#I wasn’t even able to report getting COVID to like anywhere | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

stay-mon-army · 3 years

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Lazy Day In

Warnings: None

Word count: 1,362 words

Pairing: Hyungwon x gender neutral!reader

Even before Covid-19, you were no stranger to locking yourself away in your apartment for extended periods of time— ignoring the world outside except to order takeout. Having a boyfriend like Hyungwon kept you well-acquainted with that lifestyle. Hyungwon wasn't lazy, he just preferred simpler comforts when his life was usually so hectic. You couldn't blame him, really. After a long week of work and chores and errands, curling up in bed with good food, a nice drama, and a snuggly boyfriend (or plushie, if former is unavailable) sounded like absolute heaven. However sometimes you liked to plan real dates with Hyungwon when you both had time. You had planned this nice long day out— with shopping and a picnic in the park and a nice dinner at a quiet family run restaurant you had been dying to try.

That didn't seem like it was going to happen, however. Hyungwon had come over after his practice last night, utterly exhausted and quickly ushering you to your bed for cuddles. He'd fallen asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow, his arms still tight around you while his face went totally slack. You would've snapped a sneaky, cringey picture of his agape mouth, but you were so comfortable and you didn't want to risk stirring his clearly comfortable slumber— plus, you had a million such photos (he was sleeping often at your place). Instead you simply closed your eyes, snuggling closer, and fell asleep.

You had set an alarm for 10am, not wanting to get up too early since you both deserved the rest, but you also wanted the day to go well so you couldn't sleep in too late. As your alarm screamed at you, Hyungwon groaned loud, not happy with the disruption of his sleep. If you weren't also utterly exhausted, you might have laughed at his overreaction as he twists away from the sound, pulling his pillow over his head.

You turned off the alarm and started to slide out of bed, but Hyungwon wasn't having that. His arm shot out from under the comforter to circle your waist, tugging you back against him.

"Wonnie, we have to get up. I have plans for us today." He shakes his head into the pillow before turning to curl his long body around you. A soft laugh falls from your lips as his face presses into your neck, him releasing puffs of air that tickles your skin. "I'm serious, Hyungwon. We can't stay in bed all day."

You weren't mad, and in all honesty, you didn't sound serious because your voice was light with the smile gracing your lips. Yes, you wanted to have this day out on your mutual day off, but when Hyungwon for clingy, you also wanted to simply stay in his arms all day long. Regardless, he released you and rolled over, rubbing at his face with the heels of his hands. His hair was wild a top his head, no doubt from him tossing around so much this morning.

You finally manage to slip from between the warm comforter and pad over to your closet to begin picking out your outfit. As you pick out something nice and comfortable for the warm spring day the weather forecasters promised you, you could hear Hyungwon rustling himself out of bed as well. You felt comfortable enough with Hyungwon to begin to get changed in the room. As you tug off your sleep clothes, you can sense Hyungwon behind you. Just before you can turn to face him, he rests his head on your shoulder, his hands softly grazing your hips.

"You're so gorgeous." He presses a kiss to your shoulder before releasing you, reaching around you to grab a shirt and pair of pants. Your cheeks flush as you glance back to watch him disappear into the bathroom. You hear him rustling around and quickly finish dressing yourself.

Once you're finished getting ready, which didn't take long because you were too tired to put too much effort into your look today, you wander into the kitchen. You shuffle around grabbing various items you'd need for your picnic. You put them all into a small picnic basket you had gotten from a family member for your last birthday— you finally had an opportunity to use it. You only packed away foods you knew wouldn't go bad in the time it would take you to get Hyungwon out of the house and to the Han river, where you knew the perfect place to picnic away from prying eyes.

As you placed the last sandwich and ice pack into the basket and shut the top, you heard Hyungwon shuffle his feet into the living room-kitchen doorway.

"Are you ready for a wonderful day out?" You smile, turning to face him, until your smile drops. "What's wrong?" He had a sad look on his face, obviously disappointed about whatever he was about to tell you.

"I just texted my manager to let him know I was going out today with you, and he said that I shouldn't go out. I guess someone got into some scandal and news people are gonna be all over the city all day trying to get their hands on more information, or another scandal to boost their company. I know how excited you were about your plans today and I'm so so sorry that I have to ruin them." He runs a hand through his still messy hair, a pout on his lips as your face drops. You put your hand on the counter, looking away from him towards the picnic basket, all packed and ready to go. "However..."

You glance back at him, head tilting slightly at the sly grin that's slid onto his face.

"How about we do all of those plans here, inside? We can picnic in the living room, and I'll buy you some adorable outfits online, and then we can order food from wherever you want and we can eat it in bed and binge that new drama you were telling me about last week." He slowly enters the kitchen, slipping his arms around your waist as he pulls you against him. "I may not be able to give you that perfect date day, but I can try to recreate your masterpiece indoors." He presses a kiss to your forehead before meeting your eyes with the softest gaze.

"I like that idea a lot, Wonnie. I'm a little sad we can't do my original plan, but it's not your fault. We had no way of knowing some scandal was going to come out today of all days. We can still make the most of it." You smile up at him as he visibly relaxes, obviously happy that you weren't too mad or disappointed in the sudden change of plans. "Help me set up a picnic blanket in the living room?"

"Anything for you, darling." He mumbles as he pecks you on the lips, reaching around you for the picnic blanket before stepping towards the living room.

You grab the basket and follow him, placing it on the coffee table before you grab the other half of the picnic blanket, helping him spread it across the floor as best as you could around the furniture. You place the basket on the blanket before sitting down besides Hyungwon.

"What did you pack us today?" He asks, rubbing his hands together as you laugh at his actions.

While you didn't have the "perfect" date you had planned that day, you wouldn't have complained about a single thing. You enjoyed the day with Hyungwon, getting to joke and enjoy good food with the man you loved. In public, you didn't often get to be your complete quirky selves because you were always aware of the fact that fans or reporters could be around any corner, but in the comfort of your own home, you both could be yourselves with each other. It wasn't as nice as having a day out of course, because it was always nice to explore and change your surroundings, but you were happy anywhere when you had Hyungwon by your side.

#hyungwon imagine #hyungwon imagines #monsta x #monsta x imagine #monsta x imagines #chae hyungwon #hyungwon #chae hyungwon imagine

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holisticpassport · 3 years

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My Covid Story

Apologies for any spelling errors, I’m on a time crunch. I’m a few hours out from leaving for my first flight since July 2019 (and before that, March 2018). Heading out to Sydney, I’m a mix of anxiety and absolute excitement. In January of this year, our sublet was almost up in Eltham and Cam and I had plans to pack up the car and begin doing workaways around Australia to help rebuild communities devastated by the historic wild fires (doesn’t that feel FOREVER ago?). When our sublet became available for a full lease transfer, we changed our minds to stay in our space, so that was the first instance of travel being knocked out of the picture. Then we had Valentine’s weekend open to go visit some friends in Tasmania, so we booked tickets and upon waiting in the airport, our flights were cancelled due to inclement weather. DAMN. Mid-march came around and it was Cam’s birthday, so we wanted to get out for a weekend of camping in our big bell tent, find a gorgeous spot in the woods out east near Warburton. When we arrived, every camping spot for an hour’s dive any direction was either full or completely not open at all. We picked a spot off a random road and spent one night there, but some rangers came by and said we couldn’t stay there due to the possible danger of logging trucks not seeing us. So that was a bust.

Then as you’re aware, this time frame leads up to the very tumultuous third week of March when Melbourne officially went into its first lockdown due to COVID. I documented this time in journal entries which I will add at the end, but ultimately the lockdown went until June, and the state reopened too quickly/had a fiasco with quarantined cases getting out of a hotel, thus sparking the second wave. We had flights booked to California for June to see my family and then planned to travel around Mexico for a few months, but that dream was quickly squashed when flights out of Melbourne ceased to exist at all. Months later, I had a flight booked in July to go to Sydney where I was to have my eggs extracted for donation. The day before I was to fly out, second lockdown went into effect and the flight was cancelled (thus forcing me to have the procedure done in Melbourne and cause a huge, historic controversy between Melbourne IVF’s CEO and the medical director of IVF Australia about how to transfer frozen eggs over a closed border!).

I’m struggling to comprehend just how important and meaningful my ability to travel today is. To think back to the first time in history, watching borders around the world close, flights become grounded, and witnessing a global pandemic unfold whilst in a foreign country—I remember thinking at the beginning how unfathomable the scale of it was. When people talk about things not seeming real or like it’s a dream you can’t wake up from, that’s exactly how it felt. I questioned whether I needed to go back to the U.S. in fear I might not see my family for years or be with them if they got fatally ill. Would I be able to even go back if that happened let alone would I be able to re-enter AU (the answer was no). And thank god I didn’t go back considering the absolute cluster fuck of a mess Trump made of the pandemic. But also, thank god my family has been healthy and safe. The level of fear for their safety was at an all-time high as civil tensions grew when the riots around the country kicked off in conjunction with the pandemic. I wrote to all of them to have a plan to escape to Mexico and get their passports if Trump won the re-election. This was a genuine fear I’ve never experienced before.

The level of frustration, depression, anxiety, hopelessness, self-hatred for lack of productivity during lockdown, and uncertainty about so many facets of life weighed down on me during this time. But I know how much worse our time could have been. I was immensely grateful for the fact that we had a home and incredibly gracious landlords who were human and understood the financial difficulties of this unprecedented time when so many became homeless as job loss skyrocketed. We were so fortunate that I was able to continue working even 2 days a week through the lockdown as a barista and Cam was able to get government support for six months as a NZ citizen who lived in AU over 10 years when so many other New Zealanders were forced to return to their country because of the time limit stipulation for support. We only had two family members contract Covid and were young and healthy enough to survive when so many families will be without a member at the holidays this year.

And I acknowledge my privilege in that my identity is so closely entwined with the ability to travel, that while it felt suffocating to not even have the choice to travel anywhere outside of a 5km (3mile) zone, I fully empathize with those in parts of the world where they could not walk more than 50 meters from their front door or people who didn’t have windows/balconies in apartment buildings who were going out of their mind. All of that does not diminish the struggles I faced with not being able to travel, but it does always keep my perspective in check. My trip today signifies how a city and a country came together during the most difficult period of our lifetime, followed strict government guidelines, and came out after 120+ days in full lockdown on the other side of a pandemic, now able to cross state borders without isolation or quarantine. To go to a live music show, have drinks on rooftop bars, walk around outside without a mask on, and see people going about their daily lives again on public transport and see a city bustling with energy—the months of mental hardship and growth was all to get back to a post-Covid world. Even though a vaccine is not out yet and we need to be cautious, the level of hopelessness has diminished significantly, and I’m not terrified my trip might be cancelled in two hours. I’m actually going this time!

There is also a whole other facet to my time in lockdown and that of course is the personal development and mutual growth in my marriage! That’s a whole separate post though which I hope to get out soonish. But here’s a bit of something I started a few months ago. Enjoy.

********

I remember when it first started in the news; like a minor blip of a story flashing at the bottom of the screen: some mutant virus had infected a couple dozen people in some random city in China. I was working solo in a café serving the employees of a major shoe distribution company in the warehouse district of Collingwood, Melbourne. The TV was on in the cafe but muted the first few weeks of January as the main stories were about the most devastating wildfires in the history of the world, and we all just felt a communal helplessness. As the numbers grew in China and the story became a daily headline, the first case was announced in Queensland on January 25th. Everyone stuck around a few minutes longer each day after they were handed their coffee. I think back to the moment when Wuhan, the epicenter at the time, reported 1,500 cases and I thought surely there can’t be much more than that. This is just media sensationalizing something small. This whole story will blow over in another week or two.

If only.

It was summer in Australia, and my husband and I were planning what to do after our sublease was up in mid-March. I commuted daily from a suburb 50 minutes north called Eltham, a creative and eco-friendly heritage town. We lived in a triplex made of adobe mudbrick, surrounded by native forest, a communal garden, and enjoyed huge artisan windows that brought in natural filtered light through the towering trees. Our little studio was a quiet haven away from the chaos and constant flurry of people in Melbourne, especially during summer as it brought travelers from every corner of the globe. There was no way we could have possibly known that this little paradise would feel like a prison after six months in the world’s longest lockdown due to a global pandemic caused by that little virus in some random city in China now known worldwide as COVID-19.

As the weeks passed by in February, more and more countries began reporting cases. I did not understand how pandemics worked as the last one I was alive for and could remember was H1N1 in California, and I was about 17—far too consumed with college applications and boys to think about world affairs. The Spanish Flu was never something that was particularly emphasized in our history classes, so it didn’t even occur to me to compare what was happening now to that point in time. Then again, this was incomparable because in 1912, the world was a less globalized economy and there were no commercial flights transporting thousands of passengers across the globe daily. By the first week of March, my daily rush-hour commutes became the first real difference I noticed. The number of morning passengers on the train platforms dwindled from 50 to 25 to 5, and eventually, to just me. As the train stopped at over 30 stops from where I lived to the city, my carriage wasn’t even remotely full at 7 a.m.

There was less foot traffic in the city. Flinders Street Station, one of the two largest hubs that saw thousands of people daily, was eerily quiet and empty. We were two weeks out from leaving Melbourne to go travel, planning to go to New South Wales, AU to help rebuild communities that were ravaged by the bushfires. I was desperate to travel this year, and we were so close to leaving. I had picked up some other barista work in an advertising agency closer to the city. But day by day, office workers were being told to work from home if they were able to. Hand sanitizer became readily available in the café, bathrooms, and around the office. I remember staring out the window of this high rise building that overlooked the lush green stretch of Albert Park and thinking it looks so normal outside. Every day, I looked at the news in Australia, which I had never really done before. Industries were shutting down, and the panic was setting in for thousands of casual workers in the hospitality industry as it was only a matter of time before we would be shut down too.

Melbourne is a cultural hub filled with travelers who typically come here on a Work and Holiday Visa which gives them 1-2 years to work and live in AU. Most find work in hospitality as there are over 40,000 restaurants and cafes in this region. You couldn’t go a single day without meeting someone from another country which is why I fell in love with this city. I worked as a freelance barista through agencies that called for workers to be able to step in if someone called out sick or quit unexpectedly and they found themselves short. But my agencies had gone completely silent in the week leading up to the industry shutting down. There was no more work and travelers were finding themselves stranded. I journaled daily in the lead up to my final day of work in the city as I knew something big was happening, and I wanted to be able to recall when it all began. I also knew we would not be travelling anytime soon, around Australia or otherwise, when national and international borders began closing around the world.

March 17th, 2020

All that’s being talked about is COVID-19. Entire countries are closing borders and going into complete lockdown. Italy has been inundated with patients in hospitals and now have to choose who lives and who dies. AU isn’t taking nearly as intense of measures, but the general atmosphere is not normal. All events with over 500 people have been cancelled. Those who have traveled anywhere must self-quarantine for 14 days or face a huge fine. Some people still don’t take it seriously, thinking/acting like it’s just a normal flu when in reality its ability to be passed on and even re-infect someone a second time is much higher than the rate of a simple flu. In the states, my family says all the restaurants and schools have closed, even the Hollywood entertainment industry has closed down. So many independent contractors, myself included, are without means to live because there’s no emergency government funding in place. It shows what’s truly flawed with the system. Luckily Cam has full time work still, but for those people who have kids and no daycare options? No partner or family? Those who are traveling and can’t get back home? This is devastating for all of us, but them in particular. Supposedly, there are rumors that the virus dies with the warm weather, but AU is headed into winter. It could be why the virus isn’t as big in places like South America and Africa (*note* countries from these two continents are now in the top 10 most infected places as of September 2020) Europe is completely shut down as is New Zealand. I have flights to California in June, so I’m hoping I can still go. For how weak my immune system is, I’m surprised I’m not more concerned because I’ve been continuously reassured the virus only attacks those with underlying conditions, mainly in the elderly population. Even in calm, tight-knitted communities like ours in Eltham, we’re seeing the best and worst of humanity come out with people hoarding resources, but also there are those offering rides for people to stores or grocery drop offs to their homes. I’m very interested to see how the next three months progress all around the world. Right about now, it’d be nice to hide away in a beachside house in Mexico. (*Mexico is also among the top 10 most infected countries now*)

March18th, 2020

The government should announce today whether hospitality industry will close, potentially putting Cam and I both out of jobs. Luckily our landlord is being highly accommodating. Trump is giving Americans $1,200 and has postponed tax season by 3 months. Only seems he does something decent when it’s to keep the economy from tanking and his money is protected.

Cam and I both have throat annoyances and headaches. We should try to stay home, but can’t afford it. Today, they’ve dropped gatherings of 500 down to only 100 people, yet shopping centers and public transport remain open, which I would think are the riskiest places for transferring infections. It’s been stated this is a once in a decade event that will change the course of history.

March 19th, 2020

Amidst all the chaos from morning to night, people are finally taking time to nurture their interests and creativity. I’m taking two courses on sustainable fashion and fashion in design. I’ve also applied to be a mentor for women trying to gain work and leadership experience at an NGO called Fitted for Work. They have stylists that help women to prepare business outfits and tailor their resumes/do mock interviews. I’ve looked into an MA program I’m interested in at Warren Wilson College back in North Carolina. I think looking forward is the only way to keep the fear down about how long these shut downs may last possibly through June. The world economy is going to see some extremely confronting realities it hasn’t seen since the Great Depression. For the moment I’m looking into teaching English online which I’m already certified to do, just to try and earn some money. I’ll be interested to see all the art that comes out of this period and the photojournalism that captures this historic time.

March 21st, 2020

We went over to Williamstown (Cam’s parent’s house) as Cam had two shifts out that way. Restrictions in cafes are now 1 person per 4 square meters, so in the 100 person limit already imposed, it’s now down to 25. I’m nervous for Cam to keep working and going on public transport. It’s high risk and unethical in terms of coming in contact with people we could transmit it to without knowing (asymptomatic) because it takes 14 days to even show symptoms. We made the choice to start self-isolation come Monday as we can see in the next week or two the same spike will be here in Melbourne as we’ve seen in Italy and most likely soon to see in the U.S. Reading other peoples’ accounts about how they continued life as normal as though nothing had changed in Italy is exactly where AU is projected to head towards.

March 25, 2020

As of Monday, AU took drastic measures to ensure safety and closed many non-essential businesses with a series of daily updates for more and more businesses to shut or only stay open for takeaway. Overnight, nearly 80,000 people in hospitality work were laid off or lost work, Cam and I included. A stimulus package of 66 billion dollars was announced and Cam qualified for government payments through Centrelink because he’s a kiwi who’s been here over 10 years. Other kiwis who haven’t been here that long are completely without any kind of support from the AU government, even though in NZ, Aussies are supported. A very backward, selfish system who told them to go home.

We went to Centrelink on Monday at 7:45am in Greensborough (suburb over from Eltham). By 8:30 am when the doors opened there were over 200 people in line. The government has been terribly confusing with their messages out to the public, highly unprepared. People are confused about what they can and can’t do, what businesses are remaining open, who is eligible… it’s a mess. Why are liquor stores and hair salons considered essential?? There have been spikes in young people getting this virus as young as 18, and they are dying. The virus coats your lungs like a jelly ultimately blocking oxygen. We did what is hopefully our last grocery shop because being in the store is just as contagious as a café. There’s no safety or hygiene measures in place. We had gloves on and people were dancing around each other in the aisles to maintain 1.5m social distance.

The U.S. is becoming the new epicenter with horrific rapid spreading, particularly in New York. Flight around the world, including as of today AU, are being stopped and we can no longer leave the country at all.

To Be Continued…..

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astyle-alex · 3 years

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[FANFIC - Destiel & JayTim]

Multiverse Mishap | DCU Bat Family x Supernatural

Fandom: DCU Bat Family x Supernatrual Pairings: Destiel, Jay x Tim Rating: Teen Warnings: Swearing, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Heavy Angst (with a happy ending), Implied Underage Prostitution Total Word Count: ~156k | SPN vers = 76k / Bat vers = 80k

Summary:

One slip up in the lab has Tim Drake careening into a new world where things are rather dramatically different from the world he’s used to. Fortunately, this is not his first rodeo. He knows how to handle this nonsense, more or less at least. Unfortunately, the people of the world he’s wound up in see things a little differently. And when Dick Grayson and Jason Todd mount an ill-conceived rescue mission, things get complicated very quickly.

When Team Free Will is at their lowest (well, their lowest as of YET, at least) with Castiel missing (and probably human), they get thrown a lifeline. Charlie calls with a lead on a strange young-man who bears a stunning resemblance to their MIA angel. Even with the world on a precipice around them, Sam and Dean won’t leave their angel out to dry—Dean especially has a few missteps he’d like to make up for… If only he could find some way to get through to one hella conked out Angel of the Lord.

This project started as a distraction and got WAY out of hand, but I’m actually really excited about it. I’ll be posting it as two separate stories on Ao3 (one form the Bat Family PoV and one from the SPN family PoV, both of which will be updating HERE...) with new chapters going up weekly, but only one chapter from each version.

As excited as I am about it, my schedule is currently in shambles because I got an opportunity to get the COVID Vaccine and it’s thrown my whole schedule into utter chaos. I’m hopeful that I’ll get back on track soon, but I can’t guarantee when I’ll be able to post here or on Ao3.

Since I can schedule posts on Patreon, that updating schedule will be much more definitively regular. The second chapters of each version are already available to Patrons and should open up to all viewers by Monday!

- Multiverse Mishap | SPN Vers - Chapter 2

- Multiverse Mishap | SPN Vers - Chapter 3

- Multiverse Mishap | Bat Vers - Chapter 2

Read the first chapter of the SPN version below (with Charlie playing a super spy and getting Sam & Dean a lead on a maybe-Castiel / maybe-alien-infiltrator) and I hope you all have a fabulous Easter Weekend (whether or not you celebrate religiously, you gotta admit the season-exclusive candy is pretty dang great!)! ^_~

A bit of fiddling, that’s all it was.

Well, that’s all it was supposed to be.

A device that plays with space-time and the very weave of whatever it was that spanned the gap between dimensions?

How could anyone just let something like that gather dust in an archive?

It functioned how it was meant to, it was only that what it was meant to do was cause harm… If they just tweaked it a bit, just a little, gave it an anchor point and limited the scale of possibilities… If they yanked down the juice that kept it powered to a more moderated level…

It could save lives.

So… fiddling.

Just a bit, here and there and on weekends when there wasn’t anything big going on.

The stupid thing wasn’t even turned on most of the time.

It was inert and dead as fricken paperweight (which honestly is what the fiddler in question had mostly been using it for)…

And then… it wasn’t.

One button, a loose screw, the slip of a paperclip…

A big flash of blinding light.

Silence, like the absolute nothing right before the tidal wave hits.

And in that silence, a tiny, over-caffeinated little voice:

“… Oops…”

_ _ _

Chapter 1 – MIA Angel or Alien Infiltrator?

Charlie Bradbury knows she’s awesome.

But there’s the standard awesome that any Queen of Moondoor is simply by nature of being epic enough to have achieved the throne to start with...

And then there’s the awesome that is having created a automated dark web trawling program to track the world’s Big Weirds (and only the very BIGGEST of the Big Weirds) and having that super secret extra level deep vault program actually work.

Well, of course it worked, but it like worked.

It found an Angel.

Sorta.

It found a something.

And an MIA angel, who was not exactly an angel anymore, but also couldn’t really pass as truly human, and who was still on like every watchlist ever (magical, criminal, meme-spirational, etc), but is somehow still entirely off the fricken radar?

Yeah. BIG Weird.

Said angel-not-angel popping up at a Biggerson’s in Ohio with no shoes, more money than god, an insane caffeine tolerance and absolutely no idea how to function inside a Walmart?

HELLA Big Weird.

So Charlie, being the awesome Queen that she is (and being acutely aware of what false hope here could do to the people in particular question with this) went to check it out herself.

Personally.

And, personally, she can say that this kid is the weirdest thing she’s ever seen, and after having day-tripped out to the literal Land of Oz a few times over… well, that’s sayin’ something.

Charlie’s met Castiel.

Not exactly her type, but she could see how that divine slice of puppy in a trench coat could be seen as something of a serious snack.

Though… If he weren’t an angel, she’d swear he was an alien.

But, like, a cool alien.

Much less spy-trained infiltrator than innocent human-admirer who wants to experience the local flavor on his little vacation out to the Milky Way’s most interesting backwater, Sol-3.

And the kid she finds in Ohio… is not that guy.

Not really.

For starters, she’s not entirely sure he’s old enough to drink alcohol.

And he’s… not looking for Sam and Dean ( which is seriously a BIG red flag for deciding whether this particular angel-not-angel is the right angel-not-angel).

He is looking for something, though.

Something he seems to think is in Kansas, near-ish enough to the Bunker’s coordinates to make her question the ‘not looking for Sam and Dean thing’ (but the absolute dinosaur of a smartphone he’s working on to pull up maps could totally just call the bunker, if he wanted to… or any of the plethora of emergency numbers the Boys have set up…).

Charlie’s looking on from a Very Inconspicuous post in the booth two tables away from the kid in the red hoodie and she can feel his frustration with the device radiating off him like physical Force pulses. Fortunately, proto-Sith this kid is not, and all the tables remain table-y.

She’s watching him fight with the internet to find something and his device’s crappy security means she didn’t even have to work hard to get her own screen to show what’s happening on his. He’s definitely looking at Kansas, at going to Kansas— Lebanon in particular.

Messy black hair, big blue eyes, grumpy face to rival any Netscape feline…

Looking for Lebanon and totally out of sync with humanity…

And… his oversized red hoodie just happens to have the 2-D rendering of a big black pair of wings stitched into its backside— stemming right from where they should on the kid’s shoulder blades if the wings were real.

Charlie’s not really gullible enough to believe in signs from God anymore…

But if she were… well, that would be pretty convincingly Divine Sign-like.

So, she makes the call.

Sam picks up on the third ring.

“So, you know how like the main character always has dramatically weird colored hair and sits in the second to last desk by the window?”

With a heavy sigh filled with enough affection to make Charlie’s insides feel all squiggly and warm, Sam says, “No, Charlie, I have absolutely no idea.”

“Well, they do.”

“Okay. And?”

“They are Narrative Significant, they stick out from the background in like a big way, but not just in like a ‘doing main character things’ kinda way,” Charlie rambles, trying to find her point buried under the spiraling metaphor.

“Charlie, do you know what time it is?”

“Uh, 2, maybe, 3am. I think. But that may have been like three coffees ago,” Charlie prattles off automatically before veering back on track, “Anyway. The point is that I think I found a main character. He’s not the character I thought he should be, though. He doesn’t look right. He’s too young. And no trench coat. But he is hella out of sync… and the blue eyes and black hair and everything else…”

There’s a pause as Sam’s non-caffeinated brain tries to keep up with Charlie’s infodump.

“Trench coat?”

“I think I found him, Sam,” Charlie whispers. “I think I found Castiel. Well, I found someone weird enough to maybe be Castiel, in the Castiel kind of way, and he’s looking for a way to get to Lebanon, so…”

Much more alert, Sam asks, “Where are you?”

“Ohio. Quaint little place called Granville,” Charlie reports. “It’s a pretty straight shot to the Bunker, but it’s like 14 hours on the road and I’m not sure the gods of caffeine consumption will really be cool with me pushing their bounty that hard…”

“Don’t try too hard to get him to go anywhere with you, see if you can just offer to pay for a motel room for the night,” Sam instructs, the sounds of a pack being prepped with one hand clanging about in the background. “We’ll be in Granville before noon.”

“What if he really wants to head out?”

“Take it slow and text us when you get gas, we’ll meet you in Indianapolis.”

He’s using ‘Serious Sam’ voice.

It’s the voice that makes panicking bunny rabbits being chased by wendigos settle down for half a second so Dean can frickin torch those ghost-y cannibal creepers.

Only, in this case, the wendigos aren’t cannibal forest ghosts chomping down on campers. This time, the Big Bad that Dean is unequivocally about to destroy is approximately 909 miles of US Highway 36.

It makes Charlie feel a little bit better about nearly everything that’s wrong.

She hangs up with Sam after promising to keep the updates coming, and looks back at the kid who could be Castiel.

Only to find him looking back.

For a minute, she’s worried that he heard her talking to Sam about him.

But he seems kinda zonked.

And he doesn’t look upset or embarrassed or angry, so…

She is the only other person on this side of the Biggerson’s, (and really she’s the only non-staff member in this Biggerson’s all told besides the kid himself), so it’s really not that strange for her to be the dust mote in motion that’s wound up drawing the kid’s eye.

He’s not really expressing anything.

He’s just looking.

It’s weird.

Whelp, he’s got that creepy unblinking stare down pat, bird-like head-tip and all.

The kind of stare that’s not angry or judgmental but feels more clinical than anything else, like he’s seeing through the bones and skin and sinew to the soul that’s underneath.

Dissecting it and diagnosing it…

It makes her shiver.

But she plasters on a smile and says, “Hey. You wanna refill?”

The kid looks down at his empty coffee cup.

He blinks, real slow like.

Then he nods.

Relief floods Charlie.

Step One, making with the contact with the Target. Check.

In her experience that’s usually been the hardest part of these things.

Not that she really has much experience in ‘these things’…

But still, Score 1 for the Queen, yeah?

She signals to a waitress for two more cups of coffee, shots of espresso boosting both of them. It’s like a weird AU of a sleezy bar beat, a remixed mark meets con-woman kinda thing.

“So, kid, what’s your name?”

“Shouldn’t you tell me yours first?”

Charlie shrugs. “Well, generally yeah, that is the convention. But I like being unconventional, I guess.”

Really, it’s that she hasn’t quite decided what name to give him.

He blinks expectantly, head tipping over again.

Realizing that she’s already giving up ground in this pseudo-battle of wills and whatnot, Charlie sighs heavily and says, “I’m Charlie, Charlie Bradbury. Geek extraordinaire.”

The kid nods, visibly internalizing the information.

Trying really hard not to be perturbed by that, Charlie barrels on to say, “I see that tablet of yours is gone a bit wonky. You looking for something in Kansas? I might be able to fix your tech or find what you’re looking for with mine.”

“My tablet…” With big owl eyes, the kid glances down at the piece of crap barely smart enough to call a screen and gives a plaintive little huff. “It is… insufficient.”

Charlie gives a laugh that only sounds two-thirds forced and says, “Understatement, buddy. You’re grand at it.”

The kid simply frowns.

“So,” she says, drum-rolling her fingers on the plastic tabletop as she leans into the leading questions. “Tell me what’s your name and what you’re looking for in Kansas and we’ll see if I can work my magic, huh?”

The kid’s eyes narrow suspiciously on the word ‘magic’, but he gives no other reaction.

For a solid minute, easy, they just kinda sit there.

And then the kid downs a full cup of espresso-boosted coffee like it’s a bottle of watered down Gatorade and flashes Charlie the stiffest stretch of smile she’s ever seen on any face that still looks mostly-human.

“My name’s Alvin,” he tells her with all the bland panache of a used car salesman. “Alvin Draper. And honestly? I’m looking for a hole in the universe.”

Charlie almost bursts out laughing.

The kid— Alvin— spots the reaction. He glowers, quite impressively, to be honest.

“Well, Alvin, that’s the fakest fake-name I’ve ever heard, but I think I can help with the ‘hole in the universe’ thing,” she tells him.

Alvin’s frowning again, it’s adorable and endearing in ways it really shouldn’t be.

“One problem, though,” she lays out. “You’re gonna have to be a little more specific about which hole in the universe or tear in the fabric of reality your talking about.”

Taken entirely aback, Alvin huffs, “Is it a commonplace occurrence to have your universe ripped open, then?”

“Well, not exactly. It’s more like our universe is the knit-scarf version of a life-raft,” Charlie explains, wheezing a bit as the metaphor sinks perfectly into a crack she didn’t quite realize she still needed to find a way to fill. “Things here aren’t… Well, uh, how many apocalypses have you fended off this week?”

“You’re really just gonna roll with the implicit declaration that I’m from another universe and you’re not going to question my sanity?”

Alvin looks like he’s suddenly questioning her sanity.

For a beat, Charlie feels insulted.

But really, his reaction is the more logical one.

Maybe Charlie should start trying to talk to more normies here soon, she’s totally lost touch with what constitutes a ‘reasonable reaction to weird shit’.

“Whelp, I’m not a Time Lord or anything,” she confesses, “but I’ve had enough contact with the Supernatural to know how to spot someone who’s brushed up against something ugly in the dark and is kinda freaking out about it. You fit the bill, Alvin.”

The kid rolls his eyes.

It could be an angel-learned-it-from-Dean thing, it really could be.

The weight of the sarcasm is just that strong.

“Fine, yes. ‘Alvin’ is not my real name,” he admits.

Then he casts a wicked smile her way that almost makes her rethink the ‘learned it from Dean’ idea, because this is… creepy in an almost Demon kinda way… in an almost Leviathan way. The grin is so unnerving that Charlie almost misses his next words:

“But you know, I’m pretty damn sure that ‘Charlie’ isn’t yours.”

“Yeah? Well, darn. Ya got me,” she breathes, trying to make herself remember that the Leviathan are gone, that she didn’t even see Cas when he was one of them.

In any other circumstance, Charlie would be reaching for the Borax.

But this angel-not-angel (and maybe-but-probably-not-demon-or-leviathan) kid whose name is definitely not Alvin, notices her sudden stiffness.

Immediately, he softens.

“Hey, what happened? You okay?”

Charlie shrugs. “You wouldn’t happen to be allergic to a certain 19th century boron-containing sodium compound, would ya?”

“Sodium borate? Like Borax? Can’t say I am,” the kid assures. “Any particular reason?”

“Uh, the word ‘Leviathan’ mean anything to you? Like specific, human-livestock-eating, double-tongued with lots of teeth lizard-men people-imitators specific? ‘Cause you just really reminded me of one there. And like I had a friend go Darkside… well, a lotta my friends have actually gone Darkside, but there was one and he… he’s missing still and well, bad things happen to my friends when they go missing.”

“Like apocalypses?”

“Yeah, kinda.”

“Really? Literal apocalypses? How exactly literal?”

“Um, pick a holy book at random? We’ve probably hit most of them by now,” Charlie admits, with a discomfited shrug as she vaguely wonders how she ended up on this side of the metaphorical interrogation table. “I think the first one was the Judeo-Christian one, they took things pretty literal. Michael-Lucifer prize fight and all…”

“Okay…” the kid says, finally sounding a little thrown, “but you stopped that one?”

“Yeah,” she tells him.

“So where are you now?”

“Somewhere between God’s little sister throwing a world-ending temper tantrum and you know a Luci-spawn antichrist accidentally poof-ing up new laws of physics?”

“Sounds plausible,” the kid tells her, his tone both entirely accepting of it as the gospel truth and sounding like he thinks she’s totally bonkers.

“No, it really doesn’t,” Charlie sighs. “Doesn’t change the fact it’s true. But enough about me and my world-ending escapades. How about your hole in the universe?”

“That’s the thing… See, I don’t remember.”

“What?”

“I don’t remember how I got here, I just remember that I don’t belong,” the kid confesses, sounding a lot more like he’s being honest than before. “I’m not supposed to be here, but I can’t explain what might be able to bring me back.”

“So, Lebanon, Kansas?”

“Has a safehouse I remember, or I think I do,” he lays out. “And it has a power source I think I need. And…”

“And..?”

Charlie’s hoping for something about the people waiting for him there, something about the ‘profound bond’ doing something to clue him in.

She can’t tell if this is just a spell or something, or if it’s a consequence of having Fallen, regained Angel status, and then seemingly kicked it again in the fastest repeat of the cycle yet.

“I dunno,” he sighs. “I just have to be there.”

Well, it’s not what she was hoping for.

But it’s still closer than she thought she’d get…

So, she’s still not 100% certain this kid is a whammied Castiel.

But she’s definitely like 85% certain, maybe 87%.

And in Winchester World? That there’s some pretty damn good lookin’ odds. So, Charlie will take what she can get and will roll with the rest.

Sam and Dean will be here in a few more hours. All she has to do ‘till then is keep this kid in arm’s reach and keep them both from being buckled up for the looney bin.

Sounds totally doable, right?

In retrospect, Charlie may have to adjust her definition of ‘doable’…

_ _ _

Keep up with everything I’m getting up to HERE!

Have a great week!

#fanfiction #fanfic #batman #batman & robin #BatFam #DCU #dcu fanfic #SPN #spn fanfic #supernatural #destiel #jay x tim #jason todd x tim drake #dean x castiel #multiverse #crossover #charlie bradbury

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route22ny · 4 years

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I grew up in the Bay Area at the height of AIDS panic, and all of that era’s sex paranoia remains burned into my brain, repurposed for Covid-19 and the act of commingling wet breath. A few weeks into this crisis, I found myself having a ten-foot-distant conversation with my neighbor Patty, both of us incredulous at people who still tried to talk to us in-tight face-to-face, like we weren't all suddenly barebacking reality with everyone they'd chit-chatted with that day and everyone in their lives, etc. Patty allowed that she should be able to strike people she considered a threat. I mentioned Florida's attitude toward this legal principle and firearms. I suggested she become militant. I tell that to a lot of people, but I attenuate the humor of it for the audience. I tell every teacher I know to strike.

There are more sirens now. It's hard to tell, because unlike New York, everything isn't quiet. Cars are out on the road—fewer, but enough that hearing a siren can still be vehicular idiocy and not a more sinister house call. But I still hear more of them.

I don’t know why Luke asked me to write about Coronavirus in Florida. I mostly stopped writing last year when a good friend dropped dead in front of his family. (Subscribe to my Substack—we don't update regularly!) Before that, I felt increasingly overborne by events. Things ground to a halt in 2019, but the machine began to break down long before. I ended the 2016 campaign periodically sitting under my desk, high, feeling secure because I wasn't writing anything stupid and feeling good because I was appropriately afraid of everything, but people thought I was exaggerating when I mentioned it.

I wish I could say my seriousness about the novel coronavirus stems solely from believing in science and peer review and that I would take it seriously regardless, but my spouse is immunocompromised, and my father, who lives out in the Bay Area, had Covid-19, back in March or early April. He didn't tell us kids until he was out of the woods, but for days he had fevers over 103º. My stepmom, a former emergency room nurse, couldn't get him admitted anywhere, because he wasn't having respiratory problems. He woke up the same every day: It felt like someone had parked a Volkswagen on him.

We're supposed to say he's out of the woods. I'll believe that when he dies of old age, or something more reasonable that kills men in my family, like colon cancer or car accidents. Sometimes I think about him dropping dead like my friend, only from whatever post-Covid-19 effect triggers the brain’s forgetting to tell the lungs to breathe—or from the one that leads to storms of strokes, like a brain's blood vessels recreating the burning energies depicted on a CRISS ANGEL MINDFREAK poster. Then I wonder how I would die, or my wife, or my friend in Atlanta, or my brother. I think about drowning in open air, alone in a hissing world, and being incapable of saying the overdue apologies I ran out of time for.

After a while I realized that basically all Luke wanted was to hear from a coward living in the mismanaged kleptocracy of Florida, and the thing is, I can do that! I’m frightened right now!

I considered opening with, Every day I wake up frightened, to throw a fucking jolt into a piece about facing down a pandemic in a place where they have a paradise just for the cheeseburgers. But the joke is, I'm not wastin' away here in Coronaville. Sometimes I wake up and just have to pee, on the rare days when I don't wake up from the sensation of my son elbow-dropping my head because—how rude of me—it's 6:45 already.

In this respect, I am serene: My son and I exercise outside to burn off his energy, so I'm out in the sun for hours a day. I'm tanner, I've lost weight, and my phlegm feels looser. I grew a lushly indifferent goatee. My haircut looks like something that belongs on the gatefold cover of a concept album about a form of locomotion by a band named after geography. While the term "Lebowski Phase" has been applied to my appearance and to the fact that my leg injury and medical-marijuana prescription have collided with the reality of never having to drive anywhere again, I must insist that in many respects I have come to look like Jesus Christ. I am pro life and take no pleasure in reporting this.

As I have said, I am frequently awakened by my son, whose full name is My Beautiful Five-Year-Old Son Maitland. He is a treasure who spends quarantine within earshot of 24-hour news, regurgitating West Wing Democrat observations of mine with five-year-old precocity to harvest follows for Instagram. Maitland is an influencer already on record as supporting L’Oréal, opposing Medicare For All, and, when I first read him the shaggy start to this piece, he said, "Not a good look." He's a natural.

Waking up is violent but easy. The problem is everything after that. By the time I close my eyes, I'm not sure what I felt most on any given day—anger, sadness, impotence, a resentful churning need for vengeance, despair. Any one can seem like a day's dominant emotional dysfunction and then suddenly be overwhelmed by the dread that suffuses prolonged thought about the world outside.

I am one of the people who is Taking It Seriously. Seriously Taking It Seriously, though—not the people who say they're taking it seriously and then tell you about:

• Going to a recent indoor birthday party.

• Having a multi-course dinner at a fancy restaurant, "But it was okay because it was [extremely not-worth-a-life celebration]!"

• A full-contact playdate their kid had recently with two other children.

I abhor these people. I have an existential loathing of these people, and a granular scientific indictment. I enjoy reading new articles to learn new ways in which they are a danger to me. My apprehension is rich and exquisite. May their friends shun them, and may they be abandoned by their gods.

Sooner or later, every day, I think of the threats arrayed against me and my family. Each day, I see the most recent thing said by my governor, Ronald Fuckface DeSantis, in which he explicitly endorses and declares his intent to pursue actions that all available data say will kill Floridians by the thousands. Each day, I think about how, if I do so much as suggest fostering a free exchange of ideas about the proportional value of using every means to stop him, I will be arrested.

Every day, I bounce the "Evil or Moronic?" debate around my brain. I check in with an alumna buddy in Atlanta to see whose governor has shown more recent determination to murder his citizens. I gotta give Brian Kemp credit, because he's really holding his own. Naturally, this leads to wondering if either of them have a natural or acculturated advantage in terms of idiocy and malevolence. DeSantis' enrollment at Yale and Harvard and service in the military problematizes the idiocy narrative only for as long as it takes to remember all the people you've met who've gone to any of them and were dumber than dogshit. It would seem like fate to be murdered by an oaf, but I don't know that it's not merciful to at least be murdered purposefully rather than contemptuously and indolently.

Eventually, this leads to spending some time thinking about DeSantis as a kind of lethal bro angel. It's hard not to see his shitchyeah, brah, people are dyin', it's classic! expression and recognize that the state's chief executive resembles a lout you don't want to run into walking alone at FSU after a home loss. I prefer my jokes about the governor, but my friend David Roth nailed it when he said that DeSantis seemed like a person who would describe himself as “kind of a DUI guy.”

I know there's supposedly a culture war out there. There's a truck in my neighborhood with a Q sticker, and another with a Three-Percenter sticker, and there are more than a few neighbors of the "easily victimized white dude who owns a $50,000 truck he rarely takes off the pavement and who becomes physically belligerent when you correct him" variety, but there's a reason why you really only see “war” shit on YouTube. Few Americans are hostile to general safety protocols, and even fewer act out against them. I live where hate groups and old fashioned unaffiliated redneck trash drive in from the county to make a show of rebel flags, rolling coal and honking to intimidate protests, but people line up six feet apart at Home Depot, wear masks at Publix and get takeout at the pizza place outside without insisting on barging in. Most wars don’t need one side of them to be this manufactured.

Most of my friends and colleagues from this gig live in New York, so I've already sat through weeks of descriptions of streets silent except for ambulances, and I’ve already woken for weeks to the half-twilight of nightmares where friends died in a spare white hallway. There aren't a lot of surprises in store for Florida, and no images I can describe that would make you want to turn back now. It's like we're waiting for the rolling premiere of a franchise blockbuster. The dead won't really start packing them in for a few more weeks, but all the scariest shit hit YouTube when it opened in New York a thousand years ago. The coronavirus as an image, what it functionally is, as a horror, feels as familiar as the Scream mask, and the context that makes that scary as hell already feels dangerously been-and-gone, like an apprehension that Florida had for too long before the actual scare came.

There's a hope that all this will come to little again. Despite Governor DeSantis' refusal to take the initiative on shutting down the state until the last dollar was wrung from the last snowbird, the original shellacking never came. The Tampa Bay Times sampled smartphone data and concluded that Floridians overwhelmingly took the initiative to stay home, and they were aided in their quarantine process by the fact that Florida is car-dependent and atomized.

The heartbreaking realization, as you gradually run across more people who are Not Taking It Seriously or are Expressing Moronic Skepticism, is that for a month there about 80 percent of America was on board with doing the right thing. We, a people who suck at doing the right thing even for the wrong reasons, stood on the side of doing the harder thing if it helped people who weren't even us.

I really can't tell if I feel more anger than sadness at the fact that those who were meant to encourage us in safety, to serve us by offering difficult guidance, wasted our sacrifice and our trust. They squandered the patience given by a beggared and exhausted people. All they had to do was the right thing, and if they weren't sure what that was, they could have erred on the side of saving people’s lives and hoping it counted, and they failed.

Instead, more people will die, and we'll be shut down again, and we will realize we are fundamentally unequipped for life with Covid-19. Florida is built on enclosed air-conditioned spaces: It's dependent on divorcing yourself from Florida as a climate and place. Asking Floridians to generate a public life under the unshielded rage of God’s angriest sun and baked from beneath by a sprawling pave-ocalypse requires asking them to rebel against everything their infrastructure has taught them for as long as they can remember. It is a car culture to the flesh and bone, and a restaurant relocating indoor tables to a road patio would park its diners inches away from eternity.

A picnic day like that is months off, again. It's time to go back inside and resume Inside Time. Inside Time melts away. I saw a headline around the Fourth of July, from the New York Times, that read, "In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both," and I remember seeing colleagues tweet, mmmm, so true, and, gets at something crucial we aren't talking about, and shit like that, and I was like, "Buddy, let's get in the DeLorean and visit March." I have nowhere to go, anyway, and all life is timeless.

We have no family in the area and have had no break. It's the three of us, like No Exit, but if most of the dialogue was the word "no" and a lot of stuff about poop and butts and farts, good guys and bad guys, and what Lego Star Wars would do, but with a lot of excruciated pleading for silence because Mom and Dad Are Working Right Now and We Love You Very Much but Jesus Christ Please Stop for the Love of God I Will Give You a Dollar If You Go in Your Room and Be Quiet and Play That Kindle App That Teaches You to Read That You Pay Attention to More Than Us Even Though I Would Read You a Fucking Novel If You'd Just Shut Up and Sit Still.

I'm resigned to staying in here until 2022. I’m screaming, but I will do it. I'm lucky in that I have access to a community pool and a neighborhood where my son and I can roam around on bikes and romp and look at water and birds and turtles. When we're lazy, we have a porch where we can feel nature without feeling exposed. We have a dependable (ok!!! haha!!!) income, and I can do irregularly scheduled work that allows me to be Parent rather than Employee. Exercise, meals and stories take up enough hours that I might as well lean into it.

But we’re lucky. We have a house and prescription mood-altering drugs and one thousand years of undersleep, but we are in less immediate danger than most. The state, almost reflexively, reaches out to open more doors even as Covid-19 blows past reopening benchmark after reopening benchmark.

The inexorable march for commerce doesn’t even come from malice in many cases; people in charge just don’t know how to do anything else but extort and scold people into working under any conditions, so long as it devours most of their time. All the exploitive principles are expected to work the same even if the world they built is fraudulent. We feed meat and the virus into the machines, irrespective of what the data says, and pray for rain. Watching Florida government on the state and local level is like watching two parents bring an alcoholic home after he got kicked out of rehab and deciding that the best course of action is leaving him with $5,000 in an apartment up the street from a dive bar and then going to Cancun for the week. It was on the calendar already, there wasn’t any choice, he looked very healthy at the time!

We have friends who are teachers, and we are scared for their spouses and kids. I don't know what Florida's plan for its teachers is other than to murder them. Again, I don't know if DeSantis is an idiot for flirting with giving enormous bipartisan sympathy to arguably the most effective labor group in the state, or a genius for flirting with finally eliminating a lobbying obstacle to conservative governance by simply liquidating its members as a class.

I worry if I start listing all the things I'm scared of, they'll never stop, but every day I see my son reach for something he should be able to reach for, and I either have a low-grade panic response and stifle it, or I have the panic response and yelp at him to get his attention and tell him to stop, startle him, and add another layer of gun-shy haunting to his day. I'm afraid he'll eventually become an animal in a Skinner Box in which all the buttons and levers are electrocuted, and there are no prizes.

I'm afraid that my son will always be emotionally arrested at two years behind the development of people the same age who had siblings in their house, or who, like many kids in my neighborhood, had parents who thought kids were invincible to Covid-19 and let them play with whomever they wanted. I worry that he may pay a price year after year even into adulthood because other kids got to practice socializing as we rode past. They got to hang out with people their own age and run around and do vitally stupid shit and say "butts" a lot, and he got look at me heartbroken and knowing empirically and epidemiologically that he couldn't play with his friends anymore but still needing to know why, and knowing that I couldn't tell him anything more sophisticated and anything less terrifying than, "So we don't get sick."

The other day he started crying and then screaming, "I hate the sickness! I hate the sickness!" repeating it in a higher and higher register, until he was up even past that piercing birdlike screech that prepubescent boys make whenever trying to sound like lasers or dinosaurs or squealing brakes. Every day I worry that I see another little bit of his capacity for happiness is dying—that the same awkward process of terror that took me from happy little kid to profoundly unhappy teen to scarred adult is even more rapidly at work, and each day another sparkling and joyous little light of childhood winks out in him, replaced by fear as a necessity of life.

I know that there is no plan for us. Conservatives don't want to be taxed or have their businesses lose money, so people are being kicked off unemployment and sent back to work with no test and trace protocols, irregular access to PPE, overwhelmed hospitals and often limited access to any care. We're doing all this as Florida blooms scarlet like paint being spilled into a mold shaped like the state. We're sending the men in the gasoline suits right at the heart of the fire.

It's a cruelly lazy little culling genocide of the working class, a Wall Street gamble that the blow to the labor force won't be more than a blip on the Dow and, a little recession aside, the One Percent will come out ten years later owning an even greater percentage of the United States. To the extent that there is a plan, that's the plan, and whether you land on the dead or the living part of any of those exchanges is more of a Your Problem than a Their Problem.

For now, it's enough to be hermits and hope the rest of Florida goes on strike by going inside and staying there and writing letters to representatives threatening to never come out. Cooking the same things, getting the same exercise in the same places, having the same awkward conversations on VOIP delay, and living every moment outside like we're three drinks in so we’re ready to get belligerent with anyone who is getting too close. Living every moment with some low-level neurasthenia that grows spine-deep and for the rest of our lives sends shuddering disequilibrium at the thought of air that never seems to move, hallways that lengthen without exits, and objects that seem both unavoidable and unclean. It’s fine. We’re all fine, here, now. How are you?

I feel a sudden Git Offa Mah Land thing about my son, a resolute commitment to homeschooling for the foreseeable future and to keeping the gummymint away. It sucks so much. I was so happy to send him to the public school just a few blocks away, instead of the shitty little charter schools nearby, but now that it’s Plague or Parents, he’s got his parents. Between us, he'll have access to 1.5 first-class educations. I still have my grandpa's service weapons from WWII, the last time America was in a war with fascism, when we took the opposing side. I'll empty a couple magazines into anyone who comes onto my property and tries to stop me from teaching my son critical race theory, Howard Zinn, and Leonard Levy's Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side. I refuse to turn my back on the heritage of my youth, of watching thousands of hours of MASH, by refusing to wear a mask outside or in fact any time I am doing anything other than drinking gin that I made in a tent.

Outside, records fall and progress rolls on. A governor whose go-to pejorative for opponents of all ages and sexes is very likely still “queef” watches as even the president concedes that a Republican National Convention here would be too lethal, as the state repeatedly sets records for daily deaths, beats out all of Europe in terms of new daily cases, leads the nation in cases per day, then tries to set them again. And then, every day, our governor makes his ahegao-but-for-ethnic-cleansing face and psychotically clangs a bell indicating that Florida just became the 15,000 customer at Leadshoe Larry’s Kicked-in-the-Dick, and it’s time for all us lucky winners to line up and drop our pants.

Florida’s lethality is so tacky that it’s almost camp, but there is no satisfaction in being right about how wrong everything is. Nobody gets a prize for correctly guessing the surplus death toll. All you have to do is look someone else in the eye working in life under Covid.

I’m old now, so I have Humiliating Injury Syndrome (HIS), and somehow in the month between the Super Bowl and the pandemic, I tore a rotator cuff, a labrum, or both, by throwing a (mini!!!) football with friends. After four months, I broke down and went to get an MRI. I skulked down corridors and lurked in a corner of a waiting room, like playing spies with an opponent who was the air. Even the clean and modern fixtures felt miasmic and corrupted, like they were a parking garage in an Alan Pakula film.

Eventually a nurse emerged from an office, crinkled her brown eyes, waved and surprised me by asking after my family by name. She lives three blocks away from me and had hosted me at a party once. Later that day, as my car coasted down the approach to my house, I saw a garage door open and my neighbor’s son walk out on his way to his shift at the same grocery store that I treat emotionally like a Superfund site.

I thought about how much I unconsciously held my breath where they work, and how I unconsciously associate those places with poor choices. The danger of the world outside is so massive that I reflexively need to cordon off the threat into areas of blame and blamelessness. In a moment of crisis, years of conservative rhetorical conditioning in the discourse have taught me to reflexively pathologize those in harm’s way. There is less chaos if someone is at least responsible for something. There is less risk to me, if it turns out someone else’s epidemic is someone else’s fault.

But it is someone else’s fault. And it’s not some poor fucker doomed to sit in a box somewhere and accept paper money and hand metal money back and point at where toilets are, because that’s how he keeps the lights on. It’s not the person consigned to some life-sucking task that, on the best of days, is too humiliating and cruelly impoverished of purpose to ever be a reason why someone should die. It’s not the person around whom you hold your breath because you don’t know where they’ve been. It’s the person and people who put us all in position to suddenly feel like we’re suffocating together.

I hate that I sometimes unconsciously hold my breath around strangers, and I hate that they have heard it. I think of my neighbors, and of the workers on whom we’re dependent, and the permanent uncertain shortness of breath I feel, and I want every moment of their anxiety and mine gathered up and then rained on those who shepherded it into being, those who nurtured it and feasted on it, those who profited from it and were indifferent toward it. Those who consider themselves DUI guys and those who pay to elect them and give them sinecures and who are simply too rich to be arrested for boating under the influence anymore.

I think of how I hold my breath near good people and near vulnerable people in places I am wary of and that we all need to share, and I wonder if we will simply hold our breath for the rest of the year, and if we’ve bargained for standing near each other and holding it for all of the next. And I wish so eagerly that all our suspended futures and the air between us might catch at the throats of those who put us here. That justice for a man like Ron DeSantis might be a permanent and sucking terror: stuck always in an involuntary startled gasp at the sight of responsibility, afraid at the approach of every stranger, incapable of drawing a full and restful breath, and never knowing peace again.

Jeb Lund used to write about politics for Rolling Stone, The Guardian and Gawker, and a bunch of other places, and was the Spectacle of Trump Editor at 50 States of Blue. He and David Roth have a podcast about Hallmark original movies that is mostly funny and exasperated and not unkind, and it's not ultimately about the movies anyway. It's fine and people enjoy it. Don't make it weird. He also has a podcast where he watches every Dennis Quaid movie in a row. That is also completely normal.

Ok here’s me again with a couple more things.

You’ll want to read this in the New York Times today about a forthcoming documentary on ICE. After it was completed the filmmakers were apparently threatened with legal action by the agency over the inclusion of parts that made ICE look even worse than they already look doing literally everything else they do.

Some of the contentious scenes include ICE officers lying to immigrants to gain access to their homes and mocking them after taking them into custody. One shows an officer illegally picking the lock to an apartment building during a raid.

At town hall meetings captured on camera, agency spokesmen reassured the public that the organization’s focus was on arresting and deporting immigrants who had committed serious crimes. But the filmmakers observed numerous occasions in which officers expressed satisfaction after being told by supervisors to arrest as many people as possible, even those without criminal records.

“Start taking collaterals, man,” a supervisor in New York said over a speakerphone to an officer who was making street arrests as the filmmakers listened in. “I don’t care what you do, but bring at least two people,” he said.

Here’s one disgusting detail among many.

They followed Border Patrol tactical agents who took pride in rescuing migrants from deadly dehydration even as the agents acknowledged that their tactics were pushing the migrants further into harm’s way. They showed how the government had at times evaluated the success of its border policies based not only on the number of migrants apprehended, but on the number who died while crossing.

***

source:

https://luke.substack.com/p/all-they-had-to-do-was-the-right?utm_source=Brooklyn+Today&utm_campaign=dd6f63665c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_07_28_01_15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1ba554d7d5-dd6f63665c-125128182

#long reads #florida #covid #genocidal dystopia #Jeb Lund

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foodmadewithlove · 3 years

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With Delicious and Fresh Seafood, It’s No Wonder Why ‘Turner’s’ Is So Popular

I’ve always loved food. I tend to have high expectations for the meals I am receiving or eating, and strive to find places with a variety of dishes that I can choose from. If I’m going to pay for it, it has to be good. Few restaurants stand up to that measure, but I believe that I might have found one.

My goal was to find a family-owned and operated restaurant on the North Shore, a place that has been in the family for a long time. Since my Beat Reporting class junior year, I have been a member of the ‘North Shore Eats’ Facebook group page in which members of the North Shore communities suggest and recommend restaurants and places to eat. As I became stuck trying to find places on Google, I decided to reach out and ask members of the group their favorite restaurants that are family-owned and run. I was expecting a few responses, but when I looked at my post the next day, I had ended up receiving over 230 comments. I was blown away by how many people decided to help me, and very excited to look through all the recommendations.

There was one restaurant that everyone kept commenting, a place called ‘Turner’s Seafood’. Seafood is one of my favorite things to eat, especially when I am able to enjoy lobster rolls at the beach during the summer as well as clam chowder throughout the year. Since I love seafood and due to the fact that I had never heard of the restaurant before, I decided to look it up and became overwhelmed by what I found. ‘Turner’s’ had not one, not two, but three locations around the North Shore. The locations are all different, with some focusing on on-site dining and others providing a fresh seafood market for customers. They all looked amazing, but I knew I had to go to the location which started it all.

(Above) A shot of Turner’s Melrose location that I went to. Credit: Turner’s Seafood website.

20-year-old James F. Turner emigrated from St. John’s Newfoundland in 1922, and started his career on the Boston Fish Pier. With hard work, “Jim” opened ‘Turner Fisheries’ in 1954, eventually becoming one of the leading suppliers of fresh seafood due to the new ability to fly their products anywhere across the country. Due to a myriad of restrictions and regulations surrounding the seafood industry in the 1980s, John Turner (Jim’s only son) established ‘J. Turner Seafoods’ in 1989. This new wholesale company in Gloucester dealt with the lesser amount of supplies and difficult regulations that had been implemented.

John had four sons, who growing up learned the ins and outs of the seafood industry. In their hometown of Melrose, John’s four sons opened up ‘Turner’s Seafood Grill and Market’ in 1994. The sons decided to expand the business, first creating a Gloucester location in 2006 as well as a market in the same location that ships seafood overnight in 2010. The Turner brothers additionally opened up another restaurant in Salem in 2013. Each restaurant and location is different, but all has that same family-oriented atmosphere to them. On their website, ‘Turner’s’ boasts that 9 of the 4th generation of the Turner family currently work in the three locations.

That’s how I arrived at ‘Turner’s Seafood Grill and Market’, the sons’ original location in Melrose. The seemingly small location is located on one of the main streets in downtown Melrose, among other shops and restaurants. With the onset of warm weather, various people had been sitting in multiple tables outside the restaurant, enjoying drinks such as martinis as well as their food. When I walked in, I was met by the delicious smell of fresh, cooked seafood. The restaurant is much bigger than it looks, split into four sections. The dark colored walls are filled with various seafood-related decorations, such as oars and fake fish. To the right, a glass display case held fresh seafood such as clams and shrimp on ice, in which customers are able to purchase every day. Behind that, a bunch of small tables remain in an ‘oyster bar’ area, where customers can get fresh oysters upon request.

On the other side of the restaurant, multiple tables covered in blue-striped tablecloths allow customers to get a full dining experience. I was seated in a high top next to the regular tables, near a string-lights covered bar that normally has seating but due to Covid has been removed. I noticed a hard working bartender, making his way through the various drink orders of the night. I could hear him constantly talking with the waitresses, creating a comfortable atmosphere that reminded me of fun family banter.

The restaurant had the option of ordering through your phone, but I decided to order with a waitress, who welcomed us with a smile and a greeting. Since it was my first time there, she was very helpful in describing the various dishes they had to offer. ‘Turner’s’ has a wide variety of options on their menu, starting with appetizers such as clam chowder that is not bad priced at $6.50 a cup. I went there with my boyfriend, and we decided to start off with a warm crab dip as we both enjoy crab. It didn’t take too long for the appetizer to come, and we were excited to dig in. The plate contained four large soft pretzels, which we were able to dip in a ramekin of warm, delicious crab dip. It was very savory, and I could even find large chunks of crab in my spoonfuls, which greatly impressed me. It was just what we wanted to start off the night.

It was truly hard to decide what I wanted for my meal, as ‘Turner’s’ has so much to offer. I considered getting the crab roll, but decided that since I just had the crab dip, it would be too much of the same thing. My boyfriend considered getting fish and chips, but we both knew that we wanted to go down to ‘Turner’s’ Gloucester location to eat at their specialty fish and chips shop soon. He ended up getting the yellowfin tuna burger, with fries and a brightly colored slaw as well as a wasabi aioli (that was too spicy for me, but he loved it!). The burger is one of the lower priced items on the menu at $15.00, but is still fairly large for its price and easily able to be shared. I ended up trying his burger, which seemed a little dry to me, but was still full of fresh flavor and seasonings. As for me, I love shrimp, so I decided on getting stuffed shrimp with a baked potato and brussel sprouts as my sides.

When the food arrived, I was very impressed with the overall presentation. Four shrimp sat in the middle, all stuffed with a breadlike seafood vegetable filling. My baked potato was to the left, with a pad of already melted butter sitting in its ridges. The brussel sprouts, which contained bacon, sat on the right. My mouth was watering even before I dug in. The presentation was great, but the food was even better. Each shrimp tasted like it had just come out of the ocean, and the bread filling reminded me of Thanksgiving day stuffing. The filling was a perfect combination with the shrimp, as it added extra flavor and texture. They were topped off with a lobster basil cream sauce, which was heavenly. It had an almost buttery taste to it, a creamy flavoring that was delicious on top of the shrimp. The sauce seeped into my brussel sprouts, which combined with the smokey flavor of the bacon throughout.

(Above) The meal I got at Turner’s, a stuffed shrimp dish with a baked potato and brussel sprouts.

The star of the show truly were the roasted brussel sprouts, which were fresh and perfectly charred to perfection. I normally don’t like whole brussel sprouts, but these changed my mind. They were a 2 dollar upgrade, but completely worth it. My baked potato with butter was pretty good, but nothing special, tasting starchy like a normal potato without any seasoning. Even so, it was a delicious meal overall. My dinner wasn’t badly priced either, a steal at $22.00 for a large plate of fresh seafood (which is usually highly priced!). After I ate, I was so full and pleased with what I had just gotten.

When the check came, I was shocked to see that the price wasn’t higher. I feel that they gave fresh, delicious seafood for a great price, which is amazing. After we left, I knew this could be deemed as one of the best restaurants I had tried in the North Shore area. I will definitely be back, and I of course want to try the other ‘Turner’s’ locations in the area. I encourage you to check out the various ‘Turner’s’ restaurants across the North Shore, you won’t be disappointed!

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chibivesicle · 4 years

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Golden Kamuy chapters 239 & 240 - character background arrives for Kikuta

Hello all, this is a much belated meta for the past two chapters. I was very busy with work last weekend and I’m feeling the usual work related exhaustion with the covid-19 situation on top of it. I’m currently living in a part of the States which still has a much stricter social distancing policy and it is still unclear when I can return to work, even if we follow new social distancing policies. Suffice to say, it has been a huge struggle for me. I’m already more prone to suffer from depression and this situation has just been really hard with friends and family very far away from me.

I usually like to give my all into my meta analysis of a chapter but I really didn’t like chapter 239. The sense of humor that underlies the “midnight shoot out” just well - well. I wasn’t keen on it. I have a pretty dirty sense of humor so it isn’t even the fact that it is a part of male body part humor; just how it was implemented.

So I’m just going to go with this. Usami and our “Jack” convict are men cut from the same cloth who link sexual acts with violence. The only difference between them is that Usami was found and groomed by Tsurumi, thus appearing to be a more contributing member of society (as a member of the military), while ��Jack” has been left to his own devices and is a free roaming serial killer. Usami is the correct member of the 27th to do the field work for this convict. What is more interesting is teaming him up with Kikuta. After Usami and Jack’s “shoot out” Usami pursues him on foot while he’s on horseback. Usami’s general response is to try to beat someone via brute force. It isn’t surprising that he just jumps for the man only to get knocked down, he acts on instinct.

Kikuta has a much more tempered response as he first had Usami and him split off to try to pinch him off between the alleys/streets. It gives him a clear shot at Jack. Here he’s using one of his revolvers in his right hand.

Jack is lucky as Kikuta hits his top hat. This pause in action allows Kikuta to spring into action. He sprints towards Jack tossing his revolver so that he can grab onto the convict with his right hand. What I really like about this is how is shows how Kikuta thinks very quickly on his feet as we saw at the hot springs.

He’s able to use his left hand to reach into his coat where he likely has at least another revolver in a holster. It should be game over for the man as he tells him that he’s got him with the revolver to the back of his head.

Unfortunately, Kikuta is defeated by “Jack’s” manly abilities and it is just plain gross and unnecessary. Kikuta is one of my fav current members of the 27th, I just didn’t like this entire scene. As a result he escapes and Kikuta is likely feeling - well feeling used, gross and assaulted.

Usami and Kikuta continue to pursue him and hear a woman scream. Sure enough he managed to kill her and Kikuta looks shocked as they find the body. The fact that Usami looks at Kikuta from the corner of his eyes makes me think that Usami is not surprised by anything our killer does.

In contrast, despite his years of experience, Kikuta is uncomfortable with this type of criminal activity & violence. He’s no stranger to violence but he clearly has a strong moral compass.

The next day, they return to the scene of the crime in daylight. The sketchy and questionable police officer is there with our sad and pathetic reporter. Kikuta muses what the killer is thinking. Due to all the things that have transpired so far, it is clear that Kikuta is really trying to rationalize things. In contrast,’knowing’ his mind, Usami just offers an explanation that makes sense to him since it takes one to know one.

This only further highlights the difference between these two men. It is clear that Tsurumi wants them to keep working together, even if Kikuta is really uncomfortable with Usami.

Usami is eager to visit the other crime scene, Kikuta hangs back and lets Usami go ahead. He uses this time to casually approach Ariko. Everything about Kikuta’s body language, behavior and vibe scream - spy/secret agent. He’s able to address Ariko with a calm demeanor and then when Ariko almost panics he instructs him how to behave.

Kikuta cuts the tension by teasing Ariko, stating that he’d recognize his figure anywhere and to think he’d be difficult to recognize is a bit of an insult to Kikuta’s intelligence.

He’s able to approach Ariko about his role as an unwilling double agent. Since he’s there under direct orders from Tsurumi he knows that for the time to being he should be in the loop as far as Hijikata’s movements. If Ariko is in Sapporo, it is a logical extension that Hijikata is there as well.

The chapter then wraps up with Tsurumi leading most of his men to Sapporo leaving only two to remain near Otaru to look for Asirpa. He reports that Kikuta is the one who sent him the telegram about our convict, Jack. If Tsurumi is reporting the truth to his men, it means that Kikuta only reported on the convict and requested backup but Kikuta may be withholding information about Hijikata being there as well. This chapter leaves it up in the air as it shows Tsurumi looking military dictator-ish while Hijikata stares off into the distance.

What is most important in this chapter is setting up how Kikuta is going to be some sort of player in the hunt for this convict in particular.

Chapter 240 begins to bring the manga plot back to the aspects that I like of it, more intellectual, big picture moves of the different groups as well as a side of good old fashioned spy business.

The chapter title page helps us to establish Ariko’s and Kikuta’s personalities even more. Ariko is playing cat’s cradle with Tanigaki in the trenches while Kikuta literally has Ariko’s back and he watches them.

This shows several things. 1.) Kikuta is similar to Ogata as he’s always watching. Since he was one of the “Russian” kidnappers, we know he has a background in intelligence and he’s a clever guy. We also know that he cares about Ariko as a person, hence comfortable enough to lean up against his back as well as cover that back. 2.) It let’s the reader know that Ariko is similar to Tanigaki. He’s a large, soft, dopey man. He is simple, he’s outwardly friendly and like Tanigaki he has natural outdoorsman/hunting skills but that he’s an okay solider and but isn’t the most intelligent. Neither man is a good liar and they are predictable.

Ariko is 100% out of his element and trying to be a double agent is pretty much a situation ripe for failure. He just can’t do it. In direct contrast, Kikuta looks completely natural and at ease. He’s used to doing things like this and he’s confident with the games of espionage and intelligence.

Ariko is barely able to hold himself together, voice unsteady, sweating, looking like he’s got no out. So Kikuta tells him to team up with him in contrast to Hijikata and Tsurumi.

Of course Ariko is shocked by this statement. Kikuta continues his argument. He frames himself as Ariko’s only option. They survived the war together, they saw that same moon together. The flashback shows, Kikuta reaching out to touch Ariko while he goes to hold his hand.

They’ve survived together against the odds. So Kikuta is willing to ask Ariko to ignore everything else. Forget about his father’s involvement in the gold theft and his murder and the fact that Tsurumi will try to get his cooperation by threatening family. He summarizes it doesn’t matter which man he tries to align himself with, the outcome is same - it is terrible. So then he let’s him know that “central” is going to let things play out in Hokkaido.

This is enough information for Ariko to figure out why Kikuta was so keen to regain Tsurumi’s trust. He’s the spy for central that Tsukishima has been always on the look out for.

The angle of this panel is just great, Ariko is in shock while Kikuta adjusts his bowler hat. And with that, a running joke that originated on a discord server when Kikuta first showed up became the truth.

With Kikuta’s appearance several of us tried to figure out what is role would be and we came up with a nickname for him, “Roger”, which was coined by Merdopseudo. This was due to how he looked like Roger Moore, one of the actors that played James Bond. I 100% agreed with the Roger nickname and as a result, I struggle to write any meta post about Kikuta without referring to him as Roger instead. I personally was leaning toward a more Clark Gable inspired look but Roger was just better.

The chapter then has Jack hanging around a church with no informative text.

The action then shifts to Hijikata’s group which is all in disguise.

The wee babe, Kantarou is a newsboy, selling newspapers. Hijikata is a goldfish vendor. Ushiyama and Toni are buddhist monks, and Kadokura is a Koya-san pilgrim. Ogata is a filial piety puppet performer and Nagakura and Ariko are just random looking civilians. Kirawus remained as himself. Perhaps they thought if he tried to blend in as Japanese it would be obvious?

Our morally bankrupt reporter, is able to elaborate on the details of the Sapporo serial killer - calling him a copycat of Jack the Ripper. The Cliff Notes version of things is that if this is a true Jack the Ripper copycat, the fifth and final murder will happen 40 days after the two murders from the night before. It seems proper that Hijikata is the one to summarize the situation that his group is in.

Interestingly, Kadokura, Kantarou and Kirawus are shown sweating in the background while Ogata is deadpan. Clearly, Ogata is not bothered by the 40 day time limit.

This makes a nice transition to Sugimoto, Shiraishi and Asirpa now in Barato. Shiraishi, being the smart dude that he is, points out an interesting article. Sugimoto assumes it is about “Jack” but instead he notices children have gone missing. Boutarou is able to immediately connect these crimes to another tattooed convict.

Asirpa looks nervous as, well she’s a child and she was teased additional information than what Sugimoto got from meeting him. Boutarou is upfront and immediately is able to identify him for the rest of the group. Asirpa is totally freaked out as the identifies him as the candy peddler.

Sugimoto then has murder eyes and angry screentones as he concludes that he is of course one of the convicts.

This chapter is setting up a clear confrontation between all the different groups. I like how it finally begins to ratchet up the the tension and put pieces in place. Usami showing that he’s terrible at spying and discretion both makes them stand out but also tips Kikuta off that something else is likely afoot on Tsurumi’s side.

The missing children are a trail indication the direction of Ueji Keiji. I like how Shiraishi and Sugimoto are looking at the paper while Boutarou towers over them and looks at the paper.

The chapter ends with our two shaded convicts surrounded by swirling newspapers. Both men are making their actions clear to the public. I would guess are both reading the newspapers as Jack let’s his activities know while Ueji is potentially communicating with him as his own actions are showing his direction, moving towards Sapporo.

The chapter then ends with a dark Ogata joke. He’s really into his filial piety act and has to be yelled at firmly by another member of the group.

Overall impressions on 240 and some brief ponderings.

1.) I love Roger, er Kikuta so much. His character has a level of class and sophistication that many characters lack. He is also a ‘self’ made man who rose through the ranks to be a valuable member of military intelligence. It is clear now why Tsurumi would have kept his distance from him and why he was so insistent on getting back into Tsurumi’s inner circle. It is clear that Kikuta is not a “Tsurumisexual”. He is also the type of man who Tsukishima was suspicious of going back to his showdown with Ogata. Tsukishima is livid that Ogata sniped Maeyama and told him that he’s the pet cat of “central” he’s waiting to sell out the 27th to gain position in the military establishment.

Therefore, our three “Russian” kidnappers are all originally enlisted men who likely gained a lot of skills working for a fallen elite like Tsurumi. Tsukishima stresses loyalty to comrades. Ogata has never shown much loyalty to those around him, but it is obvious that Kikuta has loyalty to Ariko. He had to put on an act to look like Ariko had betrayed him and Tsurumi.

I have begun to wonder if Ogata is the red herring deflecting the focus from Kikuta. Ogata doesn’t believe in the words of Tsurumi that are used to stir loyalty and dedication to a cause. Is this because Ogata believe it is complete bullshit or that he’s aware that Tsurumi uses these types of concepts to control most people?

What I want to know now is if Ogata is working with or in parallel to Kikuta. I still don’t see Ogata as a spy for central. It goes against by gut reading on Ogata. I could see Ogata and Kikuta being aware of each other and their objectives where Ogata may have even tried to make it look like he’s the spy to deflect attention from Kikuta. Again, Ogata’s goal from this entire situation is still completely unknown. Was Kikuta linked to the rebel group - RIP bear death trio. I still haven’t forgotten you.

But based on Tsukishima thinks of Ogata as a putative spy, it fits Kikuta’s personality better. Kikuta still has loyalty and connection to others from the 27th, e.g. Ariko. His discomfort working with Usami on Jack’s trail shows that Kikuta has a stronger moral compass and thinks about what actions are justifiable and which are more ‘evil’ or morally questionable.

2.) Ogata needs a therapist. Of all of the “disguises” he could choose, Ogata picks the filial piety puppet show. >_< He put on makeup to look like his own father, and a son puppet that has a striking resemblance to his half brother Yuusaku. Therefore, the bastard child is performing an act where his devoted brother does everything he’s expected to do as a model son for their asshole father. The fact that his line is “What a dutiful son. Please give him the reward that he deserves.” can be read on several levels. Basic text reading - Yuusaku was a good son, and he truly deserved the reward for being a good son. He kept his virginity and purity, was un-corruptable by Ogata and therefore, he had no choice but to snipe him. Subtext reading - due to Ogata’s clear “daddy” issues, he is actually the dutiful son and he wants the reward that he deserves. Ogata entered the military and performed well both in intelligence for Tsurumi, on the battlefield as a sniper and did everything that was asked of him before he liberated himself from Tsurumi. In that regard, Ogata was an excellent solider if not better one that Yuusaku with hands on/real world experience long before Yuusaku was a flag bearer. I think this situation should both be read on the text and subtext level. ‘Cause it is Ogata dammit and he’s not some obvious character.

Ogata is a character who wants and desires nothing more than love and acceptance. Of course being the cynical intellectual that he is, he would pick something like this. . . . it just makes you want to cringe and go “Ogata . . .”

The fact that they almost left Ogata behind indicates to me that he’s acting out his own plan for - something. Our man of mystery - Ogata.

#golden kamuy #golden kamuy meta #warrant officer kikuta #Usami Tokishige #tsurumi tokushirou #hijikata toshizo #nagakura shinpachi #ushiyama tatsuma #kirawus #kantarou #kadokura #ogata hyakunosuke #sugimoto saichi #Shiraishi Yoshitake #ASIRPA #boutarou the pirate #hanazawakoujiro #hanazawayuusaku #ariko rikimatsu

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amplesalty · 4 years

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Halloween 2020 - Day 1 - The Stand (1994) - Episode 1 The Plague

Gee, an epic post-apocalyptic story about an out of control pandemic. Never heard that one before.

Much as we like to tie the Halloween season to the Christmas one by opening up with a festive horror movie, why not link back to the TV binging that provided some content to this blog earlier in the year by partaking in this mini series? We’re only covering part one here today as this is like four feature length episodes. In a worst case scenario, the rest will serve as backups that I can plug in if I’m having an off day so to help me from falling behind. But ideally they’ll go up once a week on the same day as a standard movie post. You manage to go back to actually doing 31 entries for the first time in donkeys years and it all goes to your head and you suddenly think you can do 34!

This has actually been on my list for quite a while now, we do love a good (or bad) Stephen King adaptation around here and I have a distinct memory of seeing this on TV when I was a kid. I’m guessing it must have played over a few nights over here at some point or maybe over a bank holiday or something? Not that I really remember much in the way of details, just the cornfields and a creepy face which we’ll get on to.

It’s something that’s stuck with me over all these years, I actually got a copy of the book at one point in what must have been the early to mid 2000’s. Still have it actually, I dug it out for the sake of this entry. Seems it’s a version from 1980 from it’s first run as a paperback in the UK. Seems to have a page or two missing near the start in amongst all the copywright business but otherwise it’s in okay shape.

Even has some writing on the first page that I can only make out in parts, one section seems to read ‘an old man beats a mule’. Or perhaps, more pertinently to this story, a mute...

Cover seems a bit dull and non descript compared to the various other ones that have come out over the years. There’s something interesting to this original version with the two figures fighting, very much a literal take on the good versus evil nature of the story with one figure dressed in light colours and the other dark. The dark figure is wielding a scythe which is obviously closely associated with the Grim Reaper. Seems to have some form of beak sticking out of its hood too and the robes and shoes seem to be almost harlequin or jester type clothes?

I wasn’t really expecting much going into it, especially based on the 1990 mini-series of It. I think because of the nature of It being partly set in the 60’s, as well the contemporary portion which just looks very 80’s, gives it this image in my head of being very dated. Outside of a few actors like Tim Curry, John Ritter and Seth Green, there’s not really any notable stars in it either and even though, Green’s notably arguably came much later on. The Stand though? This thing has some names, even if the bigger ones are just small cameos. Amongst the main cast you’ve got Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald and Rob Lowe. Obviously Ringwald isn’t a massive star or anything and is only really known for that string of John Hughes movies in the 80’s but around this time was peak Sinise. He’s not long removed from starring in Of Mice and Men (...and men....and men...) and would have roles in Forrest Gump, Apollo 13 and Ransom in the following years. Plus that big stretch in CSI:NY in the 00’s. But then you’ve got people like Ed Harris and Kathy Bates showing up, albeit briefly but these guys have some clout. I mean, Bates had just won the Academy Award a few years prior for her role in Misery so maybe she felt compelled to do more work under the King umbrella. Even the more minor roles seem like a roll call of ‘hey, it’s you!’ with Ken Jenkins (AKA Bob Kelso from Scrubs), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the proprietor of Joe Bob’s Drive In, Joe Bob Briggs.

The landscape of TV feels very different today with actors much more willing to work in the field as it’s taken on much more artistic integrity. The greater availability of shows after they’ve aired, be it through DVR, home media or streaming, has enabled people to watch in far greater numbers. There was a time when the big break was deemed to be making it to Hollywood and starring in motion picture epics but it seems more and more that story tellers are moving away from the relatively cramped 2 hour-ish format of the silver screen to having their vision play out over a long form story and the big name actors are following suit. I feel like things would have been very different back in the early 90’s so to have these names attached.

Seems for a long time there were plans to turn this into a movie, it’s even referred to during a ‘making of’ feature on the blu-ray (pretty much the only feature on there I might add) as a ‘motion picture epic’ but this must have been done way into production so either they were confused or trying to mislead viewers for some reason? Apparently in the early 80’s the idea was for the success of Creepshow to finance production of The Stand but took until the early 90’s for everyone to finally settle on the miniseries.

Very much a big budget affair too for a TV Show, $6m per episode. And it’s needed given the scale of the story, taking place in all these different locations, the special effetcs and with so many characters involved with over 125 speaking roles across the series. It’s definitely a jump up from It, even though that had the two different time periods, it only had a budget of $12m across its two parts compared to the $24m here across four parts.

But to finally address the massive elephant in the room, this story centers around an outbreak of a strain of influenza seemingly created in some shadowy government facility. After something goes awry in the lab, a doomed insider pleads with the guy watching the main gate to seal the facility but he instead piss bolts for his nearby house and hurriedly bundles his wife and child into their car as they make their escape. Everyone else is not nearly as fortunate though as the camera pans the facility, lifeless corpses strewn throughout that have seemingly dropped dead in the middle of their everyday activities, there’s even one guy doubled over on a ping pong table. All of this is set to the sounds of BOC’s Don’t Fear the Reaper and culminates with the image of a crow picking at a doll dropped by the child in the rush out of the front gate. The crow features prominently on the front cover of the blu-ray I have, perched atop of a skull. Though, I know they’re going for the whole post-apocalyptic vibe but what about the superflu is causing the road to burn up and crack like that? The bird also shows up a fair bit throughout the episode, I was going to talk about it being a raven and how such birds are linked with ill omen and death but it’s a crow apparently. Who knew? Not me, I’m no ornithologist. It also seems to be very closely linked with a mysterious figure that is alluded to throughout, a ‘dark man’ or monster.

When the original carrier of the disease makes his way into Arnette, Texas, and crashes into the gas station that Sinise’s character Stu Redman is working at, his dying words are of his efforts to escape from a dark man that was chasing him and that no one can out run him. Maybe in that moment you’d think this is just a state of delirium and he’s speaking oddly poetically about trying to outrun Death himself but as the show goes on, more and more people speak of this dark man, almost as if everyone in the grip of this disease comes to share this vision.

And speaking of visions, we can’t forget Mother Abigail and her cornfields. Both Lowe and Sinise’s characters are whisked away in their dreams to the middle of nowhere where a centurion on her porch warns of them of an ominous future. Think Mama Murphy from Fallout 4 only with much less chem addiction. The only thing Mama Abigail needs is her bread. What is it with King and fields anyway? You’ve got In the Tall Grass, plus the corn fields here and in Children of the Corn. There’s probably more I’m forgetting too. It’s either cornfields, writers in distress or killer ‘whatever I can see in front of me whilst I’m pitching this story’ with this guy.

In a way though it’s good that the show takes this supernatural turn because otherwise this would be a little too on the nose to be watching in this current climate. It’s very eerie to see such similar events play out on screen, starting with the widespread rumours and misinformation. It starts out innocently enough with talk of this so called superflu being downplayed, covered up by the government as an anthrax attack or outbreak of swineflu. I remember back to those more innocent times at the start of the year when COVID was naively dismissed as little more than another flavour of the month disease like the swineflu, sars or ebola that would be here today and gone tomorrow. But then you’ve got things like the sense of paranoia suddenly surrounding a simple cough or sneeze, talks of quarantines, social distancing, the implementation of masks (which one reporter describes as not being able to stop a flu germ with a hangover) to the more disturbing scene of lethal force being used against a TV news crew who refuse to surrender footage they’ve shot of army troops disposing of bodies. Granted, we never got anywhere near that level, I think the worst we had was that guy from CNN getting arrested or that Aussie reporter being pushed over.

They even managed to mirror how universal a pandemic like this is, from the common man to the height of celebrity. One of the characters we’re introduced to is a singer who, whilst he seems to be one of the few lucky to have some immunity, still sees his mother succumb to the virus. Just like we saw with the likes of BoJo or Tom Hanks, it really is a great leveller and, as a wise man once said, ‘You might be a King or a little street sweeper but sooner or later you dance with the Reaper!’. I guess we can take solice that we haven’t quite had the societal collapse that this show manages to pull off in less than a week, with Times Square on fire and a guy running around shooting people like he’s in Falling Down. That’s not to say we wont get there, we seem to be hovering more around general civil disobedience right now with the growing frustration of lockdown and PPE spilling out into protests.

It makes for compelling viewing to see how quickly things break down from simply a man having the sniffles to people being rounded up from their homes and ushered into army vehicles. There’s a lot to take in as the show has to establish the events taking place and introducing it’s multitude of characters so there’s not really much room to breathe. Hopefully episode 2 can relax a little now and give the cast some time to grow. There’s still some standout performances though such as Redman’s growing frustration at being cooped up in a test facility, lashing out at the doctors and nurses coming in in their hazmat suits, prodding and poking him. It would have been nice to see more scenes with him and Dr. Dietz. They have one argument where they nearly come to blows before having a big showdown by the end, with the Doc being one of the last staff members left alive, seemingly crazed by their inability to find any answers in Redman’s tests and he threatens to take his frustrations out on Redman by shooting him. He might be immune to the virus but I bet he’s not immune to a bullet. Dietz starts out with this complete lack of empathy, almost to the point of having a rather cheery deposition considering the circumstances, as he finds some fascination in the speed at which the virus causes death. But he becomes more and more short tempered and threatening as the days wear on and it would have been good to see a more gradual descent.

The aforementioned Ed Harris plays General Starkey overseeing the initial bioweapon project and the fallout of it’s outbreak, perhaps overseeing to a fault as it becomes pretty clear from his ever increasing five o’clock shadow, dishevelled clothing and massive bags under his eyes that he’s slept very sparingly since the initial breach in containment. I think for the entire time we see him, his screen never changes from a shot of one of the cooks at the base of the initial outbreak slumped over, face down in the meal he was preparing. It makes a bit of a change to go from the quite verbal exchanges of Redman and Dietz to Starkey’s physical appearance and facial expressions putting across his mood.

#Halloween 2020 #Stephen King #The Stand

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violetsystems · 3 years

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personal

I’ve been able to sleep until six the last few days. I’ve been on this miserable eight to four sleep schedule. I ordered a silent vortex coffee grinder specifically to be less annoying in this regard. Even if I could literally just grind the coffee the night before. I also bought a rug cleaner for the first time in my life. It’s amazing the things you don’t realize you need for a home let alone an office. Last night I received an email from LinkedIn asking me to weigh in on a conversation about higher education. The only public facing social networking site I really use actively I pay for. They bought a service called Linda.com years ago. It was probably the most important site to me for instructional videos. These days it is included on the platform so I spend a fair amount of time keeping my job skills plausible. I learned pretty hard the last six months that my professional network had all but evaporated. A hard thing to face when you worked with your friends for over twenty years. But people have to move on. I sometimes make decisions that seem smarter in retrospect. You could even mistake it for premonition but I just call it good judgement. I made the decision to start the process of becoming a LLC. It was pretty easy to do once you paid the four hundred dollars. There’s services out there online that will do the legal part for you. I chose VS consulting as the name which becomes real around mid December if the Secretary of State accepts it. They asked me to cut the ribbon virtually. I congratulated myself in silence but this is pretty much the first place I’ve shared the news with. My mom didn’t quite understand what I had done and my dad is an accountant. I haven’t told him yet either. I got the idea seeing some of the people who still work at my old job starting their own side businesses. Crazy to see people still employed having extra jobs in this economy. But for the most part I don’t really compare my experience to anyone’s anymore. So I just look forward. There are a lot of ways I generate income. Some of them aren’t very lucrative. I released another ep Monday. Three of my friends from across the world I never really talk to bought it immediately. It makes sense because my music is how they know me. So that’s how they keep up with me. From there, Bandcamp revenue share Friday passed with little or no fanfare. It still doesn’t change the fact I owe taxes on the income above a certain amount if I report it. We all know how the rich hate paying those taxes. And the whole world now knows that I work for a LLC on the premier professional social networking site. It’s a win win for me because I can still look for a job but I appear employed. It’s also a nice buffer in these times for your resume. In retrospect, every article I read says the end of December is a perfect time to start your own business. Mostly because January 1st allows you to start with a fresh balance sheet and good accounting. So if anything my New Year’s resolution is to be cleaner and more concise about everything. Even if the rest of society’s ethics and accountability gets muddier as COVID-19 and the election process drags on. The only things I really have to worry about this next year are documenting my spending, opening up a business checking account, and deducting business expenses. Sounds like a job to me.

There are tools you need for a job. I bought a year long subscription to Creative Cloud. I had it for free for years. I worked in a visual communications department for ten years. I saw the most amazing work every morning hung up outside my office. It inspired me to learn about print making and screen printing. I even owned Adobe stock at one point because I realized Microsoft Office wasn’t doing my resume much justice. I shudder to think how many jokes were cracked by the Workday staff over my Chanel submission. Truth is nobody called back for interviews at any of the places I applied. And this doesn’t really stop me from keeping my eyes out for a position anywhere. But if we are talking about generating income, I can do that all by myself. I can also hire people and deduct more business expenses if I felt that was an option. Which starts to get into the meat of why the job market and economy is so fucked up in America. A lot of people didn’t fall in line on a balance sheet when COVID-19 came crashing down last February. And when the fiscal year came time to start fresh, they thinned their liabilities. Companies are now thinking in quarters rather than years at this point. And small businesses like myself also have to think the same because I now owe the IRS money every three months. The accounting side of it doesn’t really bore me. I’ve done every IT role in the business pretty much over twenty years. I guess that’s why LinkedIn calls on me to offer an opinion. I’ve never had to be this hardcore about the finances. Another great reason why I spend so much time in spreadsheets aside from writing on the internet. It’s much easier to approach a professional consultant with twenty years of experience with an invoice than it is to tether them to your payroll with benefits. I’m always having to think six months ahead myself. This has an advantage to it insofar that I don’t often look back. You pay your taxes and you move on. There are many things I could do to generate income. I could make a zine and sell it quarterly on bandcamp along with shirts. I could post flyers around the neighborhood offering after christmas tech support. I could scour the net for opportunities to audit galvanized IT departments. I could do all this with more confidence if I could say I am employed. I could also hire someone to help me. But I could do none of this and deduct expenses without applying for a sole proprietorship. And truth be told I already have to claim this for the New York Stock Exchange. So if you had to put a label on what I do now it isn’t really that much different from any other business. The state’s richest men started as LLCs. They’re also the biggest pricks who pay the least taxes. Trickle down economics is a funny concept. Businesses offer jobs they deduct from their income therefore paying less to the pool. This would be fine for small income generating businesses. But Ken Griffin would say otherwise as he and other rich people benefit from this structure. They say the American Dream is owning your own business. So welcome to my personal nightmare. I hope you don’t mind me taking the itemized deductions after how I’ve been treated.

I don’t actually know how it’s going to work out. I just know I don’t want to appear unemployed while corporate America expects me to wink and make them more money. There are investments that have worked out for me as volatile as they might be. One Chinese company I invested in has made the CEO twelve times richer. I own four hundred and twenty shares of that company in a brokerage. My intent is to hold on to them for the long term possibly making someone richer at my own risk. I could short the entire next year to my heart’s content. My credit scores have gone through the roof. Nobody has had any answers for me on what to do. Nobody has coached me. I read. I think. I come up with solutions to my problems. And I put money in the right places. That doesn’t mean anything is a sure thing. Especially when my government finds it more advantageous to punish other countries while forgetting about it’s own people. I am absolutely in the dark about everything. Everything except running my own business in America. I already have income I have to report over the next three years due the CARES act. So that is income I will deduct. This is how it works here in America. You seize the means of production and you go to work. If it seems backward for me, you wouldn’t know the half. My life is so fucked up in terms of how hazy and confusing other people have made it. People invaded my life on pretenses that I can’t even begin to explain. And part of being a strong, responsible adult is engineering your way out of these problems. And for the most part, I’ve engineered myself into a fort that overlooks the CTA train. And a small portion of that fort can be written off as an office. Which in some ways if you do the math makes rent and utilities cheaper in the long run. I don’t make the rules. This is how America works. A LLC gets a tax id number. It allows you better options for retirement savings with a SEP IRA. You can apply for business accounts and waive taxes on business purchases. Even the family dollar around the corner has a sign in the window reminding me I can apply for tax free status. Maybe they’re mostly to blame for planting the idea in my head. I’m the one who made the call to apply. Nobody held my hand. You could also get audited by the IRS. And I’m sure the IRS would have to figure out how I got into this situation in the first place. Maybe they’d offer me a job. There’s other fantasies in my life I could imagine happening more than that waking nightmare. Like actually having money to retire. I could be travelling around the world cleaning up the mess mark to market accounting has left on big business. The scars on economies the rich have pock marked on the middle class. Or I could just keep generating income and be my own boss here in my kitchen. The one thing I do know is that is sexier to be confident enough to move ahead with your own plan slowly than to short a bunch of stocks disruptively and brag about it on the internet. You could call it my three year plan. Don’t ask me how bonds factor in that equation. I’m not a spy. What I am is a guy that is trying to be the solution and not the victim. And that guy doesn’t ever want to be a burden on the people I love. So that guy is going to keep doing what he does. And I’m not going to lie that you inspire me to do so. As sexy and confident as I’m born to be. <3 Tim

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god-hunter · 4 years

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Adjusting to Singledom

It’s about time for an update on my Single Situation, if that’s what we’re calling it. I’ve been meaning to clarify some things since unofficially starting these rants back in 2018 anyway. It might be short, it might be long. So let’s run through it and see. I’m gonna be talking about 6 girls that I’m talking to, so pay attention and keep up. This rant is going to be interesting.

First of all, the Work Crush that I had brought up originally back in 2018 is NOT Dancing Girl. Nono, Work Crush, or Original Crush was a 28 year old Barbie lookin’ Office Hottie that had so much bubbly energy about her, I didn’t know what to do with it. I never resolved that story, btw. After we became Friends on Facebook, she was that type of person that didn’t really message much. Eventually group hang outs happened and she met my Then-Girlfriend. And the two got along so well that we just became Couple Friends.

Post break up, she had reached out to me. I’m going to refer to her as Twin, because that is what she used to refer to me as at work, affectionately. First of all, Twin & her boyfriend were supposed to come over for dinner, but it didn’t work out. It’s just as well, because my Ex and I got into a fight while fixing up the apartment before they had cancelled. Then we broke up. So with this bizarre scenario, Twin had still wanted to see me. I’ll be 3rd Wheeling it and checking out their new apartment instead [which is not so new at this point.]. That plan has never surfaced as of yet, due to general busyness, but now Covid-19 is affecting our plans. Since time is moving on, by the time this outbreak calms down I’ll probably be settled into my own place. And she is very much looking forward to visiting me with her guy one day, but I’m not holding my breath.

I mention Twin, because she’s a former crush that won’t go away. I’m not trying to do anything, obviously. She has a great boyfriend who likes me a lot. But she’s definitely a significant girl in my life, and I would be very happy to hang with her (and him) more in the future.

Speaking of couples, I’m going to refer to my Beautiful Friendship as the Significant Couple. They are certainly a collective and I still like talking to them a lot. I won’t deny that I’ve been hoping to be intimate again since that one awesome night, but the differing schedules make that very difficult. Still, one thing worth noting is that I’ve spoken to both parties about the idea of... not hanging up the phone when They want to get intimate, and neither are opposed to it. So for the moment, I’ll just leave it at that =). I respect these 2 immensely for being so open to their experiences.

But now it’s time to add some new names to this mix. This was the purpose of this entry. Let’s talk about Bakery Girl. This too, is a former co-worker and friend of Twin. I call her Bakery Girl because she literally left our job to work in a new office for better pay, but hated it so much that she ended up quitting and working at her favorite Bakery that she’s now a Manager of. So, that seemed to work out for her, for now. Well, this is a person that was always pleasant at work. She was always nice, and nice on the eyes lol. We always got along, but didn't really interact or ever flirt. Still... Facebook can be a real beautiful thing.

Before she had left our job, she had mentioned that she wanted to get drinks with me. (Not just me, but a bunch of us from work.). Of course I said yeah as this was just a friend thing. ...It never happened. Instead Dancing Girl came out and.. that crush began, I guess.

But anyway... Since the Breakup I opened up to a bunch of people. And I suppose it was week 3 or so, that I had told her about it on FB. I’m not quite sure when we first spoke about my new situation, but I do remember being in my old bedroom and not feeling miserable, because she was so fun to talk to. I wasn’t moping about my last chapter, but merely informing her as we caught up. And then as we talked, the energy felt borderline flirty, or sort of like this friendly vetting process. What I mean by that is we’ll tell each other stuff, and see how the other feels about the topics. Most we agree on. Some we definitely differ on. But respect is there. Anyway, more-to-the-point. After a couple of failed attempts at talking on Facebook, I tried one more time last night and got another good conversation with her. And this time, I was able to bring it over to the phone. I got her number! So who knows if it’ll go anywhere, but for now I’ll take that victory. This girl’s definitely a good person, and even if it’s a long-term developing thing she is someone definitely worth keeping in touch with. It really helps that she’s 28 and not 21. Or as she refers to Dancing Girl... she’s not 12, lol. [Yes, she knows Dancing Girl too from work, but she has no idea that I was into her. I plan to keep it that way.]

Speaking of Dancing Girl, her and Dante are fucking annoying, yo. We barely talk at breaks now, because I’m not trying. Instead Dante’s either being an idiot or just cooing at her, and the two of them are just obnoxious with each other in my space. But I’m learning to put it in its place. Literally everything is changing. Breaks now seem to get split up between us all chilling and talking, then the two of them splitting off to smoke weed, while my other dude in his 40′s goes and smokes a cig by himself. Today I took it upon myself to make it my new normal to join him when he smokes that cig. Since no one else really talks to each other any more... We just literally hang around each other while everyone’s on their phones. It sickens me. But I guess that’s what happens when Millenials see each other every day... [And no, I don’t smoke, but I’ve always gone outside for the fresh air and good company. Now that company ain’t so good any more, but they’re still my friends.]

There’s another former co-worker I hit up, but nothing to really report yet. I don’t have a codename for her yet, but I asked if she’d like to catch up over dinner and she said, yes. But after the Coronavirus passes, if that’s okay. I told her it was, and instead we caught up on Facebook for an hour or so. For now I’ll call her the Social Distancer... =P

And lastly, I’m going to bring up Gamer Girl. This one’s a slippery slope, but it’s very important to talk about now, because I do not know what is going to happen next. She is my Ex’s friend, but ever since we dated, she was always into both of us. Like, she literally would’ve swung with us if my Ex was into that. I’ll never forget, she was like, “Wow. You two are hot.” She’s been referred to as a Unicorn, because she loves getting into sexual situations, but she has no romantic attachment to any of it. And this is why I’m bringing her up. Again, it was about 3 weeks after the break up. The Ex and I had gotten into a fight post-break up, which propelled me to really want to leave. And at the worst time, she messaged me starting with, “I hope this doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable...” And then she proceeded to talk about how she was lonely and not good at making friends and needs an area friend to hang out with. She brought up a past divorce and that she doesn’t want anything romantic, but she wants to play video games and have pizza with me. She opened it up as a night where I could vent to her and just have fun.

Against my better judgement, I said yeah. Plans weren’t made until this week. Literally tomorrow night, I’ll be seeing what this actually is. Now, on paper, it might simply be pizza and video games. But we’ve talked a little since then. In the first place, she was flirty and brought up her whole schedule for the week. Then she said, “On this day I’m off and have no plans other than to have no pants on.” Something like that. Now, why would she say something like that to me, if not to get a rise out of me...? Then I gagued it a little further when we made the plan. She brought up that Free Pizza is best pizza and I told her, “No way. I’ll happily pay my share,” then she explained to me that she has so many points that it’ll be a completely free pizza. So instead I offered to supply the drinks and asked what she likes. “Rum and Coke is my poison of choice,” o.o. “Rum and Coke it is!!”

So we’re drinkin’ now...

I’m trying not to get my hopes up. I’m trying not to make it weird. But knowing that this girl didn’t want to make me uncomfortable, but she's been lonely since her divorce and wants to hang out, but doesn’t want anything romantic... and knowing that she’s the type of person to screw without attachment... and then she’s telling me that she wants to drink, now...

I mean, how can I not get a little excited!? Also, we’re playing Fallout Vegas, so that’ll probably be very fun. Right now my plan is to expect nothing, but be prepared for it to get weird. The Ex will inevitably be brought up, along with any venting that goes along with it.

I don’t expect to win her over that way, and I’m not exactly trying to do that anyway. But who knows how she gets? Maybe she’s just casual as fuck and she’ll want to cuddle?? For comfort?? I have no idea.

But as a Single Dude, I am fucking Game. This is my new Revolution, man. I don’t care. Between the randomness of this hang out, Bakery Girl practically interviewing me about the Ex - asking if I’m over her and then giving me her number, and the Social Distancer being interested in dinner, I’m feeling Really Confident right now. Not to mention that the Significant Couple is chill as fuck and I always like talking to them.

Things are interesting now... Things are definitely different. My New Normal isn’t here yet. But I’m adjusting all the same.

#Adjusting to Singledom #dating #relationships #Twin #Significant Couple #Bakery Girl #Dancing Girl #Social Distancer #Gamer Girl

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thesickpanda · 2 years

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Covid Drugs and Medical Gatekeeping in Australia

I have been living in relative isolation since restrictions were lifted in Australia in December 2021. Prior to that, I only had a few brief bouts of cautious freedom when Covid cases reached low to zero (back when Australia was still trying to protect its vulnerable and stamp the virus out). So it has been a very long 2 years for me of lockdowns, both enforced and personal.

Now that the Australian government has completely given up on even acknowledging there’s a pandemic at all, and has lifted all restrictions (except masks on public transport but I am sure that’s going to go soon, too), case numbers are soaring, and death rates are much too high than any of us should be comfortable accepting. But, here we are. As the death rates tend to be among the elderly, sick and disabled, who gives a damn, right? Those people are just “burdens on society anyway” so screw ‘em. Basically, we have been totally given up on, which is on brand for this government.

And so I *remain* living in relative isolation. I see only 2 local friends for outdoor hangouts once a week, with masks on and RATs taken. Apart from them, I am seeing my partner’s parents who, like me, are largely in isolation due to their both having cancer. Outside that, it’s the physiotherapist and psychologist that I see, again with RATs and masks, although my psychologist no longer wears them for my comfort and I cannot force her to. It is great when you own psych causes you anxiety by refusing to wear a mask…

I do not go to shops, to restaurants, to events (indoors or out), to friends’ houses, to anywhere that is not a nature reserve or quiet bush track. And with a 2 year long La Nina event and copious amounts of rain, most of the outdoors has been rendered off limits for me, too (hooray for floods 3 years in a fucking row!).

So that paints the picture. Today I had an appointment with my GP Specialist who is currently treating me for MCAS and Fibromyalgia. She has just recovered from Covid herself. We talked about my maladies, and then I explained my situation to her and asked about: A.) Getting a 4th vaccine and B.) Failing that, whether I could get access to PAXLOVID or similar should I contract Covid. The Australian government has, at every turn, made it REALLY hard for people with chronic illness to get early access to vaccines and boosters. Basically, they have a teeny tiny list of what they consider “serious illnesses” that qualify people for these things, and I have never been on it. I have had to BEG and PLEAD my way to get help throughout this pandemic because as far as the government and most GPs are concerned, I don’t have anything serious. Fibromyalgia is basically treated as “Whining Bitch Syndrome” and none of them seem aware of the recent studies that prove, beyond any doubt, that it’s an auto-immune disease (and don’t get me started on MCAS; almost no one here has heard of it and that is *also* autoimmune and sometimes deadly).

Well, here’s the message I just sent to my partner:

“On the topic of getting another booster, she [my GP specialist] researched it while we spoke and was of the opinion that if a 4th shot hasn't been encouraged for people not on the Magic List of Illnesses, there may not be enough evidence of benefit. [Note: this is not what some other countries are reporting.] However, she also felt like I should be able to access it if I want to, and that being gate kept out of a 4th jab wasn't cool. So it was nice to at least be validated there. As for Paxlovid, she also researched that and it is as I feared: it is only going to be given to people who are on another Magic List, which I do not make. I asked if a doctor's letter would help my case, and she explained to me why it wouldn't, as the way it is assessed is....insane, to be honest. Again, she thought it completely unfair the government has done this, but it isn't even up to GPs who gets Paxlovid, but the "acute medical assessors" they refer your case to. Basically, once I test positive, I'd have to see a GP, beg, cry and plead my case, then they'd have to APPLY to attain a LICENSE to treat me with it, which could very well be denied if the "Acute Medical Assessor" doesn't deem me sick or vulnerable enough, which is likely to be the case thanks to the Magic List. And what's more, the drugs are most effective BEFORE you get hideously ill with Covid, so the kerfuffle involved in just trying to get hold of the drug already renders it less effective by the time you actually DO get it (and that is if you’re lucky). It's infuriating. I feel like the ticket to my freedom is on the other side of unbreakable glass and this wicked government is keeping me (and others like me) from accessing it.”

If I had Paxlovid in my own medical cabinet, or a script for it that I could get a friend to take to the pharmacy should I test positive, I would feel SO MUCH BETTER about living my life again. I’d see a few more friends, maybe even set foot in a shop one in a while. But not, I am once again, Not Sick Enough. I mean, I am too sick to work or do much of anything, but I have been denied the Disability Pension, access to subsidized healthcare and now Covid drugs. I am a non-person in this society. I do not matter, I do not exist, they do not care if I live or die.

I am so tired. I am tired of having to JADE my very existence to everyone (Justify, Argue, Defend, Explain). I am tired of the judgment I receive from some people in my network for “still acting like it is 2020” and “being paranoid”. I know my own body; I know how it historically has responded to even mild infections. I get REALLY FRIGGIN’ SICK and I almost *never* recover without lingering symptoms that become chronic and add to the litany of maladies and miseries that I am ALSO JUDGED FOR.

I cannot just be a human being anymore.

Honestly, fuck this government. Fuck them all to hell. And if they get voted in again next election, fuck their entire voter base, too.

#covid #australia #australian government #fuck the australian government #chronic illness #ableism

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deeeelightfuldee · 3 years

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What’s the earliest you could go to bed at night and feel okay about?

in my best dreams id love to go to bed at like 745/8. but my brain doesnt shut down like that, and i tend to be very productive at night. Maybe one day tho

What is you favorite type of lunch meat?

uhhhhh turkey

What time of the year do you dislike the most?

summer heat.

Do you put ketchup on your scrambled eggs?

ew no.

What is your favorite color to wear?

so I have historically worn a lot of darker colors but I’m trying to be intentional about making my life romantic and I need to introduce more color.

Are you an overachiever?

in most respects, yes

What physical feature do you wish you had (i.e. freckles, curly hair)?

smaller size, sharper jawline, thicker hair (not a LOT thicker, just mildly)

What fictional character (i.e. Bambi, Scarlette O'Hara) would you marry?

mr. darcy omfggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg.

Did you ever go through a phase where you wrote bad poetry?

no. never

What is your favorite thing about your life?

that no matter what, God has always provided and had a better plan

Have you ever painted a picture of somebody?

as a kid, all the time.

Did you enjoy your past relationships?

in most respects. each of them was good for a time.

Name a comedy that you like.

four christmases

Could you wait until marriage for sex?

that was the plan

What was the last thing that impressed you?

ummm that the plumber was able to get the roots out of the drain as easily as he did.

When was the last time you were in a pet store?

last summer. We were going to get benny a little bro/sis but with covid everyone was adopting animals like crazy out here.. so the ones they had were on these enormous wait lists where you would go thru an interview, a HOME INSPECTION, and had to bring all your other animals in to meet said rescue. it was ridiculous.

What nationality is your last name?

dutch

What’s your favorite kind of chips and dip?

ems crack dip with uhhh the wavy lays

Who was the last boy that you saw cry?

uhh hm. hmmmmmmm... I honestly can’t recall

Does your mom know you do surveys?

I dunno, tbh

Have you ever had a serious injury?

I mean, somewhat. Not anything I discuss tho lol

What was the last thing you achieved?

surviving vid!

Would you enjoy being famous?

i doubt it. I’m pretty introverted and even though I get along very easily with people, my batteries charge best when im by myself or home. I would very much like the income though lol.

What’s under your bed?

I plan to go thru it soon! I’m trying to gather all my kile memories and I know I have like jewelry paperwork, cards from flowers, letters, etc. that need to be pulled. :(

Do you enjoy travelling?

Love it.

Have you ever belonged to a club? If so, what was it?

absolutely. thats a long, long list. lots of academic, Christian, honors, volunteer, and youth group types.

When was the last time you drank strawberry milk?

oh geez, maybeeeeeee 15 years?

Have you ever managed to collect all the fast food toys in a set?

no. that was never my thing.

Do you have a clock in your room?

No. My old cable box had the besttttttt time light. I miss having a small clock. I mentioned this to mom how we spent like forever looking for replacements after we changed cable providers. We didn’t want red or green, but the white. Now this makes me want to find one for my room. mom has a google device so shes set lol.

Did you have a good driver’s ED teacher?

I had the most phenomenal teacher. tho when it came to actual driving appointments (after the class periods) I often got paired with this older fella who constantly berated me over being homeschooled and telling me he was going to report me to the state. eventually I stood up to him, handed him the HSLDA contact card (home school legal defense association) and encouraged him to report me all he wanted. he stopped attacking me finally. it was awful. but the other gentleman was hilarious and fun.

Which of Britney Spears’ songs is your favorite?

ohhhhhh mer gersh i love so many of her songs. this answer would definitely change depending on the week but this week its a tie between gimme more and circus.

Does mind over matter work for you?

in most respects

Are you paranoid?

i can be at times.

What is the best thing about winter?

OOOOOoo good gravy this is a long list. I love the calm. I love the way the air is thick and cold and how quiet it becomes. I love hearing the sound of snow falling. I love the glitter haze it leaves. I love the way it feels like the house wraps you up in a warm hug when you come in from the cold. I love the way candles and a fire in the fireplace make everything so cozy. I love the glow of twinkling lights, white and colored, just casting the most beautiful and dreamy cast on the neighborhood. I love the food and drinks that make you feel full and ready for a deep sleep. I love the clothes and the bundling up, the scarves, the hats, the mittens. I love the music and the way no matter where you go, there are carols playing the sweetest love songs. I love the way decorations come up and people display their much-loved memories in the form of ornaments on their trees. I love seeing the elaborate wrapping styles of packages around the tree and filling up the stockings. I love seeing the snowmen and igloo designs displayed with pride in the front yards around town. I love the way the world gets dark so early, yet.. there is light reflecting off the mounds of snow. I love the way the early night allows for early comfy flannel pajamas and thick wool socks and sleep. I love the curling up under a giant mound of blankets and reading a book. I love thinking about the joy on other’s faces when they open gifts that were cultivated for their happiness. I love the rereading of the beloved passages of scripture where we recall the reason for the season. I just love it all.

Have you ever been truly in love?

yes. 2 times, how lucky I was.

Are you currently planning a trip?

I was not. I probably could stand to be home for a bit.

How many plants are in your home?

honestly, no clue at this point. I’ve been locked away coming up on a month. I dunno how many we have right now.

What is your favorite possession?

hmm. boy this is hard. It used to be my ring kile got me. I feel weird saying my favorite things are from him lately, so maybe my stained glass lamp.

Have you ever felt like you were too nice and way too often overlooked?

I am a nice person majority of the time and I would say I have been overlooked from time to time but I definitely do not behave nicely in order to be noticed.

What movies have tripped you out?

eh, I’m not entirely sure.

Did you rollerblade as a kid? Do you still rollerblade?

nope. I was so prone to breaking my ankles that it just absolutely was not for me. I tried a couple times, but couldn’t grasp the hang of it.

Would you ever settle into a relationship that wasn’t right for you? Do you know friends who are in relationships just so they have someone to sleep with at night?

no. this life is way too precious and too short to be spent laying next to someone who isn’t right for me. I have no intentions of settling. I do know of friends who have settled just to have someone near. It makes me so sad. The thought of settling like that just destroys me. Not to mention how unfair it is to the other person. Idk. Just sad sad sad.

Would you take a dirty picture of yourself for someone you are dating?

no nudity.

Do you use earplugs or a sleeping mask when you sleep?

no. I would be way too distracted by that. I also don’t like things touching my face.

What summertime treats do you love?

ummm watermelon. popsicles.

How picky are you when it comes to choosing who to kiss or not kiss?

oooo boy im so ridiculously picky about it. In fact, one guy i was seeing for a few dates... i was like unsure of him and he wanted to kiss so bad and I just avoided it everytime lol.

What do you hate most about moving?

I’ve only done a temporary move. I don’t know that it’s the same.

Do you feel that having sex anywhere but a bed is more exciting?

I think that I’d be down for it if I were married, but I think its most intimate when its in private lol

Do you drink 5 hour energy drinks or any other kinds of energy drinks?

Nope. It’s just not my thing. I’m never lacking that much energy.

Has anyone ever whistled at you?

yes.

Do you like scarves?

love them.

Is your father homophobic?

I’m not sure. I haven’t got a clue.

Do you take gummy vitamins?

sometimes. its my preferred method

Have you ever applied make-up on a guy, for any reason at all?

not that I can recall. ohhhhhh maybe when i was in theater and we needed to put like color on their faces to ensure they wouldn’t be washed out by the harsh lighting.

Who would you like to meet before you die?

no one. those who want to meet me, should meet me lol

If your dream was to be a model, and a big opportunity came up, but you had to be nude, would you take it?

nah.

What’s the most ridiculous conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard of?

oh there have been so many. I just ignore them. I don’t see sense in letting my mind be corrupted by that

If Heaven and Hell exists, where are you going when you die?

heaven!

Who is the person that you are afraid of losing, above everyone else?

mom!

What is one thing that pisses you off pretty much everyday?

the bathroom lol

Is there anyone you know that you feel should consider therapy?

everyone. everyone and anyone would benefit from therapy.

Do you like any of the songs on Twilight, or the actual movie/saga itself?

I’ve never seen it so I couldn’t tell ya.

How old was the first person you kissed?

at the time? I was 16 he was ...... 19

Will you be a strict parent one day?

strict? no. I’ll have rules and such but I’m a very loving caregiver... not to be cocky

Last person to stand up for you?

I wish i could tell you. I’ve never been the kind that requires someone else to protect me like that. but man, it has to feel good to know someone else is willing to go to those lengths.

Have you been to a baby shower?

many times.

Who were you with the last time you went to the movie theater?

My sister

What’s your favorite high school memory?

hmm, there are so many i loved.. probably the trips.

Do you like relationships, or do you prefer to be single?

i love being single, but miss the connection from a relationship

What is one adventurous thing you’d be willing to do?

hot air balloon.

What subject at school did you absolutely hate?

freakin math

Italian food or Chinese food?

Chinese. ugh, I’d kill for some if they had GF soy sauce options

Do you like to make flash cards when you study?

sometimes, it depends on what I’m using them for. often I’ll just write like Question Answer type patterns in my notebook and then use a coversheet. I hate losing notecards.

Has anyone ever told you that you’re a good singer?

yeah but I don’t sing like that anymore.

Do you ever watch TED talks, live or online?

I used to a lot,not anymore so much.

I dare you to write the name of a person you strongly dislike.

no thank you

Biggest trouble you’ve ever gotten into at school?

none really on my behalf. one girl completely plagiarized my work and that led to some drama, but beyond that nothing.

Do you own one of those “professional” DSLR cameras?

no, I’m not that sort of wealthy.

Does it bother you when you see a 6th grader with a bunch of gadgets?

I mean, part of me thinks that its just kinda sad for the kid to not have simple pleasures instead of needing all the finest gadgets,

Did you buy yearbooks every year in high school, or did you not bother?

n/a

Do you have Restless Legs Syndrome?

Jalapeños: yay or nay?

yay most of the time.

Did you ever play Minecraft?

uhhhh only when my nephews ask me to for like 5 mins lol

Did you ever have a Club Penguin account? Were you a member?

I didn’t.

Do you know anyone that seems to not have any common sense?

yes. some people just seem very... unaware.

What do you think is the biggest injustice that was ever done to you?

assault

What type of person angers you the most?

those who feel it is OK for them to assault another person in order to gain what they want or to release what they desire to release

If you could change your appearance, how would you alter it?

I’d want to be smaller. thicker hair. probably invisalign so I can correct my bite.

Describe your first relationship?

he was ... fascinating to me. He allowed me to have my guard down. He made me laugh, he made me blush, but he made me feel like I was constantly safe. He was wounded from his previous marriage but he was.. so worth mending. However, we were long distance and he just wasn’t able to do that. He needed more than I was able to offer him at the time.

Describe your last relationship?

OK so relationship is such a widely defined word. I’m going to describe the last person I was personally committed to. He was my other half. He was pretty vain and conceited when I first got to know him. Constantly concerned with his work and nothing but his work. However, along the years he developed into the most kind, generous, patient, extremely loving man. He changed all sorts of his former ways. He began investing in his character and taking the time to better himself. It was so incredible to watch. We created a bond where he was my world. I thought I was his. but we ended over him having a relationship for years that I knew nothing about. it’s weird, this quote from jane eyre reminds me of him...

“I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you. And if you were to leave I'm afraid that cord of communion would snap. And I have a notion that I'd take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, you'd forget me.”

Can you honestly say that you always practice safe sex?

I didn’t get the option to do so when it was happening.

Why do you think your most favorite film touches you so deeply?

ps i love you just tears me to shreds over how effing painful it is to lose someone you love.

What do you want people you meet for the first time to think about you?

that I was kind and friendly, warm and inviting.

Do you feel protective over someone?

yes. my loved ones. my family members. my close friends.

What perfume/cologne do you wear?

ummm either very sexy night, or refuge.

What was the color of the bridesmaid dresses of the last wedding you went to?

a very deep, dark red/maroon. super lovely

What is your favorite way to eat chicken?

CHICKEN SANDWICH< preach

It is your birthday. You hope the cake is:

omg i crave regular birthday cake. gluten free cake so far has been quite disappointing.

What were you doing at 8pm last night?

nothing.

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rhigbcstudent · 3 years

Text

I’ve Learned A Lot

Who Inspired Me

During the seminar series we were able to speak to numerous marketing professionals with a vast array of experience. The most important takeaway for me was to be open to any opportunities that come your way; big or small. We spoke with Asta Shouten who has a background in graphic design and is currently studying digital analytics at George Brown college. Asta is a huge asset to her employer because she has diverse set of skills. She can execute graphic design or branding and then also implement the marketing strategies for those matters. After speaking with Asta I was inspired to learn photoshop. I have been taking photoshop courses on Skillshare. After developing my photoshop skills I plan on learning Adobe Illustrator so that I’ll have adequate graphic design skills to promote myself to future employers.

Here are links to classes I’ve been taking:

Adobe Photoshop CC – Essentials Training Course

https://skl.sh/3uvjtvk

Adobe Illustrator CC – Essentials Training

https://skl.sh/3sVFcvV

My Future Endeavour

Luckily, I had been developing my skills because I managed to secure an internship that requires me to have basic photoshop abilities. This summer I will be working as the marketing coordinator for Dog World Resort & Spa, which is a brand-new doggy daycare and grooming facility. I was interested in this position because the job requirements are expansive. In this role I’ll have to conduct research to attract our target audience, create a content strategy for social channels, report monthly social analytics, write blog and social media posts and assist with the creation of promotional material, amongst other things. Additionally, I was attracted to this position because their marketing strategies are a completely blank canvas. The business has yet to open and they have done little to no marketing so far. I’ll be able to collaborate with the owner and create something completely new. At the end of the summer I’ll be able to look back at our work and decipher what strategies were successful or not. I’ll know with a degree of confidence that the outcomes were a direct result of my work. I might not have this opportunity for clear reflection had I taken a position somewhere that already had marketing strategies in place. I’ll be able to use this summer as a learning lesson that I can take with me throughout the rest of my career.

The Importance of Networking

Participating in the strategic relationship marketing program at George Brown College has really emphasized the importance of networking. James Mirynech spoke to our class about his change in career path. He was previously working in retail banking at Scotiabank. He felt that there were too many barriers to career progression in that environment and he generally wasn’t passionate about the field. It was a friend of James who advised him to apply at Shopify. If James hadn’t had that professional connection, he might not be where he is today. Now he is the Shopify+ guru, where he is able to work with some of the most successful business owners that use the platform. He thoroughly enjoys his job now and is disappointed when the workday is over. This is a great example of why it is so important to maintain professional connections. Your peers can open up your eyes to opportunities you never considered before or didn’t even know were out there.

Even though I attended this program during the unique circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic, I feel as though my peers and I have built a strong community that supports each other. We created a WhatsApp group during the first week of school and have used it to continuously communicate with each other through the year. It is obviously hard to get to know people when you aren’t able to see each other face to face but I feel that everyone in our program has made a conscious effort to become connected. In the past, I studied at University of Toronto where the class sizes were extremely large, anywhere from 100 to 1200 students per class. It was hard to build connections and get to know people due to the class environments and also being a commuter school where people often head right home or off campus after class. George Brown afforded me the opportunity of much smaller class sizes and a great deal of group work that required us to spend long amounts of time collaborating with our classmates. I feel like I have a way stronger community here than what I had at U of T.

I look forward to staying in touch with my classmates after completing this program. Many of the student have already shared where they’ll be completing their work placement this summer. Most of us have already followed each other on LinkedIn and will be able to watch each other’s career progression. I look forward to seeing where life takes my classmates and me after leaving George Brown College.

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rylredrants · 3 years

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The New Normal

The pandemic has changed everything and lately I’ve been asking myself, “When did this become normal? At what point of the last 10 months did the idea of the ‘new normal’ fade into a new reality?”

I recently watched the 90 Day Fiancée season that they filmed during the initial “lockdown” period last spring. People were just starting to wear masks because we had just been told they would help “flatten the curve” while learning to bake, and binging ‘Tiger King.’

I had already been doing curbside pickup because I was afraid of running into *Beetlejuice* at the grocery store. (I’ve decided to not say the name of that ex because that seems to be how I summon more “attention” from him.) I had just decided I was ready to start dating again, going on my first ‘first date’ in years right before restaurants started closing.

My first date with Pirate on April 29th consisted of slushies in the park with a bit of distance between us while we felt out whether or not the other was truly worth breaking quarantine to get physical with.

Spoiler alert! Things are just as great in our everyday life as they were in that initial NRE phase last spring.

I’ve been working from home for the same company for 3 and a half years, so that was no change for me. The daily press briefings from the tRump interrupted my work day but I just had to watch live because I wouldn’t believe the things I was hearing if I hadn’t seen and heard it live… the look on Dr. Birx face when he suggested “hitting the body with UV light” and rambled into the suggestion that doctors inject disinfectant to cure COVID…. The day that a reporter flat out asked him if he regretted “all the lying, all the dishonesty” during his presidency, and all of the other times he discredited the media and rambled about his ‘ratings’ while lying about the severity of the virus.

I posted articles and tweets about the pandemic so much that I lost one friend early on because I wasn’t my usual sunny self anymore. That was after she messaged me talking about how harmful masks were.

And then the election started creeping up while the Quazy Anons got progressively louder and louder.

My best friend laid a guilt trip on me for going on a road trip to Mexico for my birthday where people were masked more than anywhere locally, while she cited local COVID numbers from her hotel room in Las Vegas… where she had flown… through Phoenix. I ended that relationship a couple weeks later.

It’s been a blur of one historical event after another while the death tolls climb, surpassing the numbers of lives lost in 9-11 on a daily basis.

2,977 deaths on 9-11 and a record 4,383 reported deaths on Jan 20th

But somewhere along the way, the pandemic fatigue set in and rather than adapting to the reality of masks, curbside pickup, remote learning and true physical distancing people gave up. They started pushing to get kids back in school, despite teachers not being priority on the vaccine schedule. They went back to browsing the aisles with their masks down under their chins and shrugged off repeated requests by the CDC to not travel for the holidays.

Some complied with the mask requirements in public, only to host family gatherings at home. Others decided that “my body, my choice” meant they have the right to not wear a mask and go around asymptomatic and spreading COVID because of their free-dumbs.

The political discourse devolved into a full-scale insurrection at the Capitol only 4 weeks ago.

Today Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went live on Instagram detailing her experience that day. She hid in Rep. Katie Porter’s office, and borrowed casual clothes and sneakers from a staffer so that she would be better prepared should she need to run for her life... again.

And the sidebar story on that article is about Marilyn Manson’s response to Evan Rachel Wood’s naming him as her abuser. I almost got into it with a stranger on Facebook over that today but gave up after my 2nd response including video of her testimony to congress about sexual and domestic abuse in an effort to extend the statute of limitations on prosecuting abusers like Manson.

Every day there is another trauma, another loss...

Another reminder that the country has unraveled ways that none of us could have possibly imagined on November 8th, 2016- a statement I made on Facebook today in a post that read, “A heartfelt ‘fuck you’ to everyone who told me I was overacting in November 2016.”

My mother, who has gone full Quazy down the rabbit hole of conspiracies, echoing calls that the election was “stolen” by President Biden, unironically replied that ‘nobody messes with her woman-child” with a gif of a woman rolling her eyes and sticking her tongue out. Her insanity hit a place a couple weeks ago that was so bad my brother reached out asking for help dealing with her and agreeing with my suggestion that she be committed to a psych ward.

I can’t wrap my head around this new reality.

But I keep coming back to asking, when did this become normal? When did people decide that this was okay and life had to just ‘go on’ while ignoring facts, science, and logic?

One year ago today I was waking up in my own apartment for the first time in my life, at 41 years old. I’d never lived alone and was reeling from loss after loss from the quad to my marriage and home, to the ‘false spring’ that ended up being the bridge between dependence and independence in a way I’d never imagined possible.

Today I woke up surrounded by boxes again.

My personal reality is full of uncertainties… When will Pirate’s ex stop fighting the divorce and sign the quit claim on the ranch? Even if she does, will the bank work with us to modify the loan? Or will we just have to pack again after a few months living rent and mortgage free?

Or the more important questions… am I ever be able to fit into my pants? Will there ever be another event to go to that will warrant dusting off my high heels and putting on lipstick? Is this just what life will be forever? Masked, socially-distanced outdoor dining for those who have abandoned their sourdough bread recipes and grown tire of Door Dashed take out while Pirate and I literally mask up before walking out the door because we heard the neighbor coughing and it didn’t sound like his usual weed cough. Seriously.

A week from today I’ll be waking up at the ranch with 2 new husky puppies in addition to the 2 Great Danes, 2 rescue dogs, dozen chickens, and a single sheep in a place where Door Dash doesn’t deliver. We will get the workout and eating on track again and find yet another new normal on the ranch together.

#newnormal #pandemic pounds #its a dogs life #ranch life #COVIDiots #Q-Crazies

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