#Coffee/Commodity/Art

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Week

🌍🌡️ - Climate Prophecy: The Forecast Is 100% Chance of 'Cool'

1. No cases of cancer caused by HPV in Norwegian 25-year olds, the first cohort to be mass vaccinated for HPV

Last year there were zero cases of cervical cancer in the population that was vaccinated in 2009 against the HPV virus, which can cause the cancer in women. The HPV virus is extremely common, basically everyone comes into contact with one version or another of the virus in their lifetime.

The vaccine was given to girls only out of an abundance of caution, they were the most likely to contract cancer from the viruses, and because there was limited supply.

2. ‘Every square inch is covered in life’: the ageing oil rigs that became marine oases

Built decades ago, California’s offshore oil platforms are home to a huge diversity of marine life. According to a 2014 study, the rigs were some of the most “productive” ocean habitats in the world, a term that refers to biomass – or number of fish and other creatures and how much space they take up – per unit area.

3. Vaccinations may have prevented almost 20 million COVID-19 deaths worldwide

Vaccinations estimated to have averted 19.8 million COVID-19 deaths worldwide in their first year, according to the latest Imperial modelling study.

In the first year of the vaccination programme, 19.8 million out of a potential 31.4 million COVID-19 deaths were prevented worldwide according to estimates based on excess deaths from 185 countries and territories.

4. Global climate policy forecast predicts ‘well below 2°C’ Paris Agreement climate goals will be met

They report only a 10% probability we exceed 2°C by 2050. Temperatures are expected to peak between 1.7°C and 1.8°C, which is consistent with the “well below 2°C” objective of the Paris Agreement in Art. 2.1c.

5. Young driver fatality rates have fallen sharply in the US, helped by education, technology

Crash and fatality rates among drivers under 21 have fallen dramatically in the U.S. during the past 20 years.

Using data from 2002-2021, the report says that fatal crashes involving a young driver fell by 38%, while deaths of young drivers dropped even more, by about 45%.

6. A Virginia woman was feeling sad. Her doctor prescribed her a cat.

7. Remote workers report saving $5,000 to $10,000 a year

What value would American workers place on the privilege to work from home?

In a 2022 survey by FlexJobs, 45% of remote workers reported saving at least $5,000 a year. One in 5 reported saving $10,000 a year. The savings average out to about $6,000 a year. The poll reached 4,000 workers in July and August of last year.

Three years into the remote-work revolution, research increasingly suggests that telework is a commodity, a job descriptor worth thousands of dollars in potential savings and improved quality of life.

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That's it for this week :)

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#best news of last week

[yorshie]

Bayverse Headcanons

Just some headcanons I keep in mind when I'm writing bayverse. Will probably come back and add more as I decide on them.

Leonardo

Height/weight: 6’2”, 670lbs

Theme song : Loyal by ODESZA

Ambidextrous but if he needs to punch someone he uses his right hand

Has a dry sense of humor, more little quips and witty one liners than anything planned

Turns into a bit of a caveman when you’re in danger. He catches you going someplace dangerous? Straight to turtle jail for 1000 years. You don’t wanna be picked up and carried to safety? Too bad, it’s happening

Is the King of small touches. A hand on your back, a nudge of his knuckles to get you moving. Mr. soft eyes and low voice when he wants to get his way

Still gets into arguments with Raph. Sometimes they still dissolve into fisticuffs.

References vines to the horror of his brothers (his fav is “road work ahead”)

No one will play Risk with him because even if he’s losing he somehow bleeds everyone dry

Has a gameboy with exactly one game, Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town. All his animals have names like "Bob" or "Tilda"

can't cook, is banned from the kitchen, once set water on fire.

reads science fiction, fantasy and sagas a lot, though if you pay attention to his books the covers are sometimes swapped and it's almost always poetry or romances.

Not a big fan of PDA. Will give you a snoot boop or a chaste forehead kiss in public, but anything more is off limits. What’s that? You wanna snuggle? You better hope none of his brothers walk in because this turtle might panic and shove you off his lap in a snap decision instinct. You wanna go to his room? The scandal. What will everyone think? Fine, but he’ll ninja you in there. No one will know or see. Ninja silent. Except- Donnie will know. Donnie will see. Because he was sitting in the chair right next to you two and you both somehow forgot he was there.

Hogs the bed. And the covers. And the pillows. Basically if you want any bed commodity you better be prepared to snuggle

If you want him to watch tv that’s not sports it’s gotta be some older saga or classic that you actually have to pay attention to. Loves black and white martial arts movies. You once caught him hugging a pillow and watching Princess Mononoke with tears in his eyes.

Will just stare at the person who asked him to kill a little harmless spider before leaving the room

Donatello

Height/Weight: 6’8”/ 680lbs

Theme Song: Frequency by Tim Wolf

Left handed

Donnie is THE sarcastic little shit. 

He realizes quickly that while Leo has softness, and Raph is filthy, he doesn’t need to stoop to theatrics to get what he wants. He just has to make eye contact, tilt his head, and tell you in a calm, plain voice what he desires, and it works. 

Can’t keep his attention on one thing for a long period of time, or has to have multiple stimuli going on to keep focus. King of multitasking

The turtle most likely to curse

Can’t sleep without a nightlight and either music or a movie

Listens to filthy music when he’s working. 

The others gang up on him during trivia night to give everyone else a chance

the adrenaline junkie

one time he got Leo's tea mixed up with his coffee and he spat the substance clear across the Lair.

can cook but it's kinda bland. Can't bake to save his life, despite arguing with every failed cake like it’s out to get him: “it’s science why won’t you work??!”

hasn't opened a real book since the invention of the internet. Has a library of hard drives with the subject matter clearly labeled in alphabetical order. Mikey doesn't know about it and thus it has stayed relatively in order.

Doesn’t use his bed much, so the upside is you always have room to stretch out. Bad news is, if you want this turtle to get any decent sleep, you have to figure out how to keep him trapped enough where he can’t move without waking you up. And he’s a ninja.

Donnie likes to watch informative things. Like how it’s made, or unsolved mysteries. His crack show though? Cryptid hunters. He’ll laugh himself silly over people trying to trap Bigfoot or corner Mothman

The one that kills spiders

Raphael

Height/Weight: 6’5”/ 720lbs

Theme Song: Don’t Get in My Way by Zack Hemsey

Right handed

Turtle has a MOUTH and he is not afraid to open it to to get what he wants. Absolutely filthy when he wants to be.

Will turn into a little melted turtle puddle if someone is sweet to him. Doesn’t really turn to butter over words, but actions will get him every time.

Watches crocodile hunter and golden girls when no one else is awake. Loves animal documentaries, and zoboomafoo

Rough around the edges when it comes to heartfelt affection or feelings. With seduction he’s smooth, but telling someone he genuinely cares for them? Good luck stringing two words together my dude.

Prefers silence or listening when hanging out with someone. He’s slow with his input, careful with what he says. You’re winning if you can make him laugh

in the kitchen he’s either making the most disgusting looking thing that tastes fucking amazing or he’s grilling. Doesn’t tell anyone he learned how to make bread watching Julia Childe.

If he's doing something dangerous or something stupid, the worse thing you could say is along the line of "Leo said-" like, congrats, you just made sure he's gonna do the thing everyone knows he shouldn't. Flip side, he's trying to talk you out of doing something? Just sigh and say "ok, guess I'll go ask Leo-" Boom. Thing is done. Is it healthy? no. Does it work? yes.

Is the most considerate when it comes to sleepy time. He’ll make sure you have your own pillow, own blankets. He sleeps on his stomach and doesn’t move much, and is large enough that you could sleep tucked under the lip of his shell without fear of being squashed

Not the one to call if you see a spider. He will scream

Michelangelo

Height/weight: 6’0”/ 640lbs

Theme Song: Handclap by Fitz and the Tantrums

Right handed but if he puts his mind to it he can use his left equally for everything but writing

Is legally obligated to use cheesy pick up lines, and is a Talker

Uses lollipops and hard candy to keep his focus, bit of an oral fixation

completely ruins heartfelt moments by getting sidetracked. Can be giving the mushiest compliments then in the next breath go "so you gonna eat that leftover cake in your fridge or nah?"

Changes nicknames for you on a semi-weekly basis just to keep you on your toes and to annoy his brothers

Prankster extraordinare 

Can cook, but like the annoying ‘these are the worst ingredients to combine and somehow this tastes good and I'm going to sue you over telling me what's in this’

Is the best with understanding emotions and expressing himself. Yes, Leo might be better reading body language, but Mikey has empathy over why someone might react a certain way, not just 'if I do y then x happens'

Will push buttons to see how much he can bug someone

The one most likely to help you sneak out and get up to shit. Also the one most likely to get you two caught.

Makes up song lyrics when he doesn't know the actual words. Will change them to suit his needs, or how badly he wants to tick off his brothers. Not sure who would get the MOST annoyed by wrong lyrics on purpose, but you just know he has a different set fine tuned for each brother

His bed is basically a storage container for pillows and blankets. Which is good, because he is a serial cuddler, and if you need space to sleep you’ve got plenty of pillows to act as a body double if needs be

Loves soap operas, iron chef, diners drive-ins and dives. The more drama is in it, the more he eats it up. He and Raph bond over Golden Girls once the bigger brother realized he wasn’t going to get teased over it

Will pick up the spider to show you it’s not something to be scared of

#tmnt headcanons #tmnt bayverse #tmnt bayverse headcanons #bayverse leonardo #bayverse donatello #bayverse raphael #bayverse michelangelo #my writing snippets

[whitedarkmoonflower]

Your modern Sihtric fics are lovely! May I request a modern Sihtric fic (nothing serious just some fluff) where Sihtric and reader are best friends and madly in love with each other, but afraid of confessing their feelings. With some happy ending, please.

Pairing: modern!Sihtric x reader (female)

Authors note: this is the fluffiest fluff that I’m capable of 😅, but a small portion of angst is very recommended for mental health... Once more a big, warm thanks to the Anon who requested it. I know it took me a while to write this, but it was just the right thing in the right moment 💖

Credits: @arcielee you know you are awesome. Thank you for all the comments!

Warnings: fluff, fluff and only fluff, and a bit of angst 

Word Count: 4,2K

Tags: @sihtricfedaraaahvicius @hb8301 @zillahvathek

—----------------------------------------------

The old university library was something like your sanctuary. You loved its serene ambiance, which made it much easier to concentrate there than in your apartment that you shared with your best friends, Gisela and Brida. It was always buzzing with some activity. While Gisela pursued her music career, which meant spontaneous jam sessions with her band at all hours, Brida loved hosting weekly gaming nights. Consequently, moments of peace and tranquillity were rare commodities in your home.

Empty chip bags, discarded cola cans, and leftover pizza cartons were among most frequent remnants of the previous night's shenanigans that you usually found strewn across the living room making your attempts to get to the kitchen something like a hurdle-race. The energetic atmosphere was exhilarating, and you truly cherished the bond you shared with Gisela and Brida, but there were times when you just couldn’t stand the constant background noise anymore.

That's when the library became your haven. The familiar scent of ageing books, the soft rustling of pages turning, and the hush of some short whispered conversations created a stark contrast to your lively apartment. The cosy armchairs by the window were your favourite place to sink in and lose yourself in your studies, making the world outside feel miles away.

You could have never imagined that, but it was this very library – your quiet refuge– where you first met Sihtric, the heart-stoppingly handsome stranger that turned your whole world upside down. 

One late evening buried in stacks of books, you barely paid attention to the dark-haired guy who settled across from you. It was only when your laptop’s battery started to dwindle, making you search for a power outlet, that you noticed him.

"Mind if I plug in here?" you asked, pointing to the outlet under the table.

Sihtric, with his dark hair falling carelessly over his eyes, looked up, an amused smirk playing on his lips. "Only if you can tell me - why do cats purr?"

You raised an eyebrow, playing along, "Planning their next global takeover?"

He laughed, unplugging his laptop to make room for yours. "Fair enough. Go ahead and plug in."

“By the way, I'm Sihtric,” he introduced, his smile warm and inviting with a mischievous spark in his eyes. That smile made your heart race. Within a few minutes you both were lost in a conversation, permeated with giggles, snorts and muffled exclamations, inevitably earning several exasperating glances from other library visitors. 

“How about coffee? There’s a new place just around the corner,” Sihtric suggested as you both stood outside the library with your laptops and notes in hand.

“I practically run on coffee,” you chuckled. “Lead the way.” 

Hours flew by, filled with laughter and countless cups of coffee, and very soon you realised Sihtric was more than just a handsome face. He was witty, intelligent, attentive, and incredibly charming. You discovered his major was art history while yours was law—a fact that explained your paths never crossing earlier. And you both were in the last semester of your Masters preparing for final exams. Eagerly, you awaited the next day, hoping to see him again at the university.

Your friendship with Sihtric deepened effortlessly from that existential cat question. It evolved from brief coffee chats during breaks to lunches in the university's canteen and soon you found yourself spending more time with him than even with your roommates. You studied together in the library or huddled in some empty lecture halls burying yourselves in books, papers and notes. Sihtric had a rare talent to keep you grounded, when your thoughts wandered too far. It looked like he could sense when your mind started to drift, gaze becoming too cloudy. A short remark or joke, and he had brought you back into focus and to your reading material. And you tried to return the same favour to him. 

You were enamoured by the way he approached all challenges and changes in his life, always sprinkled with humour and lightness. You loved your shared study sessions. Even being completely unfamiliar with your subject Sihtric would conjure the most wild theories, debating them with the ferocity of an old learned lawyer, or try to simplify for you the trickiest concepts with a touch of humour only he possessed, making you laugh until your stomach was aching and convulsing.

You felt an undeniable connection for him, like two puzzle pieces fitting together. It wasn’t just his tousled hair or that cheeky grin, mischievous and mysterious at the same time. It was the aura about him, pulling you in like a moth to a flame. Every word he uttered seemed layered with depth, making you keen to decipher its nuances. You found yourself entranced by the subtlest of things—how his fingers danced across the keyboard, the intent furrow of his brow while concentrating. Silly little details, but to you they were precious.

You loved the way he seemed to dominate the space, not by size, but by his sheer presence, and the way his lips curved or his eyes lit up when he talked about something he was passionate about. You loved his infectious laugh that made your heart dance along. In simple words— you were head to toe in love with Sihtric.

Yet, Sihtric seemed entirely unaware of your affections, missing your longing gazes and lingering touches. Ever cheerful, supportive, and ready to lift your spirits, he displayed nothing beyond a profound friendship.

Your friends Gisela and Brida often teased you about your 'library romance', unable to grasp why you wouldn't confess your feelings to Sihtric. But you had made them swear to keep it a secret. You just couldn’t bear the thought of ruining your friendship by revealing yourself to him in case he didn’t feel the same.

As the final exams were nearing, you contemplated looking around for your own apartment. You adored your friends, but you were tired of the chaos in your shared living space. 

“That’s it.  I can't deal with these constant disruptions, random parties, and the perpetual mess in the kitchen. I need a new place,” one day you revealed your intentions to Sihtric over burgers and fries.

"You're ditching Gisela and Brida?" Sihtric asked sceptically.

"I love them, but I need to focus if I want to pass," you retorted.

"Well, how about we team up?" Sihtric suggested, leaving you momentarily stunned. "I've been apartment hunting too. I promise, I keep my things tidy."

"You're looking too? Why didn't you mention it earlier?"

"It just never came up," Sihtric replied nonchalantly.

Your heart skipped a beat. On one hand, the idea was tantalising. Sharing a space with Sihtric would mean even more shared moments and conversations, more shared meals, and certainly more late-night coffee sessions. But, on the other hand, you couldn’t ignore your reason, whispering that this was a complete madness. How were you going to concentrate or even breathe having him around all the time, if a casual glance from him often left you breathless? Living together would definitely intensify your feelings, making the apartment a cauldron of unspoken words and suppressed emotions. Yet, that was definitely not what you wanted to listen into, as you hushed your reason with a firm shrug. You weren’t about to let this opportunity slip by. 

"As long as you don't play death metal at 3 am, we're good," you answered, wiping ketchup off your chin, watching Sihtric’s face lightening up with a bright smile.

Thus, the search for an apartment began. After weeks of exchanging memes about outrageous listings and chuckling over exorbitant rents, the two of you finally found a cosy two-bedroom apartment near the university.

It was like a dream come true. Your mornings typically started with shared coffee, often brewed by Sihtric, who had mastered the art of making it exactly the way you liked. Evenings often found you both unwinding on the couch, discussing the day or getting lost in your favourite series. Sharing a living space meant you learned more about each other's habits - from Sihtric's unique way of organising his books to your habit of humming while cooking.

However, as days turned into weeks, you found that close proximity both comforting and challenging. Just as you had feared there was an unspoken tension in the air. You were unable to shake off the constant awareness of his presence. Your shared laughs, evenings spent together on the sofa, even the discussions about chores stirred emotions you carefully tried to suppress. His simple gestures, like leaving you the last piece of pizza or ensuring the fridge was stocked with your favourite snacks, were tugging at your heart.

In an attempt to distract yourself and keep those rising emotions in check, you decided to start dating again. Somewhere deep inside you there was a hope that perhaps another relationship would free you from the emotional swamp of loving your best friend. 

Nights out with different suitors became your regular escape from the constant whirl of feelings Sihtric invoked. But each time you returned home, his familiar silhouette on the couch in the living area or the soft sounds of music from his room made your heart beat stronger.

Sihtric, for his part, seemed to take your dating in stride. Ever the understanding friend, he listened to your stories, shared in your laughter, or offered a shoulder when dates didn’t go as planned.

—--------------------------------------------------------------

From the very moment Sihtric’s gaze met yours that fateful evening in the library, he was completely enchanted. He was perplexed  as to how the two of you, having attended the same university for four years, had never crossed paths. Determined to be closer, he quickly found out about your class schedule and began appearing during breaks or at the conclusion of your lectures. What began as fleeting conversations soon blossomed into extended chats, coffee dates, and lunches. 

You were almost an addict to coffee. Recognising this, Sihtric would often surprise you with two lattes, earning your genuine appreciation and undivided attention. Over time, these coffee breaks morphed into common expeditions to different local cafes, arguing over which blend was best, or simply savouring coffee in a shared silence. 

It was in those moments, with the steam from the mugs fogging the world around, that he felt closest to you. The casual touch of your fingers brushing against his while passing the sugar, the warmth of your laughter, the shared dreams and secrets–every small thing only deepened his feelings and longing for you. He often caught himself lost in the small details of your presence, admiring the gentle curve of your lips on the edge of the mug or the way your hair fell across your face. He’d scold himself afterwards internally, it was just a friendly coffee break, after all, but next time it would all repeat again, slowly drawing him to the brink of madness.

His heart would do a silly little jump every time he made you laugh. He loved how genuine it was, how it echoed in his ears long after the sound had faded. But, he played it cool, always masking his deeper feelings with humour.

Though Sihtric held no particular knowledge or interest in law, it didn't stop him from proposing study sessions together. The hours spent in library or lecture halls, when you both got buried in books and handwritten notes, were filled with small moments of pure joy. Like the time you had an eyelash on your cheek, and he pointed it out, saying, "Make a wish, maybe for a quieter roommate?"

You had rolled your eyes at that but still played along, blowing the eyelash away. He wished silently that he'd been brave enough to brush it off himself.

He treasured the moments where you both got lost in discussions and occasionally drifted into personal stories and dreams. This was how he found out that you had no family left, with both parents gone and no siblings. Sometimes he just kept silent and listened to you, getting lost in the sound of your voice. It was soothing, familiar, and dangerously addictive. The way you'd passionately discuss a topic, your eyes lighting up with enthusiasm, was mesmerising to Sihtric. He'd always found himself drawn to passionate people, and there you were, embodying everything he admired.

There was one evening, you were stressed about an upcoming paper, your eyes red-rimmed from exhaustion. Without thinking, Sihtric had reached out, gently tucking a stray strand of hair behind your ear. The palpable spark from that brief touch had left him breathless. He had quickly retrieved his hand and masked it with a joke, trying to lighten the mood, but inside, his emotions were burning with an engulfing flame.

Sihtric had fallen for you, hard. The realisation both thrilled and terrified him. Yet the fear of ruining the beautiful friendship you both shared didn’t let him open up about his feelings to you. Sometimes he would replay your conversations in his mind, looking for the right moment to tell you how he felt. But the dread of losing what you two had, of making things awkward between you both in case you didn’t reciprocate always held him back.

His world went tumbling, when you mentioned you were looking for a new apartment. Though he hadn’t previously planned to move out of his, he impulsively proposed a joint search, secretly hoping that the closeness this would bring, would make you finally notice him in a different light, seeing him as more than just a loyal friend, learning buddy and coffee companion.

—-------------------------------------------------------------

Returning home from yet another disappointing date, you flopped onto the couch, discarding your heels. Sihtric looked up from his book, raising an eyebrow in question. "Another misadventure?" he asked.

You groaned. "Why is it so hard to find a decent guy in this city?"

He chuckled, shifting to make room for you beside him. "Perhaps it's the vastness of the city, or maybe you're just too exceptional for most."

"Very funny, Sihtric," you said, poking him in the side. But you appreciated his attempts to lighten the mood. Every time.

Sihtric had witnessed them all–the charmers, the players, the flirty ones, the arrogant idiots and the simply bizarre ones. And every time a date went awry, it was him you returned to, seeking solace, laughing it off and looking for advice on what to do next.

He loved being your confidant, the one you turned to. It was him who wrapped you then in a soft blanket next to him on the couch and picked a movie to distract you from the evening’s disappointments. He'd often watch you from the corner of his eye, taking in your every gesture, every laugh, every sigh. The way your lips curved into a smile when something amused you on-screen or how your nose would scrunch up when you didn’t like a character’s choice or disagreed with them. These simple, stolen moments were his solace even if they were bittersweet.

On the surface, he perfectly played the part of the supportive best friend, but underneath it was a pure torture. Being so close, feeling the warmth emanating from you, and not being able to articulate his feelings was driving him crazy. 

And with every failed date you had, he wished for you to see what, or rather who, was right in front of you and had always been there. Him.

He remembered one night he almost let it slip. You complained about a particularly self-obsessed idiot that had kept talking only about himself all evening. 

"Sometimes, I wish I could just find  someone who really gets me, you know?" you  had mused with a heavy sigh.

Sihtric had locked eyes with you then and choked on the words that almost tumbled out. 

"Like me?" he’d wanted to ask, but fear had prevailed and he’d opted for a simple, "You deserve the best, you know. Someone who truly understands you."

Your giggles echoed in the apartment while Sihtric's heart raced. Moments like these were becoming more frequent and he wondered how much longer he could keep up the façade.

"And you?” you inquired. “I’ve never seen you with anyone. Ever thought of, you know, trying out a dating app?" 

"Thought I'd first try my luck with the classics–libraries, cafes," Sihtric shrugged, trying to sound casual. But you didn’t get his hint. How could you, Sihtric thought to himself, when for you he was merely the steadfast university friend you never knew you needed. 

—--------------------------------------------------------

The clock seemed to mock Sihtric with its persistent ticking. It was 11:30 pm and you were nowhere to be found. This wasn't like you. You always texted if your plans changed or if you were staying elsewhere. He tried to dismiss the growing knot of worry in his stomach, reminding himself you were an adult who could take care of yourself. But deep down, he couldn't shake off the feeling that something was wrong.

He tried to distract himself by watching TV, but everything he turned on just passed by as a blur. Every faint noise from the corridor made his heart leap, hoping it would be the sound of your key turning in the lock.

He picked up his phone repeatedly, indecisive whether to call or text you, but he didn't want to come across as overbearing. Finally, giving into the urge, he sent you a message, "Hey, everything OK?"

Minutes dragged on torturously as he waited for a response, but it just never came. He considered calling Gisela or Brida, but hesitated, thinking it would really look somewhat weird. 

Suddenly, a series of quick knocks echoed through the apartment, jolting him. He sprinted to the door, hoping it would be you on the other side, but instead he was met by two police officers with grave expressions.

"We regret to inform you there's been an incident," one began.

Sihtric's heart plummeted as he processed the officers' words. 

"Y/N... What happened to her?" Sihtric stammered, struggling to keep his voice steady.

"She was found on a street, unconscious, seemingly a victim of a robbery. Her ID directed us here," the taller officer replied.

"And she's...?" Sihtric couldn't bring himself to complete the sentence.

"She's been taken to the city hospital," the younger officer said softly. "She was still unresponsive when we left."

Without a word, Sihtric grabbed his jacket, rushing past the officers and leaving the door ajar.

As he raced to the hospital, a hurricane of emotions swirled within him—guilt for not being there, for not having protected you, anger at the attackers, and an overwhelming concern for you.

Upon arrival, he was guided to your room. There you were, lying on the bed with an IV drip attached, bruises marrying your beautiful face. He approached, hesitantly, heart pounding in his throat.

"She's sustained a significant head injury," a voice interrupted Sihtric's thoughts.

“What does it mean?” Sihtric’s voice trembled as he turned to face the doctor.

"It's critical. We'll be monitoring her. Surgery might become necessary depending on the swelling. Are you family? A partner? We might need your consent given the risks," the doctor explained.

The words of the doctor sank slowly in, as Sihtric turned to look at you. The feeling of failure and deep pain enveloped him. Admitting that he was no relative would mean that he will not be allowed to stay, so Sihtric just nodded, feeling a mix of dread and helplessness filling his chest, threatening to suffocate him. 

“You can stay. Speaking to her could help. Even unconscious, a familiar voice can be comforting,” the doctor advised before leaving the room.

In the soft glow of the hospital room, Sihtric pulled a chair close to the side of your bed. For several long moments, he just watched you, observing every detail of your face and the gentle rise and fall of your chest beneath the pale sheet.

"Hey," he began softly, brushing a stray hair from your forehead, letting his fingers linger on your cool skin. "It's me, Sihtric."

You lay motionless, your skin pale, eyes shut, your breathing faint. Sihtric took a deep breath, his voice barely above a whisper. 

"I know you can’t hear me, but there's something I need to tell you, and I can't hold it in any longer."

Gently clasping your hand, he softly brushed his thumb over your fingers. Leaning closer, he placed tender kisses on your knuckles.

"I've fallen for you. I've been in love with you for longer than I'd like to admit. I moved in with you to be close to you, to protect you, to show you how much I loved you, but I failed and never dared to speak it out. Can you imagine what a torture it was to watch you with others, offering support when you were heartbroken, and then seeing you move on? I’m such an idiot. If only I had braved to reveal my feelings for you, you might have never landed here,” Sihtric paused to take another deep steadying breath, as he noticed his voice quivering more and more with each word he spoke.

“I think I loved you from the first moment I saw you in the library. Do you still remember my silly cat’s question? It was the first thing that popped in my mind and your answer made me laugh. You always make me laugh," Sihtric’s grip on your hand tightened, as he continued. "Seeing you like this, it terrifies me. I don't want to imagine a life without you in it."

"Please, wake up. Come back to me. I can't lose you, not now, not when I've just found the courage to tell you how I truly feel," tears trickled down his cheeks as he leaned down, pressing his lips against your forehead, while his hands kept hold of your cold fingers. 

"I love you so much. Please, just don’t leave me," he whispered. 

Amidst the stillness of the room, Sihtric suddenly felt an unexpected pressure—your hand slightly squeezing his. He lifted his head, his gaze fixating to your face and eyes widening in surprise as your eyelids slowly fluttered open.

"Sihtric..." your voice, so weak, just above a whisper, broke the silence. "I... I've loved you too, for so long. We’ve been such fools …"

But before Sihtric could respond, the room was thrown into chaos. The machines connected to you began to blare alarms and the room was instantly flooded with medical staff.

"Please, step back! We need space!" a nurse demanded, trying to assess your vitals. A doctor quickly followed suit, taking command of the situation.

Before Sihtric could grasp what was happening, they unlocked the brakes on your bed and were already wheeling you out of the room. Desperate, Sihtric tried to follow, but a nurse held him back.

"Sir, you must stay," she insisted.

"Please, I need to be with her!" Sihtric's voice cracked, his plea heartrending.

The nurse gently placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. "They’ll do everything they can. Please, wait."

As the door swung shut behind, leaving Sihtric in the cold silence of the now empty room, a feeling of desolation gripped him. The walls seemed to close in, and he gripped his hair with both hands slowly sinking back into the chair. 

“She loves me,” Sihtric murmured and despite having never been religious, he found himself praying. “Please, don’t take her away. Don’t take her.”

Hours later, Sihtric anxiously paced in the small waiting room outside the operating area. His world seemed to spin, every tick of the clock echoing louder in his ears, every hospital announcement amplifying his anxiety. Each time a doctor emerged through the sliding doors, his gaze lit up with expectation and dimmed as someone else in the room was addressed. One time Sihtric witnessed an elderly couple break down in tears embracing each other while listening to the doctor and a surge of guilty relief washed over him that it wasn’t his bad news. 

Then, the door opened again, revealing the surgeon who had been with you. Sihtric's heart started to race as he made a step closer, every ounce of his attention honed in. 

“How is she?” his voice, laden with dread and hope, barely made a sound.

“The surgery was complicated. Frankly, the odds weren’t in her favour, but she's resilient. Something is driving her will to survive. We halted the bleeding, and she's stable now. You can see her," the surgeon declared, breaking the stifling tension.

The weight that had been pressing down on Sihtric seemed to lift, replaced by a rush of such an intense relief that his vision blurred and he nearly collapsed, feeling his knees weakening and giving way beneath him. But before he could hit the ground, the doctor's quick reflexes caught and steadied him, preventing a fall. 

"Easy there," he cautioned, immediately signalling a pair of nurses. They rushed to Sihtric's side, supporting him and guiding him to a nearby chair. "Take a moment," the doctor added, handing Sihtric a cup of water.

Sihtric's trembling hands grasped the cup, the cool liquid grounding him. After a short moment his breathing gradually evened out and he stood up, his eyes unmistakably betraying his urge to see you. 

“I’ll show you the way,” one of the nurses offered with an understanding look on her face. Sihtric nodded and followed as they quickly navigated through the sterile corridors, until they reached your room. 

Sihtric paused a moment before the door, taking a deep breath, before gripping the handle and gently pushing the door open.

#sihtric #sihtric kjartansson #the last kingdom #tlk #sihtric fanfic #sihtric fic #modern!sihtric #sihtric x you #sihtric x reader

[skybrushus]

Another drawing I started during a recent Picarto stream. The theme was weather and this was a request for Zecora doing a dance celebrating the rainy season.

     Now in both my Equestria Dreamscape and my anthro RESF Dreamscape zebras do not possess any means to magically manipulate the weather. However the many kingdoms and republics of the Southern Continent have devised ingenious ways to manage, move, store, conserve, treat the water resources that they receive. And there are many ceromonies and festivals every year that celebrate the arrival of the rainy season.

      Now in recent times there has been some cooperation between the countries of the Southern Continent and Equestria to provide assistance weather prediction, management and limited weather control. These efforts are for diplomatic reasons and goodwill missions,  but there are also other reasons as well. 

     Equestria is a major buyer of many agricultural crops from Southern Continent. Sugar, coffee, wheat, maize, sorghum, rice, and soy beans being the most common. So helping assure that the various nations of the zebras have consistent rainfall relative to their locale helps avoid severe fluctuations in the price of these commodities. 

     Equestria has also been establishing remote weather stations beyond its borders to help better predict weather patterns and systems that may enter the kingdom's borders. 

      Equestria has also been establishing remote weather stations beyond its borders to help better predict weather patterns and systems that may enter the kingdom's borders. In particular in my Equestria dreamscape a new Grand Map is being proposed, and before it is implemented the Crown wants prevent it from have any disastrous, unforeseen consequences on nations that they have treaties with.

      Finally both the Crown and private companies have invested significantly in various enterprises in the Southern Continent, and drought is terribly destabilizing force on the various nations there. So once again as a goodwill gesture Equestria has decided that helping your neighbor is a way to help yourself. I hope you like what you see. Please help make more art like this possible by supporting me at Patreon

#baron-engel #mlp #anthropomorphic #zecora #zebra #dreamscape #picarto

[memestockpile]

relentless melt (2023) feel free to change as needed.

my own youthful vigor is perhaps not entirely what it once was.

a precious commodity, time.

keep your eyes closed, please.

i see we have some ground yet to cover.

i noticed that you knew more than you said.

well, i believe i've kept you here long enough.

if you want a better answer, you must ask better questions.

you appear to have a resourceful mind.

that's supposed to be a secret, remember?

a scream by itself doesn't necessarily mean a crime.

i was with you, you damn idiot.

we're all outta luck then.

did someone strike you?

i propose that we go and have a drink.

something about it seems off.

that's encouraging.

i don't want to just be promising, i want to be excellent.

it's an old bit of thieves' magic.

learning something hard takes time.

would you like to dance?

run along, unless you want me to cut your face wide open.

how long have you been working on this?

it's pretty, don't you think?

i used to have so many pretty things.

fashion: i do not understand it!

i appreciate the arts.

i'm trying to teach you something here, my young friend.

not much of a reader.

aye. devilment afoot.

i don't theorize. i'm not one much for it. i observe.

you're a bright man, [name], but also a young man.

i thought i was to take you to dinner tonight.

i'd just gotten started with something, something really important, and already it's over.

i offer this only as a gentle suggestion.

the last guy you introduced me to was -- pretty strange.

how'd you do that?

must be my hearing going, then.

well, lad, don't just stand there in the dark, come on in and say hello.

i've brought a friend.

it's a wonderful age, yours. so much yet ahead of you. an age of rich potential.

i'd be willing to learn just about anything that you'd be open to teaching.

why don't you tell me something.

will you join me in the study?

you don't owe me an explanation.

do you think the cases are related? part of a pattern of similar attacks?

i read the newspapers. i read them every day.

the papers don't know everything that goes on.

who knows why they do what they do.

we don't even know where to begin looking.

what are you, in disguise or something?

ace stuff, absolutely ace stuff.

i beg your pardon.

and i am going to ask, mister, that you shut your face.

you're both being ridiculous, and i don't want to see anyone get hurt.

put that knife away. i've had more than enough knives pointed at me recently.

i've seen stranger things.

police don't know anything.

order some more coffee, on me.

you are in trouble, very much in trouble!

what exactly are you gonna do to me?

listen. i see what you're trying to do here.

you're a smart little bitch, i'll give you that.

i'm not frightened.

you're right. of course. i wasn't thinking. i'm sorry.

you're getting better at that spell.

let me close my eyes, and you describe him to me, and i'll see if i can visualize him.

is this where you live?

it seems like a noble experiment.

i have information. i learned something.

i know it's not what you want to hear.

i know the secret knock.

your reputation precedes you.

and what do you know of my loss?

please believe me when i say i understand your pain.

i am no longer interested in discussing things like a gentleman.

it was as though i were overhearing an entity that was suffering in hell.

what did i do, child?

it pains me to admit it, but yes.

you don't get to make that choice.

you caught me unawares with that trick the first time, commendably. but you're unlikely to catch me that way a second time.

do not speak to me of kindness. i do not want to hear that word in your mouth.

clasp your hands behind your back.

you and i are not alike.

this is not a matter for debate.

oh, my dear. my darling girl.

i'm not sure that's for me to say.

i asked you, [title/name], did i not? you would do well to answer.

can i order you some breakfast?

i got you a christmas gift.

i'm ok. it's hard, though.

i feel like i'm onto something here.

so you stole this book?

you're not a person who isn't brave.

how long was i out?

you're getting ahead of yourself.

you know what we're doing here is a crime.

you don't know that.

look, you don't have to do this with me, if you don't want to.

we're doing this together.

i know what happened to you, and i just wanted to say i am sorry.

you're distinctive looking, you know.

i don't have a better idea.

i heard you were looking for me.

i need you to do me a favor.

anything for family.

tomorrow night, i need you to make a policeman disappear.

forgive me if i don't shed a tear.

hey, buddy. you think you can see your way to buying me a drink?

let me think of how i want to put this.

sorry if i woke you. i couldn't sleep.

what's the worst thing you've ever done?

wily little bastard.

even with some whiskey in me i'm a good shot.

you damn kid, you move like a whip.

there's no coming back from that.

why don't you make yourself useful and hold this?

i don't really like the idea of you going down there to do something dangerous.

at the end of the day, you're still my [relationship].

you meet some interesting people in my line of work.

if this is where our time together ends, i hope it won't be, obviously, but if this is where it ends, i will want you to know that i won't have regretted a moment.

you look very handsome in your suit.

no. no, you can't. it isn't fair.

i hate to point this out, but i don't think it would be very wise for us to be found down here.

we accomplished something tonight. not without a cost, and the cost was high.

we should get you to a hospital.

i'm glad you're alive, [name].

i'm you, from the future.

you figured it out quick.

at the end of the day, it's just a scar. you get used to it.

do you want a cigarette?

this is weird.

it's a long story.

there are good people in every time.

ask me again in six months.

don't worry. you'll figure it out.

you want to know the truth?

you deserve better.

#roleplay meme #ask meme #inbox meme #inbox rp meme #roleplay #ask #meme #askbox meme #askbox #rp meme #rp inbox meme #tumblr rp #rp #tumblr roleplay #sentence starter meme #rp sentence meme #roleplay sentence meme #sentence starters #sentence meme #askbox rp

[grimvr]

do you feel like social media is taken too seriously?

i mean it would be foolish to pretend like social media isnt a huge part of our current society and doesn’t have an impact on real lives etc

but its still not the real world and people unironically need to walk through meadows and go to shows and make physical art and kiss their friends more and realize that social media isnt the end all be all

if the question is do i hate the extreme commodification of social media (both of the sites themselves and the way people turn themselves into commodities for the sites)- yes bring back smaller personal websites or post silly photos of your morning coffee or whatever

#again we live in a society

[mesaryth]

Last night i dreamt a new Bob Dylan song. It was one he always meant to write, but never got around to making. He listed all the horrifying, newly commercialized street corners of New York, London, and Paris; Tribeca, Hudson Yards, Bedford Ave and 7th, Rue Charlot in the Marais, that canal that's in East London. All these places had huge wheat-pastes promoting his new album. It was a black and white photo of his face with big text that said "DYLAN", right next to an ad for the new Jack Harlow bowl at Sweetgreen. He thought about making a song about these places, in an effort to prove to the listener that all art eventually becomes part of the machine, that everything transgressive is bought and sold as a commodity, that being transgressive is the least punk thing you could be, maybe even that the most punk person on the block is Jack Harlow, smiling on a billboard, happily eating his custom salad from Sweetgreen. Maybe it'd be cooler to not have that tattoo from that huge studio in [location]. The one right by the plant store that sells monstera plants for like 70 dollars. Yeah, that's where they're promoting Dylan's brand new album. He's pissed about it, he's not happy at all, he still has an excellent radar for who's cool (who's cool), who's a poser (who's a poser), who's a ripoff (who's a ripoff), who's a dreamer, he hasn't forgotten the beats, the lessons he learned along the road, and when he's in his Uber Black to Electric Lady Studios on 8th Street, he passes the newly condemned McDonald's that people only used to use as a bathroom. He passes Blank Street Coffee, and gets nauseous, cause right outside that Blank Street Coffee on the sidewalk is a massive ad for his brand new album. He wants to stop the car, walk up, rip it off the walls, sink his nails into the chipped green paint of the construction board behind it, tear at all the shreds and shed a tear about where did he go wrong. Is this what success is? To have your album promoted right by the Blank Street Coffee, where it used to be a cool stoop that you'd smoke cigs on? Tribeca, Hudson Yards (Tribeca, Hudson Yards), Bedford Ave and 7th, Rue Charlot in the Marais, that canal that's in East London, Tribeca, Hudson Yards, Bedford Ave and 7th, Rue Charlot in the Marais, that canal that's in East London, Tribeca, Hudson Yards (Tribeca, Hudson Yards), Bedford Ave and 7th (Bedford Ave and 7th), Rue Charlot in the Marais (Rue Charlot in the Marais), that canal that's in East London (that canal that's in East London), Tribeca, Hudson Yards (Tribeca, Hudson Yards), Bedford Ave and 7th, Tribeca, Hudson Yards...

#the location for the tattoo studio is the only word I can't hear properly no matter how many times i rewind..it sounds kind of like #livington but I don't think that's right

[epitomees]

Chie’s interests were brazenly on display, allowing for an easy deduction. The stack of video games automatically labeled itself as a last minute purchase. A case could be slipped into the stack, forgotten until it was knocked over, or in a moment of remembrance that yes, this was actually a game she owned. A collection of movies was also present, mostly martial arts, but unless it was critically acclaimed, Naoto felt that it too would be forgotten among its brethren.

Something else. Last year’s present was a moderate hit. Chie appeared to be thrilled that her haori went along with Naoto’s own, but summer was the season of festivals, food stalls and game booths abundant. It prevented Naoto from diving below that line, but beyond a plush, festival commodities were not to die for.

A platter of meat would have sufficed, knowing Chie’s carnivorous palate. They could have homemade yakiniku. Well, no. Rather, they could go to a yakiniku place. The only hindrance came in the form of Naoto’s pride. Compared to last year, it went below the bar of expectations. An edible meal someone could forget versus an article of clothing that one would see in the closet. But Chie had eaten more vegetables, ate less greasy Chinese take out from some dinky corner of Tokyo. Perhaps it would be all right to allow Chie to eat to her heart’s content. Covering meals completely wasn’t an everyday occurrence, and it would be preferable than conveyor belt sushi. Of course, it had to be a respected place.

Two days after her reservation was made, in a typical rude roommate greeting, Naoto threw one of Chie’s many green jackets directly at her face. “Happy Birthday.” (She wouldn’t take it personally, would she?)

“We’re going to a yakiniku restaurant. I already reserved a table, but we should head over now. It may seem like a step down compared to last year, but I hope you’ll find this year’s present acceptable as well.”

Surprises came in all shapes, sizes, and...people, so to say. High school Chie would never have thought one day she'd live with someone who tolerated her very hyperactive personality and invasive behavior. Let alone, a friend...and let alone, that friend being Naoto out of her close friend group. Circumstances led to them finding each other in the same place, around the same time, so covering the cost of a two-person apartment appeared suitable to their financial needs.

A year already passed. It hadn't felt like it. The first few days certainly were awkward, but not too foreign, at least to Chie. Naoto never was a morning person, nor someone willing to join in her daily workouts or exercises, or even eat the same foods as her. Their groceries trips always puzzled most clerks considering their different tastes and diets. Naoto's coffee addiction baffled them, too. It wasn't too bad. An acquired likeness, for sure, but Chie didn't bash the 'hot bean water' as much now like she did during the first few months together.

They learned more about each other, now that a whole year passed without someone winding up in the hospital from food poisoning. She assumed Naoto would highly consider separating since the detective preferred peaceful, quiet living spaces but...again, surprises always came in different ways.

Even now, as Chie's special day arrived, yet another bout of shock startled the messy-haired, slowly waking brunette. Days off meant sleeping in late. Plenty of naps, too. While she emerged from the cave known as her own room, she was met with a sudden spell of darkness. Lavender scents too. "MMPFF MPF!!!" Good use of words, even though no one understood it. She pried the jacket off her face, taking in a deep inhale of air in time to let out a rather large, very noisy yawn.

"Aaaaaahhh...hmmm? What's..." Chocolate eyes adjusted to the dim living room lighting until her focus returned, now centered on the darker shades of blue standing by the coat hanger. "...w-w-wait! You mean like...right NOW!?" So much for preparation. But it was food. A birthday dinner. A meal specifically reserved just for them.

"Oh!! OoooooOOOOH!! Okay! Gimme just a sec! I can go freshen up reeeal quick!" Back into the void of her room. She was rather quick, just as promised. A bit of deodorant and a splash of cold water to the face worked miracles. A change of clothes later, and Chie once again appeared. Although this time, she traded out a simple T-shirt and shorts for a more casual dining attire.

Specifically, the haori gifted to her, from Naoto.

"Why don't you wear yours too? I know we won't be going to any festivals today-" Maybe on the weekend. She was looking forward to sharing red bean taiyaki with her roommate. "-but...ya know, we could match!" Hopefully the restaurant staff didn't get any ideas.

Or maybe...Chie wanted them to...deep down...

#ic #Chie #chibitantei #Better Days - Post P4 Verse #Chie's Birthday 2023 #long post #((I think about them I THINK ABOUT THEM A LOT!!! #and they were roommates #at least let Chie hold your hand when you're walking there Naoto))

[dankusner]

Flower shop gays

Nelson, Long venture into 'Lowest Greenville' to open Art & Lily boutique

By DANIEL KUSNER | 01.16.09

David Nelson's cueball head was practically glowing on the Greenville Avenue sidewalk outside of his newest venture, Art & Lily.

He's talking to AT&T about getting the phone line installed into his boutique, which is packed with the nifty chandeliers, cool portrait paintings, Nelsons' nude drawings, sharp black-and-white photography, comfy chairs and sofas, antique rugs, a ginormous African mask, a coffee shop and a floral design studio.

Located next door to Lula Antique Mall, "in 'Lowest Greenville," Nelson says, Art & Lily has been open less than three hours.

And the shop is already bustling with foot traffic.

Nelson and his helpful barista Maryann laugh about how, in the late '70s, they used to slamdance there when the space was a punk club called D.J.'s.

Like a scene from a gay episode of "The Simpsons," Nelson immediately points out one of Greenville Avenue's local celebrities.

"She's the neighborhood drunk," Nelson gushes. "She asked me for an application, but we're already fully staffed. I mean, to afford her drinking habit, she must have a trust fund, right?"

Art & Lily is worth stopping in just to engage Nelson in conversation.

As a former creative director for the DIFFA Dallas Collection, he keeps Big D fabulously weird — a commodity in short supply in Bush's new hometown.

From the back of the store enters Bryan Long, a bearded heartthrob.

Long is the "Lily" part of the boutique.

And with his bear-hug arms, he carries in boxes of roses, hydrangeas and bouquets of freesia.

We have about two minutes to snap a photo on this historic "first day of business."

Do they expect a busy Valentines Day?

"Of course," Long says.

What kinda flowers do you send to the per- son you just broke up with?

"A bouquet of just stems with the heads cut off," Nelson laughs.

WIDE OPEN Art & Lily, 2000 Greenville Ave. at Oram Street

[abishekmuses]

Marketing is seduction

Style is a virtue - it's an external indicator of the lens through which you view reality, events and situations. It's the "Frame" that you inhabit - it's an expression of your aesthetic ideals - it shows the world where you find beauty. It shows the world the internal cadence - the tempo that marks the beat of your movements through life. More importantly, it reflects your capacity to appreciate beauty and your commitment towards embodying beauty and the extent to which you are willing to go for beauty.

We are fart-bags that are filled with flesh that's slowly rotting. We emanate odours, burp and one day, we'll die. Before that, depending on how unlucky our lot is, we suffer a bunch of ignominies - injuries, heartbreaks, embarrassments - we shit our pants, we get hard for people that don't want anything to do with us naked - we get jacked up wanting to see people naked - people who themselves will one day get old and need diaper changes or surgeries where their shit comes out through tubes on their abdomens. Why am I painting this grisly picture?

Because none of this stuff is news - we all know this. This is the nature of our physical reality as humans and this truth isn't lost on most of us. However, there is still is extraordinary capacity for style that we possess - This capacity to appreciate beauty - to do things with a sense of aesthetic - to " present" ourselves as works of art rather than as stinking pieces of meat.

Beauty makes life beautiful - duh! Ok let me try another way. Beauty makes life tolerable. Why do any of the things we do if we don't do them beautifully? Every moment, a human has the choice to frame things in such a way - do things in such a manner - that it can be elevated to poetry.

Again, none of these ideas are new. We know how the act of drinking coffee can be an act of ugly compulsion - think lines of irritated, haggard looking people at an airport starbucks waiting to catch an early morning flight - or an exercise in love, style and aesthetic bliss - think of someone who wakes up, works out, showers, does his hair up just right - puts on a clean white tee shirt and crisply ironed chinos - and with meticulous precision, arranges his cup, his spoon, his milk jug, his coffee grinder - and goes about infusing as much love and devotion as possible into making that cup of coffee - pouring his attention into every single step involved - doing it with a sense of care like not getting a microscopic part of the process perfectly right would be the end of the world. That's what i mean by elevating actions - making poetry out of life.

i'm not speaking about OCD though. that's just as unaesthetic as being slapdash as far as Im concerned. Insouciance is attractive. Devotion with insouciance - now that's poetry.

I think seduction is closely tied to this. An expert seducer is someone who values aesthetics - he lives it and breathes it. He might not even necessarily understand it as such. But his movements, his life possess a quality of otherworldliness. a sense of cinematic allure. A sense of art. Something elysian, astral, supernal. A sense of something immortal and infinite. Something that isn't so immutably beset by the banal, the mortal, the rotting and the mundane.

I feel like marketing is very similar to seduction in this sense. marketing is all about framing things - It's about creating something a bit more ethereal around commodities/products/services -which are just banal things.

A product is a commodity. It belongs to the realm of flesh and bones. A brand is something undying - it belongs to the realm of demigods. It is something supernal. Something astral. Something that is nebulous, subtle and powerful.

I'm writing all this just to get down some ideas that I've been working with. This is an attempt to publicly post my process.

I came across the term public journal recently - I guess this is an attempt to have one of those myself.

Paralysed with potential - This is an itneresting idea

Best writers make errors -e diting is key

Excitement is actually a really subtle form of fear - when it doesn't allow us to settle into the present moment - I catch myself these days with a feeling that i would traditionally label as "positive" - a feverish sense of excitement - like hey "I'm pumped!!!" - but upon closer inspection, it's an attempt to move away from the present moment. It's a refusal to accept the intensity of a given moment and relax into it - accept it. It's using the mind to project an imaginary future where the intensity of internal state in this moment is used to create positive fantasies in the future - subtly suggesting to yourself - i'll be happy and fulfilled then" - subtly sowing seeds for waking up the next morning (or whenever) with regrets for not inhabiting that fantasy reality.

[retromasterseo]

Furniture Trader

Title: Rediscovering Timeless Elegance: Exploring Furniture Trader – Retro Master

In a world where trends come and go, there's a timeless allure to the designs of yesteryears. Furniture Trader – Retro Master, a haven for enthusiasts of classic design, stands as a beacon amidst the ever-changing landscape of interior decor. Within its walls, an emporium breathes life into vintage aesthetics, meticulously curating pieces that whisper tales of bygone eras.

For aficionados of timeless design, stepping into Furniture Trader – Retro Master is akin to entering a treasure trove of nostalgia. Every corner of this sanctuary is adorned with pieces that evoke memories of a simpler, more elegant time. From mid-century modern sofas to art deco coffee tables, each item tells a story of craftsmanship and ingenuity.

What sets Furniture Trader apart is not just its collection of vintage furniture, but the passion and expertise that permeate every aspect of the establishment. The curators behind this emporium are more than mere merchants; they are storytellers, breathing new life into forgotten relics of the past. With keen eyes for detail and a deep appreciation for design history, they carefully select each piece to ensure that it meets the highest standards of authenticity and quality.

Walking through the aisles of Furniture Trader, one can't help but be transported to another time. Each piece reflects the aesthetic sensibilities of its era, whether it's the clean lines of mid-century modernism or the ornate flourishes of art nouveau. Yet, despite their diverse styles, all the furniture here shares a common trait: timeless elegance.

For those who seek to infuse their homes with the charm of the past, Furniture Trader – Retro Master offers a sanctuary unlike any other. Here, they can find not just furniture, but inspiration – inspiration to create spaces that reflect their own unique tastes and personalities. Whether they're searching for a statement piece to serve as the focal point of a room or simply looking to add a touch of vintage flair, they'll find exactly what they need within these walls.

But Furniture Trader is more than just a place to buy furniture; it's a community for like-minded individuals who share a passion for design and craftsmanship. Visitors can exchange stories and ideas, forging connections that transcend time and space. In an age where disposable consumerism reigns supreme, this sense of community is a rare and precious commodity.

In essence, Furniture Trader – Retro Master is more than just a furniture store; it's a testament to the enduring appeal of timeless design. It's a place where the past meets the present, where passion and expertise converge to create something truly extraordinary. So, whether you're a seasoned collector or simply someone who appreciates the finer things in life, come and discover the magic of Furniture Trader – Retro Master.

[worthyhog0001]

Electric Coffee Grinder: A Game-Changer in Your Morning Routine

In the fast-paced world we live in, mornings often set the tone for the rest of the day. For many, the day doesn't truly begin until that first sip of coffee hits the lips. If you're a coffee enthusiast, you know the importance of freshly ground beans in achieving that perfect cup. In this blog post, we'll explore the game-changing role of electric coffee grinders in transforming your morning routine.

The Art of Coffee Grinding

Before delving into the wonders of electric coffee grinders, let's understand the significance of the grinding process. Coffee beans are at their peak flavor just after being ground. This is because grinding exposes more surface area of the bean to the air, allowing the aromatic oils to be released and enhancing the overall flavor profile of the coffee.

Traditionally, coffee enthusiasts would rely on manual grinders or pre-ground coffee to get their daily caffeine fix. However, the advent of electric coffee grinders has revolutionized the way we approach our morning brew, offering unparalleled convenience and control.

Precision at Your Fingertips

One of the standout features of electric coffee grinders is their precision. Unlike manual grinders, which require a certain level of skill to achieve consistency, electric grinders provide a uniform grind size with just the push of a button. This consistency is crucial for extracting the full spectrum of flavors from your coffee beans, ensuring each cup is a masterpiece.

Most electric grinders also come with adjustable settings, allowing you to customize the grind size to match your preferred brewing method. Whether you're a fan of espresso, French press, or pour-over, an electric grinder gives you the flexibility to experiment and fine-tune your grind for the perfect cup every time.

Time-Saving Convenience

In our busy lives, time is a precious commodity. Electric coffee grinders are a time-saving game-changer, especially in the morning rush. With the simple press of a button, you can have freshly ground coffee in a matter of seconds, eliminating the need for manual effort and saving you precious minutes.

Imagine waking up to the aroma of freshly ground coffee without having to sacrifice extra sleep or compromise on flavor. Electric grinders seamlessly integrate into your morning routine, making the process efficient and enjoyable.

Retaining Flavor Integrity

One of the key advantages of electric grinders is their ability to preserve the flavor integrity of the coffee beans. Unlike pre-ground coffee, which starts losing its freshness and aroma soon after grinding, electric grinders allow you to grind your beans just before brewing.

The airtight containers of many electric grinders also contribute to preserving the freshness of the ground coffee. This means every cup you brew bursts with the full-bodied flavor and aromatic richness that can only be achieved with freshly ground beans.

Exploring the World of Coffee

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[hellsitesonlybookclub]

It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 29-30

CHAPTER XXIX

THE propaganda throughout the country was not all to the New Underground; not even most of it; and though the pamphleteers for the N.U., at home and exiled abroad, included hundreds of the most capable professional journalists of America, they were cramped by a certain respect for facts which never enfeebled the press agents for Corpoism. And the Corpos had a notable staff. It included college presidents, some of the most renowned among the radio announcers who aforetime had crooned their affection for mouth washes and noninsomniac coffee, famous ex-war-correspondents, ex- governors, former vice-presidents of the American Federation of Labor, and no less an artist than the public relations counsel of a princely corporation of electrical-goods manufacturers.

The newspapers everywhere might no longer be so wishily-washily liberal as to print the opinions of non-Corpos; they might give but little news from those old-fashioned and democratic countries, Great Britain, France, and the Scandinavian states; might indeed print almost no foreign news, except as regards the triumphs of Italy in giving Ethiopia good roads, trains on time, freedom from beggars and from men of honor, and all the other spiritual benefactions of Roman civilization. But, on the other hand, never had newspapers shown so many comic strips—the most popular was a very funny one about a preposterous New Underground crank, who wore mortuary black with a high hat decorated with crêpe and who was always being comically beaten up by M.M.'s. Never had there been, even in the days when Mr. Hearst was freeing Cuba, so many large red headlines. Never so many dramatic drawings of murders—the murderers were always notorious anti-Corpos. Never such a wealth of literature, worthy its twenty-four-hour immortality, as the articles proving, and proving by figures, that American wages were universally higher, commodities universally lower-priced, war budgets smaller but the army and its equipment much larger, than ever in history. Never such righteous polemics as the proofs that all non-Corpos were Communists.

Almost daily, Windrip, Sarason, Dr. Macgoblin, Secretary of War Luthorne, or Vice-President Perley Beecroft humbly addressed their Masters, the great General Public, on the radio, and congratulated them on making a new world by their example of American solidarity— marching shoulder to shoulder under the Grand Old Flag, comrades in the blessings of peace and comrades in the joys of war to come.

Much-heralded movies, subsidized by the government (and could there be any better proof of the attention paid by Dr. Macgoblin and the other Nazi leaders to the arts than the fact that movie actors who before the days of the Chief were receiving only fifteen hundred gold dollars a week were now getting five thousand?), showed the M.M.'s driving armored motors at eighty miles an hour, piloting a fleet of one thousand planes, and being very tender to a little girl with a kitten.

Everyone, including Doremus Jessup, had said in 1935, "If there ever is a Fascist dictatorship here, American humor and pioneer independence are so marked that it will be absolutely different from anything in Europe."

For almost a year after Windrip came in, this seemed true. The Chief was photographed playing poker, in shirtsleeves and with a derby on the back of his head, with a newspaperman, a chauffeur, and a pair of rugged steel-workers. Dr. Macgoblin in person led an Elks' brass band and dived in competition with the Atlantic City bathing-beauties. It was reputably reported that M.M.'s apologized to political prisoners for having to arrest them, and that the prisoners joked amiably with the guards... at first.

All that was gone, within a year after the inauguration, and surprised scientists discovered that whips and handcuffs hurt just as sorely in the clear American air as in the miasmic fogs of Prussia.

Doremus, reading the authors he had concealed in the horsehair sofa—the gallant Communist, Karl Billinger, the gallant anti- Communist, Tchernavin, and the gallant neutral, Lorant—began to see something like a biology of dictatorships, all dictatorships. The universal apprehension, the timorous denials of faith, the same methods of arrest—sudden pounding on the door late at night, the squad of police pushing in, the blows, the search, the obscene oaths at the frightened women, the third degree by young snipe of officials, the accompanying blows and then the formal beatings, when the prisoner is forced to count the strokes until he faints, the leprous beds and the sour stew, guards jokingly shooting round and round a prisoner who believes he is being executed, the waiting in solitude to know what will happen, till men go mad and hang themselves—

Thus had things gone in Germany, exactly thus in Soviet Russia, in Italy and Hungary and Poland, Spain and Cuba and Japan and China. Not very different had it been under the blessings of liberty and fraternity in the French Revolution. All dictators followed the same routine of torture, as if they had all read the same manual of sadistic etiquette. And now, in the humorous, friendly, happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twain, Doremus saw the homicidal maniacs having just as good a time as they had had in central Europe.

America followed, too, the same ingenious finances as Europe. Windrip had promised to make everybody richer, and had contrived to make everybody, except for a few hundred bankers and industrialists and soldiers, much poorer. He needed no higher mathematicians to produce his financial statements: any ordinary press agent could do them. To show a 100 per cent economy in military expenditures, while increasing the establishment 700 per cent, it had been necessary only to charge up all expenditures for the Minute Men to non-military departments, so that their training in the art of bayonet-sticking was debited to the Department of Education. To show an increase in average wages one did tricks with "categories of labor" and "required minimum wages," and forgot to state how many workers ever did become entitled to the "minimum," and how much was charged as wages, on the books, for food and shelter for the millions in the labor camps.

It all made dazzling reading. There had never been more elegant and romantic fiction.

Even loyal Corpos began to wonder why the armed forces, army and M.M.'s together, were being so increased. Was a frightened Windrip getting ready to defend himself against a rising of the whole nation? Did he plan to attack all of North and South America and make himself an emperor? Or both? In any case, the forces were so swollen that even with its despotic power of taxation, the Corpo government never had enough. They began to force exports, to practice the "dumping" of wheat, corn, timber, copper, oil, machinery. They increased production, forced it by fines and threats, then stripped the farmer of all he had, for export at depreciated prices. But at home the prices were not depreciated but increased, so that the more we exported, the less the industrial worker in America had to eat. And really zealous County Commissioners took from the farmer (after the patriotic manner of many Mid-Western counties in 1918) even his seed grain, so that he could grow no more, and on the very acres where once he had raised superfluous wheat he now starved for bread. And while he was starving, the Commissioners continued to try to make him pay for the Corpo bonds which he had been made to buy on the instalment plan.

But still, when he did finally starve to death, none of these things worried him.

There were bread lines now in Fort Beulah, once or twice a week.

The hardest phenomenon of dictatorship for a Doremus to understand, even when he saw it daily in his own street, was the steady diminution of gayety among the people.

America, like England and Scotland, had never really been a gay nation. Rather it had been heavily and noisily jocular, with a substratum of worry and insecurity, in the image of its patron saint, Lincoln of the rollicking stories and the tragic heart. But at least there had been hearty greetings, man to man; there had been clamorous jazz for dancing, and the lively, slangy catcalls of young people, and the nervous blatting of tremendous traffic.

All that false cheerfulness lessened now, day by day.

The Corpos found nothing more convenient to milk than public pleasures. After the bread had molded, the circuses were closed. There were taxes or increased taxes on motorcars, movies, theaters, dances, and ice-cream sodas. There was a tax on playing a phonograph or radio in any restaurant. Lee Sarason, himself a bachelor, conceived of super-taxing bachelors and spinsters, and contrariwise of taxing all weddings at which more than five persons were present.

Even the most reckless youngsters went less and less to public entertainments, because no one not ostentatiously in uniform cared to be noticed, these days. It was impossible to sit in a public place without wondering which spies were watching you. So all the world stayed home—and jumped anxiously at every passing footstep, every telephone ring, every tap of an ivy sprig on the window.

The score of people definitely pledged to the New Underground were the only persons to whom Doremus dared talk about anything more incriminating than whether it was likely to rain, though he had been the friendliest gossip in town. Always it had taken ten minutes longer than was humanly possible for him to walk to the Informer office, because he stopped on every corner to ask after someone's sick wife, politics, potato crop, opinions about Deism, or luck at fishing.

As he read of rebels against the régime who worked in Rome, in Berlin, he envied them. They had thousands of government agents, unknown by sight and thus the more dangerous, to watch them; but also they had thousands of comrades from whom to seek encouragement, exciting personal tattle, shop talk, and the assurance that they were not altogether idiotic to risk their lives for a mistress so ungrateful as Revolution. Those secret flats in great cities— perhaps some of them really were filled with the rosy glow they had in fiction. But the Fort Beulahs, anywhere in the world, were so isolated, the conspirators so uninspiringly familiar one to another, that only by inexplicable faith could one go on.

Now that Lorinda was gone, there certainly was nothing very diverting in sneaking round corners, trying to look like somebody else, merely to meet Buck and Dan Wilgus and that good woman, Sissy!

Buck and he and the rest—they were such amateurs. They needed the guidance of veteran agitators like Mr. Ailey and Mr. Bailey and Mr. Cailey.

Their feeble pamphlets, their smearily printed newspaper, seemed futile against the enormous blare of Corpo propaganda. It seemed worse than futile, it seemed insane, to risk martyrdom in a world where Fascists persecuted Communists, Communists persecuted Social-Democrats, Social-Democrats persecuted everybody who would stand for it; where "Aryans" who looked like Jews persecuted Jews who looked like Aryans and Jews persecuted their debtors; where every statesman and clergyman praised Peace and brightly asserted that the only way to get Peace was to get ready for War.

What conceivable reason could one have for seeking after righteousness in a world which so hated righteousness? Why do anything except eat and read and make love and provide for sleep that should be secure against disturbance by armed policemen?

He never did find any particularly good reason. He simply went on.

In June, when the Fort Beulah cell of the New Underground had been carrying on for some three months, Mr. Francis Tasbrough, the golden quarryman, called on his neighbor, Doremus.

"How are you, Frank?"

"Fine, Remus. How's the old carping critic?"

"Fine, Frank. Still carping. Fine carping weather, at that. Have a cigar?"

"Thanks. Got a match? Thanks. Saw Sissy yesterday. She looks fine."

"Yes, she's fine. I saw Malcolm driving by yesterday. How did he like it in the Provincial University, at New York?"

"Oh, fine—fine. He says the athletics are grand. They're getting Primo Carnera over to coach in tennis next year—I think it's Carnera—I think it's tennis—but anyway, the athletics are fine there, Malcolm says. Say, uh, Remus, there's something I been meaning to ask you. I, uh—The fact is—I want you to be sure and not repeat this to anybody. I know you can be trusted with a secret, even if you are a newspaperman—or used to be, I mean, but— The fact is (and this is inside stuff; official), there's going to be some governmental promotions all along the line—this is confidential, and it comes to me straight from the Provincial Commissioner, Colonel Haik. Luthorne is finished as Secretary of War—he's a nice fellow, but he hasn't got as much publicity for the Corpos out of his office as the Chief expected him to. Haik is to have his job, and also take over the position of High Marshal of the Minute Men from Lee Sarason—I suppose Sarason has too much to do. Well then, John Sullivan Reek is slated to be Provincial Commissioner; that leaves the office of District Commissioner for Vermont-New Hampshire empty, and I'm one of the people being seriously considered. I've done a lot of speaking for the Corpos, and I know Dewey Haik very well—I was able to advise him about erecting public buildings. Of course there's none of the County Commissioners around here that measure up to a district commissionership—not even Dr. Staubmeyer—certainly not Shad Ledue. Now if you could see your way clear to throw in with me, your influence would help—"

"Good heavens, Frank, the worst thing you could have happen, if you want the job, is to have me favor you! The Corpos don't like me. Oh, of course they know I'm loyal, not one of these dirty, sneaking anti-Corpos, but I never made enough noise in the paper to please 'em."

"That's just it, Remus! I've got a really striking idea. Even if they don't like you, the Corpos respect you, and they know how long you've been important in the State. We'd all be greatly pleased if you came out and joined us. Now just suppose you did so and let people know that it was my influence that converted you to Corpoism. That might give me quite a leg-up. And between old friends like us, Remus, I can tell you that this job of District Commissioner would be useful to me in the quarry business, aside from the social advantages. And if I got the position, I can promise you that I'd either get the Informer taken away from Staubmeyer and that dirty little stinker, Itchitt, and given back to you to run absolutely as you pleased—providing, of course, you had the sense to keep from criticizing the Chief and the State. Or, if you'd rather, I think I could probably wangle a job for you as military judge (they don't necessarily have to be lawyers) or maybe President Peaseley's job as District Director of Education— you'd have a lot of fun out of that!—awfully amusing the way all the teachers kiss the Director's foot! Come on, old man! Think of all the fun we used to have in the old days! Come to your senses and face the inevitable and join us and fix up some good publicity for me. How about it—huh, huh?"

Doremus reflected that the worst trial of a revolutionary propagandist was not risking his life, but having to be civil to people like Future-Commissioner Tasbrough.

He supposed that his voice was polite as he muttered, "Afraid I'm too old to try it, Frank," but apparently Tasbrough was offended. He sprang up and tramped away grumbling, "Oh, very well then!"

"And I didn't give him a chance to say anything about being realistic or breaking eggs to make an omelet," regretted Doremus.

The next day Malcolm Tasbrough, meeting Sissy on the street, made his beefy most of cutting her. At the time the Jessups thought that was very amusing. They thought the occasion less amusing when Malcolm chased little David out of the Tasbrough apple orchard, which he had been wont to use as the Great Western Forest where at any time one was rather more than likely to meet Kit Carson, Robin Hood, and Colonel Lindbergh hunting together.

Having only Frank's word for it, Doremus could do no more than hint in Vermont Vigilance that Colonel Dewey Haik was to be made Secretary of War, and give Haik's actual military record, which included the facts that as a first lieutenant in France in 1918, he had been under fire for less than fifteen minutes, and that his one real triumph had been commanding state militia during a strike in Oregon, when eleven strikers had been shot down, five of them in the back.

Then Doremus forgot Tasbrough completely and happily.

CHAPTER XXX

BUT worse than having to be civil to the fatuous Mr. Tasbrough was keeping his mouth shut when, toward the end of June, a newspaperman at Battington, Vermont, was suddenly arrested as editor of Vermont Vigilance and author of all the pamphlets by Doremus and Lorinda. He went to concentration camp. Buck and Dan Wilgus and Sissy prevented Doremus from confessing, and from even going to call on the victim, and when, with Lorinda no longer there as confidante, Doremus tried to explain it all to Emma, she said, Wasn't it lucky that the government had blamed somebody else!

Emma had worked out the theory that the N.U. activity was some sort of a naughty game which kept her boy, Doremus, busy after his retirement. He was mildly nagging the Corpos. She wasn't sure that it was really nice to nag the legal authorities, but still, for a little fellow, her Doremus had always been surprisingly spunky—just like (she often confided to Sissy) a spunky little Scotch terrier she had owned when she was a girl—Mr. McNabbit its name had been, a little Scotch terrier, but my! so spunky he acted like he was a regular lion!

She was rather glad that Lorinda was gone, though she liked Lorinda and worried about how well she might do with a tea room in a new town, a town where she had never lived. But she just couldn't help feeling (she confided not only to Sissy but to Mary and Buck) that Lorinda, with all her wild crazy ideas about women's rights, and workmen being just as good as their employers, had a bad influence on Doremus's tendency to show off and shock people. (She mildly wondered why Buck and Sissy snorted so. She hadn't meant to say anything particularly funny!)

For too many years she had been used to Doremus's irregular routine to have her sleep disturbed by his returning from Buck's at the improper time to which she referred as "at all hours," but she did wish he would be "more on time for his meals," and she gave up the question of why, these days, he seemed to like to associate with Ordinary People like John Pollikop, Dan Wilgus, Daniel Babcock, and Pete Vutong—my! some people said Pete couldn't even read and write, and Doremus so educated and all! Why didn't he see more of lovely people like Frank Tasbrough and Professor Staubmeyer and Mr. R. C. Crowley and this new friend of his, the Hon. John Sullivan Reek?

Why couldn't he keep out of politics? She'd always SAID they were no occupation for a gentleman!

Like David, now ten years old (and like twenty or thirty million other Americans, from one to a hundred, but all of the same mental age), Emma thought the marching M.M.'s were a very fine show indeed, so much like movies of the Civil War, really quite educational; and while of course if Doremus didn't care for President Windrip, she was opposed to him also, yet didn't Mr. Windrip speak beautifully about pure language, church attendance, low taxation, and the American flag?

The realists, the makers of omelets, did climb, as Tasbrough had predicted. Colonel Dewey Haik, Commissioner of the Northeastern Province, became Secretary of War and High Marshal of M.M.'s, while the former secretary, Colonel Luthorne, retired to Kansas and the real-estate business and was well spoken of by all business men for being thus willing to give up the grandeur of Washington for duty toward practical affairs and his family, who were throughout the press depicted as having frequently missed him. It was rumored in N.U. cells that Haik might go higher even than Secretary of War; that Windrip was worried by the forced growth of a certain effeminacy in Lee Sarason under the arc light of glory.

Francis Tasbrough was elevated to District Commissionership at Hanover. But Mr. Sullivan Reek did not in series go on to be Provincial Commissioner. It was said that he had too many friends among just the old-line politicians whose jobs the Corpos were so enthusiastically taking. No, the new Provincial Commissioner, viceroy and general, was Military Judge Effingham Swan, the one man whom Mary Jessup Greenhill hated more than she did Shad Ledue.

Swan was a splendid commissioner. Within three days after taking office, he had John Sullivan Reek and seven assistant district commissioners arrested, tried, and imprisoned, all within twenty-four hours, and an eighty-year-old woman, mother of a New Underground agent but not otherwise accused of wickedness, penned in a concentration camp for the more desperate traitors. It was in a disused quarry which was always a foot deep in water. After he had sentenced her, Swan was said to have bowed to her most courteously.

The New Underground sent out warning, from headquarters in Montreal, for a general tightening up of precautions against being caught distributing propaganda. Agents were disappearing rather alarmingly.

Buck scoffed, but Doremus was nervous. He noticed that the same strange man, ostensibly a drummer, a large man with unpleasant eyes, had twice got into conversation with him in the Hotel Wessex lobby, and too obviously hinted that he was anti-Corpo and would love to have Doremus say something nasty about the Chief and the M.M.'s.

Doremus became cautious about going out to Buck's. He parked his car in half-a-dozen different wood-roads and crept afoot to the secret basement.

On the evening of the twenty-eighth of June, 1938, he had a notion that he was being followed, so closely did a car with red-tinted headlights, anxiously watched in his rear-view mirror, stick behind him as he took the Keezmet highway down to Buck's. He turned up a side road, down another. The spy car followed. He stopped, in a driveway on the left-hand side of the road, and angrily stepped out, in time to see the other car pass, with a man who looked like Shad Ledue driving. He swung round then and, without concealment, bolted for Buck's.

In the basement, Buck was contentedly tying up bundles of the Vigilance, while Father Perefixe, in his shirtsleeves, vest open and black dickey swinging beneath his reversed collar, sat at a plain pine table, writing a warning to New England Catholics that though the Corpos had, unlike the Nazis in Germany, been shrewd enough to flatter prelates, they had lowered the wages of French-Canadian Catholic mill hands and imprisoned their leaders just as severely as in the case of the avowedly wicked Protestants.

Perefixe smiled up at Doremus, stretched, lighted a pipe, and chuckled, "As a great ecclesiast, Doremus, is it your opinion that I shall be committing a venial or a mortal sin by publishing this little masterpiece—the work of my favorite author—without the Bishop's imprimatur?"

"Stephen! Buck! I think they're on to us! Maybe we've got to fold up already and get the press and type out of here!" He told of being shadowed. He telephoned to Julian, at M.M. headquarters, and (since there were too many French-Canadian inspectors about for him to dare to use his brand of French) he telephoned in the fine new German he had been learning by translation:

"Denks du ihr Freunds dere haben a Idee die letzt Tag von vot ve mach here?"

And the college-bred Julian had so much international culture as to be able to answer: "Ja, Ich mein ihr vos sachen morning free. Look owid!"

How could they move? Where?

Dan Wilgus arrived, in panic, an hour after.

"Say! They're watching us!" Doremus, Buck, and the priest gathered round the black viking of a man. "Just now when I came in I thought I heard something in the bushes, here in the yard, near the house, and before I thought, I flashed my torch on him, and by golly if it wasn't Aras Dilley, and not in uniform—and you know how Aras loves his God—excuse me, Father—how he loves his uniform. He was disguised! Sure! In overalls! Looked like a jackass that's gone under a clothes-line! Well, he'd been rubbering at the house. Course these curtains are drawn, but I don't know what he saw and—"

The three large men looked to Doremus for orders.

"We got to get all this stuff out of here! Quick! Take it and hide it in Truman Webb's attic. Stephen: get John Pollikop and Mungo Kitterick and Pete Vutong on the phone—get 'em here, quick— tell John to stop by and tell Julian to come as soon as he can. Dan: start dismantling the press. Buck: bundle up all the literature." As he spoke, Doremus was wrapping type in scraps of newspaper. And at three next morning, before light, Pollikop was driving toward Truman Webb's farmhouse the entire equipment of the New Underground printing establishment, in Buck's old farm truck, from which blatted, for the benefit of all ears that might be concerned, two frightened calves.

Next day Julian ventured to invite his superior officers, Shad Ledue and Emil Staubmeyer, to a poker session at Buck's. They came, with alacrity. They found Buck, Doremus, Mungo Kitterick, and Doc Itchitt—the last an entirely innocent participant in certain deceptions.

They played in Buck's parlor. But during the evening Buck announced that anyone wanting beer instead of whisky would find it in a tub of ice in the basement, and that anyone wishing to wash his hands would find two bathrooms upstairs.

Shad hastily went for beer. Doc Itchitt even more hastily went to wash his hands. Both of them were gone much longer than one would have expected.

When the party broke up and Buck and Doremus were alone, Buck shrieked with bucolic mirth: "I could scarcely keep a straight face when I heard good old Shad opening the cupboards and taking a fine long look-see for pamphlets down in the basement. Well, Cap'n Jessup, that about ends their suspicion of this place as a den of traitors, I guess! God, but isn't Shad dumb!"

This was at perhaps 3 A.M. on the morning of June thirtieth.

Doremus stayed home, writing sedition, all the afternoon and evening of the thirtieth, hiding the sheets under pages of newspaper in the Franklin stove in his study, so that he could touch them off with a match in case of a raid—a trick he had learned from Karl Billinger's anti-Nazi Fatherland.

This new opus was devoted to murders ordered by Commissioner Effingham Swan.

On the first and second of July, when he sauntered uptown, he was rather noticeably encountered by the same weighty drummer who had picked him up in the Hotel Wessex lobby before, and who now insisted on their having a drink together. Doremus escaped, and was conscious that he was being followed by an unknown young man, flamboyant in an apricot-colored polo shirt and gray bags, whom he recognized as having worn M.M. uniform at a parade in June. On July third, rather panicky, Doremus drove to Truman Webb's, taking an hour of zigzagging to do it, and warned Truman not to permit any more printing till he should have a release.

When Doremus went home, Sissy lightly informed him that Shad had insisted she go out to an M.M. picnic with him on the next afternoon, the Fourth, and that, information or no, she had refused. She was afraid of him, surrounded by his ready playmates.

That night of the third, Doremus slept only in sick spasms. He was reasonlessly convinced that he would be arrested before dawn. The night was overcast and electric and uneasy. The crickets sounded as though they were piping under compulsion, in a rhythm of terror. He lay throbbing to their sound. He wanted to flee—but how and where, and how could he leave his threatened family? For the first time in years he wished that he were sleeping beside the unperturbable Emma, beside her small earthy hillock of body. He laughed at himself. What could Emma do to protect him against Minute Men? Just scream! And what then? But he, who always slept with his door shut, to protect his sacred aloneness, popped out of bed to open the door, that he might have the comfort of hearing her breathe, and the fiercer Mary stir in slumber, and Sissy's occasional young whimper.

He was awakened before dawn by early firecrackers. He heard the tramping of feet. He lay taut. Then he awoke again, at seven-thirty, and was slightly angry that nothing happened.

The M.M.'s brought out their burnished helmets and all the rideable horses in the neighborhood—some of them known as most superior plow-horses—for the great celebration of the New Freedom on the morning of Fourth of July. There was no post of the American Legion in the jaunty parade. That organization had been completely suppressed, and a number of American Legion leaders had been shot. Others had tactfully taken posts in the M.M. itself.

The troops, in hollow square, with the ordinary citizenry humbly jammed in behind them and the Jessup family rather hoity-toity on the outskirts, were addressed by Ex-Governor Isham Hubbard, a fine ruddy old rooster who could say "Cock-a-doodle-do" with more profundity than any fowl since Æsop. He announced that the Chief had extraordinary resemblances to Washington, Jefferson, and William B. McKinley, and to Napoleon on his better days.

The trumpets blew, the M.M.'s gallantly marched off nowhere in particular, and Doremus went home, feeling much better after his laugh. Following noon dinner, since it was raining, he proposed a game of contract to Emma, Mary, and Sissy—with Mrs. Candy as volunteer umpire.

But the thunder of the hill country disquieted him. Whenever he was dummy, he ambled to a window. The rain ceased; the sun came out for a false, hesitating moment, and the wet grass looked unreal. Clouds with torn bottoms, like the hem of a ragged skirt, were driven down the valley, cutting off the bulk of Mount Faithful; the sun went out as in a mammoth catastrophe; and instantly the world was in unholy darkness, which poured into the room.

"Why, it's quite dark, isn't it! Sissy, turn on the lights," said Emma.

The rain attacked again, in a crash, and to Doremus, looking out, the whole knowable world seemed washed out. Through the deluge he saw a huge car flash, the great wheels throwing up fountains. "Wonder what make of car that is? Must be a sixteen-cylinder Cadillac, I guess," reflected Doremus. The car swerved into his own gateway, almost knocking down a gatepost, and stopped with a jar at his porch. From it leaped five Minute Men, black waterproof capes over their uniforms. Before he could quite get through the reflection that he recognized none of them, they were there in the room. The leader, an ensign (and most certainly Doremus did not recognize him) marched up to Doremus, looked at him casually, and struck him full in the face.

Except for the one light pink of the bayonet when he had been arrested before, except for an occasional toothache or headache, or a smart when he had banged a fingernail, Doremus Jessup had not for thirty years known authentic pain. It was as incredible as it was horrifying, this torture in his eyes and nose and crushed mouth. He stood bent, gasping, and the Ensign again smashed his face, and observed, "You are under arrest."

Mary had launched herself on the Ensign, was hitting at him with a china ash tray. Two M.M.'s dragged her off, threw her on the couch, and one of them pinned her there. The other two guards were bulking over the paralyzed Emma, the galvanized Sissy.

Doremus vomited suddenly and collapsed, as though he were dead drunk.

He was conscious that the five M.M.'s were yanking the books from the shelves and hurling them on the floor, so that the covers split, and with their pistol butts smashing vases and lamp shades and small occasional tables. One of them tattooed a rough M M on the white paneling above the fireplace with shots from his automatic.

The Ensign said only, "Careful, Jim," and kissed the hysterical Sissy.

Doremus struggled to get up. An M.M. kicked him in the elbow. It felt like death itself, and Doremus writhed on the floor. He heard them tramping upstairs. He remembered then that his manuscript about the murders by Provincial Commissioner Effingham Swan was hidden in the Franklin stove in his study.

The sound of their smashing of furniture in the bedrooms on the second floor was like that of a dozen wood-choppers gone mad.

In all his agony, Doremus struggled to get up—to set fire to the papers in the stove before they should be found. He tried to look at his women. He could make out Mary, tied to the couch. (When had that ever happened?) But his vision was too blurred, his mind too bruised, to see anything clearly. Staggering, sometimes creeping on his hands and knees, he did actually get past the men in the bedrooms and up the stairs to the third floor and his study.

He was in time to see the Ensign throwing his best-beloved books and his letter files, accumulated these twenty years, out of the study window, to see him search the papers in the Franklin stove, look up with cheerful triumph and cackle, "Nice piece you've written here, I guess, Jessup. Commissioner Swan will love to see it!"

"I demand—see—Commissioner Ledue—Dist' Commissioner Tasbrough— friends of mine," stammered Doremus.

"Don't know a thing about them. I'm running this show," the Ensign chuckled, and slapped Doremus, not very painfully, merely with a shamefulness as great as Doremus's when he realized that he had been so cowardly as to appeal to Shad and Francis. He did not open his mouth again, did not whimper nor even amuse the troopers by vainly appealing on behalf of the women, as he was hustled down two flights of stairs—they threw him down the lower flight and he landed on his raw shoulder—and out to the big car.

The M.M. driver, who had been waiting behind the wheel, already had the engine running. The car whined away, threatening every instant to skid. But the Doremus who had been queasy about skidding did not notice. What could he do about it, anyway? He was helpless between two troopers in the back seat, and his powerlessness to make the driver slow up seemed part of all his powerlessness before the dictator's power... he who had always so taken it for granted that in his dignity and social security he was just slightly superior to laws and judges and policemen, to all the risks and pain of ordinary workers.

He was unloaded, like a balky mule, at the jail entrance of the courthouse. He resolved that when he was led before Shad he would so rebuke the scoundrel that he would not forget it. But Doremus was not taken into the courthouse. He was kicked toward a large, black-painted, unlettered truck by the entrance—literally kicked, while even in his bewildered anguish he speculated, "I wonder which is worse?—the physical pain of being kicked, or the mental humiliation of being turned into a slave? Hell! Don't be sophistical! It's the pain in the behind that hurts most!"

He was hiked up a stepladder into the back of the truck.

From the unlighted interior a moan, "My God, not you too, Dormouse!" It was the voice of Buck Titus, and with him as prisoners were Truman Webb and Dan Wilgus. Dan was in handcuffs, because he had fought so.

The four men were too sore to talk much as they felt the truck lurch away and they were thrown against one another. Once Doremus spoke truthfully, "I don't know how to tell you how ghastly sorry I am to have got you into this!" and once he lied, when Buck groaned, "Did those ——- ——-hurt the girls?"

They must have ridden for three hours. Doremus was in such a coma of suffering that even though his back winced as it bounced against the rough floor and his face was all one neuralgia, he drowsed and woke to terror, drowsed and woke, drowsed and woke to his own helpless wailing.

The truck stopped. The doors were opened on lights thick among white brick buildings. He hazily saw that they were on the one-time Dartmouth campus—headquarters now of the Corpo District Commissioner.

That commissioner was his old acquaintance Francis Tasbrough! He would be released! They would be freed, all four!

The incredulity of his humiliation cleared away. He came out of his sick fear like a shipwrecked man sighting an approaching boat.

But he did not see Tasbrough. The M.M.'s, silent save for mechanical cursing, drove him into a hallway, into a cell which had once been part of a sedate classroom, left him with a final clout on the head. He dropped on a wooden pallet with a straw pillow and was instantly asleep. He was too dazed—he who usually looked recordingly at places—to note then or afterward what his cell was like, except that it appeared to be filled with sulphuric fumes from a locomotive engine.

When he came to, his face seemed frozen stiff. His coat was torn, and foul with the smell of vomit. He felt degraded, as though he had done something shameful.

His door was violently opened, a dirt-clotted bowl of feeble coffee, with a crust of bread faintly smeared with oleomargarine, was thrust at him, and after he had given them up, nauseated, he was marched out into the corridor, by two guards, just as he wanted to go to the toilet. Even that he could forget in the paralysis of fear. One guard seized him by the trim small beard and yanked it, laughing very much. "Always did want to see whether a billygoat whisker would pull out or not!" snickered the guard. While he was thus tormented, Doremus received a crack behind his ear from the other man, and a scolding command, "Come on, goat! Want us to milk you? You dirty little so-and-so! What you in for? You look like a little Kike tailor, you little ——-"

"Him?" the other scoffed. "Naw! He's some kind of a half-eared hick newspaper editor—they'll sure shoot him—sedition—but I hope they'll beat hell out of him first for being such a bum editor."

"Him? An editor? Say! Listen! I got a swell idea. Hey! Fellas!" Four or five other M.M.'s, half dressed, looked out from a room down the hall. "This-here is a writing-fellow! I'm going to make him show us how he writes! Lookit!"

The guard dashed down the corridor to a door with the sign "Gents" hung out in front of it, came back with paper, not clean, threw it in front of Doremus, and yammered, "Come on, boss. Show us how you write your pieces! Come on, write us a piece—with your nose!" He was iron-strong. He pressed Doremus's nose down against the filthy paper and held it there, while his mates giggled. They were interrupted by an officer, commanding, though leniently, "Come on, boys, cut out the monkeyshines and take this ——-to the bull pen. Trial this morning."

Doremus was led to a dirty room in which half-a-dozen prisoners were waiting. One of them was Buck Titus. Over one eye Buck had a slatternly bandage which had so loosened as to show that his forehead was cut to the bone. Buck managed to wink jovially. Doremus tried, vainly, to keep from sobbing.

He waited an hour, standing, arms tight at his side, at the demands of an ugly-faced guard, snapping a dog whip with which he twice slashed Doremus when his hands fell lax.

Buck was led into the trial room just before him. The door was closed. Doremus heard Buck cry out terribly, as though he had been wounded to death. The cry faded into a choked gasping. When Buck was led out of the inner room, his face was as dirty and as pale as his bandage, over which blood was now creeping. The man at the door of the inner room jerked his thumb sharply at Doremus, and snarled, "You're NEXT!"

Now he would face Tasbrough!

But in the small room into which he had been taken—and he was confused, because somehow he had expected a large courtroom—there was only the Ensign who had arrested him yesterday, sitting at a table, running through papers, while a stolid M.M. stood on either side of him, rigid, hand on pistol holster.

The Ensign kept him waiting, then snapped with disheartening suddenness, "Your name!"

"You know it!"

The two guards beside Doremus each hit him.

"Your name?"

"Doremus Jessup."

"You're a Communist!"

"No I'm not!"

"Twenty-five lashes—and the oil."

Not believing, not understanding, Doremus was rushed across the room, into a cellar beyond. A long wooden table there was dark with dry blood, stank with dry blood. The guards seized Doremus, sharply jerked his head back, pried open his jaws, and poured in a quart of castor oil. They tore off his garments above the belt, flung them on the sticky floor. They threw him face downward on the long table and began to lash him with a one-piece steel fishing rod. Each stroke cut into the flesh of his back, and they beat him slowly, relishing it, to keep him from fainting too quickly. But he was unconscious when, to the guards' great diversion, the castor oil took effect. Indeed he did not know it till he found himself limp on a messy piece of gunnysacking on the floor of his cell.

They awakened him twice during the night to demand, "You're a Communist, heh? You better admit it! We're going to beat the living tar out of you till you do!"

Though he was sicker than he had ever been in his life, yet he was also angrier; too angry to admit anything whatever, even to save his wrecked life. He simply snarled "No." But on the third beating he savagely wondered if "No" was now a truthful answer. After each questioning he was pounded again with fists, but not lashed with the steel rod, because the headquarters doctor had forbidden it.

He was a sporty-looking young doctor in plus-fours. He yawned at the guards, in the blood-reeking cellar, "Better cut out the lashes or this ——-will pass out on you."

Doremus raised his head from the table to gasp, "You call yourself a doctor, and you associate with these murderers?"

"Oh, shut up, you little ——-! Dirty traitors like you deserve to be beaten to death—and maybe you will be, but I think the boys ought to save you for the trial!" The doctor showed his scientific mettle by twisting Doremus's ear till it felt as though it were torn off, chuckled, "Go to it, boys," and ambled away, ostentatiously humming.

For three nights he was questioned and lashed—once, late at night, by guards who complained of the inhuman callousness of their officers in making them work so late. They amused themselves by using an old harness strap, with a buckle on it, to beat him.

He almost broke down when the examining Ensign declared that Buck Titus had confessed their illegal propaganda, and narrated so many details of the work that Doremus could almost have believed in the confession. He did not listen. He told himself, "No! Buck would die before he'd confess anything. It's all Aras Dilley's spying."

The Ensign cooed, "Now if you'll just have the sense to copy your friend Titus and tell us who's in the conspiracy besides him and you and Wilgus and Webb, we'll let you go. We know, all right—oh, we know the whole plot!—but we just want to find out whether you've finally come to your senses and been converted, my little friend. Now who else was there? Just give us their names. We'll let you go. Or would you like the castor oil and the whip again?"

Doremus did not answer.

"Ten lashes," said the Ensign.

He was chased out for half an hour's walk on the campus every afternoon—probably because he would have preferred lying on his hard cot, trying to keep still enough so that his heart would stop its deathly hammering. Half a hundred prisoners marched there, round and round senselessly. He passed Buck Titus. To salute him would have meant a blow from the guards. They greeted each other with quick eyelids, and when he saw those untroubled spaniel eyes, Doremus knew that Buck had not squealed.

And in the exercise yard he saw Dan Wilgus, but Dan was not walking free; he was led out from the torture rooms by guards, and with his crushed nose, his flattened ear, he looked as though he had been pounded by a prizefighter. He seemed partly paralyzed. Doremus tried to get information about Dan from a guard in his cell corridor. The guard—a handsome, clear-cheeked young man, noted in a valley of the White Mountains as a local beau, and very kind to his mother—laughed, "Oh, your friend Wilgus? That chump thinks he can lick his weight in wildcats. I hear he always tries to soak the guards. They'll take that out of him, all right!"

Doremus thought, that night—he could not be sure, but he thought he heard Dan wailing, half the night. Next morning he was told that Dan, who had always been so disgusted when he had had to set up the news of a weakling's suicide, had hanged himself in his cell.

Then, unexpectedly, Doremus was taken into a room, this time reasonably large, a former English classroom turned into a court, for his trial.

But it was not District Commissioner Francis Tasbrough who was on the bench, nor any Military Judge, but no less a Protector of the People than the great new Provincial Commissioner, Effingham Swan.

Swan was looking at Doremus's article about him as Doremus was led up to stand before the bench. He spoke—and this harsh, tired-looking man was no longer the airy Rhodes Scholar who had sported with Doremus once like a boy pulling the wings off flies.

"Jessup, do you plead guilty to seditious activities?"

"Why—" Doremus looked helplessly about for something in the way of legal counsel.

"Commissioner Tasbrough!" called Swan.

So at last Doremus did see his boyhood playmate.

Tasbrough did nothing so commendable as to avoid Doremus's eyes. Indeed he looked at Doremus directly, and most affably, as he spoke his piece:

"Your Excellency, it gives me great pain to have to expose this man, Jessup, whom I have known all my life, and tried to help, but he always was a smart-aleck—he was a laughing-stock in Fort Beulah for the way he tried to show off as a great political leader!—and when the Chief was elected, he was angry because he didn't get any political office, and he went about everywhere trying to disaffect people—I have heard him do so myself."

"That's enough. Thanks. County Commissioner Ledue... Captain Ledue, is it or is it not true that the man Jessup tried to persuade you to join a violent plot against my person?"

But Shad did not look at Doremus as he mumbled, "It's true."

Swan crackled, "Gentlemen, I think that that, plus the evidence contained in the prisoner's own manuscript, which I hold here, is sufficient testimony. Prisoner, if it weren't for your age and your damn silly senile weakness, I'd sentence you to a hundred lashes, as I do all the other Communists like you that threaten the Corporate State. As it is, I sentence you to be held in concentration camp, at the will of the Court, but with a minimum sentence of seventeen years." Doremus calculated rapidly. He was sixty-two now. He would be seventy-nine then. He never would see freedom again. "And, in the power of issuing emergency decrees, conferred upon me as Provincial Commissioner, I also sentence you to death by shooting, but I suspend that sentence—though only until such time as you may be caught trying to escape! And I hope you'll have just lots and lots of time in prison, Jessup, to think about how clever you were in this entrancing article you wrote about me! And to remember that any nasty cold morning they may take you out in the rain and shoot you." He ended with a mild suggestion to the guards: "And twenty lashes!"

Two minutes later they had forced castor oil down him; he lay trying to bite at the stained wood of the whipping-table; and he could hear the whish of the steel fishing rod as a guard playfully tried it out in the air before bringing it down across the crisscross wounds of his raw back.

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[sonulohiaems]

Dubai's Gateway to Global Growth: DMCC Business Setup Made Easy

Dubai, the City of Gold, glitters not just with precious metals but also with opportunities for ambitious entrepreneurs. At the heart of this vibrant ecosystem lies the DMCC (Dubai Multi Commodities Centre), a game-changer for those seeking to establish their presence in the Middle East. But what makes DMCC business setup so special?

Imagine this: You have a groundbreaking idea, a product with the potential to disrupt an industry. You want to tap into the vast markets of the Middle East and beyond. But navigating the complexities of setting up a business in a new country can be daunting.

**DMCC throws open its doors, offering a streamlined, efficient, and cost-effective solution for your DMCC business setup.

Here's why DMCC should be your launchpad for regional and global success:

1. A Business Paradise:

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Tailored business packages: DMCC offers various packages, from the Jump Start for startups to specialized solutions for Crypto, Gaming, and E-commerce. Find the perfect fit for your DMCC business setup needs.

4. Gateway to the World:

Strategic location: Dubai sits at the crossroads of East and West, offering unmatched connectivity to markets across Asia, Africa, and Europe.

Free trade agreements: Leverage DMCC's free trade agreements with over 80 countries, giving you a significant edge in international trade.

Visa options: Attract and retain top talent with various visa options, including residency visas for business owners and employees.

But don't just take our word for it. Here are some impressive facts and figures to solidify your decision for a DMCC business setup:

18,000+ new companies registered in DMCC in 2022, showcasing its increasing popularity.

Over AED 1 trillion (USD 272 billion) worth of trade was facilitated through DMCC in 2022, highlighting its economic impact.

Home to the world's largest diamond trading center and a leading hub for commodities like gold, coffee, and tea.

Ready to make your entrepreneurial dream a reality with a DMCC business setup?

Visit the DMCC website today and explore the wealth of resources available to you. From step-by-step guides to expert consultations, they're there to support you every step of the way.

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Saprose Retail: Elevate Your Home Décor With Stylish Table Accessories, Mats, And More

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