ruined remnants of Camilla’s rubble-strewn castle, this shadow of a man sat atop his throne of bittersweet victory, and beheld the sickly truth of the world. For, in his quest to slay the Lords of Shadow, he had mistakenly assumed his foes were the source of a tumor, and with their violent removal, one might expect the cancer of Lycanthropy, Vampirism, and Necromancy to shrivel up and die. However, this immediate diagnosis was incorrect, and they were more accurately the first patients of a plague, and though their corpses were burned free of the disease, the epidemic would continue to spread.

At first, he had lamented, for his quest had yielded no fruit for either him, or the people of this world. But what challenge, what achievement would there be in forever slaying the dregs of darkness that slowly crept into his castle, with their heads bowed down in praise? For even atop a million of their corpses he would be seen as a monster still. Their willing subservience brought with it the title of Prince of Darkness, and as they slowly filled the corridors of the Bernhard Castle, this ‘Prince ‘ found himself wondering what purpose an army of such magnitude served. Consider, then, that these were an extension of his being. They were, as he was, a fundamental, and ever-present, cog in the great wheel of things.

They were neither good, nor evil, for such things are trifles in the face of the natural order of things. Is the night evil for swallowing up the sun’s rays, and denying the crops their needed light? Is the day evil for forcing the bats, and creatures of the night, to cower in their abyssal abodes?

Rather, what was truly evil was a will to upset the natural order of things

The Brotherhood, much like his previously misguided self, sought his demise, but then what? Should their chosen paladin or cleric exorcize his blood-soaked form, then they too would find themselves atop his still warm throne. The cycle would continue, albeit less stable, until eventually, the wheel of time would career off, and either one man, or one monster, would find itself stumbling the wastes of a broken world, wondering if it was all, truly, worth it.

To every chess board, there is the white, and the black. To every coin, there is the monarch of the age, and the symbol of his land. To every species, there was its prey, and its natural predator. He was the storm of the human race, the conflict to which man would temper himself against. The Brotherhood of Light would cast themselves, bound not by caste or heritage or race, but by goal, upon the towering walls of his castle, and would fail every time. The forces of darkness, corpses, and demons alike, would choke upon his tightly held reigns, before being set free upon the villages of man to raze them to the ground, lest those born of Adam forget whom their ever-present adversary is.

Therefore, the balance would continue evermore, and all would be as ordained in the world of both the natural, and the unnatural, until the end of time itself.

[thedaveandkimmershow]

He looked over at me and said 

“Your country’s too big.”

This is more than twenty years ago in Prague. The one in The Czech Republic that, on a map, you’d be looking at central Europe to the right of Germany, between Poland above it and Austria below it.

That Czech Republic.

I’m on a shoot with Small World Productions. This particular week involves a few days here in Prague and a few days in Budapest, Hungary. On the Prague leg of the shoot, we have a guide. Young man. Easy to talk to.

I’m not sure the context of his remark, that’s among a legion of memories lost to me at this distance.

But I never forgot what he said to me.

“Your country’s too big.”

I’m reminded of it most of the time. Every day, if I’m paying attention.

What’s interesting is... I have no idea what I said to him next. I just have the thing he said and only the thing he said in my memory.

But I sure do hope I had the good sense to agree with him on the spot. 

Linzy showed me a video the other day.

“Imagine”, the classic, written by John Lennon, recorded by Pentatonix last year.

It’s a beautiful, moving performance. Lush. 

Gorgeous.

About halfway through the video, each member of the group holds up a card with words that describe them personally.

LGBTQ+

Man

Jewish

American

Black

Christian

Latina

Woman

Linzy was moved to tears.

That list of identities for me, though, provides a sharp reminder of how dated are Lennon’s words.

After all, forty plus years after his appeal 

I hope some day you'll join us And the world will be as one

Forty plus years later... I’m pretty sure the world and all the people in it are further from being one than anybody at the time Lennon’s anthem captured popular imagination would’ve thought possible.

We’re moving at breakneck speed in the opposite direction of what Lennon dreamed of... some day.

Take any word from the Pentatonix video, for example. Those identities aren’t singular identities. They’re fractured even further. Along intellectual lines. Ideological lines. Metaphysical lines. Demographic lines.

And on and on and on.

They’re actually broad categories within which people still don’t see eye-to-eye.

And many would reject the idea of being as “one” even if the topic is people who share their identity.

Not everyone’s worthy. You know?

Not everyone gets to be in the club.

No matter what that club is.

The scene is from The West Wing, season 5, episode 1. It aired in September of 2003 and was the first time I gave any thought to the subject of unity and division.

PRESIDENT WALKEN: You know I’m not the enemy. The things that unite us are greater than those that divide us. We both believe in democracy, preservation of American values, protection of our citizens in a sometimes hostile world.

CJ CREGG: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

PRESIDENT WALKEN: Exactly.

CJ CREGG: That what’s in your statement?

PRESIDENT WALKEN: Something like that.

It’s a well-known refrain:

What unites us is greater than what divides us.

It expresses a heartfelt desire for the words themselves to be true even as actually manifesting their meaning is well beyond our grasp.

Here are a few words from President Obama, speaking at the memorial service for victims of the 2011 Tucson shooting, the assassination attempt on Gabrielle Giffords, Arizona’s 8th district representative to the Congress of the United States.

“...I believe” the president said, “that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.”

To the ears of someone listening from July 4, 2018, those sentiments sound downright ironic.

In June of 1963, President Kennedy, giving the commencement address at American University in Washington, D.C., put it this way:

“For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breath the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

A riff on ”the forces that divide us...”

And a good one, at that.

But what if, in the final analysis, such ideas of unity are outdated? What if we’ve proven conclusively enough... that the forces dividing us are, in fact, stronger than whatever it is that unites us. And to say otherwise is hugely naive in a modern age whose only use for words of this nature is in the service of rhetorical flourish and gravitas.

What if unity is simply the song of wide-eyed dreamers and nothing more?

I don’t think it’s much of a tough sell to say that kind of thing anymore.

“When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.”

I read these words yesterday and did not think about July 4, 1776. I read these words and thought about July 4, 2018.

I read these words and realized that while the phrase “it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another”... while that phrase referred to the colonies and the King in 1776, today they could just as easily refer to each of us... and those with whom we disagree.

Tell me that’s not true.

I thought about how we’ve since learned that the high road is for suckers.

I thought about how we’ve since learned how easy it is for us to give ourselves a free pass when it comes to our lofty ideals of “Love Is All You Need”.

I thought about how we’ve since learned that not everybody matters. 

That some people aren’t worth the effort of community or fellowship.

That some people aren’t worth our time.

I thought about how natural it is to unfriend people who pontificate all the time.

What a stone cold habit it is to mute different ideas.

What little effort it takes to ignore news, opinions, and articles that come with a plea that they must be read.

How easy it is to minimize those who tell me that If I’m not shouting at the top of my lungs at all those who aren’t shouting at the top of theirs... then I’m part of the problem.

I thought about that time I read lamentations on how our country is lost... and then the next thing I read was the U.N. report on the Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo detailing what the authors identified as “crimes against humanity” carried out against civilians of several ethnic groups in a generalized and systematic fashion. Mutilations. Rapes. Other forms of sexual violence, torture, and exterminations.

I thought about how easy it is to care about some things and not others.

I thought about words and actions I never would’ve imagined from, you know, adults.

I thought about our completely insufficient “better angels”.

I thought about confrontations between people I never would’ve believed could be enemies. They’re on the same side, for crying out loud. Yet they splinter and splinter... and splinter.

I thought about a Supreme Court in which some justices employ a “living document” interpretation while others employ an ��original meaning” interpretation.

I thought about what the hell???

I thought about how every day someone’s declaring the causes which impel them to the separation from someone else.

I thought about whoever you are... there’s a lot of someone’s who hate you and everything you stand for. Doesn’t even matter who you are or what you believe.

I thought about how fast we are... at identifying mortal enemies. Or just people who are dumber than us.

I thought about how we’d rather not carry the baggage of certain other people. How we’d rather not be burdened by them or be subject to them. Or their friends. Or their families.

I thought about how easy it is for us to go low. And how easy it is for us to forgive ourselves for doing so.

I thought about how there’s no such thing as “We”.

I thought about how there’s no such thing as We.

 Photo by Ryan Richards on Unsplash

He looked over at me and said

“Your country’s too big.”

Twenty years ago. And I still remember it like it was yesterday.

“You’re country’s too big.”

No kidding, brother.

We can rationalize all we want. We can defend all we want. We can justify all we want. The one thing we can’t do, however, is invoke unity.

We’re too big for unity.

I don’t think it’s a real shocker to admit that. I don’t think anyone would fall over in a dead faint if I said unity isn’t important. 

And that’s fine.

Really. It’s not an actual priority nor a bona fide ambition... so why pretend? We can be honest with each other about that, surely.

I think I just don’t want to hear about it anymore. I don’t want the next president, however they identify, to implore us to “come together”, to refer to  "our great nation”, to talk about “the business of bringing the country back together again”, “national healing”, or that our divisions aren’t that big a deal.

Nope.

Just take the Oath of Office... and do what you gotta do. For whoever you’re doing it for.

And one more thing.

No need to call whatever this is The United States.

Just call it America.

Photo by Ruben Mishchuk on Unsplash

[rememberingdonnaandjim]

Above: Jim with daughters, Jamie and Charlotte, ca 1962 (top), with great-granddaughter Maria in 2015 (bottom).

Jim’s life

James Edward “Jim” Perry, 89, died Dec. 17, 2017 in Portland, Ore.

He was born May 3, 1928 in Taunton, Mass., into a household comprised of his mother, Constance Gracia, and his immigrant grandparents, Constance and Joseph Gracia, who journeyed from Spain by way of Portugal at the turn of the 20th century. Jim spoke only Spanish until entering school. He was the eldest of six children and shouldered heavy responsibility for his brother and four sisters.

The history Jim witnessed was remarkable.

He recalled, as a boy of 10, being sent out into an approaching hurricane to fetch kerosene for his family. When “The Perfect Storm” became a best-selling book and described the devastating Great New England Hurricane of 1938, we realized that was the storm he had survived — and which haunted him in nightmares for decades.

As a teenager during World War II, he found work at Camp Myles Standish in Taunton, where — ever friendly and curious about everyone he met — he conversed with the German soldiers who had been taken prisoners-of-war and were being held in his hometown.

His twin passions, music and baseball, were easily accessed near home.  As a boy, his vocal talents led him to lead roles in the school choir.  Later as a movie usher, Jim was repeatedly exposed to the best movie scores and songs, many of which he would memorize by ear.  As an older teen, he made a habit of traveling to Boston, where one theater offered a movie and a renowned Big Band concert, all for a quarter.  Even in his late 80s would Jim spontaneously whistle a series of entire songs from his seemingly bottomless repertoire and astound anyone listening.

His lifelong love of baseball — especially the Boston Red Sox — was forged during youthful visits to Fenway Park, where he recalled his days behind the “Green Monster” watching his idol, Ted Williams, and greats including Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. He became an L.A. Dodgers season ticket holder and mega-fan in the era of Koufax and Drysdale when he lived in California, and the Diamondbacks’ biggest booster during his retirement years in Arizona. Taking in countless MLB spring training games near his home was an annual thrill for him. Still, the Red Sox were always No. 1 in his heart, and after lamenting for decades that he would never see them win a World Series, he lived long enough to celebrate three titles.

A high school dropout, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and served at Lackland AFB in San Antonio, Texas, through the Korean War era,  most notably as a drill instructor.  He earned his GED in the Air Force and found the love of his life, Donna Weaver of Beatrice, Neb., a stunning and brilliant WAF — a member of the U.S. Women in the Air Force. They married on Dec. 24, 1949, just four months after falling in love at first sight.

After the birth of two daughters and Jim’s discharge, the family settled in Southern California, where Jim honed his talent for art at Los Angeles City College on the G.I. Bill and shaped his skills into a 40-year career as a commercial artist/graphic designer in the defense industry in California and Arizona. His work received national attention, including his winning entry for a design contest being emblazoned on the side of every U.S. Post Office delivery vehicle one year in the 1960s. He was also honored for his designs annually of the program cover for the prestigious Mt. San Antonio College Relays in the ’60s-’70s.

Rising to become art director at General Dynamics/Pomona in the 1960s, Jim always took his self-improvement seriously. He became involved with Toastmasters International, and won a number of state and local titles for his distinguished public speaking. A New Deal Democrat at heart, he became involved in politics, campaigning for John F. Kennedy and witnessing JFK’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 1960. Ironically, he was on work assignment in Washington, D.C., both at the time of JFK’s inauguration in January 1961 and when the president was assassinated in November 1963. Jim was part of both the crowds for the Inaugural Parade and the heartbreaking arrival of the hearse bearing the late president’s body at the White House.

He spent years working with the engineers on the Apache Helicopter Project and also created the design of an Apache warrior on horseback which was used as their official emblem.  A sculptural depiction of Jim’s design can still be seen on the Falcon Field building in Mesa.

Jim was ever the devoted family man to both his wife and children and to his wife’s large extended family — and later to his sons-in-law, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. While raising his two daughters, Donna and he planned a meaningful family vacation every summer filled with educational opportunities and happy memories.  With movie-star looks and immense charm, Jim “never met a stranger,” as the saying goes, and had dozens of friends in his longtime community of Velda Rose Estates in Mesa, Arizona, and at his daily “corner store” hangout at Basha’s grocery near his home.

He never held a grudge and shrugged off hardships, such as a frequently Dickensian upbringing, or health problems of later years, with a bit of sarcasm and a twinkle in his famously blue eyes.

His sociable nature — and the most challenging crossword puzzles — kept his mind sharp as he approached 90. His voice was deceptively young, and his unmistakably artistic handwriting never faltered, making even a simple envelope he addressed a thing of beauty. His handmade birthday and occasion cards, drawings and caricatures are treasured keepsakes, and his oldest great-granddaughter will never forget the special art lesson he gave her.

Jim had an artist’s eye up until his final days.  He spent time observing the outdoor beauty on scenic drives or just watching the changing colors of the leaves through his window.  He never failed to comment with delight.

Jim is survived by his daughters, Charlotte Aguilar (Carlos), of Bellaire, Texas, and Jamie Carter (Ed) of Portland, Ore., five grandchildren, Emily Dawn Carter, David Carter, Kevin Carter, Victoria Aguilar Hand and Gabriel Aguilar; and three great-grandchildren, Maria Elena Suarez-Aguilar, Sophia Ashley Hand and Dylan James Hand. He is preceded in death by his wife of 60 years, Donna Weaver Perry.

Jamie, who with her husband, Ed, managed Jim’s care during his final time, is planning a memorial service and internment for him and Donna in the late spring at the Prescott National Cemetery in Arizona. She encourages anyone interested in attending to contact her at jloocarter@gmail.com to be notified of the details when they are confirmed.

[erosanova-blog]

The Struggle is Real

By Axel Anderson

(Readers note: this was originally submitted Spring 2015 to a 20th Century Fiction class at Colorado State University, I just wanted to reblog it and share it with the world. I apologize some of the formatting didn't transfer over, and I sincerely hope all the references are correct. The original assignment called for a minimum of 8 pages, but the professor refused my 52 page paper, so I condensed it to 22 pages. Enjoy!)

You wake up late, in a half-inebriated state; eyes crusty at the corners and the knowledge that a term paper is due in a few hours that you have yet to begin. It’s raining outside, and you’re dreading the walk to the bus station. A half an hour away to the university, and your eyelids are drooping into their sockets. You show up at the computer terminal, shoes wet and socks sopping.  You’re wet to the core and have no way of drying off except the hand dryer in the bathroom which does a shoddy job of even drying your hands. You perch one leg on the counter, trying to dry your soggy clothing, but then slip and fall. You’re lying on your back in a pool of urine and lavatory floor water; to think all this started with a desire to further your education. You walk out of the bathroom looking (and smelling) like the victim of a sewage plant hurricane. You saunter over to the desk to work on your term paper and suddenly your mind goes blank. It’s only until fifteen minutes from your deadline does it pick back up, and out of nowhere your hands have a mind of their own, dancing and flickering lambently on the keyboard. No pauses, no breaks, a speed of light approach that leaves even you in utter amazement. The following day the professor announces that it’s the best paper he’s ever read, and you silently recite the teenage colloquialism, “the struggle is real.”

There’s a kernel of justice in the idiom of a child getting a lollipop at the doctor’s office after an “oh-so-agonizing” vaccination. Over the centuries, scholars have come to the conclusion that suffering is often the root of happiness. Pain, both emotional and physical is a transitory state between childhood and adolescence; between ignorance and epistemology. Throughout the course of the class "20th Century Fiction," taught by Thomas Conway, I have both read of anguish and experienced it firsthand in my personal life- it's easy to tie together the strings of similarity; it is also easy to relate to something that correlates with personal experience. With age comes wisdom, imparted by the indelible sickle of a fresh wound, which, once healed, imparts a valuable lesson. We rarely scald the tips of our fingers twice, out of curiosity, on a hot burner.  Louis Erdrich's Love Medicine, Don Delillo's White Noise, and J.M Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, all include instances where suffering was essential for maturation, but in the interest of time and space (and since it is frowned upon to submit a forty-six page paper when the requirement is four to six) the primary focus is with Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Don Delillo’s White Noise and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. Often the sweetest apples are those which have weathered the harshest storms, and throughout this lengthy term paper, I intend to prove that not only is suffering necessary for the stimulation of plot in a narrative, but a driving force for societal maturation.

In the short story Araby by James Joyce, the protagonist is a young boy, naive in the ways of love and unaware of the intricacies of the world outside his little village. Developing a crush or obsession with an object of desire is often unhealthy, the tendency is to become a martyr of urgency. From under the umbrage of innocence, a man is born; for when he walks into the rain his back becomes wet, his bones chill, and his desire for the looming face of the familiar replaces his desire for the obscure. But what is wet will dry, what is cold will warm, and the need to unveil the unfamiliar will be replaced an accomplished effort.

"Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." (Araby, Joyce, pg. 5)        In the end the boy discovers all the taboo and aberrant desires are not what they seem-that the path to adulthood is paved in suffering. Though his eyes may burn, he will soon become hardened and accustomed to the sensation, until one day his need for it will overwhelm the possibility of lament.

Sometimes we saunter the earth as broken men(or women), having fallen off the cliff of a crush and tossed into a sea of sharks with the blood of a lamb tossed upon us; and what goes up will undoubtedly fall to the earth at some point-such is the nature of gravity. Like a scar, ink injected into the dermis is a constant reminder of the prominent stories in the tome of someone determined to decorate their natural temple; it is a chronological depiction only capable of reminiscence by their own minds, to any outsider these imprinted Rorschach tests may appear to be the wallpaper of the human canvas, like a mantelpiece decoration- but to the individual, they are rife with meaning. When Gabriel learns of Gretta's long lost love in James Joyce's The Dead, he falls into deep introspection.

The "vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer, as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world. But he shook himself free of it with an effort of reason and continued to caress her hand. He did not question her again, for he felt that she would tell him of herself. Her hand was warm and moist: it did not respond to his touch, but he continued to caress it just as he had caressed her first letter to him that spring morning."(The Dead, Joyce pg. 21)

which leads Gabriel into the next stage of emotional transition,

"So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept, as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. His curious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair: and, as he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange, friendly pity for her entered his soul." (The Dead, Joyce, pg. 21)

But through the five stages of grief Gabriel is finally able to digest his wife's admission, and is a better person because of it, when,

"He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live. Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love." (The Dead, Joyce, pg. 21)

It is clear that Gabriel is forced into acceptance through adversity, and he emerges from the watery depths of paranoia and an unfounded sense of deception onto the shores of an epiphany. Death is a struggle in itself, and more often than not positivity exudes from a closed casket, but sometimes a negative spin corrupts the bowling ball before the strike: “Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing. (Kundera,pg.3)

Betrayal is a common occurrence in many people's lives, but in this case Gabriel feels betrayed from lack of elucidation; which brings about an interesting point: is betrayal withholding information because of awareness of the consequences of revealing such information? When people feel betrayed, they suffer. But if they never knew about this betrayal, would they ever suffer, hence would they ever grow? Jeffrey Nealon and Susan Searls Giroux state, "Like texts, expressions or clues or golf courses don't simply speak for themselves; they don't simply contain a meaning. Rather, we must always interpret them......... Everything is in need of interpretation, nothing is merely self-evident."(pg. 22)

Would you feel betrayed if this happened in your life? Or is there bliss in ignorance, is there peace in the unknown? If the end of the world was tomorrow, would you rather be aware of it or completely oblivious of the impending oblivion?

Reminiscence is both fortuitous and tortuous at the same time. Murray claims, “I don’t trust anybody’s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It’s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence.”(Delillo, pg. 246)

So we should learn from our suffering, but we shouldn’t grasp it tightly to the point of suffocation. Even if the river is flooding, let the sticks and brambles flow past instead of focusing on how scathed and bloody the skin becomes.

In Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, when King and Lynette destroy the pies carefully constructed for the family, Albertine repairs the damage as best as she can claiming,  "Once they smash there is no way to make them right." (pg. 42)

In this abstract quote about pastries, she seems to also be referring to the marriage between King and Lynette. Once scars are laid, there is no way to forget, they are a constant reminder of a harsh memory- the priceless vases which contain our fragile lives sometimes crash to the floor, and we are left to pick up the shattered pieces in introspective silence. But often after the loudest crash comes the softest silence; sometimes the suffering is so great the possibility for growth is non-existent. Even though King and Lynette proceed to make up and make love under the foggy windshield of their car, the readers are left wondering about the integrity of their relationship-since they are only given a few brief glances into the near future throughout the text, the summation of this relationship is obscure. Lulu Nanapush gave up her life of relative comfort to travel somewhere everyone warned her about- to live with Moses on his wild island full of feral felines and simple needs. She found happiness in the forbidden, even when she became pregnant in an uncivilized place, with the child of a man who she was loosely related to; she says, "I knew that this baby, still tied to my heart, could drag me under. And yet, each morning, light rose in the trembling mica, and I turned away, to the darkness in his arms." (Erdrich, pg. 83)

Even though this man represented everything she shouldn't be pursuing, she couldn't help but give in to the ultimate chase: the desire for love. Sometimes despite the biggest warnings we seek the best rewards-better to aim high and fall low than aim low and hit your feet. There is a prevailing benevolence and a dispiriting malevolence in any given situation, but as Nealon and Giroux state, “You never know because the future remains open; meaning never stops or rests simply in one interpretation." (pg. 28)

When Beverly and Lulu give in to their passion following his brother's death (Lulu’s husband), their union is anything but sacred, but it propagates from passion. Sometimes suffering leads wandering strangers down the wrong paths, slipping into a forbidden creek of lust. Although it is not always positive growth, it does provide positive introspection:  "He was more of a man than he'd ever been. The grief of loss for the beloved made their tiny flames of life so sad and precious it hardly mattered who was what." (Erdrich, pg. 116)

Sometimes we are forced to feel emotion because we are products of our environments, other times we choose to ignore emotion; we become numb. Only until we find ourselves in another epiphany can we pull out of this downward spiral. Nector Kashpaw shares a tryst with Lulu as well, another forbidden chance for personal growth. Secrecy is often the greatest thrill, and their love labors behind closed doors and in cars sitting on the horizon with melting packages of butter. Nector craves the forbidden, hence Nector enjoys suffering; it is not easy to live a double life. He finally comes to his senses and decides to terminate their rendezvous, but is immediately filled with regret, saying,   "And that is what the suffering and burning set in me with fierceness beyond myself. No sooner had I given her up than I wanted Lulu back." (Erdrich, pg. 135)

Some things in life will always change, too often we wade into the river and expect it to be the same. Heraclitus proposed that you can’t step in the same river twice- there is truth in this, the world continues to revolve around and only when you step out of your comfort level, only when you burst forth from your bubble will the world acknowledge your presence, otherwise you are just another boulder in the stream. There are certain consequences that always haunt a person, but in those consequences a seed often sprouts. We infer from our mistakes what actions will guide us through the next set of difficulties with the minimal amount of collateral damage to our selves. But oftentimes, we neglect to take a lesson from our mistakes, we look at hardship as having a detrimental effect rather than a positive one.

Now and again the trauma in our lives causes us to grow sour and weaken, rather than toughening up like ice-hardened steel. Sometimes the struggle becomes too great or too incredibly destructive; sometimes the struggle is a tornado in a trailer park-those trinkets and cardboard yard art will never be able to be replaced to their former glory (I’m stereotyping and being facetious, for this I apologize).   Obsession and paranoia have very few positive effects, if any. Oftentimes we allow ourselves to hurt by exposing our lives to the outside world, very similar to people refusing to use hand sanitizer to strengthen their immune systems or getting flu shots to prevent the inevitable sickness of the season. Marie Kashpaw (formerly Lazarre), “ate dust for one reason: to introduce herself to death. She now was inhabited by the blowing and the nameless.”(Erdrich, pg. 143).

When she finds out her husband is cheating on her, the struggle suddenly becomes real, but there is bound to be rebels in a rebellion, there is almost always opposition to an opposition. She claims, “I would not care if Lulu Lamartine ended up the wife of the chairman of the Chippewa Tribe. I’d still be Marie. Marie. Star of the Sea! I’d shine when they stripped off the wax!”(Erdrich, pg. 161)

For Nector, the sugar in his life (Lulu, the voice of temptation) often needs balanced with the salt of his life (Marie, the voice of reason and obligation). He is torn between the two, and even though he develops diabetes later on (Lulu always fed him hard candy even when he wasn’t supposed to eat it, while Marie forced vegetables on him) from an excess amount of sugar, he still salts his wounded pancreas and keeps the shaker by his side. With Lulu, there is a lightness in his being; with Marie, a heaviness, but he is bound to his shaker, though he continues to sneak sugar when he can. His struggle is real, but it is detrimental for all the parties involved. However, sometimes life is best lived at the tip of a risk that in the shelf of the pantry, because (following the attempted homicide of the man providing Babette with placebos and infidelity by Jack), “Is it better to commit evil and attempt to balance it with an exalted act than to live a resolutely neutral life” (Delillo, pg. 299). Jeffrey Nealon and Susan Searls Giroux continue with, "No matter which side you favor in such a discussion, it's much too simple to say that one is inherently good while the other is inherently bad. It's the consequences that are good or bad, not the signifiers." (pg. 27) Jack was subject to positive growth following this experience, so the gray line separating good from bad is rather obscure.

People crave turmoil like a desert craves the rain; there is a reason why so many episodes of Gossip Girl exist and why the ratings on dramatic reality television series are so high. What makes for a good story is the possibility of the protagonist going through a series of trials and errors with penultimate strife prior to the denouement. Jeffrey Nealon and Susan Giroux claim, “After all, there’s no point in being “unique” unless people know it! Perhaps the easiest way to state this point is to say that we are social animals, and one of the things we want from each other is recognition.”(pg. 43)

On occasion we expose ourselves to unnecessary hardships for the sake of personal growth. I am currently pursuing a major that makes me struggle, not only because I enjoy a challenge, but I approach it with an air of Machiavellianism. I often choose girls I know will hurt me eventually, because it was in my human nature to want what I can’t have and there is no sport in hunting an injured fox. I would rather strive to be the best I can be and hope that a woman will someday accept me for who I am than giving in to a moderate desire. In White Noise, the man known as Murray, for example, chooses to live in “a rooming house. I’m totally captivated and intrigued. It’s a gorgeous old crumbling house near the insane asylum. Seven or eight boarders, more or less a permanent one for me. A woman who harbors a terrible secret. A man with a haunted look. A man who never comes out of his room. A woman who stands by the letter box for hours, waiting for something that never seems to arrive. A man with no past. There is a smell about the place of unhappy lives in the movies that I really respond to.”(Delillo, pg. 10)

Murray surrounds himself with turmoil because he enjoys watching it; he is content watching the mayhem around him because it allows him to reflect on the important things in life, rather than focusing on the white noise that envelopes. There is an almost unhealthy obsession with death and dying in this novel as well; death being the end of all suffering and the summation of a man in a requiem,                                                                 “Dying is a quality of the air. It’s everywhere and nowhere. Men shout as they die, to be noticed, remembered for a second or two. To die in an apartment instead of a house can depress the soul, I would imagine, for several lives to come” (Delillo, pg. 38).

When we think of drama in cinema, particularly war movies, it is often a man’s last escaping words that tie the whole story together or provide plot or motive for it to continue. Why are we, as a society, so humbled by this concept? Even if it doesn’t cross the mind of a normal person, eventually the obsession with the thought of dying will present itself. When that ugly fact is finally faced headstrong with acceptance, the weight lifts from our shoulders like Atlas losing his globe. In Love Medicine, Lulu begins thinking of her regrets and the notion that carrying the burden of suffrage wasn’t worth crying over, but was worth holding on to:                                                                                    “There were so many things I never cried for. I knew if I started now I would have to waste all the rest of my last years. Besides that, there weren’t tears in me. I was incapable.” (Erdrich, pg. 292)

In the modern world we tend to categorize our memories using technology. The problem in doing so is we are too easily enabled to go back and relive our strife. It is too easy to remember the good times, but also too easy to block out the bad, as reflected in White Noise: “I made virtues from her flaws because it was my nature to shelter loved ones from the truth. Something lurked inside the truth, she said” (pg. 8). And in Love Medicine, a similar theme surfaces for Lulu when she is pondering the regrettable actions of fooling around once more with Nector Kashpaw in the retirement home:      “And yet here again I was making my one big mistake in life over again for the sake of illusion.”(Erdrich, pg. 290)

In any given instance, people as consumers are subject to white noise. Unbearable advertisements and subliminal voices invading our subconscious, and we are not necessarily stronger for it. We tune everything out, consciously ignoring advertisements but subconsciously integrating them into our being. We are the product of our technologically advanced environments, getting weaker and weaker by the day because of our augmented reliance. Too often do we rid ourselves of anxiety or fear of the struggle by the use of modern medicine; with the ingestion of placebos and prescriptions we hope will cure the distress created when life happens. Jack claims, “And I was not a believer in easy solutions, something to swallow that would rid my soul of an ancient fear”(Delillo, pg. 201). Sometimes the side effects of these drugs are worse than the problem for which they’re prescribed. Suffering through the pain is often more beneficial than artificially overcoming problems.

In spite of the fact that I have been hurt time and time again, I still have the desire to walk the plank of fortune; I can’t let the mistakes of the past allow me to throw a blind eye to the possibilities the future can bring. Even though it seems hopeless in my dissertation, the hope comes from scribing it- there is resolve in venting, and this was one of the few ducts through which I exhaled. Jack says to Babette, “Sometimes I think our love is inexperience. The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future. Simple things are doomed, or is that a superstition?” (Delillo, pg. 15)

In the end, resilience is key. The ability to stand back up after being beaten to the ground is admirable and necessary. A pampered person is able to grasp any object of my desire on a whim or with a neatly written check from an overflowing bank account, and life often seems pointless. Sometimes things obtained through hard work define you as a person, and define the objects that you crave as having some insurmountable worth. Lipsha struggled through a lifetime of surrogacy, searching for his father, searching for the meaning of life, and searching for resolution following June’s death. In the end, he drove on, wheels spinning, over the river that binds society: “It’s a dark, twisting river. The bed is deep and narrow. I thought of June. The water played in whorls beneath me or flexed over sunken cars. How weakly I remembered her. If it made any sense at all, she was part of the great loneliness being carried up the driving current. I tell you, there was good in what she did for me, I know now. … The thought of June grabbed my heart so, but I was lucky she turned me over to Grandma Kashpaw. … I’d heard that this river was the last of an ancient ocean, miles deep, that once covered the Dakotas and solved all our problems. It is easy to still imagine us beneath them vast unreasonable waves, but the truth is we live on dry land. I got inside. The morning was clear. A good road led on. So there was nothing to do but cross the water and bring her home.” (Erdrich, pg. 333)

People watching, or sociology on a macro level, is entertaining. Sociology is the reason we read books; novels provide a glimpse into another life without having to leave the comfort of your chair. Celebrities often disguise themselves in public, for fear of being noticed or treated differently.  Being a public figure disallows you from people watching, you belong to the upper echelon of society and may have a hard time candidly observing a couple at the supermarket or thrift store. A lot of celebrities hire personal assistants and personal shoppers to eliminate their need to interact with common folk; they’re completely isolated to lives in the spotlight of decadence. Is their struggle a healthy one? Sure we could all live without being sneezed on at the grocery store, or having beer spilled on us at a rock and roll concert, but is being on the stage capable of producing any personal growth? A celebrity’s struggle for privacy is rarely beneficial. When Jack talks to the chancellor about furthering his career, he suggests, “If I could become more ugly, he seemed to be suggesting, it would help my career enormously. ……I am the false character that follows the name around.”(Delillo, pg. 17) Celebrities struggle because they are defined by their actions, and, unlike the actions of the common folk, they are in the spotlight. This suffering, this struggle, is sometimes unbearably negative. Though they may be full of fortune, their lives lie in the limelight.

When we are hurt, we occasionally gain disillusionment in our surroundings; we begin to question everything. We question both what brings us pleasure and what provides pain, and begin doing a cost-benefit analysis. So corrupted by the notion of being hurt once again, oftentimes, “What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation,” (Delillo, pg. 31) and we willingly exclude ourselves from activities that hold a potential for harm. The tendency to attack previously accepted benevolent anecdotes or nuances becomes apparent, and the world surrounding us seems to loom overhead before dropping; we pick it apart like a hungry hyena devouring a week-old kill.

The concept of growth through suffering is often negated; sometimes the harshest storms topple the boughs of even the most sturdy apple trees. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “Her mother took her out of school at the age of fifteen, and Tereza went to work as a waitress, handing over all her earnings. She was willing to do anything to gain her mother’s love” (Kundera, pg. 44). This suffering lead nowhere, except leaving Tereza with a feeling like she needed to escape her wretched hell. So when six fortuities happened and Tomas appeared, she ran to him. He was all she had, even though he was a complete stranger.

“Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.”(Kundera, pg. 48) Suffering sometimes leaves it up to coincidence to rid ourselves of anguish. “Necessity knows no magical formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders” (Kundera, pg49).

Another example of this benevolence gone awry lies in the ugly truth that Tereza’s real father died because her mother left him for another man and he was so depressed he made appalling statements to the communist police. “The most manly of men became the most downcast. … The most downcast of men died after a short spell behind bars, and Tereza and her mother went to live in a small town near the mountains with her mother’s swindler” (Kundera, pg. 43). So suffering in this instance didn’t nullify or create a callous, it only exacerbated the pain. Tereza is no stranger to this notion, however, she even suffers in her early childhood, “Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of a man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas’s hand with such tenacity, we can understand why: she had been training for it since childhood.”(Kundera, pg. 55)

Perhaps the most appalling quote to come from this book, (in my personal opinion) which reflects a lack of growth as a product of suffering, “To assuage Tereza’s sufferings, he married her”(Kundera, pg. 23). Too often I observe these legally binding trysts that seem to be a desperate attempt to fix something that is incapable of repair; a bond fabricated for all the wrong reasons. People settle into the foundations of crumbling mortar and creaking floorboards because they are afraid; afraid to strive for something greater, afraid of rejection. Then they suffer because of their poor decisions-hence, they suffer because they have not suffered enough. But the people in this type of situation often reach the point where they cannot live without one another, even if the yin doesn’t converge with the yang perfectly. When Tereza leaves Tomas and he is overwhelmed with happiness, but shortly thereafter he realizes he can’t live without her, even though hiding his infidelities is quite sufferable, “For seven years he had lived bound to her, his every step subject to scrutiny. She might as well have chained iron balls to his ankles. Suddenly his step was much lighter. He soared”(Kundera, pg. 30).

However, “…necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inexplicably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value”(Kundera, pg. 33).

Tomas is stranded between the lightness of being and the contentment therein, and the necessity of the everyday struggle. He is also a creature of consideration, he can see the damage he’s causing in Tereza’s life, he can see the agony that he is imparting, “In languages that derive from Latin, “compassion” means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, “pity” (French, pitié; Italian, pietà; etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer” (Kundera, pg. 20). Tomas is awash in a tidal pool of guilt and pity the moment he discovers his unbearable lightness, “The realization that he was utterly powerless was like the blow of a sledgehammer, yet it was curiously calming as well. No one was forcing him into a decision” (Kundera, pg. 29).

Our bodies leak when we are in pain-whether it be blood or tears (or maybe if we have to urinate extremely badly), what’s inside is bursting forth for the world to see. Sometimes we cannot hide it, sometimes we don’t want to. Sometimes we are so caught up in the search for perfection that we discard everything but perfection. Disney movies established what true love should be like, they personified white knights and evil witches and provided us with an unhealthy distrust of apples. Sometimes over-analysis is debilitating, sometimes the best approach is ignorance; the unthinkable is only torturous if it manifests into a thought. Babette claims, ““My life is either/or. Either I chew regular gum or I chew sugarless gum. Either I chew gum or I smoke. Either I smoke or I gain weight. Either I gain weight or I run up the stadium steps.” “Sounds like a boring life.”     “I hope it lasts forever,” she said”(Delillo, pg. 53). The majority of little choices we make in life most likely won’t matter because in the end they are often deemed inconsequential. Life is one small struggle at a time, the easiest way to get through them is stand up straight and hold on to the handlebars. After all, “You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.” (Delillo, pg. 217)

Without suffering and the change that lies therein, what do we have on our deathbed? Would we grow without suffering? Heinrich grows when the family has to abandon their house and run to a shelter, and Jack’s connection with him grows as well. When Jack observes him speaking with a crowd about the disaster he decides not to interrupt to, “Let him bloom, if that’s what he’s doing, in the name of mischance, dread and random disaster” (Delillo, pg. 128).

Babette’s father, Vernon, is the epitome of how suffering forces growth. We are often required to compensate when our lives begin to break down, we are often forced to deal with problems as they approach; rather than wallowing in misery we are forced to think positively: ““A limp is a natural thing at a certain age. Forget the cough. It’s healthy to cough. You move the stuff around. The stuff can’t harm you as long as it doesn’t settle in one spot and stay there for years. So the cough’s all right. So is the insomnia. The insomnia’s all right. What do I gain by sleeping? You reach an age when every minute of sleep is one less minute to do useful things. To cough or limp. Never mind the women. The women are all right. We rent a cassette and have some sex. It pumps blood to the heart. Forget the cigarettes. I like to tell myself I’m getting away with something. Let the Mormon’s quit smoking. They’ll die of something just as bad. The money’s no problem. I’m all set incomewise. Zero pensions, zero savings, zero stocks and bonds. So you don’t have to worry about that. It’s all taken care of. Never mind the teeth. The teeth are all right. The looser they are, the more you can wobble them with your tongue. It gives the tongue something to do. Don’t worry about the shakes. Everybody gets the shakes now and then. It’s only the left hand anyway. The way to enjoy shakes is pretend its somebody else’s hand. Never mind the sudden and unexpected weight loss. There’s no point eating what you can’t see. Don’t worry about the eyes. The eyes can’t get any worse than they are now. Forget the mind completely. The mind goes before the body. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. So don’t worry about the mind. The mind is all right. Worry about the car. The steering’s all awry. The brakes were recalled three times. The hood shoots up on pothole terrain”” (Delillo, pg. 243-244).

Vernon brushes the suffrage off his shoulders, weakened with age. My grandma once told me not to hold grudges that life was too short to worry about injustices done to your honor. Vernon is blissfully aware of his baggage, but doesn’t let him affect his upturned attitude; he is more worried about his car falling apart than his body and mind. Even dressing differently makes people’s perception of you change, with designer clothing you are suddenly the member of the upper class, as least, in appearance.

Religion spreads like an epidemic, but at the end of the day if a person spends their entire life trying to do what’s right and true by their fellow man and there is no ethereal resting place, was their suffering all for naught? Clearly faith skews our perspective of the world, and allows for another layer of personal suffering to exist; a suffering that doesn’t necessarily end in a substantial reward. What if the religion you’ve been following since childhood is suddenly denounced as a cult? All of those layers of suffering become worthless, your whole life may spiral into depression and remorse. Marie Lazarre experiences growth through the pain of religion, a foreshadowing at the beginning of her chapter says, "So when I went there, I knew the dark fish must rise. Plumes of radiance had soldered on me. No reservation girl had ever prayed so hard." (Erdrich, pg. 43) Though she was viciously tortured at the hands of Sister Leopolda, she ran away from the fountain of knowledge with a canteen brimming with experience.

The struggle for love is real, often too real; so real people take their own lives when they think they’ve lost it-paralleling Romeo and Juliet. Murray says to Jack, “It’s bad enough to fear the unknown. Faced with the unknown, we can pretend it isn’t there. Exact dates would drive many to suicide, if only to beat the system”(White Noise, pg. 272). Most hope to obtain love on a familial level and personal level, though some may never find it. Some settle for the norm, that greenhorn level of happiness. However, social Darwinism states that only the strong survive in society; if we don’t suffer, we won’t survive, and we won’t find the ultimate love we are searching for. Arguably, those who settle with the “it’ll do” attitude, those who settle for what’s safe and easily obtained, have not suffered enough. We suffer through shitty relationships, going through a lot of crap with the hopes of changing someone. Some remain unchanged and in these cases suffering proves to be fruitless. A plane’s approach to the flight deck of love takes many different routes, and is bound to engage some turbulence. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines love as:

Love (noun) 1a (1):  strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties <maternal love for a child> (2):  attraction based on sexual desire:  affection and tenderness felt by lovers (3):   affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests <love for his old schoolmates>

b:  an assurance of affection <give her my love>

2:  warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion <love of the sea>

3a:  the object of attachment, devotion, or admiration <baseball was his first love>

b (1):  a beloved person:  darling —often used as a term of endearment (2) British —used as an informal term of address

4a: unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another: as (1):  the fatherly concern of God for humankind (2):  brotherly concern for others

b:  a person's adoration of God

5:  a god or personification of love

6:  an amorous episode:  love affair

7:  the sexual embrace:  copulation

8:  a score of zero (as in tennis)

9: capitalized Christian Science:  god.  (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/love)

Some people see love as living, “…with nothing between us and the stars. We would have made any concession, had we only known what, to go on living here. This was paradise on earth” (Coetzee, pg. 154).

There are many different ways to express it, many of which involve religion, which has been previously defined in this dissertation as something some people believe is worth struggling for. In The Incredible Lightness of Being, love is a suffrage which doesn’t necessarily reflect personal growth, “For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes” (pg. 31). In all of the novels we read throughout this course, the characters have struggled with the concept of love-either struggling to find it (Araby, Love Medicine, The River Between, The Incredible Lightness of Being), struggling to define it (The Dead, Love Medicine, The River Between, The Incredible Lightness of Being) or struggling to let it go (The Dead, Love Medicine, The River In Between, The Incredible Lightness of Being). I (obviously) struggle with this as well as made evident in That Which Remains Unspoken-The Things I Cannot Tell Her. As time passes we often fall into the in the heart of a growth chamber. At first all of my writing had a certain depressing hopeless quality to it. Suddenly a hopeful spark found its way into the kindling of my life, but be sure to watch for the spark that initiated the fire in which I’m currently bathing.

“A twirl of smoke whisks off her hair, caught on an updraft and twisting towards the starlight beaming down on us. The air coming off the lake is chilly, it impales us even under several blankets. We talk for hours, caught up in each other. Often when I look at her nothing else seems to be around-I'm a stranded pilot on a desert island staring into the brown of her eyes, watching her dimples perk up with every joke and fade with every lamentable hindsight. I tell her everything and she reciprocates, her mind edacious and her eyes fixed. They shine with the gleam of a wild child, that little spark of fire by gasoline, and I am engulfed.

When I was younger I used to dream of a white picket fence with a creek running nearby, two or three mischievous children scampering around the yard chasing a fuzzy little dog. The wind rustling through the lilacs, tulips and lilies in the garden, and no neighbors within several miles. Chickens clucking, perhaps a cat or two eager to play with anything that caught their fancy. A brown haired woman waiting on the porch swing with a cold drink and a blissful smile, one that remained in place from day to day, never fading or growing sour with age. I dreamt of walking the children down to the bus stop on those icy winter days, huddling together under a woolen blanket until they went away to further their education. I envisioned the welcoming hug and kiss when I came home, a hot pot of coffee percolating in the kitchen and homemade biscuits still cooling on top of the oven.

We all have our version of the perfect person, one that makes our days seem like minutes and makes the world collapse when we look at them, weak in the knees and drunk off their kiss-not a bad drunk, that slight inebriation where you feel warm inside and everything seems just right. These are the things which I cannot tell her. I cannot tell her that she fits my every criteria, that she is the one I have been searching for my entire life. I can't tell her that despite her warnings, telling me not to fall for her, that I already have. That I'm closer to love than I've ever been in my life. I can't tell her because I don't want her to know, I don't want her to run, but I don't want to be forced to give up the greatest present I've ever been given-one that trumps all the Christmases and Birthdays put together. I can't tell her because she won't see it the same way I do, or I'm not sure if she will. I've been in a similar situation before, I've given everything I've had, walking the plank into the mouth of hungry white sharks- only to feel that pang of rejection, that "I'm sorry but this is too soon" beginning to a fresh knife wound into my soft underbelly. I've seen what love does to people, I've watched reality television (which, ironically, is a horrible representation of real life) and sappy lifetime movies- I know what I shouldn't do because of what society defines as too soon. At the turn of the century it was uncommon to be unmarried after age twenty, and common to start at family at fifteen or sixteen. As society changes, so do the concepts of "normal" relationship behavior. Society gives us notions like the "two-three day rule for calling/texting after you get someone's number," and I never really cared for that. I suppose it's because I have an urge to rebel against the norms of society, I have an urge to be aberrant and abnormal-what many would label as "unique." If I want to call someone, I call them. If I want to jump, I jump, if they reciprocate it was meant to be, if not it wasn't.

She is fresh out of a relationship with the world at the tip of her fingers, why would she choose me? I'm just a silly farm boy with delusions of grandeur-not grandeur in the sense of fancy dinners of Rolls Royce's- delusions of a happy family sitting around the fireplace being read to as they sip hot chocolate on those cold winter days- archaic delusions. Does this really happen anymore? Or am I stuck in the past, am I too old fashioned for my own good? A silly farm boy displaced into city life with the hopes of being able to provide for that wife and kids (and immediate family) with the right kind of education.

She has travelled all over the world and I have yet to leave the United States. She talks of foreign countries and sunrises in Africa; I have seen beauty all over my home state, but nothing as diverse as what she has perceived. She makes me want to be a better person, for her, but not because she demands it, because I want to be one for her. With every narrative she serenades me with new concepts, she changes the composition of my beliefs without even knowing.

She looks into the night sky, my little selenophile. She doesn't realize how beautiful she is in this light, the flickering of them flames lambent on her eyes. She never complains, even when her feet go numb from the cold. She is always smiling, and slowly we creep towards each other like climbing vines. I am always pushing my boundaries, like a river swollen in the height of monsoon season. But it isn't sexual, at least, that's not what matters. I am content in being lost in her raven eyes, listening to her every word and digesting it; trying to keep those thoughts hell bent on telling her how wonderful I think she is, telling her how close I am to falling for her completely. But I don't want to, I try to resist like a child wanting to play with that sticky community toy at the local Pizza dive, that his parents tell him to resist because it's not safe, but he just can't seem to manage; I can't. I'm stuck.

I don't want to become that person I so often embody. My last relationship purged me of jealousy... Only to suffer because of it. Once the bond of trust is broken, it is nearly impossible to get back. She tells me one night, "Once you crumple a sheet of paper, it is very hard to flatten back out to perfection.” And she's right. She's always right. Even when she's telling me not to fall for her she's right. Even when she tells me that she has a fire in her eyes and I should stay away or be burned... she's right.

But I am a pyromaniac, and a rebel. Tell me to stay away from the flame and watch me chase it. I can't stand the man I start to become. I can't take the jealousy... and that's why I should resist. I should call it off before it goes too far and I'm too attached, too drawn in. I should run away.

But I simply can't. When everything you've ever wanted wanders in front of you, a product of fate and a few simple sticky notes placed at the right times, in the right places... it's almost like fate tapped on my shoulder and then hit me in the face with a brick; an indelible ebb and flow of events I can't seem to shake.

I don't want to toss and turn anymore, not like last time. I don't want my stomach to boil up and overflow with grief, I don't want to worry about where she's at or who she's with. It is so hard to cage a fire; and I don't want to hold that wild animal down I see bounding behind her brown ovals.

So it comes down to this... either give up on everything and walk away from what could be my soulmate, my true love, the Juliet to my Romeo, the yin to my yang, the inhalation to my exhalation, the north to my south, the other hand grasping another, my wolf, my penguin, my gibbon, my swan, my French angelfish, my albatross, my queen termite, my prairie vole, my Schistosoma Mansoni worm, my bald eagle, my turtledove (in case you were wondering what these animals have in common, may I suggest a little research? :)), the thorn on my rose and the kindling to the fire that both of us burn inside.

If a winning lottery ticket was placed in front of you, would you sit there and think of the consequences of sudden wealth? The fact that most lottery winners go crazy, bankrupt themselves, and get used by friends and family until the cash flow runs dry... would this echo in your mind? Would you take it without thinking, anxious to cash it in a quit your job to retire in the lap of luxury? Or would you give it all up, knowing it probably isn't worth the grief that a lump sum like that brings? It's an interesting analogy, but you already know the answer. How many people would refuse a multi-million dollar lifestyle; how many people could refuse a scenario like mine, suddenly plopped into complete and utter contentment, but not being able to elaborate your feelings with the person you desire? Pop culture (and Shakespeare) tell us that soulmates exist, that there is one person out there for everyone which is a perfect fit. However... I can't help but wonder will this romance be like a Lady Gaga song, a Shakespearean tragedy or a Disney fairytale.

Its torture, its torment, but isn't everything? Love is a series of mistakes that lead to true love-but not everybody finds true love. Some people simply settle because they don't want to be alone, they make sacrifices and remove the criteria they held in such high regard when they were growing up because they get tired of searching. Then years later their relationships collapse when they think they've found that person somewhere else, that they could be much happier there than here, and they throw it all away on a whim. I melt like candlewax when I'm around her, I'm dizzy and oblivious. I could walk into a wall staring at her, I could burn in a building set alight listening to her stories, enraptured by that twinkle in her eyes. I listen to her tales of hardships as a child, I patiently await anything else she has to tell me- any anecdotes or theories she has glowing and reverberating in that brilliant mind of hers. I can't stop thinking about her, and even when I do it is only out of necessity, to breathe, to study, or to fall asleep.

She is my sunrise and my moonlight, and I feel naked without her.

That's what scares me the most.

Losing her would be tragic. And I don't even have her yet, perhaps I never will. How's that for conflict?

So these are the things she doesn't need to know, that which remains unspoken but I can't keep from my mind, can't keep from ripping through my soul. That I'm falling for her, that I'm dreaming it's her sitting on that piney porch swing in the warm summer breeze, with the fire in her eyes slightly dampened with age and happiness, but still burning bright as a magnesium flare. Whenever she's around I want to kiss her and hold her, it's been like this from day one, and I have begun to believe that the cliché of love at first sight might actually exist. I am torn between the happiness of having her, and lamenting over ever having to let her go. But society dictates that I cannot say these things, I shouldn't fall so easily in love, I shouldn't chase that which cannot be caught... but I am thrilled with the chase, I am content with following the carrot barely past my nose like a stubborn donkey, because it gives me direction, it gives me purpose and hope. It has turned me from a hopeless romantic to a hopeful one, it has made me realize how I may actually fall into one of those sappy love stories I see on television and movies, where everything inexplicably falls into place with a smidgeon of magic, and a pinch of luck. Maybe I'm crazy, but aren't we all?  Maybe I'm reading between the lines and seeing what I want to see; maybe she doesn't feel the same way at all and I'm a delusional fool following an angel around like a little puppy dog.

I feel like I've known her my entire life, and I have never been more comfortable with anyone. When she tells me her ex cheated on her, I am blown away. That would be like someone taking spray-paint to Mona Lisa, or carving their initials on Michelangelo's David. What sort of an ignorant person would even dare? The grass is always greener on the other side, but you're a fool for crossing the tracks because the train comes often and without warning, and leaves you with nothing, in a desolate place slowly forgetting that coy grin on her freckled face. Maybe the whole notion of staying together for a lifetime is dead to the world, like chivalry or Elvis Presley. Maybe my grandparents, whom I admire more than anyone in the world, maybe their marriage of 65+ years and counting is a dying breed. Maybe people today can so easily file a divorce and move on to what they assume will be greener pastures than make any attempt at working out their problems. I once asked my grandmother how she did it, how she stayed with the same person for so many years. She replied, "I just take it day by day," and I had to giggle a little. That such a strong relationship could be held together by such a temporal bond. That's the problem with taking things day by day... one moment you're lofting in the clouds high above everything else, the next you fall to the earth. Leaving so much in the air generates a lot of potential energy, the possibility for eminent disaster is always looming overhead, like a rain cloud when you aren't a pluviophile, and you neglected to bring your umbrella.

All I know is as much as I hate to admit it... I'm falling in love with her, after only a short time. These are the things I cannot tell her, because I do not want her to run away. She's like a shy yet soft wild animal you can almost coax in, but may bound away at any time, galloping into the wind, brandishing her auburn hair in the waning sunlight. Maybe she's perfect... maybe perfection is subjective and I'm the subject. She says she trusts me more than she should, she says she thinks she can tell me anything... and the feeling is mutual, but I can't tell her this. Some things have to remain unsaid. Maybe on the inside I'm trying to talk myself down from that ledge before I fall, maybe I'm stuck between jumping off and hoping she'll be there to catch me and walking away. But for now, all I can do is hope, and pray-and I'm hardly the religious type- I question everything. I have never caved so fast, I have never jumped off that cliff so easily without a parachute. She sets precedents and standards. When I look at other girls now I feel like someone who has just eaten a large amount of candy, sipping sweet tea and thinking to myself, "wow this isn't sweet at all." I have no desire and little attraction, they are ash in my mouth. She is everything to me, and I want nothing else. As much as I cannot tell her these things, I hope she finds this one day and realizes how fond of her I was from the start, if we last. Wish me luck. I'm taking it day by day, I'm taking that chance and hoping for the best. She turned me from a hopeless romantic to a hopeful one, and I love it, I love every minute I'm with her. I awaken with thoughts of her in the morning and fall asleep remembering everything she's said to me throughout the day; or the way she looked in a certain light where I had to stop and ask myself, "Is this real? Is this happening? How did I get so lucky to have this wonderful woman come into my life?"

*****

The day by day theory I proposed earlier was absolutely correct. Funny how perceptions can change in the blink of an eye, how I can be one person four hours earlier, hopeful and constantly planning new adventures, and then on the brink of an emotional breakdown in the present moment. I should be studying for my Calculus exam, because it is of the utmost importance, but how can I when I have so much on my mind? Maybe it was the way I said things, the way I explained myself or the simple fact that I am not "the one" for her, or she needs time. They all need time. I need time away to soak my wounds in saline solution.

You cannot cage a wild dove, or at least you shouldn't; it simply isn't right. So I sit here typing, trying not to let a tear leave my eye, trying my best to keep them from rolling down, trying not to make eye contact with anyone for fear they may see how watery I've become. No, I don't have something in my eye, I've simply lost something I cannot find again. The essential problem with being a hopeful romantic is you leave yourself open for your dreams to be dashed, and now that all the women are like ash in my mouth and my taste buds have gone flaccid from too much premature pancreas-destruction, nothing else matters. I roam the world with a melancholy look on my face, or hide everything with the facade of a "genuine" smile. My friends won't understand why I passed up such a golden opportunity, but I do. I cannot peer into the depths of heaven and then remain outside, I cannot take the wild bird from its environment and surround it with bars-its beauty won't be the same and its magnificence will wither and erode. She knows where I am, apparently I am that transparent-apparently I make a bad habit of telling someone everything about myself and giving in too easily to distractions. I should put up another brick wall again, but it's better now than when I'm in the trenches and have nowhere to form a barrier, no stony guise or rocky outcropping to hide behind. So I will take this rejection, although it isn't her rejection necessarily, but mine rather. If the bird chooses to return to me, I will gladly bask in its beauty, but I will not hold it down.

So I'm doing what I should've done in the first place, what not many people would do; I'm resisting the temptation of the winning lottery ticket and walking past it, aware of the possible destruction that lies within. I could be rich but hollow, always trying to fill the void, or I could fall back to the barracks and lick my wounds clean. I must maintain focus, I mustn't let myself be caught in the web. I'm caught in the glimmering of the waning sunlight, the orange and blue hues that we once shared are contemptible when covered with clouds, an artic wind blowing in from the north, lifting skirts and invading the nooks and crannies on the light spring jackets of people passing by outside. They don't know who I am, what I'm going through. They cannot see the shine gathering on the brink, they cannot hear the tremor in my voice as I'm walking away trying to avoid contact.

What do I do now? Cover my tongue with ash? Indulge in a bland, flavorless sweet tea? I write. That's all I have. Maybe one day, if the bird flies back to me, it will fix its gaze over my shoulder and know where I've been and what I've gone through to reach this conclusion. The feelings subside into the keyboard. I am growing stony again, hopeless, just like before that fateful day with those silly little notes. My hands try to send the message to her, conveying the fact that we should end it, but I can't seem to press the button. Maybe I'll just avoid it completely, avoid my patterns and sit different places in the library from now on. Ignore any messages I get, or change my number. If she wants me, she can find me. "If you love someone let them go, if they return they were always yours, if they don't they never were." Sage words of advice. The sunlight is fading and so am I. Soon it will be lost to the world, the world will forget today and the sun will rise on a new one. Gooseflesh runs down my spine as the violin piercing my ears finds a familiar feeling.

It takes a lot for me to give up on this, who knows if I'll actually go through with it. She is my kryptonite, and I was trying to hold her close, blissfully unaware of the poison creeping under my skin. I wanted to hold on for as long as I can but it burned... it burns like my eyes are burning still trying to cap the emotional well billowing up from underneath. Maybe the fire in her eyes was too hot for me to handle, maybe she was right. She's always right. Maybe sometimes you have to let go of what you think is true love to make way for true suffering, the real motivator in life. Think of a man in love-he lets himself go. He begins to neglect his appearance because he knows, or thinks, that his love will always remain the same. Now imagine the down-trodden man, the one who finds his best friend fucking his girlfriend. He spends all his free time at the gym, he spends his nights eating as much random sugar as possible trying to forget, trying to find that one morsel that will outdo or undo the pain that she caused, so he can rub in her face how much better he is now, how much happier he is without her, and how much she missed out on by letting him go.

Imagine a rich man, resting his uncalloused feet every day by his personal pool, margarita in hand. What is his motivation? Maids to clean his house and butlers to bring him fresh drinks, all with the ring of a bell. His wife wears the brightest pearls and diamonds, with a plastic smile and an enhanced chest, designer clothes because Gucci knows best. Imagine a child growing up in the poorest neighborhood in town, watching the rich man drive by every day in his brand new Ferrari (his drive to the office inexplicably led him through the ghetto, it's possible he's a member of a major drug cartel); hoping, dreaming, turning his eyes to the sky and praying. He struggles through life, selling drugs on the side, committing small crimes, then major ones-working his way to the top of the ladder. Until one day he is poolside with the rich man, whose skin sags from alcoholism and drug use, muscles atrophied from lack of exercise. The poor boy takes position as right-hand man, and is soon seduced by the rich man's wife and her saline implants, allowed to take over the entire empire because the rich man let himself go. This is a modern-day Scarface.

This is but one small tangent I have become stuck on. Now that my hopes are dashed, the little notes are nowhere to be found and the potential deluge has subsided through my fingertips, I should be that motivated farm boy once again. But I am a coward. Afraid to start an altercation, but afraid too that there won't be one at all-that she will simply acquiesce to my decision, knowing how much we have in common and how sweet it tastes when we kiss. Maybe she didn't enjoy me listening intently to her every word... maybe I should just be an asshole like all the other pretentious pricks around here, socializing with loose sorority girls and calling themselves "real men" in their suede boat shoes and khaki pants, product smeared in their full head of hair like they just climbed through the grease trap at a local fast food place. Yeah we get it dude, sweet Mohawk; that fad NEVER grows old. All the inconsiderates sneezing and coughing into their hands, not even washing them after they use the bathroom.

I gave all my secrets away, all but two, which nobody knows about-and at this rate, nobody will. I will write them in my will and have them plastered on my headstone-how could I be embarrassed if I'm dead? It's completely logical, and I think people should adopt this practice. Then walking through the graveyard may at least bring a smile to someone's face- to bastardize the final resting places with Jersey Shore antics. Perhaps I will have my dreams plastered on there as well, in case they never come true. I never give up hope, I just sacrifice standards, and I give up my distorted views of perfection. "Not today, maybe never." What would you put on your gravestone?

I'm still hiding behind my cowardice, maybe I'm hoping she will come swooping out of left field with a kiss even the shortstop couldn't predict- or something like that... shit... I don't watch sports you tell me if it's accurate.

The sun is gone, and the fluorescents are humming in the parking lot. I've lost an hour of my life into the keyboard with no resolve, except I feel slightly better. My belly is still yellow, and will most likely remain that way for the next few days. I cannot respond... I cannot force that lottery ticket out of my hands, maybe it was never in them to begin with. Maybe it was fate that I resist.

I guess time will tell.

I made the mistake, or rather, I took the opportunity to read this to her, my Cinderella, that freckle faced girl with the bright smile who waltzed into my life that fateful spring day. I didn’t run like I planned on, I didn’t send that fateful text message ending everything because I didn’t have the willpower, I couldn’t discard that winning lottery ticket. I read it to her because she found something that scared her-affection-and I knew she was running anyways so I might as well elucidate my true feelings. She isn’t ready, and into this convivial keyboard I can announce that I don’t think I am either. It seems every novel we read has an interesting take on love.

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.” (Kundera, pg. 5)

Oftentimes people get caught up in fate. They desire something so greatly they force it upon themselves like it was “meant to be,” or “written in the stars,” because of a few simple fortuities that make an event seem to be a product of fate. Similarities lie where the mind desires them. When peering into a Magic Eye puzzle, some see what their mind allows them to, while others falsify their vision. The concept of “Es muss sein!” is both beautiful and sickening, “We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the “Es muss sein!” to our own great love” (Kundera, pg. 35).   This is a truly remarkable notion, whether the reader chooses to believe it is up to their interpretation.

Perhaps my life isn’t all that bad, perhaps it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either. As an American, I was been born with a placenta of complaint-screaming and crying immediately after leaving the warmth and comfort of the womb. Yes, I have suffered, some of which was unnecessary for my personal growth; but there are people on this earth that writhe in more unnecessary hardship in one day than I have experienced in a lifetime. In this way I resemble the magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, “I have lived through an eventful year, yet understand no more of it than a babe in arms. Of all the people of this town I am the least one fitted to write a memorial. Better the blacksmith with his cries of rage and woe” (Coetzee, pg. 155).

The magistrate takes the girl back to her people, and by doing so he sacrifices power and is tortured and humiliated, so he can obtain personal growth- to feel better about himself as a person, and to prove to himself that he isn’t selfish. I often do the same, living for others while torturing myself. But because of this, to a lot of people, I have gained a general reputation of being unselfish-whether or not this is a merit is in the eye of the beholder.

They say literary analysis shouldn’t contain a lot of personal pronouns, but the desire to tell the world about my struggle is too great. The struggle is that last kiss before watching her walk away. The struggle is wanting to hold her hand when walking on the square or in the library lobby and not being able to. The struggle is biting your lip so it won’t quiver in front of her when you know she’s running away from you. The struggle is reading all of your stories aloud and without revision while she watches you with those chocolate eyes. The struggle is making her laugh, knowing that it will be the last time you hear that laugh for a while. The struggle is walking away… the two paths diverging in the yellow wood that Robert Frost portrayed. “If I resolved to ride out the bad times, keeping my own counsel, I might cease to feel like a man who, in the grip of an undertow, gives up the fight, stops swimming, and turns his face towards the open sea and death. But it is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings the worst shame to me, the greatest indifference and annihilation. I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering”(Coetzee, pg. 21).

The struggle is kissing her as the rain floods off the roof, failing your exams and having your boss yell at you for being tired at work-because you were with her, because you sacrificed every minute you could just to hold her for another sixty seconds. The struggle is not caring as the rest of the world falls apart as long as she’s in your arms… the struggle comes when she’s gone.   “But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.” (Kundera, pg. 75)

The struggle changes from day to day, and so do the stories. Sometimes the best labor is that which remains behind closed doors, in the deepest annals and the darkest corners of the cerebellum. Sometimes this toil, when made public, can ruin or incite a real connection or a sudden change. In White Noise, Jack said, “But when I say I believe in complete disclosure I don’t mean it cheaply, as anecdotal sport or shallow revelation. It is a form of self-renewal and a gesture of custodial trust. Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another’s care and protection. Babette and I have turned our lives for each other’s thoughtful regard, turned them in the moonlight in our pale hands, spoken deep into the night about fathers and mothers, childhood, friendships, awakenings, old loves, old fears(except fear of death). No detail must be left out, not even a dog with ticks or a neighbor’s boy who ate an insect on a dare. The smell of pantries, the sense of empty afternoons, the feel of things as they rained across our skin, things as facts and passions, the feel of pain, loss, disappointment, breathless delight. In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is a space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.” (Delillo, pg. 30)

From the moment we’re born, the struggle becomes real. No longer are we able to rely on the nutrition our mother masticates and digests, we are forced out under the spotlight with a violent push of placenta and glory-the glory of breathing air for the first time, the glory of the sun upon our skin, the glory of life. We all struggle through growing up, through the river of politics and religion, through the currents of opposition from the natural world, and through the concept of love. In the absence of suffering sits a man on a plush padded throne, growing fat and weary with everyday life. He does not have to move, he has wheels for that; he does not have to remember, he has technology for that; he does not have to clean, he has maids for that; he does not have to adjust his diet, he has nutrition specialists for that; he does not have to love, where money reigns, desire drains. Often people focus on eliminating the strife and struggle from their lives, neglecting to acknowledge that it is this very concept that constructed who they are and who they will become as time goes by. Knowledge, desire, hope, and a forward drive walk hand in hand with suffering. Never try to remove this blessing in disguise, the world depends on it, as Murray tells Jack, “I’m saying you can’t let down the living by slipping into self-pity and despair. People will depend on you to be brave. What people look for in a dying friend is a stubborn kind of gravel-faced nobility, a refusal to give in, with moments of indomitable humor. You’re growing in prestige even as we speak. You’re creating a hazy light about your own body. I have to like it.”(Delillo, pg. 271)

And we are often left with the feeling of helplessness, like in Waiting for the Barbarians,  “Even though the overbearing weight of suffering often debilitates our minds and bodies,” and, “Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere,” (Coetzee, pg. 156) Often our growth is in the knowledge of the inevitability of suffering. It is something we cannot stop, and if we try, we cease living. Suffering is the driving force of societal and personal maturation.

Works Cited

Coetzee, J.M. Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin, 1982. Pg. 21, 154, 155, 156. Print.

DeLillo, Don, and Richard Powers. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 2009. Pg8, 10, 15, 17, 30, 31, 38, 53, 128, 201, 217, 243-244, 246, 271, 272, 299. Print.

Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. Newly Revised Ed. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009. Pg. 42, 43, 83, 116, 135, 143, 161, 290, 292, 333. Print.

Joyce, James. "Araby." Blackboard Learn. Web. 13 May 2015. Pg. 5. <https://ramct.colostate.edu/>.

Joyce, James. "Blackboard Learn- "The Dead"" Blackboard Learn. Web. 13 May 2015. Pg. 21. <http://ramct.colostate.edu/>.

"Love." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 12 May 2015. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/love>.

Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Deluxe Ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. Pg. 3, 5, 20, 23, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 43, 44, 48, 49, 55, 75. Print.

Nealon, Jeffrey T., and Susan Searls Giroux. The Theory Toolbox: Critical Concepts for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. Pg. 22, 27, 43. Print.

[writemarcus]

Drama League Announces Artists-in-Residence for 2017

BY ANDREW GANS

JAN 13, 2017

The program allows artists a chance to develop a new theatrical piece.

The Drama League has announced the theatre directors and ensembles chosen to develop new plays and musicals as part of the 2017 Drama League Artist Residency Program.

This year’s Resident Artists include Elena Heyman (2017 Under The Radar Festival), Kristin Marting (Artistic Director, HERE), Jenny Larson (Artistic Director, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, Austin, TX), and more. Public work-in-progress presentations will be held throughout the year at The Drama League Theater Center, 32 Avenue of the Americas, in Tribeca.

The Drama League Artist Residency Program offers director/collaborator teams and ensembles an opportunity to develop a new theatre piece at the Drama League Theater Center. The program includes a residency stipend, rehearsal space, professional mentorship, administrative support, and community engagement.

“The Drama League received triple the number of residency applications over last year's cycle, demonstrating an urgent need for artists to find a nurturing creative home,” stated executive artistic director Gabriel Stelian-Shanks. Many of the artists in the program will offer readings, experiments, and other insights into their creative process at public events throughout the year.

Details of the program, according to the Drama League, follow:

2017 Drama League Artists In Residence

2017 IMPACT RESIDENCY

The Impact Residency is a new initiative, in partnership with The LaGuardia Performing Arts Center in Long Island City, which provides a year of resources, space, support, production development, a $10,000.00 grant for a director working inside of an ensemble company.

2017 IMPACT ARTIST IN RESIDENCE: Kevin Doyle/Sponsored By Nobody

THE AЯTS Written, directed and designed by Kevin Doyle Dramaturg: Fannina Waubert de Puiseau Designers: Jon Bernson, Mayra Castro, Mike McGee Performed by Mike Carlsen, Josh Edelmann, Sauda Jackson, Eric Magnus, Katey Parker, and April Shannon Sweeney

THE AЯTS is a three-part work of interdisciplinary theatre under development from the Brooklyn-based theatre company, Sponsored By Nobody. The project investigates and deconstructs the history of public funding for the arts in the United States and contrasts it with events in the European Union, where threats to public subsidy have manifested in recent years. THE AЯTS is based upon transcripts from debates and hearings held in the U.S. Congress from 1963-1965 and 1989-1994; in addition to interviews conducted with arts leaders and citizens throughout the United States and Europe from 2012-2016. During their 2017 Impact Residency, Sponsored By Nobody will focus on Parts One and Two of THE AЯTS by condensing transcripts to revolve around two specific dates: October 26, 1963 and May 19, 1989. The former marks the first public hearings held in Congress on public funding of the arts. The latter marks the formal start of a backlash against arts funding, essentially beginning what we now call “the Culture Wars.” For more information on THE AЯTS, visit www.sponsoredbynobody.com.

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NEXT STAGE: ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE PROJECTS

Next Stage Residencies are bestowed upon early-career, mid-career, and established directors who are developing projects intended for production in the near future. The residency supports the collaborators with rigorous rehearsal, workshop, and developmental time to ready the work for pre-production.

Artist In Residence: Christopher Burris

Bring The Beat Back Written by Derek Lee McPhatter Directed by Christopher Burris

Tru Believers know the Musicship Megarhythmic will save them from the end of the world. But you can’t get on if you can’t get down…and somebody done stole da beat! Bring the Beat Back is a black gay sci-fi music-theatre experience, set in a futuristic, groove-centered alternative reality. Inspired by ball culture, the evolution of house music and the rich Afro-futurist tradition—including Parliament Funkadelic, Sun-Ra, Grace Jones, Prince, Meshell Ndegeocello, and others—our hero journeys towards self-acceptance and affirming spirituality, even as religious authorities and an ostentatious gay subculture clash over music at the center of his world.

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Artist In Residence: Jess Chayes

Intelligence Written by Helen Banner Directed by Jess Chayes

Intelligence is a semi-immersive play about three American women diplomats in a Washington, DC basement conference room, role-playing their way to a new handbook on conflict resolution. Sarah, the senior diplomat in the room, has recently undertaken a conversion negotiation with a splinter group leader. As she fights off career implosion, she pulls the junior diplomats into secret recreations of what exactly happened.

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Artist In Residence: Megan Hanley

Graceful Exit Written by Alanna Coby Composed by Sean Vigneau-Britt Directed by Megan Hanley

When 70-year-old Maria receives a cancer diagnosis, she begins to question how she wants to die. While Maria's loved ones grapple with how to keep her alive, Rachel, a climate change activist, heads out to sea. Graceful Exit is a darkly comic play with music that asks, “Who controls your death?” It grapples with questions about climate change and end-of-life care through vaudevillian sketches, puppetry, tap dancing, scientific lectures, and stand-up comedy.

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Artist In Residence: Elena Heyman

Home/Yuva Written by Sami Berat Marcali Directed by Ellie Heyman

Home/Yuva follows an unlikely quartet—two Turkish refugees, a club star, and taxi driver—in search of common bonds. Void of shared language, their bodies begin to speak. Drawing from the current refugee crisis in the Middle East and the increasingly fractured American dream, Home/Yuva is an international collaboration between Turkish and American artists.

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Artist In Residence: Jenny Larson

Casta Written by Adrienne Dawes Directed by Jenny Larson

Casta explores the casta paintings of Nueva Espana (Mexico), a unique genre of portraiture that depicted different racial mixtures arranged according to a hierarchy of race and status. Casta explores these constructed images of colonial bodies and the failed attempts of the government to control its subjects through increasing social regulations…as well as the shift in attitudes as paintings began to depict family violence and deviant behavior among the lower “classes.” In collaboration with Salvage Vanguard Theatre, Austin, TX.

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Artist In Residence: Kristin Marting

Assembled Identities Co-created by Purva Bedi, Mariana Newhard, Drew Weinstein and Kristin Marting Directed by Kristin Marting

What makes a human authentic? Is it their genome sequence? Their DNA profile? Their life experience? Exploring ethnic ambiguity, race and identity, Assembled Identities uses original and found text, live cinematography, and contemporary music to explore the science of identity, including genomics, genetics, eugenics, and cloning, all of which impact our culture.

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Artist In Residence: Shira Milikowsky

Distant Star Written by Javier Antonio González Directed by Shira Milikowsky

Distant Star is Caborca Theatre’s adaptation of the ground-breaking novel by Roberto Bolaño, following several young poets during and after Chile’s 1973 military coup. Infused with Bolaño’s perverse humor and mastery of suspense, Distant Star weaves memories of life (and death) under Pinochet’s American-backed dictatorship into a seductive noir of political necessity.

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Artist In Residence: Andreas Robertz

Father God Mother Death Written and performed by Mario Golden Directed by Andreas Robertz

Father God Mother Death is a poetic lamentation of a Mexican gay son mourning the loss of his mother the week immediately after her death. Deeply evocative and extremely personal, the piece simultaneously elucidates the author’s experience of immigration to the U.S. as a teenager, and the complex dynamics that triggered a reversal of gender roles between his parents, making his father become increasingly abusive towards his mother.

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Artist In Residence: Travis Lee Russ

America Is Hard To See Written and directed by Travis Lee Russ

Based on verbatim interviews and archival research, America Is Hard To See investigates the lives in and around Miracle Village, a rural community for sex offenders, buried deep in Florida's sugarcane fields. This groundbreaking play involves an exciting blend of spoken text, religious hymns, and original songs composed by Priscilla Holbrook, lead singer of the band Susan Jane. A talented ensemble of seven actors embody over 50 roles to tell tough and real stories about darkness, uncertainty, and healing in small-town America.

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Artist In Residence: Caitlin Sullivan

Gilded Girls Written by Mallery Avidon Directed by Caitlin Sullivan

Gilded Girls is actually comprised of 66 (very) short plays in which Nancy Reagan, Queen Elizabeth, Marie Curie, Leni Riefenstahl and Catherine the Great find themselves together at the end of the world. Over and Over and Over Again. Gilded Girls is an experimental dark comedy about confronting our apocalyptic past, present and future.

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Artist In Residence: Brandon Woolf

The Summer Way Conceived and Created by Brandon Woolf and Maxwell Flaum

Sequestered in a Tony Soprano-style basement, ravaged by binge consumption of contemporary television and under threat of imminent drone “strike,” Torn (white) and Timbre (black) wrestle with major issues of the day in a podcast designed to “speak to people.” Wondering if their basement banter isn't just more psycho-babble stopping up the arteries of the world-wide-web, the two hapless media-gurus make a wild grab into the cathodic maelstrom of a “haphazardly avant-garde” black-and-white television. The result of this head-on-collision with “classic” TV is a speed of light race riot in the final Nielsen rating analysis. It's all that and more, tonight, on The Summer Way.

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FIRST STAGE: ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE PROJECTS

First Stage Residencies are bestowed to early and mid-career directors who are beginning the development of a worthy new project, and supports the initial investigations, rehearsals, and collaborations of the work.

Jessica Bashline, Fresh Jake Beckhard, CHELSEAS Sophie Blumberg, Trixie The Giant West Hyler, Stella Nova Alexandra Keegan,Tough Cat Miller, Untitled Clara Immerwahr Play Molly Beach Murphy, Galveston Tatiana Pandiani, The Poet And The King Elinor Renfield, Borkhova Dan Rogers, The Future Perfect Marcus Scott, Cherry Bomb Michelle Tattenbaum, Ideas Gabriel Vasquez, Such A Tragedy

The Drama League is dedicated to “creating transformative interactions between artists and audiences…above and beyond the performances they experience.”

Performance schedules are available at www.dramaleague.org or by calling (212) 244-9494.