#we GET IT you’re HAPPY love is REAL joy is ATTAINABLE now please let me miserable in PEACE

[useless-gay-kid4]

more japhan??

more??

have we not suffered enough??

#obviously i mean this in a nice way but like. they’ve put enough salt in the wound they didn’t need to rub it in #we GET IT you’re HAPPY love is REAL joy is ATTAINABLE now please let me miserable in PEACE #dan and phil #japhan #japhan 3.0 #phandom #dnp #dan howell #phil lester

[elysianslove]

Please wrote more surrogate fics please . could I request one with SakuAtsu or could you just start a series on these. If you'd me comfortable with that. That on IwaOi surrogate fic brought me so much joy. I can't even describe it.

oh my goodness i’d love to!!! it makes me so happy knowing you liked it cause like,,, idk why it’s just special to me :) also im so glad you asked for sakuatsu bc these two ships are basically my favorite jhfgbsj. and yesyes i’d love to have a mini series with like little scenarios of each ship <333

this was insanely long. like insanely. 

content warning; artificial insemination, pregnancy, haikyuu manga spoilers, gay people being happy idk 

being iwaoi’s surrogate 

BEING SAKUATSU’S SURROGATE 

↬ it took forever to even get them together, so with a duo as indecisive as them, it’s imaginable how long the decision to raise a child together took. it took a long, long while for that transition from enemies to lovers to be final, and even then, they hadn’t realized how serious their relationship was until they were off getting married and then suddenly wanting a child? 

↬ it was something atsumu brought up out of the blue, just casually as they sat side by side on the couch. “wouldn’t it be nice if we raised a child together?” and it stuck with sakusa ever since. he didn’t know why he was obsessively thinking about it as much, but it’s all he could think about. literally. anytime he so much as thought about atsumu with a child, and a child of their own too, his stomach did a thousand and one flips. sakusa was never the biggest fan of children, and he knew that neither was atsumu. but, this would be different, wouldn’t it? Still, he tried to remind himself of the cons; they were pro-athletes, they didn’t have time, they didn’t understand the weight of the responsibility, were they even ready for something like that? somedays it was too tiring to take care of themselves, of each other. were they ready to be responsible for a whole life, someone dependent entirely on them? it seemed too— unrealistic. like something he could only hope to dream about, and just dream about.

↬ until he thought of atsumu with a little kid, a spit image of either one of them, sitting on his lap, giggling and laughing and squealing in glee. and so he decided, there will always be cons, he just has to see if the pros outweighed them. and honestly, they did. they were pro-athletes, sure, but that also meant they were financially stable, and could provide for a child, properly. they were mature now, knew each other very well, and had adapted to living with one another. they had family and friends all around. the kid would for sure grow up loved and cared for, and him and atsumu would add another person to their family. it really seemed like a dream, but this time, an attainable one.

↬ so as he ate dinner with his lover, he blurted out, “let’s raise a child together,” and atsumu honest to god choked on his food. he asked sakusa if he was serious, if he meant it, if this was real, and sakusa’s answer was yes to every single one of his question. yes, he was serious; yes, he meant it; yes, this was real. as real as can be.

↬ they both already knew they wanted a surrogate, and it didn’t matter who was the father. so long as the child was theirs.

↬ finding a surrogate was, well, a pain, to put it into perspective. sakusa was so picky about the “requirements,” if you will, and atsumu was suspicious of every single woman, it was kind of ridiculous really. he just “didn’t trust that they wouldn’t run away with the baby!” in his words. atsumu suggested sakusa’s older sister, which seemed perfect in his head, but sakusa refused, claiming it was 1. extremely weird, and 2. he doubted she’d say yes, with her own life to handle.

↬ and it finally, finally, came to atsumu: he could always just ask, well, you. he had met you during his college years, and since then, he’d been coincidentally crossing paths with you ever since then, and you’d even managed their msby jackals team at some point. it was weirdly ironic how he’s coming back to you, kind of like fate.

↬ so he suggested it to sakusa, and for once, the latter didn’t really have any way to object, except, “what if this inconveniences her?” other than that, you were the perfect candidate. they knew you well, trusted you, knew they could rely on you. and atsumu was sure you wouldn’t run with the baby. with regards to the inconvenience part, well, they could always just deal with that when the time came.

↬ they invited you over for some breakfast two days later, after they’d thought about it properly, endlessly, and figured you were their best option. it was weird seeing them so nervous when you first arrived, like they were breaking up with you or something. atsumu barely ate with how nauseous he felt, and sakusa spent the entire time watching you eat instead, hands fidgeting and legs shaking. it was really weird, but you didn’t bring it up, letting them take their own time to tell you whatever it was they wanted to tell you, because obviously, they clearly had something to say.

↬ after breakfast, you sat in their living room, just watching the tv quietly, until sakusa offered to get you some water. you weren’t really thirsty, but you agreed anyways, unsurprised to see atsumu rise from his own seat a minute later with a, “be right back,” as he headed to the kitchen. you could hear them bickering and whisper-yelling, and if you weren’t starting to grow as nervous as they were, you would’ve had it in you to laugh. they returned looking like they were bearing the most daunting of news, sitting down on the couch perpendicular to you. atsumu’s hands were sweaty and intertwined tightly together, while sakusa tried to remain as composed as possible. it seemed like the dark haired man would speak up, finally, parting his mouth with a deep breath.

↬ but it’s atsumu that blurts out, “please have my baby!— our baby. please have our baby.”

↬ honestly, your first response was to laugh, in disbelief, as you clutch your glass of water. but then you see their faces — god they looked so goddamn scared — and you realized that, they were really serious. they really wanted you to carry their baby for them. holy shit?—

↬ you were mostly speechless after that, stuttering as you ask them to please explain, you’re honored but are they are, have they thought about this? properly? in depth?

↬ to your surprise, they really knew what they were doing. they’d done their research, and thought about a million other options before deciding that you were the best one. they also repeatedly told you that you didn’t have to do this, and that they didn’t want to guilt-trip you into doing it either. they wanted you to say yes only if you yourself wanted to say yes, and if this wouldn’t negatively affect you or halt your life in any way. you were the one that was going to be carrying the baby anyways, weren’t you? at the end of the day, this was all about you.

↬ you asked them for time to think about it, and reminded them that it wasn’t a no. you just wanted to make sure you were making the right decision whichever that ended up being. a few days later, you call them, asking them to meet up one way or another, and atsumu’s even more nervous than he was asking you; not even sakusa’s gentle lips to his temple or large hands soothingly rubbing at his back or his kind words could help him. sakusa himself was insanely anxious. in his head, it seemed like your ‘no,’ would finalize everything. that it would really mean no hope in having a child of their own, their very own.

↬ you invite them over to your home, and the kettle is already boiling when they arrive. you make them tea and make small talk if only to delay the inevitable. but, to each of their surprises, you take a deep breath and say, “i’d be honored to carry your baby for you,” with the brightest, warmest smile. sakusa has to bite his inner cheek to will himself to not cry, because he can’t believe you said yes. you agreed. you’re going to carry their baby. him and atsumu were having a baby.

↬ atsumu doesn’t stop himself from throwing his arms around you, collapsing on top of you in tight hug that you kind of can’t breathe, but you let him, and you laugh when he thanks you for saying yes, that he’ll “be forever in your debt.”

↬ it’s the happiest you’ve seen either of them.

↬ when you’re done with the process of insemination (of course, atsumu does joke that the three of you should go the natural way and have a threesome, to which he earns a smack from his lover and a smack from you, at the same time), the three of you just have to wait, really. it’s the longest period of waiting you’ve ever had to do, but you try to be patient, as patient as you can be. when you wake up one morning and throw up, you look at your period tracking app to see if maybe you were pms’ing. except, you weren’t. you were late. like a good three weeks late.

↬ immediately, you’re booking a doctor’s appointment. you wait to tell sakusa and atsumu after confirming your suspicions, because you don’t want to raise their hopes up for nothing. they’ve already been swimming in a pool of doubts ever since the insemination, calling you everyday to check up on you and ask for any progress. when the doctor confirms your pregnancy — holy shit you were pregnant — the first thing you do is go over to their house. you know it’s not the best idea to show up unannounced, but with how long they’ve been waiting, and how much they’ve been wanting this, the more and more you fed into it, you couldn’t wait any longer to tell them. you arrive, and the moment sakusa opens the door for you, you gasp out, “i’m pregnant.”

↬ sakusa’s quite literally frozen in shock, his mouth pressed in a thin line with eyes wide open, while atsumu walks over and goes, “oh hey,” in greeting before noticing sakusa’s face and just ???? “what’s going on?”

↬ “i’m pregnant.”

↬ “you’re what?”

↬ you show them with tears stinging your eyes the results of the test you’d taken at the doctor’s, and atsumu grips the report so tightly, like it’ll disappear if it slips only slightly from his hands. sakusa’s still in shock, trying to process everything. it takes him a good while before he can function properly again.

↬ the pregnancy itself is a lot smoother than you’d imagined. iwaizumi, as their athletic trainer, although not well versed with pregnancy, knew a lot about health and taking care of yourself in general, so he made sure you were always eating right and healthy. he even accompanied you once when sakusa and atsumu couldn’t, to the doctor, and made sure to ask him specifically what you should and shouldn’t be eating. all of the olympic/national team are more excited than anything. they’re insanely protective over you, and always pamper and care for you you when they can, whether that be back/neck/shoulder massages or giving you their food when they notice you eyeing it or letting you lean entirely on any of them for support as you walk. granted, they do make fun of you, especially the bigger your stomach got, but they mean well, really. suna once made fun of you and, because of the hormones, and because he was genuinely just mean, you started to cry. since then, suna swore off bullying you, at least until you gave birth.

↬ osamu is beyond ecstatic to become an uncle. he’s so excited it makes atsumu incredibly emotional. he goes with his brother on trips to ikea to buy a crib and gifts him an insane amount of baby clothes and always begins a conversation with, “how’s the baby?” every time you’re around, osamu’s hand can be found resting on your stomach, soothingly rubbing, excitedly grinning when he feels a kick. he is just so happy for his brother, he could cry.

↬ you ask them if they want a gender reveal when you find out or to keep it until the delivery of the baby, but they’re both insanely impatient (even though sakusa does try to convince atsumu to wait because it’ll be exciting, he himself isn’t even that convinced of that and they just ask you to tell them). with the help of osamu and his and atsumu’s parents, you organize a gender reveal party. the moment he sees the pink smoke, atsumu cheers so loudly it makes you laugh till your stomach hurt. sakusa’s grinning wider than you’ve ever seen him, grabbing atsumu’s face and kissing him, before pulling you into a tight hug. it’s literally the cutest thing ever, everyone just cheering loudly around you and celebrating with you.

↬ when you go into labor, you’re with neither of them, but with osamu, aran, and kita. they were staying the night at a hotel since they had training away from where they lived, and you were spending the night at osamu’s because the fathers of your baby really didn’t want you to be alone so close to your due date, and who better than osamu? your water didn’t break, but you kept having contractions. you were brushing it off as normal pain at the start, but they started to get worse, and closer together in time. kita, because he’s kita, had been keeping track, and told you how far apart your contractions were. to which you went, “contractions?!”

↬ aran’s calling sakusa and atsumu as kita grabs your bag as osamu grabs his keys and helps you to his car. you really couldn’t have been around a better set of men, because they were perfectly composed the whole time, helping you breathe and stay calm by staying calm themselves, reassuring you that you didn’t need to worry and that you will get to the hospital in time. they did flinch every time you screamed or cried out in pain, but aran held your hand the entire drive there, and kita guided you to steadying yourself as osamu drove as fast as he could.

↬ the issue was with sakusa and atsumu. to say they were freaking out would be an understatement. they were positively losing it. atsumu’s anxiety was louder than sakusa’s, but the latter’s was clear as ever on his pale skin and clammy hands. they were so annoying in the delivery room, literally faring worse off than you, who was pushing a whole baby out of her body. when you finally gave birth to a healthy baby girl, atsumu sobbed and sakusa cried in his hands, so maybe it was alright after all.

↬ they literally couldn’t believe their eyes when the nurse handed you the baby and placed her on your chest. she was so, so tiny, so beautiful, and theirs. honestly, you couldn’t hold back your own tears at the sight of her, and at their reaction to her. you held her in your arms as they thanked you, over and over and over again, for the biggest blessing they could ever receive.

↬ despite the fact that you were simply their surrogate, sakusa and atsumu knew they couldn’t just separate you and your baby, and neither could they just take her home all of a sudden. so for the first few months, you stayed in their guest room, but the baby slept in her own room. it was more difficult than you expected it to be when you were leaving her to go back to your own home, but they promised you repeatedly that they’re not really taking her away. it wasn’t as if you couldn’t visit at any time you wanted to come visit her. but at the end of the day, you knew what you had been signing up for, and that she was their daughter.

↬ she grows up to be a gorgeous woman. she’s interested in volleyball, sure, she’d been raised with volleyball players everywhere around her, but it’s not her immediate passion. atsumu thought he’d be more upset about that than he actually was, because he found out that it didn’t matter at all what she wanted to do. hell, if she wanted to do nothing at all and stay home forever with them, he was 100% on board with that. whatever made her happy and healthy, he was okay with. she grows up to be really close and really comfortable with both of her fathers, and they make sure with every passing day that no matter what, she can always come to them. and she does, about every little thing. and each and every time, they listen and advice and guide her properly. a s parents, they’re a perfect balance of strict and lenient. they set and raise her to never cross those boundaries, but otherwise they give her complete freedom. they respect her privacy, her decisions, everything.

↬ there was a day when she came back home from school, and they had taken a biology class for kids, where a teacher had explained periods to them. obviously, as curious as ever, she’d asked her dads about it, because she didn’t really get it. she wanted to know the how’s and the why’s and the what’s and the when’s. with every passing second atsumu had felt his lifespan shorten. eventually he suggested they call you, who she knew as her ‘aunt’ for the time being, since you were a woman and nobody would really explain it better than you. when she did get her period eventually, and had to sheepishly and shyly ask her dads to go to the store for her because she needed, um, supplies, atsumu lost it. sakusa had to try and calm him down all while laughing as he got ready to go to the store for her, because the drama of miya atsumu never gets old. he just couldn’t believe she was already getting her period. what the hell! what the actual hell!

↬ of course, he proceeded to embarrass her by telling osamu, telling sakusa’s parents, telling his parents. not cool :(

↬ when she was old enough, especially to understand the concept of being a surrogate (oh my god the sex talk was a whole other insufferable thing), they told her about you, and that you were actually her biological mother and not just an ‘auntie.’ she tried to be angry at them for keeping it from her, but she was honestly more excited about finding out than anything. it brought the two of you closer together, and for the next mother’s day, she organized a whole brunch for you, her and her dads, got you a gift, flowers, everything. yeah, you did cry.

↬ you genuinely have never been more satisfied and thankful for a decision like this one, ever, especially because of how much of a blessing the outcome had been.

can u tell this isn’t my first time thinking about this. ever since i posted the iwaoi one i’ve been wanting to do a sakuatsu one, but i didn’t really know whether anyone had enjoyed that or would want more, so thank you for sending in this ask!! love u all mwah <3 

#haikyuu x reader #haikyuu headcanons #miya atsumu x reader #sakusa x reader #sakusa kiyoomi x reader #atsumu x sakusa #sakuatsu #sakuatsu x reader #atsumu x reader

[mysticalrambling]

Hey there hope you are doing well🥰🥰🥰Saw you were open to blurb request...can you please write a fluff related to my second steve rogers x reader story...where the reader forgives steve after his tiresome efforts to win back his family..Like can you write about how a domestic sunday willl be in their lives Steve's, reader's and Ollie's? how they will enjoy breakfasta and Steve enjoys the day with his wife and son❤❤❤

A/N: This is basically an alternative ending to Regretting his Decisions. The original one basically ended in all angst so I hope you guys like this as well. It is totally different from the first one. Just something new :)

Regretting His Decisions (S.R)

Steve Rogers AU (Fan fiction Masterlist)

Summary: Steve and reader come together after she forgives him for all the things that he had done in the past. Now, they are spending a Sunday together with their son, Oliver. It is all fluff.

Warning: None. Fluff all the way.

._._._._._.

There were times when you thought that you shouldn’t have forgiven Steve because society thought that you were in a toxic relationship. They thought that he shouldn’t have come back into your life as he chose Peggy. But Tony told you the real reason. Peggy had hijacked the time machine and Steve had to spend his whole life in the past to rebuild that time machine. That’s why he didn’t come back to you.

However, Steve came back to you like he promised he would. He got Scott to help him reverse the past and become his old self. He was going to choose you and that’s what mattered the most. Your husband knew that the things he did in the start of your marriage were cruel and he didn’t deserve you. But he had suffered a lot and he was truly in love with you. That’s why you gave him a chance. You deserved to be happy as well and your family needed a proper chance.

At first, your interaction was just limited to Oliver and you lived separately even though you knew the truth. It was hard to forgive him for the things he had actually done like belittling you or abandoning you. But as time progressed, you saw how he was with your son and how he treated you with nothing but respect.

Steve gave you as much space as you needed and he was there for you when you needed him. He was there when your library burnt down during a fire hazard. He was there to console you when your parents suddenly died in a car crash. He was there when Ollie broke his arm while playing football. He was always there and that’s what got you to eventually open up to him. You finally asked to try again and for him to move into the house. Your family was happy and that’s what mattered. Other people can go to hell.

“Stevie, mommy needs pancakes.” Your three year old was sitting on the counter with his legs swinging back and forth. He was currently arguing with his father about your breakfast preference because apparently he knew you better than your husband.

“No, Mommy loves waffles. You want pancakes so you’re telling me to make them.” The little boy had been up for the past two hours because he had a nightmare. He always wanted to cuddle with his father afterwards and now, he was angry. “I’m your dad, buddy. Not Stevie.”

“But Mommy calls you Stevie.” He whined as he jumped in his place. Steve was quick to hold him in his place before he could fall. Oliver was never afraid to get hurt because he healed too quickly. The serum running through his veins always made him feel like a super hero. In a way, he was but Steve was always worried about him.

“She can do that. Not you.” At this point, he was just messing with his son.

“I can, Stevie.” Oliver asserted his point.

“Okay, buddy. Can I call you Ollie then?” This was going to get interesting, really fast.

“No! Mommy calls me that name only.” Giving him a pointed look, Steve laughed out loud. “Okay, daddy. I get it now.”

“Good boy. Now, let’s start making the breakfast.” Tying an apron around himself, he started taking out all the ingredients.

It was Sunday so you didn’t have work today. You always slept in late on Sundays and Steve always made sure that you got your much needed rest. A twelve hour job and a hyper three year old sucked out most of your energy so he didn’t like to disturb you for anything. Morning breakfast was your family’s tradition.

Steve didn’t know how to cook properly but you never complained. His burnt french toasts are better than any five star chicken steal and that was saying a lot. You loved him too much to ever say that you didn’t want to eat the breakfast made by him. It was such a sweet gesture that you teared up whenever you saw them entering the room with a tray in their hands.

“Baby, you have to hold on to the vase tightly.” Your husband’s hushed voice filtered through the door and woke you up from your deep slumber. Footsteps echoed through the wooden floor and soon the door opened.

“Mommy!!! Look I made you breakfast.” Jumping on the bed, he completely forgot about the vase of pink flowers and dropped them on the bed.

“Oh, thank you, baby.” Oliver’s knee accidentally hit you in the stomach and knocked the breath out of your lung. Gasping, you slightly cradled your child, “Be careful, bubs.”

“Sorry, mommy.”

Laughing, Steve corrected his son, “Oliver, we both made the breakfast and I did most of the work.”

“I beat waffle mixture.”

“You dropped it all on the kitchen counter. Not the same thing, baby.” He got up on the bed but still was not a match for his father’s height.

“I made it. I’m better than you.”

Interrupting them before Oliver truly got angry, “My baby is better than everyone. Stevie, don’t tease him.”

“’kay, darling.” He raised his hands in surrender and joined you both on the bed.

Steve was thankful for his little family and he tried to spend every waking moment with them. He didn’t want to miss the special moments so he made sure to take time off from missions. Nothing was more important than his family. There was still regret in his heart for treating you like crap in the early years of marriage. He would never forgive himself for the heinous acts that he committed. He will spend every moment making it up to you.

Finishing the breakfast with a lot of teasing and jokes, you went to get ready for the day. Meanwhile, your husband took Oliver to his room and gave him a shower. Oliver was a total boy in the sense that he ran away from the idea of shower. Only Steve could make him sit in a tub long enough to actually bathe him and by the end of it, no one knew who actually showered. Steve would emerge out of the washroom with water dripping down his hair and drenched clothes.

Today was no different. ”Help this little devil with his clothes while I go change.”

“Aw. Thank you, babe.” You tried to hold in your laughter when you saw his condition but you couldn’t help it.

“Next time, you’re doing it.”

“Sure sure.” Pecking him on the lips, you went into Ollie’s closet. He always said this but he was there to take your son before you could even think about taking him to shower. He would never admit it but he liked this chore. It was a bonding time for him and Oliver.

For today you all agreed that it would be best to just relax around the house. With the upcoming Hydra missions, the media had been loitering around your house to have an interview with Steve. You both decided that the best way to attain some privacy would be to stay home.

“Incredible, please!” The little boy sitting on your lap looked at you with puppy dog eyes that you didn’t have the heart to refuse.

“But we have watched that movie a hundred times.” Steve whined from his place on the couch.

“Not a hundred times, daddy. Just seven times.” Counting on his fingers, he showed you both eight fingers instead of seven.

“That’s eight fingers, baby.” You put one of his fingers down and squished his cheeks. He was too cute for his own good. “And we can watch it one more time but that’s it.”

Steve knew that he would be outnumbered in this match so he just gave up. At this point, he knew the dialogues by heart. But he preferred this over being lonely. He stocked up on all the snacks a day before so you were all set for a movie marathon. It was going to be really fun.

In between the movie, Oliver made you sing all the songs and you all cried when Mufasa died. Even Steve had slight tears in his eyes. Fate was cruel to the Lion King and he could never think of leaving his family alone. It was too much but then the happy ending always brought him joy. This movie truly was a true roller coaster.

“I wanna watch Boss Baby now.” The little boy demanded as soon as credits rolled in.

“Okay, boss.”

“He truly is the boss, isn’t he?” You looked down at the snuggled up child on the couch.

“Yes, he is.” Ruffling his hair, Steve gave his son an adoring smile.

The whole day, you kept going through movies that were demanded by Oliver and around five, you all fell asleep on the couch. It was a really good nap and you woke up before both your boys. You made them dinner because you wanted to eat proper food. Steaks and broccoli was the best option so you went with it.

“You made dinner?” The two hands snaking around your waist startled for you a second but you relaxed when you heard his voice.

“Yeah. Got up before you guys so just thought to start working on dinner.” You kept your hands on the side of his face while he nuzzled his face in your neck. He was extra clingy today and you loved that about him.

“Okay, I loved spending time with you both today.”

“We both did as well. I love you.”

“I love you too.” You were interrupted before you could kiss your husband.

“I’m hungry!” Oliver came waltzing into the kitchen and Steve picked him up.

Both of you looked at each other before saying it together, “We love you, Ollie.”

“Family hug!” Your son was demanding and you both would never deny his wishes. Your family was too cute and you loved them too much.

Hope you guys enjoyed it!!

._._._._._.

A/N: Tell me if you guys enjoyed it. I am open to blurbs and requests so feel free to send in asks. Love you guys!! And tell me if you want to be added to my tag list.

Tag list: @peculiarpenman, @kalopsia-flaneur, @justile, @agnesk, @caanyoonmoon, @nostxlgia18

Like, comment and reblog.

._._._._._.

#rachelleblodgettwrites #my writing #books & libraries #actors #chris evans x reader #steve rogers x y/n #dad steve rogers #steve rodgers x reader #steve rogers blurb #steve rogers fluff #steve rogers angst #steve rogers #chris evans x female reader #chris evans fluff #dad chris evans #chris evans fanfiction #marvel #mcu #avengers #my imagination

[decayingphoenix]

From the Desk of Decaying Phoenix: The Cry of La Llorona

“Mama, mama, mira, look what I found.” Miguel said bringing an old book with him as he ran excitedly to his mom. 

“Que mijo, what do you have there?” His mom asked looking up from the dishes. 

“It’s an old book mama, mira, it has a story about La Llorona.” He said excitedly. 

“Que? What did you say?” His mom said as the color drained from her face. 

“La Llorona, it’s this ghost that cries as she looks for the souls of her dead children, and she takes any she finds out of their house after dark. Mama do you think she’s real?” He asked as his face was buried in the book. 

“No mijo, it’s just a story, now go wash your hands, dinner is ready.” She replied as she tried to keep her son from seeing her shake.

“Awe, mama, please five more minutes.” He said pleading.

“No, now, or do I need to get the chancla?” She said lifting her foot and reaching down for her sandal. 

“Okay mama, I’m going.” 

Miguel went upstairs and washed his hands, all the while thinking about the story he had read. Soon after it was all he could think about. He looked around all over and found the origin of the story. As he looked up the names of the people involved in the tragedy, he found a picture of La Llorona in life, he couldn’t help it he had fallen in love with her picture. He had to know where she was buried, he needed to find a way to have her. Suddenly, a thought had occurred. What if the story was true? What if she really came after children? There had to be a way to bring her back without the curse. He had to try and find a way.

A few months went by and thanks to the dark web and a few occult shops he had most of what he needed, all he was missing was her body and a victim to sacrifice. It was Mexico after all, he was sure he could find a “willing” victim, even if he had to pay one. It took some time and a little more money than he had wanted to spend, but he finally found where she was buried. Soon he was flying down to find his beloved.

“Miguel, are you sure this is a school trip.” His mom asked.

“Si, mama, I told you it was coming up.” He replied half irritated. 

“Pero, why hasn’t the school sent out permission forms?”

“They did, you signed it, it was dos semanas mama, you asked me if I had the money to go.”

“Oh, si, I remember now, are you sure you still want to go mijo?”

“Si mama, I’ve been working hard for this trip. I really want to go.”

“Fine, mijo, go, have fun, don’t get in trouble.”

Having finally convinced his mom about the school trip Miguel was one step closer to reviving his beloved. The wait for the flight seemed as though it took forever, and the flight alone seemed as though it was endless. Miguel had finally landed and was soon on the hunt for his victim. The day dragged on as he sought out the perfect target. Soon he found her, an identical copy of her in life, he knew she was the perfect girl for him. He had convinced her to go with him to the graveyard his true beloved was at. When the time was right. He plunged the knife he had bought into her heart. She lay dying as he started the ritual to bring back his beloved. The magic had started to work and the corpse started to reanimate as it took the form of the dying girl.

Having brought his beloved back and filled her in the time that had passed and what she should expect. Miguel went back home and told his mother that he had met a girl on his trip and was married to her. 

“Como chingados que te casaste?” Miguel’s mom yells. 

“Mom I love this girl. I had to marry her before I lost her, she’s a once in a lifetime kind of girl.” Miguel replied defending himself as he’s getting hit by his mother with the chancla. 

“What the Hell do you even know about her?” She asked as she went for a frying pan. 

“I know all I need to know mama.” He said as he defended himself grabbing a knife on his way out of the kitchen. 

Miguel saw an opening and stabbed his mother with the knife, in a state of shock and rage, he proceeded to stab his mother multiple times, her toso, arms, and legs all had cuts. Having seen what he had done he laughed and thought about how to dispose of her corpse. He realized how much land they actually owned and started digging a grave for his mother’s corpse. Nightfell and he dragged the body out and dropped it, it landed at the bottom with a soft thud, he proceeded to spend the next couple of hours filling the hole up. After having taken a shower Miguel went to his beloved and held her. He finally had the woman he wanted, she was gorgeous. She had brown hair down to the middle of her back, light brown eyes, light skin that shone like the afternoon sun, and the thing he loved most about her, her curves, her hips were right for raising a family.

“Well my dear, now that my mother is out of the way we can be together.” Miguel said as his head lay in his lovers breasts. 

“Si, mi amor, but what will we do now?” She asked stroking his hair.

“Well I own the company now, so we don’t have to worry about money, we can stay home and just love each other.”

“That would be great mi amor.” She said walking to the bed. 

Having finally attained everything he ever wanted he was happy. The years went on and Miguel and his love were happy, happy, that is, until Miguel started to notice his beloved’s ageing, her hair wasn’t as vibrant as it had once been, her eyes had lost that twinkle to them, her face was starting to show wrinkles. Soon Miguel found himself looking at younger women while on his walks around town. His beloved started to notice this and soon grew depressed, was she to be abandoned a second time in a second life? She wouldn’t stand for it. She took matters into her own hands, if she couldn’t have her husband, then no one would. Standing on the roof of their now broken home she decided she would get him back the one way she could. She saw Miguel in the thralls of lust with a younger prettier woman, she jumped and yelled his name, cursing him as she kissed the ground, her neck snapped back killing her instantly. Miguel ran out to find the horrific scene that lay before him. His once beloved wife, dead. He thought this was great, no divorce, no alimony. He had won once again. Over the next few days he acted as a distraught husband should, her body was laid to rest in a very flashy ceremony.

A few weeks went by and children started to disappear at night. The rumors started, as they always did in small towns. After almost forty years she was back, but there was no truth to this rumor, no one had heard the cry as before, there hadn’t been a single sighting down any roads leading to water. Perhaps it was the drug lords forcefully recruiting children into their organization. Theories were passed around back and forth. Children were no longer allowed outside after dark.. However when the children were taken off the streets, the adults started to go missing. One person had survived the attack and went to the plaza. 

“You have to hear me. She’s back.” The man crazed with fear said. “La Llorona is back. She appeared to me as a gorgeous woman, but as she got closer, I started to see what she was, I ran to the nearest church and hid out the remainder of the night.”

“Yeah right.” One man from the crowd said. “You probably imagined it all in a drunken fit. We all know La Llorona isn’t real.”

The crowd laughed at the man and shooed him off of the plaza. 

“You’ll regret not believing me.” The man cursed as he left. 

Miguel had heard of what the man had said, wanting to make sure she hadn’t come back for him he had her body dug up. The casket was empty Miguel’s name had been carved into the inside. At this sight he hired a personal bodyguard not telling him exactly what he needed protecting from. 

Over the next weeks more people disappeared. Soon Miguel could hear her. 

“Miguel, you betrayed me. I will get you.” 

The crys got closer every day. Soon Miguel wasn’t sleeping, he was jumpy at the slightest thing. La Llorona was no longer just interested in children. Anyone she found outside after dark was hers. Eventually, she caught up to her former lover.

“Miguel, I’m home.” She cried as she entered her former home.

The house was quiet, the only sound was La Llorona walking looking for her former husband. 

“Miguel! Miguel! Miguel!” She cried over and over. “Come out, I’ve missed you.”

Miguel hid as quietly as he could a new gun in his hand, thinking that would stop her. Surely she had  to still be alive, maybe all of those people left the town. She had found the room he was in. He stayed as quiet and still as the grave. Soon she ripped the door of the closet open. Miguel started shooting emptying his clip into the thing before him. She felt nothing and grabbed him. 

“Miguel, you betrayed me, now, you must pay the price.” She said as she dragged her former husband to the balcony. “I died because I loved you. Now I’ll kill you, because I love you.”

She slowly lifted him over the rail and held him looking into his eyes.

“Miguel, mi amor. We promised until death do us part. Well, death, did do us part, now in death we will be together.” She said letting go of her former husband. 

The last thing Miguel saw was a black wedding gown, with a veil to match, the wind blew just enough for him to see the decayed face of his once beautiful bride. Miguel was found in the morning, dead, police had ruled it a suicide. Having gotten her revenge, and her curse partially broken, La Llorona now roams all over her cry can be heard for miles around warning all that she is near. 

“Ay mi marido, ay mis hijos.” She cries in both pain and joy. 

Those lucky to only hear her cry claim to feel a knife piercing chill thru their body, and the house shake. However, what has become of those that have had the misfortune to come across her? Well the rumors are that the children are drowned, and the adults well you know what they say. ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’, but these are only rumors after all, so next time you’re out after dark and if you hear her cry followed by a beautiful young woman, well, I’d run if I was you. 

Well my little chicks, how was that for reviving an old Mexican legend? Do be careful when out at night, and if you hear a pained cry in the distance. I do hope you’re near shelter to hide out. Sweet screams.

#scarysstory #decayingphoenix #LaLlorona

[thesimplyluxuriouslife]

311: How Accepting Your Mortality Sets You Free to Live More Deeply

"The world is already broken. And what's true of the state of civilization is equally true of your life: it was always already the case that you would never experience a life of perfect accomplishment or security. And your four thousand weeks have always been running out. It's a revelation, though: when you begin to internalize all this even just a bit, the result is not despair, but an energizing surge of motivation . . . You realize that you never really needed the feeling of complete security you'd previously felt so desperate to attain. This is liberation." —Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time management for mortals

Admittedly, the length of a human life is short when we take the long view of civilization, so it is understandable for us to make the most of our time. However, in so doing, we often go about 'making the most of it' in unhelpful, counter-intuitive ways.

Oliver Burkeman wrote a long-running and award-winning weekly column for The Guardian up until last year. He is also the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, and so after reading his final column for The Guardian, and the synopsis for his first book, I had an idea of his frank, yet considered and sincere approach to what he shares with his readers. Four Thousand Weeks is not your typical time management book.

Thank goodness.

It is a book to open our eyes to the reality of our mortality, no matter how much we may profess we accept that we will die, we demonstrate through our actions, how we live, we may not have fully absorb this life truth. But don't worry, Burkeman shares in his introduction, his objective is to write a book that helps each of us "redress the balance [of our finite time on this planet and engage productively with fellow citizens, current events and the fate of the environment]—to see if we can't discover, or recover, some ways of thinking about time that do justice to our real situation: to the outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks."

I have pulled ten tips he shares about how to live more deeply, and thus more contentedly in our everydays and thus our entire life; however, there is much more in the book and I highly recommend reading it in its entirety. Let's take a look at the list.

0. Understand the truth about time management of our finite amount

"Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster."

What Burkeman does well throughout his book is balance each assertion, especially ones that may throw you off-guard initially, with the counter argument, and in his awareness, he brings the truth of our humanness on this earth to the forefront for each of us to do with as we see fit, however, now not ignorantly.

When we finally accept that our to-do lists will not be checked off entirely, when we acknowledge we can't plan with an ever-more-perfect planning system (you know what I am talking about - the right amount of boxes, lines, highlighter colors, tabs, etc.) to bring more contentment into our lives, "at long last" we can turn "to the things life is really supposed to be about."

As many listeners/readers know, I have used a planner nearly all of my life since I was a teenager and still do, and I have yet to find a planning system that works perfectly. And what I mean by perfectly is that I can plan my life to run smoothly, productively, and happily each and everyday. I cannot achieve this or find the particular planning system that will help me do this, because it will never exist. What does exist is each of us, for a short amount of time - approximately (if we are lucky) four thousand weeks. What will you do with your time?

Just asking that question, feels as though pressure has been placed on our shoulders, which is why Burkeman begins with his assertion about productivity being a trap and then, in each subsequent chapter, offers insights for enjoying most fully your life. Because when we take on the pressure of 'making our lives count', we do ourselves and our present being a disservice that undercuts what we say we are trying to do - live well.

Let's take a look at ten approaches to, once accepting consciously ourselves as mortal, living fully, without distraction, in each present moment as a way to achieve great contentment in our everydays.

1.Acceptance of our short lives is a cause for relief

"You get to give up on something that was always impossible—the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you're officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what's gloriously possible instead."

I want to start with the primary acceptance the book urges us to take because I have a feeling what we are seeking when errantly, but with good intentions, try to 'make the most of our lives', is a life that when we go to bed at night, our mind is at peace. The peace you are seeking will not come, not fully, not completely, until you accept your own mortality and give up the quest to be a better you, a more optimized you, a more invincible you who does everything right in the eyes of the society you are trying to please. Put that responsibility down. It is not yours to carry.

2. Shift how you see and define time. In fact, let go of defining it.

"Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you've wasted it."

Burkeman calls accepting the definition of time as a resource is a rigged game 'in which it's impossible ever to feel as though you're doing well enough'. Why? Because it pulls us away from the present moment as we are doing something we think will make tomorrow better, and thereby our eventual present better, but look at that again. When we are tending to tasks to help out our future, we are never in the present. "Leading a life spent leaning into the future, worrying about whether things will work out, experiencing everything in terms of some later, hoped-for benefit", robs of us of our lives because we are actually never in the present living them. Ultimately, we are living on the surface of life, and negating the possibility to experience what Burkeman calls 'deep time': that sense of timeless time which depends on forgetting the abstract yardstick and plunging back into the vividness of reality instead. In other words, we need to let ourselves find moments of 'flow' where time seems to stop (it never actually does, we all know this), but we are not checking the clock, we are wholly present in the moment and absorbed with the task, the conversation, the moment, the view, the painting, the music, whatever it might be. We need more of these moments to deepen the quality of our everyday lives.

All of this is to say, we need to let go. We need to do some planning (Burkeman acknowledges it's not a bad thing to plan for retirement, our child's college, how to earn money to pay your bills), but we take is so much farther than the necessities. We need to let go, so we can be in the present fully and enjoy this awesome thing called life we have been given - how lucky (and really, there is so much luck, so much we have absolutely control over) are we to be given the opportunity to live four thousand weeks?

3. Don't treat your life as a vehicle to a future state of happiness

"To treat all these moments [the last time of doing anything] solely as stepping-stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren't for the fact that we all do it, all the time."

Pointing out that 'rich people in capitalist economies are often surprisingly miserable' even though they are experts at 'instrumentalizing their time, for the purpose of generating wealth for themselves . . . they end of treating their lives in the present moment as nothing but a vehicle in which to travel toward a future state of happiness." But before we bash on capitalists and those with great wealth, they are behaving in the same way most of us are when we choose to use time in an instrumental way - a tool to attain something and not to be wasted: "a feeling of being in omnipotent control of our lives."

The shift needs to occur with what was discussed in #2. We need to let go. We need to be brave by choosing to be present in our lives. Yes, if we are so fortunate, we will live our tomorrow and the next tomorrow, but the present is all we have each and every day. If we are so busy, saving and working and strategizing for a better tomorrow, a more secure tomorrow, we are actually not living. We aren't actually loving. There is no depth. The quality of living has been dismissed as a waste of time, but the reality is, all we have is time in the present. That is all that is guaranteed. Don't miss out on life.

4. Improve the skill of being present, being mindful

"A more fruitful approach to the challenge of living more fully in the moment starts from noticing that you are, in fact, always already living in the moment anyway, whether you like it or not."

Desiring to live in the present, while a great start, is not enough to hold you in the present and enable you to live fully. As Burkeman writes, "To try to live in the moment implies that you're somehow separate from 'the moment,' and thus in a position to either succeed or fail at living in it." The reality is you are always and were always and will always be of the moment to begin with as the above quote reminds. So how do we do what we likely accept we need to do after listening so far to this podcast, reading Burkeman's book and reflecting on moments in our lives when we were present and experienced great joy, we let go of expectations of what any moment 'should' be, and let ourselves just be in the moment. Not on the sidelines watching, but immersing ourselves. For example, Burkeman shares how when we go to a museum, if we are taking out our phone and videotaping or capturing the paintings with our phone, we are not present. Instead, we are capturing something for a future moment. The same applies to a moment where you are not pulling out your phone, yet hoping something occurs that 'would make your to-do/bucket list complete'. Set the expectations aside, engage with what is and who is present. Take it all in. Be who you are and set yourself free to savor what transpires.

If there is one area of weakness in this book, it was this chapter, Chapter 8 - You Are Here. What makes presence hard is it is a skill, and we have to practice it. Practice it to progress our abilities to do it seemingly naturally in every day and every moment of our lives. It will not just happen, as it took conditioning since we were young children the moment we were told to pass this class so we can step forward into the next grade, middle school success for beneficial high school placement in different courses, and then on to colleges. It will take time to shed the conditioning that feels engrained, but it is indeed something we learned. That is the good news.

I guess part of why I challenge his assertions in this particular chapter was while it brought to the forefront a truth to accept, it dismissed it as nearly impossible to achieve. Claiming that as humans, we have an extreme aversion to being present. But as a listener/reader of the podcast/blog, I know you know that is not true. Our temperaments may aid or make more difficult holding ourselves fully in the present, but so do, and more significantly, our upbringings, the nurturing we received, what was modeled, taught, expected. It is my hope that by living simply luxuriously, we witness first-hand how our everydays are elevated when we hold ourselves in the present, we remain conscious and we savor the simple beauty in seemingly quotidian events, objects, sights, etc..

5. The crutch of distraction

"Rather than taking ownership of our lives, we seek out distractions, or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, so as to try to forget our real predicament [that we are mortal beings]."

The distractions from technology, keeping a busy schedule, not spending regular time with ourselves, actually do the opposite of what we are seeking. Assuming we are seeking a life of contentment, partaking in distraction holds our life experience on the surface. "It's only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life." When we accept, consciously accept, that our time is limited, the motivation builds to 'finally become truly present in our lives'. Let's not wait any longer, shall we?

"What you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is."

By letting ourselves be distracted by the alerts, the scrolling on free apps that actually use us as the commodity, the [whatever you look to to pull you away from what you don't want to do, or don't want to explore that will deepen your life experience], not choosing is actually happening, and this is how we deny our finitude as human beings. One more point to help inspire you to rethink how you use your time online when you do go online. "The attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever's most compelling—instead of whatever's most true, or most useful—it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face . . . and all these distorted judgments then influence how we allocate our offline time as well." The misstep however, when we do accept that distractions are not in our best interest is to become busier and fill every minute with something on a to-do list, but that would be the wrong correction. Let's step into #6 to better understand how to not creep back into busyness.

6. Reduce, instead of manage your obligations and activities vying for your time

"Most productivity experts act merely as enablers of our time troubles, by offering ways to keep on believing it might be possible to get everything done . . . but it's a lie."

Being honest and clear-eyed about your priorities, eliminating the 'middling priorities' as Warren Buffet describes them, those priorities are 'seductive enough to distract you from the ones that matter most', ensures what matters to you receives your full attention. However, this is where many of us hesitate - if I let go of this item on my list, that path is no longer part of my life journey. But by holding all of your items on your list, none of them receive your full attention, your full presence, and life is not actually lived, at least not well or deeply. As Burkeman shares in his inclusion of Kafka, 'he yearned to live more than one life.' And the reality is, we only have one life. We must make decisions, let go, be present and savor the life we have.

7. Celebrate the ironic truth of taking action - the calm ensues

"In consciously making a commitment, [you're] closing off [your] fantasies of infinite possibilities in favor of the joy of missing out (JOMO). This is also why it can be so unexpectedly calming to take actions you'd been fearing or delaying—to finally hand in your notice at work, become a parent, address a festering family issue, or close on a house purchase. When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because now there's only one direction to travel: forward into the consequences of your choice."

What I appreciate immensely about Burkeman's voice is his use of words such as 'consequences' that on the surface hold a negative connotation. What he presents is what we assume and why we fail to make a choice, but the beautiful reality is when choose, when we finally commit, we give ourselves so much more.

8. We cannot know and so we must let go of trying to control

"Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again—as if the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster. The fuel behind worry, in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance, that things will turn out fine . . . But the struggle for control over the future is a stark example of our refusal to acknowledge our built-in limitations when it comes to time, because it's a fight the worrier obviously won't win. You can never be truly certain about the future. And so your reach will always exceed your grasp."

Burkeman again shares that it is not a bad idea to plan for example the retirement that will come if we are so fortunate, or making time to go vote in order to improve the chances for the future we wish to see turn out, the problem, that which causes anxiety, "is the need that we feel, from our vantage point here in the present moment, to be able to know that those efforts will prove successful." His example to explain his point is helpful. "It's a recipe for a life of unending stress to insist that you must be able to feel certain, now, that this is how your relationship is definitely going to unfold in the future." In other words, let go of needing to be reassured. The only thing, or in this case, person that can provide reassurance is you to yourself, telling yourself that you are doing the best and will do your best and whatever happens, you will navigate through to the best of your ability. You are not being the victim, you are not reacting, you are being present, observing, setting your boundaries, but not forcing someone else to place their's in a certain place. I like to return to a previous podcast episode (#301) from last season - tend to your tasks and let others tend to theirs.

9. Refrain from taking planning too far

"But planning is an essential tool for constructing a meaningful life, and for exercising our responsibilities toward other people. The real problem isn't planning. It's that we take our plans to be something they aren't."

Burkeman succinctly describes what plans are and all that they can be in our lives even if we may want them to be more, "a present-moment statement of intent." He goes on to say with his cheeky humor, "The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply." And that is where the letting go must happen, that is where the magic of life happens, the unexpected, the never-could-have-imagined, the gift that makes life what it is, the tragedy of life, yes, but in those moments, we are reminded blatantly of our mortality, and if nothing else, it should wake us up to living more fully in the present each and every day, tending only to our tasks and letting others tend to theirs and savoring all that is around us.

10. Give up hope and elevate your life

"[Giving up hope] in a certain sense does kill you. It kills the fear-driven, control-chasing, ego-dominated version of you—the one who cares intensely about what others think of you, about not disappointing anyone or stepping too far out of line, in case the people in charge find some way to punish you for it later. 'You find, that the civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.' and the 'you' that remains is more alive than before."

The paradox of giving up hope for a better anything, a perfect anything, is Burkeman writes, when you confront things as they really are, 'you're open enough to let all the good things in more fully, too, on their own terms, instead of trying to use them to bolster your need to know that everything will turn out fine."

Perhaps the better phrase as opposed to giving up hope is to let go and immerse yourself in the everyday as it is and as you choose to be in the moment. Burkeman talks directly, and his voice takes time to understand that his desired outcome is to help his readers discover how to live a more fulfilling life, but indeed it is. We can step out of our way, that is what we do have control over, and his book aims to help us understand that we need to if we are going to savor the life we have and not spend it in the future, or working toward a future that will not make us any more content than we can be right now. I simplify this a bit, so I recommend checking out his entire book, but essentially, once you have the essentials - your health, a roof, a safe place, an income that provides for the necessities (keeping this in check as often what we define as a necessity expands with our income growth), holding yourself in each day, each moment, engaging with it, letting go of expectation and trying to control the outcomes will find you far more at peace and experiencing a much more exuberant and magical life.

~Purchase Oliver Burkeman's book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (August 2021)

~Visit Oliver Burkeman's website.

~Subscribe to TSLL's free weekly, monthly or daily newsletter here.

~Explore becoming a Member of TSLL Community and enjoy TSLL blog ad-free, unlimited reading and access to exclusive content.

Petit Plaisirs

Only Murders in the Building, series on Hulu

The Chair, series on Netflix starring Sandra Oh

View more Petit Plaisirs here.

~The Simple Sophisticate, episode #311

~Subscribe to The Simple Sophisticate:  iTunes | Stitcher | iHeartRadio | YouTube | Spotify | Amazon Music

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[elizabethleslie7654]

PissEarth, 2025

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Originally published on The American Sun by John Chapman on December 16, 2018.

““If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.”

– Cormac McCarthy, “Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West”

“ＢＯＲＮ ＴＯ ＤＩＥ WORLD IS A FUCK 鬼神 Kill Em All 1989 I am trash man 410,757,864,530 DEAD COPS”

PissEarth, 2025

It is cliche at this point to speak of how horrified you are at the detritus of our postmodern world. There is, of course, a certain kind of thrill in digging beneath the pallid white corpses of decency to see what strange and mutated life is writhing beneath, just so you can scoop it up and toss it in the faces of your friends. However, it has become rote and formulaic to look at just another story of neoliberal capitalism functioning in its just-as-planned absurdity and pull out the clown horn to signal to your friends how far we’ve fallen and how far left there is to get to hell. Our receptors for rage-flavored dopamine need something more, our haterade must be topped off. So I come to you as a prophet and I offer you a vision of the world to come.

I offer you, PissEarth, 2025.

When one hears the name PissEarth, it may conjure up images of ammonia-scented oceans of fetid yellow water, ebbing and flowing in tide under a bloodmoon in a night-sky bereft of stars, while little islands of human refuse taper across like logs of flotsam and jetsam. The spirituality of such a world is not that far off. The seers who are blind know that they were blessed to have lost their sight. You, too, may find yourself in such a state, like Oedipus staring wistfully at the golden pins after his terrible, horrible, no-good very bad lunch date with the shepherd. Like Oedipus, you’re all tainted motherfuckers.

You must understand, I do not tell you these things to hurt you, but to warn you that this new world wants to hurt you. It will. Oh, believe me it will. PissEarth, 2025 is accelerated humanity, and there is no more room for obsolescent units that think in terms of the abolished humanity. They will not return you for store credit or sit you up in Dorothy McGillicuddy’s Home for Antiques. Anything less than total depravity of your spirit, dispossession of your body, and annihilation of your mind would be a mercy. I say ‘you’ because if ‘you’ are still reading this past the first 150 words, then you are already a member of the abolished.

Everything you hate, everything you fear, everything that disgusts you inside, all of that will come quite naturally to PissEarth, 2025. A totalistic reality wholly assumed with no history. What you see now as the “slippery slope” will simply be the waterslide into a community piss-pool everyone will be baptized in. You will never gawk, never sigh and point at just how far we’ve come. You’ll be amazed at the efficiency of it all when it whittles down the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths down to just the very First one.

“I teach suffering.”

– some Indian who sat under a tree

Let us be clear. There is Clown World, and there is PissEarth. When we speak of Clown World, we speak of the contradictions and absurdities that the present culture and political order are built on. We speak of a president who is able to shoot impotent missiles at a country his own citizens can’t find on a map but who is powerless to stop a caravan of admixtured Aztecs wearing the hand-me-downs that Fat Bob of Fat Bob’s T-Shirt Emporium wasn’t able to sell. We speak of the nation grounding to a halt over whether or not little girls should be exposed to the Halloween parade hopped up on homemade HRT hobbling into their bathrooms. We speak of dozens of men who have lost gainful employment for making OKAY signs in photos because the Morris Dees newsletter fell for a prank from mischievous, anonymous frogs.

When we speak of these clownish things, we speak with a feeling that dragging these things into the light and exposing them for all the world to see will allow the light to shine in and obliterate the vampires with its cleansing sunbeams. These are all flashpoints in the broad and all-encompassing culture war that the West has found itself embroiled in, with each day yielding a brand new skirmish to deploy for, though the war is already lost. When we speak of Clown World, we speak of trying to find a way to shoo out the clowns.

PissEarth is different. PissEarth is the surrender. PissEarth is the occupation. PissEarth is the Morgenthau Plan for your shattered psyche. PissEarth is the moment this has all been building up to. Clown World ain’t nothing on PissEarth, 2025, the real Greatest Show on Earth.

WORLD IS A FUCK

“Get on with it,” I hear you (and the editor) say, “You’ve talked enough, like you’re trying to warn us from hearing out your vision, like no matter how awful it is we aren’t going to look anyway. Just put me in the hurt-box, please. Just show me what sights there are to behold.”

Very well. Behold, PissEarth, 2025.

Behold PissEarth, where the tech-giants have spread their privatized favelas far-and-wide, where debt-ridden PhDs hustle from gig-to-gig, chasing bounties that allow you to snitch on anyone insufficiently committed to diversity. It will become a game all unto its own, with high scores for ‘scalps’ that were claimed, no matter how absurd the bounties one gets. The dopamine must flow.

Behold PissEarth, where you celebrate your abortion from a mail-order kit as you make a public pledge to reduce your carbon footprint by remaining childless while Nuevo Americano rides a river of trash into your welcoming arms. Adopting enormous underprivileged families becomes the norm as a form of public atonement, and their weak-chinned fathers beam with pride and joy that their daughters are doing such a public service to the world.

Behold PissEarth, where pornographers have the social capital to demand and force aggressive men to watch pornography lest their employment and finances are endangered, mocking them for the damage it does at the same time. A thousand smirking social climbers, all in unison saying “have a fap, you’ll feel better” as their malice goes unchecked.

Behold PissEarth, where procreation is a quaint novelty–every boy a girl, every girl a boy, belonging to everyone and no one, in beautiful rainbow shades of light brown to dark brown, as even the socially ostracized will respect the pronoun and they will suck the feminine penis. Then real communism can finally be tried.

Behold PissEarth, where war is abolished but skirmishes are constant and daily with little purpose to them other than the grim remains of human resistance or simple lashings of animal rage.  No one is happy, but at last they are free. A friendly notification pops up in your latest smart-device, warning you of which roads to avoid for threat of most recent self-contained riot.

Behold PissEarth, with such technological wonders like the IUD that filters the microplastics out of your dick, “air purifiers” in place of trees, and artisanal soylent green but it’s from free-range, cruelty-free cockroaches. Status vloggers chase clicks by dumping half their paycheck to eat dressed up prole food made for them by a group of queer hijabis who receive their funding from a nearby corporation.

Behold PissEarth, where the purpose of a lifetime of labor is to fund research into how corpulent immovable masses of flesh can have better and more revolutionary forms of sex. The research and test subjects themselves become their own programming, another screen to pass the time in your shrinking apartment.

Behold PissEarth, where every neurosis has become a fetish to be enacted in order to attain collective cummies, to be taught in schools, and to be talked about incessantly on perpetual content devices. While the fear of pedophiles will always remain as a release vale for anger, its normalization will be so thorough that vigilantism against it is arbitrary.

Behold PissEarth, where the President will be a figurehead American idol, sworn-in on a human resources manual as they pledge to do their utmost to continue the pursuit of equality before a million teeming masses yearning to breathe at all in the crowd so that they can snap selfies for their social credit score. Though the president will be known as a figurehead, and though everyone will acknowledge that tech corporations have all the power, everyone still states solemnly the importance of a hallowed or is it hollowed democratic institution.

Behold PissEarth, where the gods of the new world are men disfigured into chimeras made from the new sacred rituals and paraded out in victory for their ascendance. Where children are made to be their wards by loving and approving parents. The parents will allow their children to be “babysat” by these creatures, in order that values of acceptance be inculcated at an early age.

Behold PissEarth, where any intellectual curiosity beyond the new and revised canon will be immediately suspect, where not having a strong opinion on the most current pop culture multimedia franchise will mark you with a big red flag on your social credit score, where you will never be able to escape the perpetual content stream as the algorithms pioneered by Netflix find a way to be lodged inside your brain like some kind of mind-control slug slithering its way inside. Your future has been written by media mathematics.

Behold PissEarth, where your experience with nature is a virtual reality simulation that you share with the few people online that you’ve been able to light any embers of a human connection with. Though the simulation glitches and shimmers in an unnatural way, you cling to this image because that little voice in the back of your head fears what you will do if you lose even this little bit of hope’s simulacrum.

I can hear you protest that this is already happening. Yes, the sprouts have sprung but they have not yet bloomed. Only when you have accepted all of these things as assumed and normal, when instead of being complacent your friends and family applaud it will you truly understand the reality of PissEarth, 2025. There will be no more pieces to point and gawk and decry that the world has gone mad. It will all be as staid as the abolished Sunday dinner.

This is what you must understand about the reality of PissEarth, 2025. Everything you joke about is assumed. Everything you satirize is simple reality. Whatever protests you think you’ll register against it simply won’t exist. You’ll keep your head down and just try to get through this life if you have any thoughts of rebellion, because you saw what Clown World did to the ones before you. You saw what it did to your friends, your family, and your brothers. You have accepted that you are but a drop of wine in the entire piss-bucket.

Technology will improve, but your quality of life will not. Materially it will not. Spiritually it will not. Every force that champions this great progress being made will be actively trying harm you every which way in totalistic system if there is any sense that you are not on board or there was a point you were never on board.

If you truly wish to understand PissEarth, 2025 on an intellectual level beyond the confetti-and-glitterbomb sermon I’ve laid out, then you must understand the nature of post-totalitarian ideology. Vaclav Havel lays out many of these concepts in his work The Power of the Powerless but elucidates the nature of PissEarth quite well in his concept of the greengrocer:

“{9} The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; … Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. …

{10} Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system. . . . .”

The difference between Havel’s greengrocer and the PissEarth denizen is that the people of the former are a people trained to avoid negative stimuli while the latter have learned to love the negative stimuli. They embrace it as a mission, as a religious calling, and like Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ they will strike their own perverted Christlike pose and submerge themselves wholly into these bodily fluids. They will immerse themselves and baptize themselves into a world they will lovingly embrace despite every dissonant thought, despite every horrible incident, and despite every pain that’s inflicted on them. They will hate you if you try to pull them out of it.

This is the totalistic reality of PissEarth, 2025.

Okay, Yeah, That Sounds Pretty Awful. How Do I Escape From PissEarth?

You don’t. You don’t escape PissEarth. You fight. You struggle. You take your Boomer father’s yacht that he spent your inheritance on and like Johansen you ram that shit as far into Cthulhu’s sleepy eye as you possibly can. Regardless of how it all ends. You delegitimize the system. You take everything you possibly can get from it and you rob it blind any way you can. Legally of course through any clever loophole you can find, because (taps NSA microphone) we’re good upright citizens who don’t commit any crimes and disavow any and all illegal activity.

Some seek a much more simple way to terminate this endless suffering. Listening to the wisdom of the modern nomads, they have joined the caldera deathcult and pray earnestly five times a day in the direction of Yellowstone for one final eruption to scald away our modern sins. Along this same vein, even the insects in people suits who work unpaid overtime to bring about PissEarth, 2025 stare hopefully up at the stars, not to explore them but to pull down a meteor and simply end it all. Personally, I’m pulling for a nice little grey goo scenario, an experiment of the Han Empire run amok that engulfs, smothers, and consumes the entire world. These are understandable expressions. The trashworld citizen, who knows the world for what it is, who often sat in silence like a totemic mystic once intoned “we are fucking up shit that cannot be easily unfucked“. It’s the bleak reality of a grim future, so why not end it all with a pithy “gg, everybody”.

I have another vision though. A hypnopompic one not as clear, like a dream that fades in the morning but you retain some inkling of it as you go about your day-to-day life. When I meditate I can almost see it within my mind’s eye.

I can see that even in a world lit up in gasoline-doused fires, where pain is maximal, there are men who have learned to love life so much that they will defend the last dignified patch of wood with their very lives, and not a care for how little it all means. I can still see little babies being born and suckling at their mother’s breasts in the dark of night as plastic meteors go down over the lonely mountains. I can see bands of foolhardy boys laugh about the stories they’ve heard, when technological demons once roamed the earth. I can see cold, bitter days made just a bit less uncomfortable by a fire that people learned to light by their grandfathers and great-uncles.

It must be made clear that these green dreams are not premonitions, only some slumbering notions of a better future after the inevitable long dark. Extinction is always on the table, always a possibility, and that wave of existential terror thunders inside like a beating heart in every action.

Short of a miraculous consciousness simultaneously sweeping across the great swaths of the abolished humanity, you will not stop PissEarth. It lumbers and slouches toward us, consuming everything it sees with the moral imperative of a brimstone preacher. To fight against PissEarth will be to engage in the inner jihad, to always be at war with one’s self and the world as the wars of PissEarth, 2025 are maximal wars. The forever wars.

We are not the middle children of history. We are the abandoned children of history, set down in the bulrushes of a river so polluted that it’s being set on fire. Like the Cuyahoga, I don’t know if this one has any chance of being fixed in time to undo any of the damage. Humanity has been abolished and PissEarth is rolling out the recall. You might call this bleak, you might call this depressing, but the facts are the facts and it has become clear there are two types of people in the modern world and there will only ever be these two types of people. Those who want to live and those who want to die. Those who want to die, who have given up on life, are the denizens of PissEarth, whose own lives are simulacrum broadcast back to them by malevolent entities charging them for the privilege. Those who want to live will, to a man and woman, be banished to the outer dark and be made to fend for themselves against every hostile entity, their own just desserts for rejecting the Superior Future.

Do you love life? Do you want life for your descendants? Do you want any hope against just how bad things are going to be? Then you better learn to swim in a burning river, my man, because what else are you going to do?

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[rosesvoyages]

Dear Reader, I married him…

Well in a few months I will!  So…drum roll please…I got engaged.  In Florence. It was well nice.  Isn’t it shocking that I, a real life Bridget Jones-esque character (this isn’t just me kidding myself here, anecdotes include the time I was meeting the Japanese government on a top secret advisory project my shoe fell off), am engaged to a lovely man.  I have been a bit AWOL from the blog, which will be changing as I update you.  The reason I have not been writing is that I have been besieged by visitors and gallivanting around Norway and England myself.  Life can be very interesting and one of the joys, although also the issues is that you can never tell where you’re going to end up.

Five years ago and a thousand miles away, I begun this blog writing about my time in Japan.  I distinctly remember a conversation with an older and wiser friend in an Indian restaurant (a space of one can attain enlightenment) saying that I just didn’t think I would get married.  Not because of anti-marriage sentiment, just that I did not think I was that sort of girl who would end up married.  

Now I live in a country I never would have dreamed of, and I studied in China, worked for a Japanese newspaper, been at the coal face of capitalism, and am currently curled up under sheets about to face my first Norwegian winter.  What larks, Pip, what larks.

So (I’m including a picture of the ring at the top) I suppose you’re wondering what happened.  My boyfriend and I were on a holiday in Florence, making use of our fabulous FlorenceCards by tearing up every Museum and Art Gallery in sight.  I felt like my boyfriend was slightly tense, although this did not strike me as odd given aforementioned marathon sprint around the entire 5 museums of the Pitti and Bobboli Gardens.   He suggested a weirdly large and fancy lunch, although again given we were in a city with lovely Tuscan food (and we live in Norway where food is a)expensive and b)bland ) this was also not unusual.  We then went to the Bardini Gardens.  We sat on a small bench overlooking the cityscape whilst I gulped down some Coca-Cola, my beverage of choice in the 29 degree heat. I am a vampire and so do not react well the sunshine despite loving it so.  Other tourists kept coming in drips and drabs to admire the view.    Bear in mind that I had once said something about not liking the idea of a public proposal, and my boyfriend said he was thinking about several spots, including that one.  Another contender was a wisteria tunnel which whilst beautiful held the same threat of passers-by.  At the bottom of that tunnel and slightly to the side was a beautiful, sea shell encrusted grotto I now know is called the Pergola of Roses.  We sat on a bench enjoying another clandestine view of Florence, talking about something (let’s pretend high brow).  I stood up, ready to move on to explore the rest of the garden and Peter grabbed my hand.  He went down on one knee and asked me by my full name if I would marry him.  He then pulled out a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy.  He had cut a ring box sized hole in the book (he said it was a bad translation anyway) and pulled out a diamond ring.  It was very nice.  I then obviously had to call and Skype my entire family.  

We wandered round town and Oltrarno, looking at things with a buzzing excitement. We got a drink (me an Irish coffee, I don’t like the taste of alcohol but I decided the occasion called for it) and then went to a restaurant my boyfriend frequented when he was a visiting student in Florence.   We were a little early, but they let us in and the meal was just beautiful in every way.  Perhaps because they could tell we were celebrating (although we were both too bashful to say about what) or perhaps because my boyfriend kept earnestly telling the waiters how much he loved every course we ended up getting free drinks including some limoncello, which I despise but it was a nice gesture.

We had been out all day, but ended up staying until closing time and walking back across the Ponte Sata Trinata, looking over the Ponte Veccio.  I don’t want this tale to sound like the birth of one of those smug married couples, gleefully delighting in their own self-satisfaction.  I am lucky to have met someone, and have the most wonderful family around me to share in my happiness in my Mum and Aunt.   This is such a major change and I cannot wait to see how it develops.

Stay tuned for more on planning a wedding in record time in a country you don’t live in (seriously I could not help myself) and detailed info on my travels in Norway and beyond!

#florence #engagement #florence engagement

[diverseladybookproject]

(Belated) ARC Review - Done Dirt Cheap by Sarah Nicole Lemon

This is the motorcycle gang, platonic female friendship, YA adventure book I didn't know I needed. I requested Done Dirt Cheap solely because Dahlia Adler - one of my favorite book bloggers and authors - said she loved it, and I trust her reviews (and also we seem to have the same taste in books). Also the cover is gorgeous, not that I judge books based on their covers...

Tourmaline Harris just graduated from high school and is headed to the University of Virginia in the fall. She's trying to keep up the facade of her picture perfect life - athlete boyfriend, church-going best friend, sundresses all the time. But then her mother's former drug dealer and boyfriend is paroled and starts stalking her, and her life cracks in a way that starts letting the complicated show. Like the fact that her mother is in prison. And her dad is the leader of a motorcycle club (the Wardens) with mysterious dealings and a terrible reputation. And she's so attracted to the newest recruit that she can hardly stand it, but she's not supposed to even talk to him.

Then there's Virginia Campbell. Her mother sold her to a shady local attorney to pay her debts, and Virginia is now his low-level drug dealer and pageant queen. Her latest assignment - befriend Tourmaline, figure out what's going on with the Wardens, and make him some more money. Seems easy enough. But Tourmaline is a lot more complicated and tough than Virginia gives her credit for, and their friendship is a lot more real than she was expecting.

OKAY, I'VE KEPT MY COOL LONG ENOUGH, NOW I'M GOING TO GET SHOUTY BECAUSE I LOVE THIS BOOK SO SO MUCH!

3 Things I Loved

Tourmaline and Virginia's friendship. There are a lot of YA stories with friendships in them, but this one is different. It's complicated. They don't always trust each other, or even like each other. But it endures, and they defy their families and their handlers to protect each other, and it was a joy to read.

CASH. OKAY. THIS IS WHERE I'M GOING TO GET EXCITED. I loved Cash. I loved him from the very first page he appeared on, when he was cooking for the rest of the Wardens and we didn't even know his name. I loved that he actually talked about race dynamics with Tourmaline. I loved that he wanted to follow in his father's footsteps. I loved that he was college educated, and that he loved Tourmaline even though he wasn't supposed to, and that he protected her when she needed him but let her do her own thing when she needed that too. I want more Cash (with or without Tourmaline).

Motorcycles. I've read a lot of books, but this is the first one that wrote about motorcycles in a way that made me feel it. That made me actually want one. I was blown away.

PLEASE READ THIS QUOTE AND SWOON WITH ME:

"You're a mountain road. Straightaways, sure but also curves that come back in on themselves and always threaten to wind around you, instead of you winding around them." -Cash 

Anything Problematic?

I'll be honest - I was so engrossed in this book when I was reading it that I didn't pick up on anything problematic in the text. However, since finishing it and raving about it, I've read some reviews from people who really didn't like this book. They surprised me at first, but I get it. People had some issues with the age differences in the relationships - Cash is 23 to Tourmaline's 18, and Virginia is also 18 where Jason is 28. I understand that, looking back. It didn't bother me on the page, but yeah, these girls are barely out of high school. Also, Cash is black, and Weezie (a book blogger is respect a lot) pointed out that there was some fetishization happening in his relationship with Tourmaline. Since Done Dirt Cheap was written by a white female author, and Tourmaline (a white female) is the one telling the story, she makes it sound like she is irresistible, and that Cash would do anything to be with her, despite the consequences. This plays out more in the beginning - in the last half of the book, Cash is well aware of the consequences and confronts them head-on. This is why I follow other book bloggers - everyone's different perspectives force me to look more critically at the books I both love and disliked.

As they say - everyone's faves are problematic.

Rating

A reminder of the rating scale:

Red = DNF, I hated everything

Orange = Ugh, no thank you

Yellow = I mean, I've read worse, but there were problems

Green = This was good, but not something I'd reread

Blue = Oh my gosh, everyone should be reading this book

Purple = This is the unicorn of books and I will be rereading it until the binding falls apart

Even with the problems, I'm still going to give Done Dirt Cheap a BLUE rating. I'll be rereading this book, for sure, but it's not a unicorn. I haven't found that unicorn yet, I don't think. But some books have gotten close, and this is one of them (in my eyes). 

This advanced reader copy was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This has no bearing on my opinions - I would have loved this book no matter how I attained it, and have since purchased a copy.

More motorcycle-riding women, please! That's what I have to say about YA.

Happy reading!

-A.

#motorcycles #Done Dirt Cheap #Sarah Nicole Lemon #book review #arc review #NetGalley #ARC

[nervousinpublic-blog]

A MIRROR; A WITNESS

I began avidly attending the Christian youth group in my Littleton, Colorado neighborhood a few months before the Columbine shootings in the spring of 1999. I was only 13, but I’d already been baptized twice by that point: once in a Catholic ceremony to please my Dad, and then again in a Mormon Temple at the insistence of my Mom. Both baptisms happened within a year of my 7th birthday.

After a terrible divorce that dragged on for years, my parents each decided that my siblings and I should be baptized into the religion of their upbringing. My Dad, who was raised Catholic, decided he’d give Mormonism a try in a move to please my Mom’s conservative family. A few years after the marriage went south, he decided he was definitely Catholic again and that my siblings and I should be too. And so, every weekend from the time I was 7 to 12 years old, we bounced from Catholic mass to Mormon service; from my mom’s spotless house in the suburbs to whatever friend’s basement or apartment my Dad happened to be renting that month. I am aware now that we were used as ammunition in my parents’ war against each other, and that’s probably why I clung to the things I did so desperately in my youth. When your family is broken, it makes sense that you would try to cobble together a new one out of the materials around you.

My neighbor Chris was the one who first invited me to youth group. Imagine how awkward you were when you were 13. Now imagine someone much, much more awkward. 6-ft tall, braces, unfortunately-bleached hair and perpetually unsure of what to say and where to stand. I had no idea how to live in my own body back then, so I thought the best thing to do was to stay as quiet as possible. For some reason, I had it in my mind that I wouldn’t live past 15 or 16. Some dark fate was patiently waiting to have its way with me; I was sure of it. I had no friends, so when Chris offered me the prospect of his company, I jumped at it. He was the first person I ever really trusted and something about his honest nature won me over immediately. He skateboarded, so I skateboarded. “I’m going to this thing at my church tonight,” he said. “We can skate on the stairs there.” My friendship with Chris led to other friendships, and I began to feel at home at the youth group.

Later that summer, I was convinced I heard God talking to me in my bedroom. I remember feeling loved, understood and called to something. I’m tempted now to write off the whole experience and claim that a high of happiness from finally attaining friends and a sense of belonging caused me to blindly follow my new church’s urging for non-believers to accept Christ into their hearts, but I think it’s more complicated than that. Whether what happened that day occurred within the confines of my mind or not doesn’t matter because the experience was vividly real to me. In a single afternoon, I absorbed the unshakable belief that there was a God who knew and loved me. Can you really call it faith when you’re completely convinced of something? The next day, I announced to my family that I’d become a Christian. I scheduled a 3rd baptism, this time in the religion and location of my choosing.

I loved the portable God the youth group would preach about. It was a God who listened and loved completely; an omnipotent force vaster and older than the entire universe itself that could shrink down small enough to fit inside your breast pocket. It was a God that could intervene between you and death if you could find enough faith to let it to. I took my portable God everywhere. I told it all my secrets.

For the next 5 years and throughout my time in high school, God and the youth group became the center of my life. I started going to youth group on Sunday nights and then for bible study on Tuesdays. It wasn’t long until I found myself hanging out in the church youth building every afternoon after school. I learned to play the guitar and joined the church band. My friends thought I was funny, so I traded in my silent demeanor for one more raucous and bombastic. I had learned to adapt. I was never cool, but everyone knew me and I knew everyone.

Everyone in our youth group idolized the youth leaders, and I dreamed about becoming one and working at the church after I graduated from high school. You were only asked to be a youth leader if you were attractive, well liked and spiritually pristine. “Jesus didn’t want to hang out with the flashy, popular people,” they’d tell us. “Jesus hung out with the dregs of society. If he were here, he’d want to hang out with the losers; the kid stacking chairs after service when nobody sees. That’s how you store treasure in heaven, guys. You should ask yourselves if you’re someone that Christ would want to hang out with if he were here walking around today.”

At home, my mom would tell me that I was spending too much time at church and that I needed to spend more time with the family. My response to my mom’s concerns always touched on the fact that I was a good, solid kid who was staying out of trouble. “I don’t do drugs, I don’t have sex and I’m a good person. You don’t have to worry about me,” I would tell her. The church is my real family, I told my portable God. “I don’t like this new church you’re going to,” my Dad warned. “You spend too much time there. You’d better get confirmed by the Catholic church or I’m afraid for your soul, Patrick!” Considering myself to be the moral leader of my family, I saw the concerns of my parents as nothing more than obstacles to my happiness and spiritual fulfillment. When I was 15, I wrote a letter to my older sister living in New York explaining that I was concerned about her “decision” to be a lesbian and that she should try to seek God and his forgiveness; an act that remains one of my largest and most embarrassing regrets to date.

In the years after Columbine, the youth group ballooned from 50 kids to over 300. An intangible urgency seemed to penetrate everything we did back then. You heard this a lot from Littleton residents, but it was absolutely true that Columbine High School was the last place in the world you’d expect for a massacre to happen. This was years before Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech and the thought of kids murdering other kids inside a suburban public high school was unfathomable. Everyone in Littleton knew someone impacted by the shootings, and a girl from our church named Cassie Bernall was killed.

Columbine happened while I was still in middle school, and I went to another Littleton high school near my house my freshman year. Cassie was a few years older than me, so I never met her. After the shootings, the news started reporting that one of the shooters asked Cassie if she believed in God and then shot her for saying yes. Cassie’s mom wrote a book about it called She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie BernallOver the next four years, our church traveled to major cities all over the US to give away copies of the book to anyone who’d take them. “Walk up to people and just tell them, ‘This is a book about my friend who was killed at Columbine’,” our youth leaders enthusiastically instructed us on a trip to New York City in the Summer of 2000.

“This is a book about my friend who died at Columbine High School for believing in God,” I said while approaching a bookish man in Central Park. “I read about this last year,” he said, backing away from me slightly. “I’m sorry about your friend, but this didn’t happen. They were just shooting people at random whether they were Christians or not. What you guys are doing out here… it isn’t right.” He walked past me, leaving the book in my hand.

I hated the man for what he’d said. Yes, I lied when I said that Cassie had been my friend, but why was he going out of his way to tell me this? My church was heavily invested in making sure we knew that the people who didn’t follow Christ would hate us for our devotion to God, and I was sure that the man represented the world and its disdain for me and everyone who followed Christ. Though the early accounts of Cassie’s martyrdom were discredited by major news outlets just months after the massacre, I didn’t accept what the man said as truth until I was well into my twenties. Later that day, we went to the top of one of the World Trade Center buildings. I leaned my head against the glass and looked down, wondering what it’d feel like if I had to jump.

The church taught us to believe that a lust for anything other than God was perversion, and I really believed it. I loved my portable God and I wanted to do right by him. “You can have all the sex you want,” our carpenter-ish youth pastor used to tell us, “once you’re married.” I hated the idea of sex. I didn’t understand it; what it meant and why I wanted it so much despite my best efforts to put it outside my thoughts. I didn’t understand why I had to engage in an act as permanent as marriage just to experience it. I found it easier to deem it a toxic threat than to try to see my sexuality as something positive.

I’d decide that I liked someone and would go out of my way not to look at or talk to her out of fear and resentment, taking note with joy and annoyance whenever she’d walk into the room. Like many conservative Christian churches, ours taught a message of all-or-nothing abstinence before marriage. When I was a 16, a pretty senior in one of my classes wrote me a note explaining that she thought I was funny and cute, and that she wanted to sleep with me before leaving Colorado for the summer. Normal high school boys would’ve jumped at this opportunity, but not me. I threw away the note and didn’t talk to her for the rest of the year.

Guys in the youth group were encouraged to read I Kissed Dating Goodbye, a book arguing that unmarried Christian men should court girls rather than date them. The book preached a similar message to the one I was hearing in church, claiming that masturbation and premarital sex were covert ways for Satan to gain a foothold in our lives, and that God would give us everything we needed to remain pure in our young thoughts and actions. I liked the categorical nature of these teachings and was more than happy to put sex in all my bad categories. Years after I finally left my church and religion altogether, a friend told me that a group of young guys from the youth group were researching chemical castration online; a sure-fire way to drown out every sexual feeling with pristine, medicinally-induced white noise. The hatred and fear of my own sexuality still loomed large in my thoughts for many years after I stopped believing that sex was a curse to be avoided. I couldn’t see it right away, but a deep shame had taken residence in the inaccessible corners of my mind. Guilt, not Satan, had gained a foothold in my life.

I’m still good friends with most everyone I knew from my youth group days, and it’s interesting to see us now as adults. It’s like we all experienced everything a normal person does in high school, just years later. Many of us succumbed to the world and its vices in our twenties rather than our teens: drugs, premarital sex, and drinking. I eventually drank alcohol, tried pot a few times and then a long, long time later had sex out of wedlock on a rainy March night when I was 24 years old.

I remember the night I finally lost it. The kiss. The offer. Whole body shaking on the walk up the stairs. The freedom and relief of it. The subsequent terrible relationship that I stayed in for more than a year because I didn’t have enough experience to know better. I haven’t asked around or anything, but I don’t think it’s normal for a consenting adult to shake out of fear when they have sex for the first time. After it was over, it felt like — and I truly remember thinking this that night — like I was finally joining the human race. I doubt I’ll ever feel so much relief and ease again in my life.

Chris was the first one of us to leave the youth group. He told me that God didn’t want him there anymore, and I was shocked. When the youth leaders heard the news, they took me aside after the service one morning and cried. One of the youth leaders blamed his departure on his strained relationship with his alcoholic father. A few months later, I left too. In the spring before my high school graduation, my friend Ryan died in a car accident. In the wake of his death, everything began to seem small to me: the church, its teachings and the categorical world I’d curated for myself. Sometimes our youth pastor would pace around the stage and say, “I’ve got some really profound lessons I could teach you guys, but you’re just not ready for it.” One night, in lieu of the normal Sunday night sermon, a different youth pastor talked for 45 minutes about how he flew to Hawaii to meet Scott Stapp, the lead singer of Creed.

No one could articulate it at the time, but my friends and I began to realize that there was something off about our church. A rumor had gone around Littleton that our church was a cult, and I finally understood why when I left. Sometimes you need to be far away from something in order to see it for what it really is. I graduated, moved to Seattle for a few months and began feeling spiritually desperate and anxious. Not sure of what to do, I signed up for classes at a Christian university in northern California.

The Christian college I attended was the kind of place where people would walk up to you and say, “Hey bro! You’ve been on my heart lately. Can I pray for you?”, and then they’d lay their hands on you and other people would lay their hands on you and then everyone would start praying out loud right there in the middle of campus even if you were late for class and didn’t want to be touched. Students were required to adhere to a strict curfew even though they were adults. Being found in the dorm room of someone from the opposite gender was a serious offense. I agreed to these rules because in my mind limits and boundaries were tantamount to faith and righteousness. I needed rules. Ever since I’d left my church in Littleton, my faith had begun to slowly creak, fracture and break apart like an old wooden ship in a hurricane. Christian college was my Hail Mary Pass; my last chance to stave off my doubts, questions and anger about what people did in the name of God.

“Hey, Pat McCrotch. Looks like your boys are losing,” said my college roommate while watching coverage of the 2004 election. By “boys” he was referring to the democrats. We never talked about it, but he sensed that I was one of those liberal kids who didn’t like George Bush and the war in Iraq.

“You know man, I just hate how ‘cool’ all the liberals think they are. It’s like, you’re not cool unless you hate George Bush or something. Bush is a good Christian, and he’s just doing what’s right for the country. Of course people aren’t going to like him for doing the right thing.” Choosing not to waste my energy on a useless argument, I responded with a “hmmmm” sound and left the dorm.

On a walk around the drab campus, I prayed. I asked my portable God to help me fight my body and its impurities. I asked it to help keep me company, and for guidance. I prayed for the faith, fortitude and clarity to do the will of Christ and I apologized for being such a disgusting, wretched human being. Mid-prayer, my thoughts began to float off to some other place. I was finding more and more that the emotional well of prayer was running dry for me. The dramatic inner ritual of self hatred, pleads for forgiveness and a promise to do better and was beginning to wear me out. It didn’t feel genuine anymore. Without the emotional payoff or prayer, I couldn’t keep from questioning the nature of my relationship with God. I had begun to ask myself questions I couldn’t answer. Why would God specifically design a person to be gay and then later condemn them for it? Why are there children who die of cancer? Suffering is understandable if it leads to growth or good, but what about when it doesn’t?

Late one night with some friends at a Denny’s near campus, I casually mentioned the odd religious makeup of my family: Mom was now agnostic, Dad was still staunchly Catholic, and everyone else ranged from casual Christian to atheist. My friend Josh looked down at the table and sighed. “Pat, you know what this means, right? Your family….they’re not saved. They’re going to hell unless they accept Christ fully like you have. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that. But that’s why being a witness is so powerful and important. You’re the light of your family.” I was stunned. The version of God I’d constructed for myself was a force filled with love, patience and understanding, not a terrifying entity with a penchant for sadistic punishment. If God was love, why would he punish my family for not being Christians or Christian enough by throwing them in hell forever? Where is the lesson to be learned in that? My church was conservative, but not “Your-family-is-going-to-hell” conservative.

“That’s a lot to think about,” I said, looking down and stirring my coffee. Everything began to seem absurd to me. Maybe God and conventional religion were really just mirrors; powerful vehicles for the things you already believed to be sent back to you renewed and unshakable.

Shortly after the beginning of my second semester, I decided to come back to Colorado to finish my degree at a public university. I began to finally admit to myself that I just didn’t believe in God anymore. Those were dark times. Without a God, I had no identity; spiritual or otherwise. My faith had been my shield, and without it I felt vulnerable and deeply sad. It’s weird to go from thinking you can cheat death to accepting the finite nature of your own life. “Dying is the one thing we all must do,” as my sister says.

The last time I remember praying was when I was 22. I was drinking with some friends downtown, and every time I left the table or looked away they’d fill my glass up to the top with vodka. I knew what they were doing, but I pretended like I had no idea. It was the beginning of Summer, and after being dropped off I ambled toward the lake near my house through the tepid night air. “Y’know what?,” I slurred aloud, “I tried to be what you wanted. And I was fuckin’ good. Really good.” I fell down on the grass and laughed. “Don’t you have anything to say? D’you even miss me?” Everything was quiet other than the low hum of my own shifting thoughts. The night, God and anything else that might’ve been listening was indifferent to me.

This essay was originally written for the Nervous In Public blog in June 2016

#personal essay #christianity #columbine #atheism #storytelling #writing #creative writing #patrick mcguire