#i found my larry dolls recently

[sunflowrrvollou]

guess who joined the mile high club today!

#i found my larry dolls recently #get ready for me to take pictures of them everywhere #harry #harry styles #louis #louis tomlinson #larry #larry stylinson #larry forever

[blouisparadise]

Upon request, here is a rec list of bottom Louis fics where Louis cries during sex. If you enjoy our rec lists, please take the time to like this post and especially to reblog it to help spread the word. Happy reading!

1) I Could Be Your China Doll | Explicit | 2138 words

"This is my punishment for you, my slut." Harry kisses Louis' inner thighs and Louis shivers at his boyfriend's touch. Harry moves out of the bed again but Louis can hear shuffling and he knows that Harry is getting something not so good. The noise stops as the footsteps of the older guy suddenly become too loud for his ears.

2) Lips Are Like The Galaxy’s Edge | Mature | 2360 words

Harry licks over Louis’ hole slowly, deliberately, and his tongue is like velvet and Louis’ skin is burning at every junction where Harry touches him and it’s all so good he thinks he might cry. He licks a few more times, moaning softly like he’s relishing the taste of Louis and that’s just, well, fuck.

3) Louder Louder | Explicit | 2931 words

There's really only one way to get Louis out of a mood this terrible, and Harry is prepared to sacrifice his entire evening if necessary.

4) Heaven In These Sheets | Explicit | 3557 words

Bunny Hybrid Louis has it out for his boyfriend’s phone.

5) As Clean As A Sinner Can Be | Not Rated | 3394 words

If you asked Harry, he would tell you it’s not his fault they were in this predicament. It’s not his fault that his hair is getting too long (it is, he’s too lazy and too stubborn to let Lou cut it). It’s not his fault that because said hair is too long he had to find some way of keeping it out of his eyes (gelling it back wasn’t his style and snapbacks more times than not bugged him). It’s not his fault that Zayn had ripped his shirt sleeve off of his favourite button down shirt and he couldn’t part with it (plus he had far too much time on his hands in between shows) so he fashioned a headband, or as others would call it a head scarf, and found that it really helped keep the hair out of his eyes. Nor is he at fault for the fact that he looked like a sex god every time he wore the damn thing and really it was all his fault at how turned on it made Louis.

6) When I Hear Your Cries, Praying For Life. (I Will Be There) | Explicit | 5623 words

Well, I figured we needed Larry birthday sex, soooo.....

7) Singing Your Praises | Explicit | 6226 words

Prompt 86: Louis rides Harry while wearing his packer’s jersey/sweater and gets his ass ate.

8) Sugar, With Just The Right Amount Of Spice. | Explicit | 6314 words

Harry’s old fashioned when it comes to sex, he loves being face to face with his partner, watching their reactions to everything Harry gives them. He never does anything else then fuck in missionary position. Louis loves his sex life with Harry - but he’s getting a bit bored with doing the same position, all he really wants is for Harry to be rough with him, take control and dominate him for once.

9) Give It Up To Me | Explicit | 8134 words

"You're going to end up making me come with all the boys in our lounge," he finished, his tone softening the longer he spoke.

"And?" Harry murmured, placing his palm over the crevice of Louis' arse, keeping the plug nice and tight inside of him. "What if I wanted you to?"

10) Making A Splash | Explicit | 9557 words

“You want this?” Harry muses, fisting his cock as he drags his hand lazily up his thick length. Louis eyes the motion and nods his head absentmindedly. “You want to show everyone at this beach how much of a slut you are for Daddy’s cock?”

“M‘your slut,” Louis immediately replies, inching closer, inching closer with his eyes glued on Harry’s glistening cock, precome shining under the sun as it dribbles out his slit.

Harry grins widely and stops the movement of his hand to grip himself at the base again, pushing Louis’ head down. “Show everyone how much of a slut you are.”

11) Place Your Head On My Beating Heart | Explicit | 10860 words

The AU where porn sensation Harry Styles takes his newbie to his place and gets him to come untouched twice before even fingering him and they may or may not fall in love at some point between second and third orgasms.

12) Know You Got That Thing (That I Like) | Explicit | 15798 words

In all the ways he thought about their reunion going, watching Louis finger himself open was not on the list.

13) Baby, Let Me Love You Goodbye | Explicit | 20249 words

Louis almost calls Harry daddy. Cue denial, feelings, and way too much dirty talk.

14) Middle Ground | Explicit | 23561 words

Note: This fic is locked and can only be read by AO3 users.

Harry moves to a new town for work where he meets the enigma that is Louis Tomlinson.

15) Give So Much (Not Enough) | Explicit | 24610 words

“For my little lion,” Louis slid the smoothie bowl in front of Oscar, letting him dig in with his little hands. “And for daddy.”

He didn’t process the bowl in front of him, the push across the table causing a raspberry to roll off and fall on his lap, because Louis calling himself mummy may make him feel all sorts of mushy emotions, but Louis addressing Harry as daddy was suddenly having a very different effect on him. Since when did Louis saying daddy out loud render him speechless?

“Daddy’s still sleepy, but we’re up bright and early right Ossie?” Louis’ cooing shook him out of his daze. The man coughed, picking the raspberry off his lap and swallowing it with unintentional, and very unnecessary, eye contact with Louis. “Well, is it better than your protein smoothies and why?”

 Harry chuckled, spooning another heap of the strawberry banana goodness into his mouth, “Way better sweetheart.”

16) Put In Them Hours | Explicit | 25009 words

Note: This fic is locked and can only be read by AO3 users.

AU where Louis makes the poor decision of hiring an unfairly attractive assistant. Inspired by Rachel and Tag from Friends.

17) Honey, Make This Easy | Explicit | 25483 words

Note: This fic is locked and can only be read by AO3 users.

AU; Harry’s sister recently passed away, leaving him with temporary custody of her daughter. Needing help, he hires Louis as a nanny and the boy turns out to be help in more ways than he expected.

18) What's Mine Is Yours To Make Your Own | Explicit | 39919 words | Sequel

Sometimes, the closest Harry ever feels to home is Louis. It's their shared hotel rooms on tour, their shoes toed off in the doorway next to each other, jackets hung on the same post.

19) Worth Dying For | Explicit | 44906 words

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Louis says, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest. In the center of the table, a set of three glossy photos stares up at him, mocking him.

“A security detail is non-negotiable, Louis, you know this,” his mum reminds him, tapping the middle photo with two fingers.

Louis doesn’t look back down at the pictures, gesturing towards them wildly, over-dramatically. “This is not a security detail!” he protests. “This is a lanky college student. In what world do you hire someone like this kid to protect me?”

20) No Easy Choice, But You’re Mine | Explicit | 45601 words

Louis is an omega hitman with one last job that goes a little sideways. Harry is the alpha bartender that looks a little too closely and cares a little too much.

21) Sedative Duty. | Explicit | 46588 words

Pop-star of the moment Louis Tomlinson is on his third-world tour. He decides to hire renowned professional dominant Harry Styles to unwind while on the road. In an effort not to raise suspicion by the crew, fans, and press,  Harry pretends to be his bodyguard. He ends up being far more than that.It's everything he doesn't notice until it's been taken away from him.

Check out our other fic rec lists by category here and by title here.

#fic recs #larry #bottom louis #top harry #blp fic recs #crying during sex

[itsyounggaga]

Gaga was interviewd by HX Magazine in 8th August, 2008. The magazine is based in NY.

Photoshoot by Pieter Henket.

“Just Dance” singer Lady Gaga gives back to the gays

By Brandon Voss Not quite sure what to make of electro-pop diva Lady Gaga’s theatrical fashion-forward fierceness? Follow the advice of her international hit single: “Just dance. It’ll be okay.” Still hot off a history-making performance on the Miss Universe Pageant in Vietnam and with her glittery debut album The Fame out in October, the 22-year-old NYC native discusses booze, bisexuality and even Britney before she makes all the boys gag at Daniel Nardicio’s birthday celebration on Friday, August 8, at The Ice Palace in Cherry Grove. HX: Did you always know that the gays were going to go gaga over your music? Lady Gaga: I have a lot of gay friends, so it was more like, I wonder if my friends will like it. I’m a dancer and grew up in a theater community in New York, so I feel like my music is a product of that environment. I find something really beautiful about the spirit of the gay community. I feel a part of it. I was the girl in high school who never really had a lot of popular friends, so I found my place with my gay friends in acting school and dance class. It’s a really inspiring community, and I feel very privileged to be around it. Who’s your best gay friend? I couldn’t say—I have too many! I would upset a lot of people. You surely earned even more gay fans with the recent announcement that you wrote a track for Britney’s upcoming album. Was that a dream come true? Yeah. I was working with Rodney Jerkins on Pussycat Dolls, and we wrote this song—I almost slipped and told you the name. Thank God I caught myself; I respect her a lot, so I was to give her control over that. When we were done with the song, I was like, “Oh, I want to sing it,” but my album was already closed. It never even crossed my mind that she was doing a new record. Then Rodney played it for [Britney’s manager] Larry Rudolph, who was in the studio. Rodney called me later and was like, “Britney’s people are freaking out about this song.” Ultimately, she makes the decisions, so when I found out that she loved it and was going to record it, it was amazing. I actually heard it yesterday with her on it for the first time, and I really had chills. Shouldn’t you start being more selfish with hits that you write? My record is really great, and it has a lot of hits on there that I can run with for a while. I’m not an egomaniac; I don’t need to sing every great song that I write. If anything, it’s more of an achievement for me as a writer to get to write for a superstar. You did a mini-promo tour of the NYC gay club scene a couple of months ago. What was that experience like? It was awesome, and it made me want to work harder. When I was at Splash, I was mad that I was performing, because I wanted to be on E, sweating my pants off in the crowd. When I play at gay clubs, it’s like playing for my friends: They get it and understand what I’m trying to say, and they have a very open mind about art, pop and commercial music. When I did Miss Universe, all of the gays on my site were like, “Man, you looked so cool. We loved your outfit.” But every now and then you’ll see a comment that’s like, “I love her, but she’s a little weird.” I’m always thinking to myself, Oh, they just don’t know fashion. [Laughs] Performing for years in downtown clubs, your life could’ve taken a darker turn. How’d you avoid temptation? Well, I really didn’t for a little while. I was for sure not focused, but I was making great work. I don’t want to encourage people to do drugs for music or anything, but I did it because I wanted to understand what inspired the artistic life of the ’70s and how Andy Warhol functioned. It was sort of a creative journey for myself, and at some point it just got out of hand. I was having trouble sleeping, and I would have a panic attack after one glass of wine just because my body was so afraid of substance. I was too afraid to lose everything. Was there a night in particular that inspired “Just Dance”? Yeah, for sure. If you’ve ever been so high that it’s, like, scary, the only way you can deal with it is not deal with it, so you just kind of dance through the intoxication. I wrote the song the day after I had just flew in from New York to L.A., so I was taken very quickly out of my party lifestyle. I wrote it instantly—like it flew out of my body. I’d been working on this album for two-and-a-half years, and I was at a crossroads with my songwriting. I was trying to be so cool with my own music, but I would get better responses when I would write for other artists because I was not trying to be cool. So when I did “Just Dance,” that was my way of being like, “just fuckin’ write a good song. Stop worrying about what’s going to fly in the underground. Worry about writing a great record.” Actually, that record ended up being more powerful than any of the songs that I racked my brain writing, and after that, it was an influx of record after record. It was almost like a switch went off in my brain, and I figured out how to write a good pop song. Are you really as boy-crazy as your lyrics suggest? Yeah. Well, I’m girl-crazy too. I really depends on where I am. I love men, I love women and I love sex, but I’m actually pretty introverted right now because I’m so enveloped in my work, and it’s hard to let anybody near that. People fuck with your energy, and it’s very hard to find people that are supportive of your art and don’t want to take time away from it. A lot of times, boyfriends and girlfriends get jealous and want all your attention, and I really don’t have time for that. Do you consider yourself bisexual? Sure. I mean, I don’t really consider sexual orientation in general. It’s like, people are born the way they are. If a drag queen wanted to do Lady Gaga, what would be your best advice? If you’re wearing a blonde wig or extensions, you have to wash it with purple shampoo. Because I don’t have any yellow in my hair and I’m very insane about that. What’s been your most mind-blowing appearance thus far?Probably Gay Pride in San Francisco. To be asked to play the main stage and close the whole weekend was—I don’t know. I got very choked up on stage. Right before I did “Just Dance,” I said, “I just want to tell all of you that being here makes me so fucking proud.” Everybody looked very emotional. It was kind of this beautiful moment, because I can put out a lot of records, write for other people, sell and get famous, but it’s not the same as really connecting with and inspiring a community of people. If I can be that for anyone, especially the gay community, that’s incredible.

Source: https://ladygaga.fandom.com/wiki/HX_(magazine)

#2008 #lady gaga #the fame #the fame era #hx magazine #magazine #interview #pieter henket

[littlewalken]

Sep 11

you know what else is 20 years old? Those boxes that prove my point someone else repacked mine and put their or vague stuff on top so now the half finished quilt blocks are already gone and the fabric for it was found yesterday.

which is why I am not sorting a piece of Barbie anything until it’s all in one place because the side of a 40 year old inflatable pool chair is in one tub and the rest in another

Cutie patootie Larry Saltis is here to remind me that aside from doll stuff all the fabric and related shit that has been packed all these years probably should go. More recent fabric will go. It has to be done.

Play that waxing Elizabeth song, thank you to the two others including Nick Rowe who get it.

In the stress of moving, shedding of the toxic past, and grief over Milkshake these things must be attended to and the results will be worth it.

stuff can weigh you down

just getting rid of what the life Ruiner abandoned the first time she took off, but we kept in case she’d return and get better, is clearing the rooms literally. All she did when she got back was add more stuff and refused to go thru and part with anything

it took years of having to move and in most cases throw away grandma’s hoard of things she let sit and rot instead of use

also if it’s out of my hands I no longer have to deal with it one way or another

hoarding and adhd with rejection sensitivity never mix. I will finish ‘ruining’ things and throw them away to spite my grandmother’s spirit because she would dig things out of the trash that were useless, she would also take and hide things

thats the bitch I never did any sort of string work around because I know she would take it, undo it, then redo if not finish it completely while I was asleep or at school because I didn’t do it ‘right’

all it does is teach the ‘wrong’ person how to hide, lie, and ensure you never know anything about them so they can protect their interests from your poison

[jakeperalta]

As regards your tags in the kaylor/larry ask, i would say that while idk that much about kaylor i can say without certainty that the shipping was one of the biggest factors in breaking harry/louis friendship. Like honestly, louis had a gf and had repeatedly said they were not together, but then it turned into a thing where they could not publicly interact without people speculating that they were together, so they stopped/started overthinking everything and eventually i do believe it really cut into their friendship. To this day, i feel like they can barely say each other’s name in public without having a mini panic moment. Which is just plain sad considering how close they were.

Very much like lauren Jauregui said from 5th harmony as regards people who shipped her with camila cabello (camren), and how it made her feel like a predator/uncomfy and ended up breaking very much their friendship (if you have not seen the interview you should! I feel like it showcases how harmful this things can be)

Which is why i think is so shitty to ship real life people who have not confirmed they are in a relationship. Specially minors!!! Who don’t know better, are young and recently famous!!! I feel like kaylor was taken better by taylor bc she was seasoned and at that point mostly gave not that many fucks about what people were saying (even knowing she always gives a fuck bc ahe is taylor and can’t help but be affected by what the media says about her).

But honestly, i can’t believe people STILL ship those theories like madmen. It is kind of the flat earthers of pop culture lol.

yes!! louis made it clear over and over how disrespectful the shippers were and it’s been said a lot that it made their friendship a lot more difficult because they couldn’t do anything without people overanalysing it and using it as a reason to completely invalidate their actual relationships. i remember one time years ago when some shipper hacked louis’ mum’s emails to try to find proof (and of course found nothing) like if i were them i would sort of feel like no friendship is worth having my private life and that of my loved ones being invaded like that.

i never followed 5th harmony at all but i saw that interview with lauren jauregui and thought it was so sad and frustrating for her and shows how even if someone you’re shipping/projecting onto is bi/gay it’s still really harmful. same with when dan howell came out and said that people shipping and speculating actually made things worse.

taylor unfortunately is so used to people inserting themselves into her personal life that she’s learned how to detach from what people try to theorise (although she did quite recently compare being shipped/people picking her favourite friends to people stalking her location and feeling like a doll in a dollhouse so it must get under her skin sometimes!)

“the flat earthers of pop culture” is the perfect comparison skdjnfknsdf

#Anonymous #answered

[tabloidtoc]

Globe, November 9

You can buy a copy of this issue for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: Prince Andrew fails lie detector -- new crisis rocks the palace 

Page 2: Up Front & Personal -- Bruno Toniolo shirtless, Heidi Pratt at a pumpkin patch in L.A., Jacqueline Bisset catches some rays in L.A. 

Page 3: Larry David leaves an L.A. office, Ellen Pompeo, Pete Wentz 

Page 4: Kathie Lee Gifford is talking to NBC bigwigs about coming back to Today and they’re hot over the idea but Hoda Kotb is not pleased and Jenna Bush Hager is feeling threatened because Jenna never really grabbed the audience like Kathie Lee did, Martha Stewart and Gwyneth Paltrow are heading into the holidays trash-talking each other even more than usual and their pals have nowhere to hide -- they’re snippier than ever and can’t get through the week without saying something crass but the trouble is they have the same friends and they use some of the same chefs and caterers and crew -- all their friends in the Hamptons including the Seinfelds and Beyonce and Jay-Z and Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley and Rachael Ray are trying to keep out of it but it’s impossible because Martha and Gwyneth are both screaming for loyalty 

Page 5: Legal hotshot and writer Jeffrey Toobin has been shelved by the New Yorker magazine for showing off his willie to co-workers during a Zoom conference call -- witnesses say Toobin was masturbating but he insists it was a blooper

Page 6: Dolly Parton was so lovestruck when she met Elvis Presley that she nearly chucked her marriage and career to shack up with Elvis -- Dolly is ready to tell all about Elvis after decades of protecting her husband Carl Dean and Elvis’ only child Lisa Marie Presley -- Dolly was in her late 20s and Elvis was in his late 30s when they had their sizzling encounter where she got dolled up to meet Elvis in a Nashville office and discuss working together and he wanted to do a duet but she didn’t trust herself to work with him and she didn’t even let Elvis do a cover of her song I Will Always Love You -- even though Dolly didn’t actually cheat on Carl she sure was tempted and she’s felt guilty about it ever since 

Page 8: Just two weeks after splitting with his wife of 14 years former Home Improvement kid Zachery Ty Bryan was arrested and jailed on charges of trying to strangle a terrified galpal -- after a night of partying where he was photographed surrounded by four gals with an iced bottle of vodka at the table Zachery reportedly got into a heated clash with his galpal and she claims Zachery grabbed her by the throat and squeezed then tried to snatch her phone when she attempted to call 911 so she ran to a neighbor’s home where she hid while cops were called 

Page 9: Distressed Kelly Clarkson and her two toddlers are in therapy to help cope with the anguish brought on by her divorce from Brandon Blackstock -- the talk show host is especially struggling because the split is playing out so publicly and the kids are seeing things about their mom on TV and she feels immense guilt about the divorce but knows it was the best decision because she wasn’t happy married to Brandon though she did try but staying in a marriage just for the kids wasn’t an option for her -- Kelly was deeply wounded when her father-in-law Narvel Blackstock’s management company recently sued her for $1.4 million in alleged unpaid commissions but she’s speaking with her ex privately in an effort to resolve the issue out of court but Kelly suspects he’s using it as a bargaining chip for a bigger settlement and also feels he’s using the kids against her as a weapon 

Page 10: Showbiz legend Michelle Phillips has become a shut-in who sits home alone tippling wine while watching movies on TV and listening to her hits from The Mamas & the Papas where she is the last surviving member of the band -- she’s sad the rest are all gone  and she’ll put on a record and sit in the dark; she misses them and so many other people -- she’s become a shut-in due to the pandemic and can’t bear for people to see her so old and haggard and overweight and all those years of partying have done their damage to her once-beautiful face -- she also hasn’t been able to see her young grandson and she’s grieving the loss of her longtime lover who died in 2017 

Page 11: Baywatch hunk Jeremy Jackson’s cover girl ex-wife has been found homeless wandering California’s mean streets in worn and shabby clothes -- lost for two years Loni Willison is now virtually unrecognizable with missing teeth and her long blond tresses cropped short -- she was found pushing a grocery cart filled with her battered possessions in Venice -- despite her tragic situation she insists she’d doing fine and doesn’t want help despite reportedly having drug and mental health issues 

Page 12: Celebrity Buzz -- Rita Ora in a see-through frock (picture), Lily James got caught brazenly canoodling with the very much married Dominic West who plays her father in the BBC miniseries The Pursuit of Love, just weeks after Cardi B filed to dissolve her marriage to Offset she’s put the split on hold and all it took was Offset to spend bucks on a heart-tugging Sunset Strip billboard and a Rolls-Royce and a Hermes Birkin bag, Kate Hudson’s getting loose-lipped about gross snotty smooches with her leading man Matthew McConaughey 

Page 13: Vinny Guadagnino eating in Beverly Hills (picture), Kaitlyn Bristowe has a puffy trout pout (picture), Shia LaBeouf doesn’t let an apparent injury keep him from getting out and about in Pasadena (picture), Alanis Morissette says the fame that came with her 1995 revenge song You Oughta Know wasn’t so sweet but instead was an isolating experience 

Page 14: Nicole Kidman is starring opposite Hugh Grant in the thriller series The Undoing but she really wanted to plays Hugh’s love interest in Notting Hill except she wasn’t well-known enough, Reba McEntire has landed herself a brand new TV show which is a modernized Fried Green Tomatoes drama series in which she’ll play the present-day Idgie Threadgoode, Fashion Verdict -- Regina King 8/10, Isabelle Huppert 2/10, Queen Maxima 5/10, Tracee Ellis Ross 9/10, Cher 4/10 

Page 16: How John F. Kennedy stole the White House from Richard Nixon -- Chicago mob rigged the 1960 vote and cheated Nixon out of the presidency 

Page 19: True Crime 

Page 21: Parkinson’s patient Alan Alda is refusing to slow down at age 84 and friends fear the fragile M*A*S*H legend is headed for a devastating health crisis and he’s busier now than he ever was even during his sitcom days and he bravely says he lives with it by staying active but medication can only do so much and his friends and family including wife Arlene are worried he’s pushing himself too hard, teary-eyed Ringo Starr confesses his last conversation with dying Beatles bandmate George Harrison was heartbreaking and unforgettable -- Ringo wanted to stay with George until the end but his daughter Lee had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and Ringo had to rush to Boston to see her and when Ringo told George he had to go to Boston George said D’ya want me to come wit’ ya? so even on his death bed George made his best buddy smile while both faced unspeakable grief 

Page 22: 10 Things You Don’t Know About S. Epatha Merkerson, Today show host Hoda Kotb reveals Frank Sinatra Jr. was the show’s worst guest because he clammed up instead of touting a book about his famous dad in 2015, Khloe Kardashian confesses she once worked as Nicole Richie’s personal assistant because she just needed a job and they went to school together -- Nicole’s reality career crashed in 2007 which was the same year Khloe’s series started

Page 24: Cover Story -- Disgraced Prince Andrew has flunked a lie detector test on his close relationship with murdered American pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and now the rogue royal insists he’ll never cooperate with the FBI for fear his testimony will land him behind bars but Queen Elizabeth’s favorite son has his back against the wall as new evidence surfaces on both sides of the Atlantic -- Andrew is terrified newly released secret testimony from Epstein’s accused madam Ghislaine Maxwell is just the tip of the iceberg of what she’s prepared to reveal and Maxwell’s revelations detailing her twisted sex life come on the heels of an explosive new British book accusing Andrew of attending debauched events with Epstein where teenage girls were parading around topless -- even though friends close to Andrew say he did nothing wrong and has no reason to fear the prince may not have a choice about spilling his guts because the fed-up royal family is threatening to cut off the cash-strapped rogue unless he plays ball 

Page 25: Prince Andrew has been banished from the gift shop at his mother’s Balmoral Castle -- tourists can still purchase postcards her Her Majesty’s kids Prince Charles and Princess Anne and Prince Edward but Prince Andrew has disappeared which is a sure sign that Andrew is in the doghouse since items featuring Elizabeth’s beloved corgis are still up for sale 

Page 26: Health Report 

Page 27: Dirtiest places on planes exposed 

Page 30: Serial sleaze Matt Lauer’s ready to pop the question to girlfriend Shamin Abas over the holidays and he hopes for a brighter future with her a year after his 20-year marriage to Annette Roque ended in divorce -- Matt showers Shamin her with gifts and wants to buy a house on the East Coast where they can make new memories and Matt’s hinted he’s already bought the ring and plans to propose by New Year’s and he hopes to have a celeb-studded wedding at their new home, Kathleen Turner will be back at Michael Douglas’ throat as his acid ex in The Kominsky Method to fill the hole left by Alan Arkin who abruptly pulled out of the third and final season of the show

Page 35: Matthew McConaughey’s father predicted he’d die while making love to his wife and he did, desperate to turn back time Marie Osmond is going whole hog on a head-to-toe makeover -- Marie is no stranger to cosmetic fixes and she is considering a slew of procedures to get a new look that’ll knock ‘em out including everything from Botox and fillers to face-lift to boob job and lipo-sculpting to enhance her waistline -- the makeover is motivated by revenge because she’s bitter over recently being pushed off her co-host gig on The Talk and now she’s counting on a younger look to land her a plum new TV gig 

Page 38: Real Life Monsters 

Page 39: Kris Jenner blames social media for ending the 14-year run of Keeping Up with the Kardashians because when the show started there was no Instagram or Snapchat or other social media platforms but now she gripes that now there are so many the viewer doesn’t have to wait three or four months to see an episode but instead information spreads online in real time, Phil Collins’ ex-wife has traded him in for a 31-year-old guitarist who never managed to make much noise in the music industry -- Phil was furious when he heard Orianne Cevey married Tom Bates in Las Vegas, Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman died without a will according to his widow -- Taylor Simone Ledward filed a probate case in L.A. asking a judge to name her administrator of Boseman’s estimated $938,500 estate with limited authority

Page 44: Straight Talk -- Bruce Willis and Demi Moore’s daughter Rumer Willis claims posing for raunchy bondage shots proves she’s a liberated woman free from sexual stereotypes but it’s not that simple 

Page 45: Jeff Bridges is battling non-Hodgkin lymphoma which is a rampaging cancer that often spreads through the body to the liver and bone marrow and lungs -- while the cancer can be deadly experts say the five-year survival rate is 73 percent 

#tabloid #grain of salt #tabloid toc #tabloidtoc #prince andrew #ghislaine maxwell #kathie lee gifford #martha stewart #gwyneth paltrow #dolly parton #elvis #elvis presley #zachery ty bryan #kelly clarkson #michelle phillips #loni willison #john kennedy #john f. kennedy #jfk #president kennedy #richard nixon #alan alda #ringo starr #george harrison #s. epatha markerson #hoda kotb #frank sinatra jr. #khloe kardashian #nicole richie #matt lauer

[mtvswatches]

Friends 2x03 – The One Where Heckles Dies

Previous Recaps 

In a nutshell: Chandler goes through an existential crisis after Heckles dies and he finds he has one too many similarities with the deceased hermit. Monica and Rachel fight over a lamp. Ross tries to prove Phoebe that evolution is real. 

Chandler: Everyone calls Chandler out on being too picky with the women he dates, after recently breaking up with yet another off-screen girlfriend because her nostrils were too big. This, and the fact that Heckles is on this episode – played by an actor who played an actor playing Kramer on Seinfeld – reminded me why Jerry and Larry David used to say that Friends was Seinfeld with pretty people. Anywho, Chandler goes over his dating history and the very shallow reasons why he broke up with each of his girlfriends. While going through Heckles’ things, Chandler finds a big book entitled “My Big Book of Grievances”, in which Heckles recorded every little thing that he found annoying. He ends up finding out Heckles was the class clown, played the clarinet, and nitpicked his dates just like him. He draws the conclusion that he’ll suffer the same destiny as Heckles – living a sad life and dying an angry, lonely, old man. In a desperate attempt to avoid this fate, he calls up Janice, who shows up only to rub it in his face that she’s married, happy, and pregnant. He then seems to have the realization that he can’t continue to break up with women over the most superficial things and then bitching about how there aren’t any good women he can date. Of course, all the progress he may have done is lost by the end of the episode, when he asks yet another woman out only to bitch about how big her head is. It will take Chandler a few more seasons and a secret relationship with Monica to actually grow up.

Joey: Joey says the woman he dated had an Adam’s apple, and I guess he forgot to call it according to each person’s name. At least that’s what Chandler tells him in one of the later seasons when he refers to his own as “Joey’s Apple”. So Joey is either unlearning stuff and becoming more and more stupid as time goes by, or the writers dropped the ball. Let’s just embrace the fact that Joey dating a transgender woman is canon, okay?

Monica and Rachel: The girls are having a neighborly fight with Mr. Heckles because he keeps complaining about them making noise when they really aren’t. Probably as a result of their quarrel, he dies. Surprisingly, he ends up giving everything that belonged to him to both of them, which is a bunch of crap. While sorting through Heckles’ dump, Rachel finds a couple of items of questionable taste that she wants to add to their apartment, which Monica doesn’t approve of. Rachel confronts her about the fact that Monica still feels the apartment is only hers and that Rachel is merely renting a room, and decides to bring the objects to their apartment anyway. Monica gets really hung up about the lamp, which is ugly af. “By accident”, Monica breaks Rachel’s lamp. Monica finally tells Rachel to get the doll-clock she wanted to get and calls their place “our apartment.”

Phoebe and Ross: Phoebe claims not to believe in evolution, and this obviously riles Ross up, being the science and logic man that he is. It turns out in this whole thing where Ross keeps trying to convince Phoebe that evolution is real, and ends up with Phoebe manipulating Ross into admitting that there’s a tiny chance that everything he believes in might actually not be true. She delivers the crushing blow after he caves and tells him that she lost all respect for him for abandoning his entire belief system so easily.

One Iconic Scene:

The whole Ross vs Phoebe over evolution is my favorite part of the episode, tbh, even though it’s the C plot.

Hope you enjoyed my recap, and, as usual, if you’ve got this far, thank you for reading! If you enjoy my recaps and my blog, please consider supporting it on ko-fi.Thanks!

#F.R.I.E.N.D.S. #friends #Chandler Bing #Ross Geller #Phoebe Buffay #Rachel Green #Monica Geller #FRIENDS 2x03 #FRIENDS recap #mine

[tonguetiedmag]

interview: as it is

Wrapping up The Great Depression Tour with only a handful of shows left , I caught up with Patty Walters from As It Is just before the group rocked out a set at The Hi-Dive in Denver to learn more about his favorite vegan eateries, rare studio-moments during the recording of the band’s latest release, and what it’s been like welcoming in a new permanent member.

What’s been your favorite part about this tour apart from other tours you’ve done?

“I think the camaraderie. We love the bands we brought out as bands, and as people. We didn’t know Point North or Hold Close as human beings before this tour, but we were fans of their music and their art, and we’ve gotten to know everybody over the course of however long it’s been, probably about a month now-- it’s bittersweet. Sharptooth were some of my closest friends on warped tour of last year, we’ve seen them on pretty much every day off as well. It’s just been one big happy family honestly this tour; I think that’s the bittersweet part, is you have such a good time when everyone’s here and that just makes saying goodbye a little more difficult. It’s been one of my favorite tours we’ve ever done over 6 or 7 years now.”

What’s been your favorite song from The Great Depression to play live?

“​The Wounded World i​ s always going to be a standout because of the relentless energy of it--I’m just a big fan of songs that really go 100 miles an hour throughout the whole thing, it’s absolutely one of those songs. Equally, opening with ​The Reaper ​has been so much fun, and ​The Question, The Answer​ has been a nice intimate moment. We weren’t sure if we were going to be playing it out here; it’s been such a fun part of the set, it makes it so much more dynamic and intimate. So there’s a couple standouts, but I think ​The Wounded World​ is probably my favorite moment of the set, which is why it’s last in the set and it’s the biggest climax and finale that we possibly could have created.”

Is there any song you wanted to put on the setlist that didn’t make the cut?

“Yes-- and part of the nature and the reason behind is that Ronnie [Ish, lead guitar] is a very new member and only knows so many of our songs right now, so we were limited to songs that we were playing on our most recent EU and UK headline run, which is why this setlist bears so much similarity to that one. But equally, we put so much time and effort and thought into this set so that it does feel theatrical and ... special-- It’s a set that we have all crafted and believed in. Adding “​Such Great Heights” ​[The Postal Service]​ t​ o the equation out here has been really fun, so there were a couple that we did manage to sneak in. I think we’re getting Ronnie there maybe one or two songs per tour, just learning the entire As It Is discography slowly.”

When did you guys know you wanted Ronnie to become a permanent member?

“For a while, it’s been a long time coming. Ron was in the studio when we were writing and recording The Great Depression, but Ronnie has been family for a long time--we met Ronnie in 2015 on the Vans Warped Tour, he was living on our bus. He, in the interim period, served as every different touring crew member...you could imagine, as tour manager, guitar tech, driver, and merch. The thing about it--and I think it’s often a thing that gets viewed from one perspective-- is it’s not only ‘Did we want Ronnie to join?’ (which of course we did), it’s ‘Does Ronnie want to commit to these four people, this lifestyle where he doesn’t get to see his friends and family very often, where he doesn’t get paid as much as he probably could back home. For that reason I think we’re really flattered and humbled that he wants to commit the next however many years of his life to this band and us as people. The first real trial period of tour was warped tour of last year. That was Ronnie’s first time playing onstage with us, but we just kind of knew it in the back of our minds, and the back of his, that this was what we were meant to do together.”

Has the dynamic changed at all?

“Oh massively. Ronnie has the biggest personality of anyone I’ve ever met, for better or for worse; some days you’re not in the mood to be surrounded by such a loud presence. He’s one of a kind and he brings so much more energy and sincerity to what we do to our live performance, and engaging and interacting with our fans on and off stage, before and after the set.”

What’s a favorite memory you’ve made with another band on this tour?

“That’s a great question! Doing Disney world with every band on this tour was really fun, that was a really nice moment. We did an escape room with Sharptooth and Doll Skin in Arizona, that was really fun-- I had never done an escape room before, I don’t think most of us had. We were divided into four, which became two teams due to the nature of the escape room-- it was tons of fun.”

With the stark difference sound-wise between ​Okay ​and ​The Great Depression​, how have you seen the dynamic of your fanbase change, if at all?

“Well, that’s one of the most interesting, kind of humbling things is that, we were uncertain as to who was still going to relate to this sound, enjoy this sound. One of the most humbling things is that so many fans from all around the world, that have been with us for upwards of five years since we’ve been touring internationally are still coming out to shows-- and it’s like nothing has changed, even though so much has changed. I think it speaks to the authenticity of the art that people can totally really love what we do and really believe in what we do. Yes, we’ve embraced a much more aggressive, darker sound, but it was the only natural evolution for our sound as a band for sure.”

Whatever you guys release next, are you gonna take it slow? Do you have ideas?

“I have ideas. Although, it was a conscious decision to be more present and engaged during the release of ​The Great Depression.​ We started writing ​The Great Depression​ three weeks before Okay was released, so when everyone got to really appreciate and consume okay, we were busy creatively, consciously invested in this next album. We didn’t get to live in the moment of ​Okay as much, and I was very aware that it would be a mistake to do that again. We all have ideas for the next record, but we haven’t started writing just yet. Equally, there are exciting expansions of The Great Depression​ that people are gonna get to enjoy pretty soon--we’re really making this one last.”

What motivates you to get up and keep going every day?

“Honestly, I’ve just made more of a conscious effort to live every day for me, as selfish as that sounds. Being as painfully introverted as I am, the most minute interaction often claims a big piece of myself and my energy. So I very selfishly at times hide myself away in my bunk, or in a cafe or something like that. We’re just working on so many exciting things right now that I don’t really have the time or the opportunity to slow down-- speeding away on a million different As It Is related projects, that’s pretty exciting.”

With you spending a lot of time in cafe’s and such, what’s your favorite place when you’re traveling to stop and eat, a place you look forward to?

“I wasn’t familiar with, but loved Arlo’s in Austin, Texas. Although, the thing about seeking out vegan restaurants on tour is that they’re not always healthy, and I’ve made a more conscious, mature decision to be healthier on tour for everyone’s well being, because I feel like trash if I just eat fake meat and cheese all day. Some of my favorites... I wanna say it’s called ‘Blackbird’s Cafe​’ o​ r something, but it’s in Philadelphia. They do an amazing vegan philly cheesesteak, vegan wings-- they have these root beer barbecue wings. That was a rare, indulgent, ‘eat the trash, feel like trash’ moment, but it was worth it.”

How do you personally fight against writers block?

“Something that I’ve found only more recently--over the last year or so-- is that I hold some of my biggest influences to such a high standard, I put them on the tallest of pedestals. Some of my favorite writers/lyricists are Adam Young from Owl City, Lights, Motion City Soundtrack, Death Cab For Cutie, The Postal Service. Something I’ve done more recently is--yes, these artists have written some of my favorite songs--some of which I believe to be the greatest songs ever written-they have also written songs that I just don’t enjoy. I seek out those songs to remind myself that everybody is human, everybody falls shorts at least in my standards [when it comes to] music that I enjoy, and remind myself that just because these people are my biggest influences in the world, doesn’t mean that they write perfect songs every time. I love starting songs, and hate finishing songs. I start a lot more projects than I finish; partly because the potential of an idea becomes very romanticized in my head, and a lot of the time the actuality of finishing that idea isn’t as great as the potential that I see in it-- and that is a very difficult battle to win some days. What I do is remind myself that every great songwriter is human, and falls short, and doesn’t write 10/10 songs every day of every year.”

Who did you guys pull inspiration from when writing The Great Depression?

“So, we very consciously paid homage to post hardcore and emo bands, such as Armor for Sleep, Underoath..But equally, being a band from the UK, and having lived in the UK since i was five years old, I listened to so many british post hardcore bands that never got the international recognition that this band is fortunate enough to have recieved. We paid homage to bands like Hero for a Friend, Hell is for Heroes, Hundred Reasons-- the third track on The Great Depression,​ The Fire, The Dark​ is co-written with Larry Hibbitt of Hundred Reasons. If you’re from the UK, and you grew up in the 90s and 2000s there was no way to not know about this band. They were on mainstream radio, playing festival mainstages, a giant in UK rock music--but I guarantee none of our fans ever hear of that band, and getting to write one of our songs alongside one of the acts that we were paying tribute to was very cool, very surreal.”

The Great Depression also features a lot of smooth, instrumental transitions between sings--what was your favorite one of those to create?

“I think my favorite to create was the transition between​ The Reaper​ and​ The Two Tongues (Screaming Salvation)​. I don’t know if anyone knows this, I don’t know if I’ve ever said this, and I don’t know if you can even tell--but in the buildup into ​The Two Tongues​ there’s a sample of a song called ​The Prisoner’s Song​, and I don’t even remember who its by, but it was written in like 1925. There’s all this guitar feedback and eerie soundscapes, and our mad scientist of a producer, Machine, had the idea of screaming into the guitar pickups-- because screaming “salvation”, it made sense. [There’s] this never seen, never released video of Machine screaming “salvation” into the guitar. You probably can’t hear it- I can hear it ‘cause I was there: right before the song kicks in , there’s this very distorted sound. It’s a guitar, but you can hear that Machine is screaming “sal-va-tion” into the guitar, and maybe if you really listen closely you’ll hear it now. It’s one of my favorite moments, because i feel like modern music--not even just modern rock music--modern ​music​ isn’t as indulgent as it used to be. I used to read about all these incredibly indulgent studio stories that I just feel like don’t exist anymore, ‘cause no one has the time nor the budget to be as indulgent as some of the greats used to be. Getting to play around with silly things that ultimately don’t matter, but equally fulfill ​you​; ​that’s​ why they matter.” 

If you could spend one day jamming with a favorite musician dead or alive who would it be, and why?

“For me it would be Adam Young in Owl City. Just my biggest influence of all time, somebody that I just respect so endlessly. I think he’s just an expert in sound just as much as he is in songwriting, I just love everything he’s ever done.”

What’s a song--either on the setlist or not--just a song of yours that you hold a lot of personal meaning to?

“​Hey Rachel​. Just hearing audiences from every end and hemisphere of the world sing your sisters’ name is always going to be hugely sentimental and personal, and it’s a very personal moment of every set we play.”

What is a song you can rage to no matter what, something that gets you hype every time?

“​Clever Girl​ by Sharptooth. Anytime [when] we were on warped tour of last year I would seek out the Sharptooth set and just get a little more fired up, and a little bit more pissed off at the state of the world, and get a little more inspired-- it’s something that I’ve tried to catch as many times as I could on this tour, cause it makes me so much more excited for my set--it’s such a great song.”

If you had to describe your music to someone who doesn’t hear, how would you describe it?

“Where optimism and pessimism come to kick the shit out of each other.”

If you want to catch the group on their upcoming “The Intimate Depression” run, or see when they’ll be playing near you next Check them out Online:

https://asitisofficial.com/

https://www.facebook.com/asitisofficial/

http://www.fearlessrecords.com/artists/as-it-is/

https://twitter.com/ASITISofficial?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

Interview by: Liz Holland

#music #as it is #liz holland #interview #patty walters #patty walters interview #as it is interview #live music #denver #colorado #hi dive

[unsettlingshortstories]

The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis

Karen Russell (2013)

THE SCARECROW THAT WE FOUND lashed to the pin oak in Friendship Park, New Jersey, was thousands of miles away from the yellow atolls of corn where you might expect to find a farmer’s doll. Scarecrow country was the actual country, everybody knew that. Scarecrows belonged to countrymen and women. They lived in hick states, the “I” states, exotic to us: Iowa, Indiana. Scarecrows made fools of the birds, and smiled with lifeless humor. Their smiles were fakes, threads. (This idea appealed to me — I was a quiet kid myself, branded “mean,” and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red sewing.) Scarecrows got planted into the same soil as their crops; they worked around the clock, like charms, to keep the hungry birds at bay. That was how it worked in TV movies, at least: horror-struck, the birds turned shrieking circles around the far-below peak of the scarecrow’s hat, afraid to land. They haloed him. Underneath a hundred starving crows, the TV scarecrow seemed pretty sanguine, grinning his tickled, brainwashed grin at the camera. He was a sort of pitiable character, I thought, a jester in the corn, imitating the farmer — the real king. All day and all night, the scarecrow had to stand watch over his quilty hills of wheat and flax, of rye and barley and three other brown grains that I couldn’t remember (my brain stole this image from the seven-grain Quilty Hills Muffins bag — at school I cheated shamelessly and I guess my imagination must have been a plagiarist too, copying its homework).

This mission had nothing to do with us or with our city of Anthem, New Jersey. Anthem had no crops, no silos, no crows — it had turquoise Port-o-Pottys and neon alleys, construction pits, dogs in purses, bag ladies with powerful smells and opinions, garbage dumps haunted by the wraith white pigeons; it had our school, the facade of which was currently covered with a glorious psychedelic phallus mosaic, a series of interlocking dicks spray painted to the scale of Picasso’s Guernica by Anthem’s tenth-grade graffiti kings; it had policemen, bus drivers, crossing guards; dolls were sold in stores.

And we were city boys. We lived in projects that were farm antonyms, these truly shitbox apartments. If flowers bloomed on our sooty sills, it must have been because of some plant Stockholm syndrome, a love our sun did not deserve. Our familiarity with the figure of the scarecrow came exclusively from watered-down L. Frank Baum cartoons, and from the corny yet frightening “Autumn’s Bounty!” display in the Food Lion grocery store, where every year a scarecrow got propped a little awkwardly between a pilgrim, a cornucopia, and a scrotally wrinkled turkey. The Food Lion scarecrow looked like a broomin a Bermuda shirt, a broomwith acne, ogling the ladies’ butts as they bent to buy their diet yogurts — once I’d heard a bag boy joke that it was there to spook the divorcees. What we found in Friendship Park in no way resembled the Food Lion scarecrow. At first I was sure the thing tied to the oak was dead, or alive. Real, I mean.

“Hey, you guys,” I swallowed. “Look — ” And pointed to the pin oak, where a boy our age was belted to the trunk. Somebody in blue jeans and a T-shirt that had faded to the same earthworm color as his hair, a white boy, doubled over the rope. His hair clung tight as a cap to his scalp, as if painted on, and his face looked like a brick of sweating cheese.

Gus got to the kid first. “You retards.” His voice was high with relief. “It’s just a doll.” He punched its stomach. “It’s got straw inside it.”

“It’s a scarecrow!” shrieked Mondo.

And he kicked at a glistening bulb of what did appear to be straw beneath the doll’s slumping face. A little hill. It regarded its own innards expressionlessly, its glass eyes twinkling. Mondo shrieked again.

I followed the scarecrow’s gaze down to its lost straw: dark gold and chlorophyll green strands were blowing loose, like cut hair on a barbershop floor. Some of the straw had a jellied black look. How long had this stuff been outside of him, I wondered — how long had it been inside of him? I looked up, searching the boy scarecrow for a rip. A cold eel-like feeling was thrashing in my belly. That same morning, while eating my Popple breakfast tart, I’d seen a news shot of a U.S. soldier calmly watching blood spill from his head. Calm came pouring over him, at pace with the blood. In the next room, I could hear my ma getting ready for work, singing an old pop song, rattling hangers. On TV, one of the soldier’s eyes was lost behind the sticky pink sheet. The camera closed in; a second later the footage switched to the trees of a new country under an ammonia blue sky. I couldn’t understand this — where was the cameraman or the camerawoman? Who was letting his face dissolve into calm?

“Let’s cut it down!” screamed Mondo. I nodded.

“Nah, we better not.” Juan Carlos looked around the woods sharply; he looked up, as if there might be a sniper hidden in the pin oak. “What if this” — he pushed at the doll — “belongs to somebody? What if somebody is watching us, right now? Laughing at us…”

It was late September, a cool red season. The scarecrow was hung up on the sunless side of the oak. The tree was a shaggy pyramid, sixty or seventy feet tall, one of the “famous” landmarks of Friendship Park; it overlooked a ravine — a split in the seam of the bedrock, very narrow and deep — that we called “the Cone.” Way down at the bottom you could see a wet blue dirt with radishy pink streaks along it, as exotic looking to us as a sea floor. Condoms and needles (not ours) and the silver shreds of Dodo Potato Chip bags and beer bottles (mostly ours) had turned the Cone into a sort of sylvan garbage can. The tree spread above it like a girl playing at suicide, quailing its many fiery leaves.

Years ago, before we started loitering here in a dedicated way, the pin oak had been planted to commemorate an Event — there was an opal plaque nestled in its roots. We knew this much but we didn’t know more — some delinquent, teenaged forefather of ours had scratched out everything but the date, “1957.”

The plaque looked like a lost little moon in the grip of the tree’s arachnid roots. I always felt a little cheated by the plaque; it was a confusing kind of resentment; I didn’t really care about the “why” of the tree at all but I didn’t like how this plaque was an open secret either, a mystery that was always itching at us. It bothered me that we were so poorly informed about the oak’s first purpose that we did not even have the option of forgetting it, using our patented June 1 method, whereby we expulsed a year of school facts from our brains in spasms of summer amnesia. (Harriet Tubman — did he invent something? The War of 1812 — why did we fight that one? For tea? Against Mexico or Sicily?) Forgetting was one of my favorite things to do at Camp Dark; I felt like a squid, sending jets of inky thoughts into the Cone. The plaque was illegible, but the oak’s glossy trunk was covered in gougings that you could easily read: V hearts K; Death 2 Asshole Jimmy Dingo; Jesus Saves; I Wuz Here!!! We’d added ourselves:

MONDO + GUS + LARRY + J.C. = CAMP DARK

The “deep end” of Friendship Park we called Camp Dark. Camp Dark was Anthem’s lame try at an urban arboretum, a sort of surprise woods bordered by gas and fire stations and a condemned pizza buffet. THE PIZZA PARTY IS CANCELED read a sign above a bulldozer. These central acres of Friendship Park were filled with young deciduous trees and naive-seeming bluish squirrels. They chittered some charming bullshit at you too, up on their hind legs begging for a handout. They lived in the trash cans and had the wide-eyed innocent look and threadbare fur of child junkies. Had they wised up, our squirrels might have mugged us and used our wallets to buy train tickets to the true woods, which were about an hour north of Anthem’s depressed downtown, according to Juan Carlos — only Juan Carlos had been out there. (“There was a river with a purple fish shitting in it,” was all we got out of him.)

Recently, the Anthem City Parks & Recreation had received a big grant, and now the playground looked like a madhouse. Padded swings, padded slides, padded gyms, padded seesaws and go-wheelies: All the once-fun equipment had gotten upholstered by the city in this red loony-bin foam. To absorb the risk of a lawsuit, said Juan Carlos; one night, at Juan Carlos’s suggestion, we all took turns pissing hooch onto the harm-preventing pillows. Our park had a poopstrewn dog run and an orange baseball diamond; a creepy pond that, like certain towns in Florida, had at one time been a very popular winter destination for geese and ducks but which had for some reason fallen out of fashion in the waterfowl society; and a Conestoga-looking covered picnic area. Gus claimed to have had sex there last Valentine’s Day, on the cement tables — “pussy sex,” he said, authoritatively, horrifying us, “not just the mouth kind.” Our feeling was, if Gus really had tricked a girl into coming to our park in late February, they most likely talked about noncontroversial subjects, like the coldness of snow and the excellence of Gus’s weed, while wearing sex-thwarting parkas.

We’d started hanging at Friendship Park four years ago, when we were ten years old. Back then we played actual games.We hid and we sought. We did benign stuff in trees. We amassed a stupidly huge plastic weapons cache in the hollow of the pin oak, including a Sounds of Warfare Blazer that as I recall required something like sixteen triple-A batteries to make a noise like a female guinea pig putting a brave face on her tuberculosis. Those were innocent times. Then we got shunted into Anthem’s combo middle-and-high school, and now we came here to drink beers and antagonize one another. Biweekly we shoplifted liquor and snacks, in a surprisingly orderly way, rotating this duty. (“We are Communists!” shrieked Mondo once, pumping a fistful of red-hot peanuts into the sky, and Juan Carlos, who did homework, snorted, “You are quite confused, my bro.”)

Participation levels varied, but usually it was the core four of us at Camp Dark: Juan Carlos Diaz, Gus Ainsworth, Mondo Chu, and me, Larry Rubio. Pronounced “Rubby-oh” by me, like a rubber ducky toy, my own surname. My dad left when I turned two and I don’t speak any Spanish unless you count the words that everybody knows, like “hablo” and “no.” My ma came from a vast hick family in Pensacola, pontoon loads of uncle-brothers and red-haired aunts and firecrotch cousins from some nth degree of cousindom, hordes of blood kin whom she renounced, I guess, to marry and then divorce my dad. We never saw any of them. We were long alone, me and my ma.

Juan Carlos had tried to tutor me once: “Rooo-bio. Fucker, you have to coo the ‘u’!”

My ma couldn’t pronounce my last name either, making for some awkward times in Vice Principal Derry’s office. She’d reverted to her maiden name, which sounded like an elf municipality: Dourif. “Why can’t I be a Dourif, like you?” I asked her once when I was very small, and she poured her drink onto the carpet, shocking me — this was my own kindergarten trick to express a violent unhappiness. She left the room and my shock deepened when she didn’t come back to clean up the mess. I watched the stain set on the carpet, the sun cutting through the curtain blades. Later, I wrote LARRY RUBIO on all of my folders. I answered to RUBIO, just like the stranger my father must be doing somewhere. What my ma seemed to want me to do — to hold onto the name without the man — felt very silly to me, like the cartoon where Wile E. Coyote holds on to the handle (just the handle) of an exploded suitcase. Latching into pure space.

The scarecrow boy was my same height, five foot five. He had pale glass eyes and a molded wax or plastic face; under his faded brown shirt his “skin” was machine-sewn sackcloth, straw stuffed. So: He had a scarecrow’s body but a boy’s head. I took a step forward and punched his torso, which was solid as a bale of hay; I half expected a scream to roll out of his mouth. I looked down — I was standing on a snarl of his guts. Would a scarecrow’s organs look like this? I wondered. Like birds’ nests. A grass kidney, a flammable heart. Now I understood Mondo’s earlier wail — when the scarecrow didn’t cry out, I wanted to scream for him.

“Who stuck those on its face?” Mondo asked. “Those eyes?”

“Whoever put him here in the first place, jackass.”

“Well, what weirdo does that? Puts eyes and clothes on a giant doll of a kid and ropes him to a tree?”

“A German, probably,” said Gus knowingly. “Or a Japanese. One of those sicko sex freaks.”

Mondo rolled his eyes. “Maybe you put it here then, Ainsworth.”

“Maybe he’s a theater prop? Like, from our school?”

“He’s wearing some nasty clothes.”

“Hey! He’s got a belt like yours, Rubby!”

“Shut up.”

“Wait — you’re going to steal the scarecrow’s belt? That ain’t bad luck?”

“Oh my God! He’s got on underwear!” Mondo snapped the elastic, giggling.

“He has a hole,” Juan Carlos said quietly. He’d slid his hand between the doll’s sagging shoulders and the tree. “Down here, in his back. Look. He’s spilling straw.”

Juan Carlos was jerking stuffing out of the scarecrow and then, in the same panicky motion, trying to cram it back inside the hole; all this he did with a sly, aghast look, as if he were a surgeon who had fatally bungled an operation and was now trying to disguise that fact from his staff. This straw, I recognized with a chill, was fresh and green.

“You got your ‘oh shit!’ face on, J.C.!” Gus laughed. I managed a laugh too, but I was scared, scared. The straw was scary to me, its pale colors and its smell. A terrible sweetness lifted out of the doll, that stench you are supposed to associate with innocent things — zoos and pet stores, pony rides. He was stuffed to the springs of his eyeballs. Put it all back, Juan, I thought hopefully, and we’ll be OK.

“Uh. You dudes? Do scarecrows have fingers?” Mondo held the scarecrow’s left hand, very formally, as if he were suddenly in a cummerbund accompanying the scarecrow to the world’s scariest prom.

“I mean, usually,” he added lamely, as if this were a normal topic to solicit our opinions on, the prevalence of scarecrow fingers.

“His body is soft.” Gus demonstrated this for us, punching it. “But his face is, like, a wax? Not-straw. Some other shit. Plastic.”

Only it wasn’t generic, like a mall mannequin. Even the dark blue eye color looked particular, familiar. His features were weird and specific, like the face of a wax actress in a museum. Someone you were supposed to recognize.

“What the hell?” Gus whispered, twisting the scarecrow’s face by its plastic chin. The chin was pocked with a fiery braille of blemishes and cuts, so convincingly nasty that you half expected them to ooze. The longer I stared at him, the less real I myself felt. Was I really the only one who remembered his name?

“Weird. His face is cold.” Juan Carlos ran a long finger down the scarecrow’s crooked nose.

“He’s not wearing his glasses,” I mumbled. Now that I knew who this was I was afraid to touch his face, as if the humid wand of my finger might bring him to life.

“His face is hard,” Mondo confirmed, knocking on the scarecrow’s forehead. “His eyes are…uh-oh. Oops.”

Mondo turned to us, grinning.

“Oh shit!” Gus shook his head. “Put them back in.”

“I can’t. The little threads broke.” Mondo held out the eyes: two grape-sized balls, an amethyst glass soaked blue by the last light of day. “Any of you bitches know how to sew?” Intense pinks were filtering through the autumn mesh of the oak. It was dusk, sunset; the park was now officially closed. “Seriously?” Mondo asked, sounding a little panicky now. “Anybody got glue or something?”

I stared at the sprigs of thread where the scarecrow’s eyes had been. Now his face was putty white from the “T” of his nose to his forehead. A little firefly was lighting up the airless caves of the doll’s nostrils, undetected by the doll. You’re even blinder now, I thought, and a heavy feeling draped over me.

Then I heard the question I’d been dreading: “Don’t we know this kid?”

Now Mondo stood on his toes and peered into the scarecrow’s eyes with a shrewdness that you did not ordinarily expect from Mondo Chu — his mind was lost inside one of those baby-fat faces that he couldn’t seem to age out of, with big slabby cheeks that squeezed his eyes into a narcoleptic squint, although outside of school Mondo could get pretty annoyingly energetic. There was some evidence that Mondo did not have the happiest home life. Mondo was half Chinese, half something.We’d all forgotten, assuming we’d ever known.

In fact, as a “we,” Camp Dark was pretty fiercely uninterested in the details of its members’ lives outside of school or beyond the fenced urban woods of Friendship Park. Silence policed the shady meeting point under our oak. I didn’t know, for example, if Juan Carlos’s big sister was pregnant or just getting large on Hershey’s Kisses, or how Mondo got the yellowish bruises that covered his flabby upper arms. Inside of our “we,” nobody would ask you about your ma’s cancer or your alcoholic aunt, your moon-eyed half sister, your family’s debts, nobody commented on the emotions that might fly across your face and raise your fists and nobody demanded a bullshit weather report from you either, a reason for your anger — not like the teachers, who were always demanding that sort of phony meteorology from us. We cracked jokes together in Camp Dark, but I think it was the silence, all those unasked questions, that bound us. At school we beat down kids as a foursome and this too we did in an animal silence. We’d drag a hysterical kid behind the red-brick Science Building — this march could look a little medieval, like some Gallows Day parade, each of us taking up an arm or a leg — and then we would hammer and piston our fists into his clawing, shrilling body until the kid went slack as rags. For us, this process was a necessary evil. We were like four factory guys, manufacturing the quiet, a calm that was not available to us naturally anywhere in Anthem. We’d kneel there, panting together, and let the good quiet bubble around our fists like glue.

It was Mondo who cracked the mystery. He didn’t solve it, I don’t mean that — in fact he made the mystery much worse. That’s what I pictured anyhow, when Mondo tapped the mystery with his little eureka! hammer — hairline cracks appearing in a round, solid shell. Yolk came oozing out of the mystery, covering all of our hands, so that we became involved.

“Oh!” Mondo fell back on his heels and let out a bee-stung cry. “It’s Eric.”

“Oh.” I took a step away from the tree.

Juan Carlos paused with one hand lost in the doll’s back, still wearing a doctor’s distant, guileful expression.

“Who the fuck is Eric?” Gus snarled.

Then Mondo, grinning loonily like a Jeopardy! champ, grabbed the scarecrow’s left arm by the wrist and made it shake hands with the cold air between us. “Don’t you assholes remember him? Eric Mutis.”

Sure, we remembered him now: Eric Mutis. Eric Mutant, Eric Mucus, Eric the Mute. Paler than a cauliflower, a friendless kid who had once or twice had seizures in our class. “Eric Mutis is an epileptic,” our teacher had explained a little uncertainly, after Mutant got carried by Coach Leyshon from the room. Eric Mutis had joined our eighth-grade class in October of the previous year, a transfer kid. One day Mutant was sitting in the back row of our homeroom; the teacher never introduced him. Kids rarely moved to Anthem, New Jersey, and generally the teachers made the New Boy or the New Girl parade their strangeness for us; but Eric Mutis, who seemed genuinely otherworldly, much weirder even than the Guatemalan New Boy, Eric Mutis arrived in exile. He sank like a stone to the bottom of our homeroom. One day, several weeks before the official end of our school term, he vanished, and I honestly had not spoken his name since. Nobody had.

In the school halls, Eric Mutis had been as familiar as air; at the same time we never thought about him. Not unless he was right in front of our noses. Then you couldn’t ignore him — there was something provocative about Eric Mutis’s ugliness, something about his oblivion, his froggy lashes and his worse-than-dumb expression, that filled your eyes and closed your throat. He could metamorphose Jilly Lucio, the top of the cheer pyramid, a dog lover and the sweetest girl in our grade, into a harpy. “What smells?” she’d whisper, little unicorn-pendant Jilly, thrilling us with her acid tone, and only Eric Mutis would blink his large, bovine eyes at her and say, “I don’t smell it, Jilly,” in that voice like thin bluemilk. Congenitally, he really did seem like a mutant, incapable of shame. Even then, at age twelve, before our glands made us all swell into monsters, I felt allergic to the kid. His ugliness panned into a weird calm, and this combination was like a bully allergen. A teacher’s allergen, too — the poor get poorer, I guess, because many of our teachers were openly hostile to Eric Mutis; by December, Coach Leyshon was sneering, “Pick it up, Mutant!” on the courts.

The courts, the grass behind them — that was where Camp Dark came to order. We did what you might call these “alterations” on the blacktop. At recess we’d descend on Eric Mutis like deranged tailors, trailing these little threads of Eric’s spittle and Eric’s blood. But his costume — the smoggy yellow cloud of his hair, his sickly bus-terminal complexion — it was his skin. We could not free him, we could not torch the costume off him. He wouldn’t change, no matter how often we encouraged him to do so with our insults and the instruction of our “pranks” and fists. We stole his Hoops sneakers, hung them up on the flagpole, we smashed his gray Medicaid glasses three times that year, his hideous glasses, with frames the width of my TV set; and then he’d come to school in a new pair of the same eyesore frames, the same nine-dollar Hoops sneakers, fresh from the Starmart box. How many pairs of Hoops did we force him to buy — or, most likely, since Eric Mutis queued up with us for the free lunch program, to steal?

“Why are you so stubborn, Mutant?” I hissed at him once, when his face was inches away from mine, lying prone on the blacktop — closer to my face than any girl’s had ever been. Closer than I’d let my ma’s face get to me, now that I’d turned thirteen. I could smell his blue bubblegum, and what we called “Anthem cologne” — like my own clothes, Mutant’s rags stunk of diesel and fried doughnut grease and the sweet, fecal waft off manhole covers.

“Why don’t you learn?” And I Goliath crushed the Medicaid glasses in my hand, feeling sick.

“Your palms, Larry.” Eric the Mute had shocked me that time, calling me by name. “They’re bleeding.”

“Are you retarded?” I marveled. “You are the one bleeding! This is your blood!” It was our blood actually, but his voice and his monotone blue eyes made me furious. “WAKE UP!” I backed away to give Gus space to deliver an encore kick. “Listen, Mutant: DO…NOT…WEAR THAT UGLY SHIT TO SCHOOL!”

And Monday came, and guess what Mutant wore?

Was he wearing this stuff out of rebellion? A kind of nerd insurrection? I didn’t think so; that might have relieved us a little bit, if the kid had the spine and the mind to rebel. But Eric Mutant seemed terribly oblivious of his own appearance — that was the problem — he wore that stuff witlessly, shamelessly. We couldn’t teach him how to be ashamed of it. (“Who did this? Who did this?” our upstairs neighbor, Miss Zeke from 3C, used to holler, grinding her cross-eyed dachshund’s nose into a lake of urine on the stairwell, while the dog, a true lost cause, jetted another weak stream onto the floor.) When we took Eric Mutis around behind the red-brick Science Building, he never seemed to understand what his crime had been, or what was happening, or even — his blue eyes drifting, unplugged — that it was happening to him.

In fact, I think Eric Mutis would have been hard-pressed to identify himself in a police lineup. In the school bathroom he always avoided mirrors. The school bathroom was tiled, naval blue for boys, which made the act of pissing into a bowl feel weirdly perilous, as if at any moment you might get plowed under by an Atlantic City wave. Teachers used a separate faculty john; I’d cracked younger kids’ skulls on those tiles before. Eric the Mute knew this much about me — that was the one lesson he took.

“Well, hallo there, Mutant,” I’d whistle at him.

More than once I watched him drop his dick and zip up and sprint past the bank of sinks when I entered the bathroom, his homely face pursuing him blurrily and hopelessly in the mirrors. This used to make me happy, when kids like Eric Mucus were afraid of me. (Really, I don’t know who I could have been then either.)

“Well,” Gus sighed, dragging down his dark earlobes, which was his baseball signal to the rest of us that he’d lost it, his patience with our dithering voices, his faith in debate fertilizing an action. “We could do an experiment, like. Seems pretty simple. One way to find out what old Eric Mutant here — ”

“The scarecrow,” Mondo hissed, as if he regretted ever naming it.

Gus rolled his eyes. “What the scarecrow is doing in the park? One way to learn what he is supposedly protecting us from? Would be to cut him down.”

“But, Gus.” I swallowed. “What if something does come to Anthem?”

“Well, Rubby…” Gus shrugged. “Then we’ll have some fascinating new information about this scarecrow, won’t we?”

We had been riffing on this: What threat, exactly, was this scarecrow keeping away from Friendship Park? Not crows, that was for sure; but what was the Anthem equivalent, the urban crow? Rabid cats? A flock of mob gunmen, or sewer rats? Those poor Canada geese that kept getting sucked into the engines of jet planes at the Anthem airport? (That one was my idea.) What could a doll of a child scare away, a freak like Mutant?

The oak shivered above us; it was almost nine o’clock. Police, if they came upon us now, would write us up for trespassing. Come upon us, officers. Maybe the police would know the protocol here, what you should do if you found a scarecrow of your classmate strung up in the woods.

“I’m with Larry. I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore, either,” said Mondo. “To cut him down. What if something really bad happens? It would be our fault.”

Juan Carlos nodded. “Look, whoever put this up is one sick fuck. I don’t want to mess with the property of a lunatic…”

Juan was still enumerating his understandable concerns when Gus, who had fallen quiet, walking around the tree and finishing everybody’s brews, stood up. A knife sprang out of Gus’s pocket, a four-inch knife that nobody had known Gus carried with him, one of the kitchen tools we’d seen used by Gus’s pretty mom, Mrs. Ainsworth, to butterfly and debone chickens. Down went Eric.

“GUS!”

We stood up just as the scarecrow shucked the oak permanently, and plummeted into the sky.Watching him go over, I felt dread without a drop of surprise — it felt like we were watching a horror movie that we’d seen a thousand times before, The Scarecrow of Eric Mutis Dives Into the Cone! I can still see the stars swarming around the pin oak and Gus sawing at the rope, Gus giving Eric Mutis’s doll a little push — joylessly, dutifully, like a big brother behind a swingset — the plaque catching at him like a stumbling stone, illegibly flashing, the doll launching over the roots, headfirst, into a night that shrank him, into the Cone’s collapsing sky, the doll falling and falling and then, not. He landed on the rocks with a baseball crack. I don’t know how to describe the optical weirdness of the pace of this event — because the doll fell fast — but the doll’s descent felt unnaturally long to me, as if the forest floor were, just as quickly, lunging away from Eric Mutis. Somebody almost laughed. Mondo was already on his knees, peering over the edge, and I joined him: The scarecrow looked like a broke-neck kid at the bottom of a well. Facedown, his limbs all scrambled on an oily soak of black and maroon leaves and strata of our glass. Had it lost more straw? Black plants waved down there and I couldn’t tell which weeds might have belonged to the scarecrow. One of his white hands had gotten twisted all the way around. He waved at us, palm up, spearing the air with his long, unlikely fingers.

“OK,” Gus said, sitting back down next to where he’d dug his red beer can into the leaves, as if we were at the beach. “You’re all welcome. Everybody needs to shut up now. Let’s start the clock on this experiment.”

We emerged from the park at Gowen Street and Forty-eighth Avenue. A doorman waved at us from a fancy apartment building. Awnings sprouted above all of the windows like golden claws. When the streetlights clicked on without warning, I think we all stifled a scream. We stood on the dirty tarmac of the sidewalk, bathed in a deep-sea light. Even on a nonscarecrow day I dreaded this, the summative pressure of the good-bye moment — but now it turned out there was nothing to say. We split off in a slow way, a slow ballet — a moth, watching the four of us from above, would have seen us as a knot dissolving over many moth centuries underneath the green air. It occurred to me that, given the lifespan of a moth, one kid’s twitch would occupy a year of insect time. The scarecrow of Eric Mutis would have twirled down for moth aeons.

“What the hell is so funny, kid?” the doorman shouted. I had been spawning a slow smile on my face, imagining the decades of moth time going by as my smile grew: Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, sleigh bells ring, Mr. Moth, here comes spring…

That night marked a funny turning point for me; I started thinking about Time in a new way, Time with a capital “T,” this substance that underwent mysterious conversions. On the walk home I watched moths go flitting above the stalled lanes of cars. I called Mondo on the phone, something I never did — I was surprised I even had his number. We didn’t talk about Eric Mutis, but the effort of not talking about him made our actual words feel like fizz, just a lot of speedy emptiness. You know, I never tried to force Eric Mutis from my mind — I never had to. Courteously, the kid had disappeared from my brain entirely, about the same time he vanished from our school rolls. Were it not for the return of his scarecrow in Camp Dark, I doubt I would have given him a second thought.

I am in the shower, Eric Mutis is where? I tied myself to mental train tracks, juxtaposing my activities against Eric Mutis’s imaginary ones — was he blowing out twisty red and white birthday candles, doing homework? What hour of what day was it, wherever Eric Mutis had moved? I pictured him in Cincinnati squiggling mustard on a ballpark frank, in France with an arty beret (I pictured him dead too, in a dreamy, compulsive way, the concrete result of which was that I no longer ate breakfast). “You don’t want your Popple, Larry?” my ma screamed. “It’s a Blamberry Popple!” The Blamberry Popple looked like a pastry nosebleed to me. What was Eric eating? How soundly was he sleeping? (“Did we break Mutant’s nose?” I asked Gus in homeroom. “At least once,” Gus confirmed.) Now each of my minutes cast an hourglass shadow and I divided into two.

But inside the Cone, as it turned out, the scarecrow of Eric Mutis was subdividing even faster.

Every day for a week, we went back to stare at the facedown scarecrow of Eric Mutis in Friendship Park. It lay there in the sun, sleeping it off. Nothing much happened. There was a mugging at the Burger Burger; the robber got a debit card and a quart of milkshake. Citywide, bus fare went up five cents. A drunk driver in the Puerto Rican day parade draped a Puerto Rican flag over his windshield like a patriotic blindfold and crashed through a beautiful float of the island of Puerto Rico. Nothing occurred on the crime blotter that seemed connected to Eric Mutis, or Eric Mutis’s absence. No strange birds flew out of exile, no new shapes came to roost in the oaks of Friendship Park now that the scarecrow’s guard was down. Downed by us, I thought angrily, like a cut power line. Drowned in air, like the world’s stupidest experiment.

Had Eric Mutis’s scarecrow been babysitting a crop? Some Jersey version of the Amish seven grains? Years of city trash and plastic guns, that was Camp Dark’s harvest. I thought of the slippery weeds crushed underneath his face, the rocks and cans glowing like blind fish in the ravine.

“Did Eric have a dad? A mom?”

“Wasn’t he a foster kid?”

“Where did he move to again?”

“Old Mucusoid never said — did he? He just disappeared.”

At school, the new guidance counselor could not help us find our “little pal” — the district computers, she said, had been wiped by a virus. Mutis, Eric: no record. His yearbook slot was an empty navy egg between the school-mandated grimaces of Omar Mowad and Valerie Night. ABSENT, it read in red letters. We consulted with Coach Leyshon, whom we found face deep in a vending-machine cheeseburger behind the dugout.

“Mutant?” he barked. “That dipshit didn’t come back?” We broke into Vice Principal Derry’s file cabinet and made depressing, irrelevant discoveries about the psychology of Vice Principal Derry — his top drawer contained about five million pointless green pencils, a Note to Moi! memo, in pen, that read BUY PENCIL SHARPENER, and a radiant mélange of glues.

Next we consulted the yellow pages at the city library, Ma Bell’s anthology of false alarms — we thought we found Mutant in Lebanon Valley, Pennsylvania. Voloun River, Tennessee. Jump City, Oregon. Jix, Alaska, a place that sounded like a breakfast cereal or an attack dog, had four Mutis families listed. We called. Many dozens of Mutises across America hung up on us, after apologizing for their households’ dearth of Erics. America felt vast and void of him.

Gus whammed the phone into its receiver, disgusted. “It’s like that kid hatched out of an egg. What I want to know is: Who made him into a scarecrow?”

Again the yellow pages got consulted. This time we weren’t even sure what sort of listing to scout for. Who made a doll of a boy — some modern Mary Shelley? An artist, a child taxidermist? We looked for ridiculous things: SCARECROW REPAIR, WAX KIDS.

I found an address for a puppeteer who had a workshop in Anthem’s garment district. Gus biked out there and did reconnaissance, weaving around the bankers’ spires of downtown Anthem and risking the shortcut under the overpass, where large, insane men brayed at you and haunted shopping carts rolled windlessly forward. He spent an hour circling the puppeteer’s studio, trying to catch him in the act of Dark Arts — because what if he wasmaking scarecrows of us? But the puppeteer turned out to be a small, baldman in a daffodil print shirt; the puppet on his table was a hippopotamus, or perhaps some kind of lion. This Gus learned on his twentieth revolution around the workshop, at which time the puppeteer lifted the window, gave a friendly wave, and told Gus that he had just telephoned the police.

“Great,” sighed Juan Carlos. “So we still have no clue who made that doll.”

“But how the fuck you going to confuse a hippo and a lion, bro!” Mondo grumbled. Often Mondo’s reactions would miss the mark entirely and slam into a non sequitur, as if his rage were a fierce and stupid bird that kept landing on the wrong tree, whole woods away from the rest of us.

“Chu, you have a brain defect.” Gus stared at him. “Something that cannot be helped.”

“Maybe Mutant did it,” I said, almost hopefully. I wanted Eric to be safe and alive. “Did he know that we hang out in the park? Maybe he roped the scarecrow there to screw with us.”

“Maybe it was Vice Principal Derry,” said Juan Carlos. “One time, I’m walking to the bus, and I see Mutant in Vice Principal Derry’s office. Through that window that faces the parking lot, right? And I sort of thought, ‘Oh, good, he’s getting some help.’ But then Derry catches me looking, right? And he stands up, he’s fucking pissed, he shuts the blinds. It was so weird. And I saw the Mute’s mug — ” I could see it too, Mutant’s leech white face behind the glass, I had seen it framed in Derry’s office window, Eric Mutis swallowed in Derry’s leather chair, wearing his queer gray glasses. “And he looked…bad,” he finished. “Like, scared? Worse than he did when we messed with him.”

“Why was he in Derry’s office?” I asked, but nobody knew.

“I saw him get picked up from school,” Mondo volunteered. “After second period, you know, cause he had one of his twitch fests? The, uh, the seizures? And this dude in the car looked so old! I was like, Mutant, is Darth Vader there your dad?”

This too was something we all suddenly remembered seeing: a cadaverous man, a liver-spotted hand on the steering wheel of a snouty green Cadillac, tapping a cigar, and then Mutant climbing into the backseat, the rear window as foggy as aquarium glass and the Mute’s head now etched dimly behind it. He always climbed into the backseat, never used the passenger door, we agreed on that. We all remembered the cigar.

Gus hadn’t stopped frowning — it had been days since he’d told a truly funny joke. “Where did Mutis live in Anthem? Does anybody remember him saying?”

“East Olmsted,” said Mondo. “Right? With a crazy aunt.” Mondo’s eyes widened, as if his memory were coming into focus. “I think the aunt was black!”

“Chu,” Juan Carlos sighed. “That is not your memory. You are thinking of a Whoopi Goldberg movie. Nah, Mutant’s parents were rich.”

“Oh my God!” Mondo clapped a hand to his face. “You’re right! That was a great movie!”

Juan Carlos directed his appeal to Gus and me. “Kid was loaded. I just remembered. I’m, like, ninety percent sure. That’s why the Mute pissed us off so bad…wasn’t it? Dressing like he was on welfare and shit. I think they lived in the Pagoda. Serious.”

I almost laughed at that — the Pagoda was an antislum, a castle of light. Eric Mutis had never lived in the Pagoda’s zip code. In fact, I had visited the house where Eric lived. Just one time. This knowledge was like a wild thumper of a rabbit inside me. I was amazed that no one else could hear it.

Wednesday morning, I went to Friendship Park on an empty stomach, alone. The sun came with me; I was already an hour late for songs with Miss Verazain in Music I, a class that I was certainly failing, since I stood in the back with Gus and made a Clint Eastwood seam with my lips and sang only in my mind. It was the class I loved.

That day we were set to sing some classical stuff, words floating uselessly on the surge of one of those “B” or “C” composers, Bach or maybe Chopin, these dead men whose songs sawed through time with violins and uncorked a forest to let a soft green light flood out, and into the voices of my friends — back then I would have said that Music I calmed me down better than pot and I didn’t like to miss it. But I had my own business with the scarecrow of Eric Mutis. I’d been having dreams about both Erics, the real one and the doll. I twisted on my pillow and imagined it loaded with straw. In one dream, I got Coach Leyshon’s permission to sub myself in for him, lashing my body to the pin oak and eating horsey fistfuls of a bloodred straw; in another, I watched the doll of Eric Mutis go plunging into the Cone again, only this time when his scarecrow hit the rocks, a thousand rabbits came bursting out of it. Baby rabbits: squeamish, furless thumbs of pink in the night, racing lemming quick under the oaks of Camp Dark.

“Eric?” I called softly, well in advance of the oak. And then, almost inaudibly: “Honey?” in a voice that was not unlike my own ma’s when she opened my bedroom door at night and called my name but clearly didn’t want to wake me, wanted instead who-knows-what? A squirrel watched me with an aggravating fearlessness as I entered Camp Dark, scratching its chest fur like a man in a soiled little shirt. I kicked it away and got on my knees and held on to the oak’s roots like my bike’s handlebars, peering down into the Cone.

“Oh my God.”

Whatever had attacked the scarecrow in the night had been big enough to tear his arm off at the root. Green and beige straw spewed out of the hole. You’re next, you’re next, you’re next, my heart screamed. I straightened and ran and I didn’t slow down until I passed under the stone arch of Friendship Park and saw the violet-gray speck at the bottom of the hill that became the glass umbrella of the #22 bus stop. I did not stop until I burst into Music I, where all of my friends were doing their do re mi work. I pushed in next to Gus and collapsed against our wall.

“You’re very late, Señor Rubio,” said Miss Verazain disgustedly, and I nodded hard, my eyes still stinging from the cold. “You’re too late to be assigned a role.”

“I am,” I agreed with her, hugging my arm.

There was one day last December, right before the Christmas break, where we got him behind the Science Building for a game that Mondo had named Freeze Tag. The game was pretty short and unsophisticated — we made a kid “It,” the way you’d identify an animal as a trophy kill, if you were a hunter, or declare a red spot “the bull’s eye,” so that you could shoot it:

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

We’d grinned and our four bodies in our white gym shirts made a grin too, where we’d gathered in the witchy grass of the back-lot ball field. We were up to our knees in the grass, advancing. Two halves of a circle. We didn’t corner the kid, Mutis, we made actual lips around him. From above we would have looked like a mouth, closing. The rules were simple and yet Eric Mutis stared at us with his opaque blue eyes, staked to the field, and gave no sign of understanding it.

“You’re it,” I’d explained to Eric.

Everybody followed me toward Camp Dark in a line.

“Here comes the army!” cackled a bum with whom we sometimes shared beers, one of a rotating cast of lost men whom Gus called the Bench Goblins. He had a long stirrup-shaped face that grinned and grinned at us when we told him about the scarecrow of Eric Mutis. Long fingers brushed at the oatmeal of wet newspapers that covered his cheeks.

“No,” he said, “I don’t see nobody come this way with no doll.”

“One week ago,” I prodded, but you could tell that this unit didn’t mean much to the guy. He had amassed a slippery skin of newspapers on his legs with headlines from early August.

All last night it had rained; the leaves were shining, the red playground foam looked like a giant’s dental equipment. We marched forward. I wasn’t the oldest or the tallest but I was the leader now, and why? Just because I knew the bad scene waiting for us behind the treeline. And, in fact, I knew a little more about the real Eric Mutis than I was letting on. I had some brewing theories, nothing I was ready to voice, about why the scarecrow had arrived in our city. It is a very good thing that we elect our presidents in America, I thought, because this had to be the wrong basis for picking a leader — if I was at this particular moment the best informed about the danger we were heading toward, I was also the worst scared.

“So what do you think did it, Rubby?” Gus asked.

“Yeah. An animal, like?” Mondo’s eyes were gleeful. “Is it all clawed up?”

“You’ll see. I dunno, guys,” I mumbled. “I dunno. I dunno.” Each word crawled like a gray mouse up the bars of my ribs to my throat. Mice dug their pink claws into my belly and my heart. (Could mice have done that to the scarecrow of Eric Mutis? Chewed off and carried away a whole arm? Could ants? Maybe the threat was multiple, pestilential, and smaller than I’d thought.)

Hypothesis 1: A human is doing this.

Hypothesis 2: An animal, or several animals, are doing this. Smart animals. Surgical animals. Animals with claws. Scavengers — opossums or something, the waddlesome undertakers of the park.

Hypothesis 3: This is being done by…Something Else.

But when we reached the Cone and they peered over the edge — I hung back, leaning on the oak — everybody started to laugh. Hysterically, a belly-clutching laugh, like three hyenas, Gus first and then the other two.

“Good one, Rubby!” they called.

I was shocked. “Why are you laughing?”

“Oh, shit, that is a good one, Rubby-oh. This is a classic.”

“This is your best yet,” Juan Carlos confirmed with a gloomy jealousy.

“Dang! Larry. You’re like a goddamn acrobat! How did you get down there?”

Eyes were rolling at me in a semicircle. I found myself thinking of Eric the Mute, Eric the Mutant, and what we must have looked like to him.

“Wait — ” I rolled my wet eyes back at them. “You think I did that?” Everybody nodded at me with a strange solemnity, so that for a disorienting second I wondered if they might be right. How did they think I had managed the amputation? I tried to see myself as they must be imagining me: swinging down into the Cone on a stolen phys ed rope, a knife in my back jeans pocket, the moon hanging over Anthem in a crescent, its light washing over the Cone’s rock walls and making the place feel even more like an unlidded casket; I watched myself approach the doll in the reeds, the doll that had been waiting for my attack with a patience rivaled only by the real Eric Mutis’s; I heard the doll’s right arm ripping away as I grunted the knife into the fabric, the moon shining on, the world watching us out of one slit eye, like a cat, a cracked Anthem stray. And then what? Did my friends think I’d swung the arm back to the surface, à la Tarzan? Carried the arm out of the park in my book bag?

“I didn’t do it!” I gasped. “This is not a joke, you assholes…”

I got up and vomited orange Gatorade into the bushes. It was all liquid — I hadn’t been eating. Days of emptiness rose in me and I dry retched again, listening to my friends’ peals of laughter echo around Camp Dark. Then I surprised myself by laughing with them, so uncontrollably and with such relief that it felt like a continuation of the retching — like disgorging my claims of innocence and crawling on my hands and knees back inside our “we.” My lungs filled with and expelled this relief, which I knew would only last as long as we could loft the joke. After a while the laughter didn’t sound connected to any of us. It was like a thunderhead, a stampede — sound poured all over us. We blinked at each other, under the laughter, our mouths open.

“And the Oscar for puking goes to…Larry Rubio!” said Juan Carlos, still doubled over.

A bird floated softly over the park. Somewhere just beyond the treeline, city buses were wheezing a cargoload of citizens to and from work. Some of these were our parents. I felt a little stab, picturing my ma eating her yellow apple on the train and reading some self improvement book, on a two-hour commute to her job at a day nursery for rich infants in Anthem’s far richer sister county. I realized that I had zero clue what my ma did there; I pictured her rolling a big striped ball, at extremely slow speeds, toward babies in little sultan hats and fat, bejeweled diapers.

“My ma’s name is Jessica,” I heard myself say. I could not stop talking now, it was like chattering teeth. “Jessica Dourif. Gus, you met her once, you remember.” I glared at Gus and dared him to say he’d forgotten her.

“Rubio? Why… ,” Juan Carlos said slowly, picking around my body like an Inquisitor, “…the hell…are you telling us this?”

I was staring down at the scarecrow’s shredded body. A gash down his back had hemorrhaged a dirty-looking straw. A golden bird was hopping around down there, pecking and pecking. Now YOU need a scarecrow, I thought, watching the bird savagely tease out straw from the old hole.

“I’ve never met my father,” I blurted. “I can’t even say my own fucking last name.”

“Larry,” Juan Carlos said sternly, standing over me. “Nobody cares. Now you pull yourself together.”

What followed over the course of the next eight days progressed with the logic of a frightening nursery rhyme:

On Tuesday morning, the scarecrow’s hands were gone. Both of them. I pictured the white fingers crawling through the park, hailing a cab, starting a new and incognito life somewhere, perhaps with a family of unwitting tarantulas in New Mexico. Eric Mutis, the real Eric, he too could be living in a painted desert now, with a new father or a new guardian. Or in a mountain town, maybe. Living at a ludicrous altitude, his body half eaten by the charcoal clouds of Aspen. By the sea. In Salamanca, Spain. In a cold cottage on the moon.

By Wednesday, the scarecrow was missing both coruscating Hoops sneakers and both feet. Everybody but me snickered about that one. We’d stolen Eric Mutis’s Hoops maybe a dozen times last year, we stole Hoops from any kid stupid enough to wear them — Hoops were imitation Nikes, glittered with an insulting ersatz gold, and just the sight of a pair enraged me. The “H” logo was a flamboyant way to announce to your class: Hey, I’m poor! Once Gus and I had gotten a three-day suspension for jerking off the Mute’s Hoops sneakers and his crusty socks and holding an “America the Great” sparkler to his bare feet — just to mess with him.

“Larry!” Gus said, clapping my back. “How did you get out of the Cone with two shoes in your hands? This is some Cirque du Soleil bullshit! You got to try out for the Olympics.” He checked the backs of my arms for fresh nets of scrapes. “What, are you flying down there?”

“I am not doing this,” I said quietly. I was getting hoarse from saying that. I realized with a grim shock that I was leaning against the oak in exactly the spot where we’d found Mutis’s scarecrow.

“Maybe,” I said in a whisper, “we can fish him up…? Hook him out? Maybe we can get down there and, and bury it.”

“Are you crying, bro?”

Everybody complimented me on my “acting.” But they were the actors — believing their easy suspicion, pretending that I was the guy to blame. OnlyMondo would let me see his smile tremble, and I felt a little better, thinking hard at him: Mondo, whatever’s happening down there, I am not behind it, OK?

On Thursday, his second arm was gone. Ripped whole, presumably, from the cloth shoulder, so that you got an unsettling glimpse of the gray straw coiled inside the scarecrow. Not-it, not-it, not-it, I’d been thinking all week, a thorny little crown of thoughts.

“What’s next, Rubby? You going to carry a guillotine down there?”

Not it! I worried I was about to ralph again.

“You bet,” I said. “How well you all know me. Next up, I’m going to climb down there and behead Eric Mutis with an ax.”

“Right.” Gus grinned. “We should follow you home. We’re gonna find Mutant’s arm under your pillow. The fake one, and probably the real one too, you psycho.”

And they did. Follow me home. On a Saturday, after we discovered that the doll’s legs had disappeared — the scarecrow was starting to look like a disintegrating jack-o-lantern, pulpy and crushed, with a sallow vegetable pallor. I was “It.” I was the only suspect. Under a dreary sky we left the scarecrow where it was, everybody but me laughing about how they’d been fucked with, faked out, punked, and gotten.

“You rotten, Rubby-Oh,” grinned Gus.

“Something’s rotten,” agreed Mondo, catching my eye.

Afterward we walked very slowly across the park toward my ma’s apartment on First and Stuckey, where we lived in ear-splitting proximity to the hospital; from my bedroom window I could see the red and white carnival lights of the ambulances. Awake, I was totally inured to the sirens, a whine that we’d been hearing throughout Anthem since birth — that urgent song drilled into us until our own heartbeats must have synced with it, which made it an easy howl to ignore; but I had dreams where the vehicular screams in the URGENT CARE parking lot became the cries of a gigantic, abandoned baby behind my apartment. All I wanted to do in these dreams was sleep but this baby wouldn’t shut up! Now I think this must be a special kind of poverty, low-rent city sleep, where even in your dreams you are an insomniac and your unconscious is shrill and starless.

When we got to my place, the apartment was dark and there was no obvious sustenance waiting for us — my ma was not one to prepare a meal. Some deep-fridge spelunking produced a pack of spicy jerky and Velveeta slices. This was beau food, suitor food, a relic from my ma’s last live-in boyfriend — was it Curtis Black? Manny Somebody? Which one had been the jerky lover? As the son, I got to be on a first name basis with all of these adult men, all of her boyfriends, but I never knew them well enough to hate them in a personal way. We folded thirty-two cheese slices into cold taco shells and ate them in front of the TV. Later I’d remember this event as a sort of wake for the scarecrow of Eric Mutis, although I had never in my life been to a funeral.

They searched my apartment, found nothing. No white hands clapping in my closet or anything. No legs propped next to the brooms in the kitchen.

“He’s clean,” shrugged Gus, talking over me. “He probably buried the evidence.”

“I do think we need to go down into the Cone,” I started babbling again, “and bury him. What’s left of him. Please, you guys. I really, really think we need to do that.”

“No way. We are not falling for that,” said Juan Carlos quickly, as if wary of falling into the Cone himself.

Accusing me, I saw, served a real utility for the group — suddenly nobody was interested in researching scarecrows at the library with me, or trying to figure out where the real Eric Mutis had gone, or deciphering who was behind his doppelgänger doll. They already had a good answer: I was behind it. This satisfied some scarecrow logic formy friends. They slept, they didn’t wonder anymore. That’s where my friends had staked me: behind the doll.

“Let’s go there one night, and just see who comes to shred and tear at him like that. We’ll be the scarecrow’s scarecrow, haha… ,” I gulped, staring at them. “And then we’ll know exactly…”

Mondo winced and snapped the TV on.

“Nice try, Rubby!” Gus crunched through a taco shell. The pepper specks that covered the yellow shell looked exactly like the blackheads on Gus’s broad nose. “Oh, I bet you’d love that. Nighttime. Phase Two of your prank. Get us all good in Camp Dark. I can’t wait to see how this all turns out, kid — what sort of Friday the Thirteenth ending you got planned for us. But we are not just going to walk into it, Rubby.”

It felt like we sat there for hours before somebody asked: “What the hell are we watching?” Nobody had noticed or commented when the station switched to pure static. My ma had an ancient, crappy RCA TV, with oven dials for controls and little rabbit ears; I always thought it looked more authentically futuristic to me than my friends’ modern Toshiba sets. Spazzy rainbows moved up and down, imbuing the screen with an insectoid life of its own. Here was the secret mind of the machine, I thought with a sudden ache, what you couldn’t see when the news anchors were staring soulfully at their teleprompters and the sitcom comedy families were making eggs and jokes in their fake houses.

Eric’s face — the face of scarecrow Eric — swam up in my mind. I realized that the random, relentless lightning inside the TV screen was how I pictured the interior of the doll — void, yet also, in a way that I did not understand and found I could not even think about head-on, much less explain to my friends, alive. My apartment was as silent as the rainbowed screen; with the TV on mute you could hear a hard clock tick.

“Hey! Rubio! What the fuck we watching?”

“Nothing,” I snapped back; a wise lie, I thought. “Obviously.”

For three days, little pieces of the doll of Eric Mutis continued to disappear. Once the major appendages were gone, the increments of Eric’s scarecrow that went missing became more difficult to track. Patches of hair vanished. Bites and chews of his shoulders. By Monday, two weeks after we’d found it, over half of the scarecrow was gone; with a sickening lurch I understood that it was too late now, that we were never going to tell anyone about him. Nobody who saw the wreck in the Cone would believe that it had been a doll of Eric Mutis.

“Well, that’s that,” said Juan Carlos in a funny voice, gazing down at the quartered scarecrow. In the Cone, his light spring-and-autumn straw was blowing everywhere now. All that bodiless straw gave me a nervous feeling, like watching a thought that I couldn’t collect. His naked head was still attached to the sack of his torso, both of these elements of Eric Mutis intact and ghoulishly white.

“That’s all, folks,” echoed Gus. “Going once, going twice! Nice work, Rubby.”

I shook my head, feeling nauseated. I’m still not sure how that silence overtook us. How did we know that we’d missed our window to tell an outsider about the scarecrow? Why didn’t we at least discuss it — bringing the police to Friendship Park, or even V.P. Derry? This might have been an option last week but now, as mysteriously as the parts themselves had disappeared, it wasn’t; we all felt it; we hadn’t acted, and now the secret was returning to the ground. Eric Mutis was escaping us again in this terrible, original way.

That Friday, the scarecrow’s head was gone. Now I thought I detected a little ripple of open fear in the others’ eyes. It was me, I realized, that they were afraid of. All of the laughter at my “prank” had fizzled out. I was afraid of my friends — terrified that they might actually be onto something.

“Where did you put it?” Mondo whispered.

“When are you going to stop?” said Juan Carlos.

“Larry,” Gus said sincerely, “that is really sick.”

Hypothesis 4.

I think this knowledge sat on the top of my mind for days and days. But it must have been unswallowed, undigested, like a little white bolus of food on a tongue — because I didn’t exactly know it. Not yet.

“I think we made him,” I told Mondo that night on the phone. I don’t know how, I don’t mean that we, like, stitched him up or anything, but I think that we must be the reason…”

“Quit acting nuts. I know you’re faking, Larry. Gus says you probably made him. My dinner’s ready — ” He hung up.

About the static — sometimes that was all you could see in Eric Mutis’s eyes. Just a random light tracking your fists back and forth, two blue-alive-voids. When we laid him flat in the weeds behind the Science Building, it was that emptiness that made us wild. The overriding feeling I had at these times was that I couldn’t stop hitting him — OK, I shouldn’t be hitting him at all, I’d think, but if I stop I’ll make things worse. The right light would return to his eyes and he would know what I had been doing. Stopping the punishing rhythm, without any warning, I’d risk waking him from a dream. Me too, I’d wake up breathless. Somehow I swear it really did feel like that, like I had to keep right on hitting him, to protect him, and me, from what was happening. Out of the red corner of one eye I could see my own wet fist flying. The slickness on it was our snot and our blood.

Only one time did anybody stop us. “Leave him alone,” said a voice approaching from the awning of the Science Building. We all turned. Eric Mutant, breathing quietly in the weeds below us, rolled his eyes toward the voice.

“You heard me,” the voice repeated, and, miraculously, we had. We stopped. The four of us followed Mutis’s example, and froze. This voice belonged to our librarian, Mrs. Kauder, a woman whose red lipped face and white hair made her shockingly attractive to us. Here she came like a leopardess, flaunting all her bones.

Somebody wiped Eric’s blood onto his own sleeve, a decoy swipe. Now we could credibly asseverate, to the librarian or to Coach Leyshon or to Vice Principal Derry, that our assault on Eric Mutis had been a fight. The librarian fixed her green eyes on each one of us — every one of us except for Eric she had known in elementary school.

“Now you go back to your homerooms,” she said, in this funny rehearsed way, as if she were reading our lives to us from a book. “Now you go to Math, Gus Ainsworth — ” She pronounced our real names so gently, as if she were breaking a spell. “Now you go to Computers, Larry Rubio…” Her voice was as nasally as Eric’s but with an old person’s polished tremble. It was a terribly embarrassing voice — a weak white grasshopper species that we would have tried to kill, had it belonged to a fellow child.

“Remember, boys,” the librarian called after us. “That is a no-no! We do not treat each other that way…” She finished with a liquidy rattle, so that you could almost see the half-sunk moon of her optimism bobbing up and down inside the sentence (this librarian was a forty-year veteran of her carrels and I think that light was going out).

“Now you, Eric Mutis,” the librarian said softly. “You come with me.”

And here’s the thing: That was just a Wednesday. That was nowhere near the worst of what we did to this kid, Mutis. I think we needed the librarian to keep reading us her story of our lives, her good script of who we were and our activities, for every minute of every day — but of course she couldn’t do this, and we did get lost.

“Do you think Eric is alive?” I asked Mondo. We were alone in Camp Dark; Juan Carlos had improbably gotten a job as a Food Lion bag boy and Gus was out with some chick.

Mondo looked up from his Choco-Slurpo, shocked. Even the junior size of the Choco-Slurpo contained a swimming pool of pudding. The junior was like the idiot adult son of the gargantuan “jumbo.”

“Of course he is! He changed schools, Rubby — he’s not dead.” He sucked furiously at chocolate sludge, his eyes goggling out.

“Well, what if he died? What if he was dying all last year? What if he got kidnapped, or ran away? How would we know?”

“Maybe he still lives right around the corner! Maybe he helped you to put the scarecrow up! Is that it, Larry?” he asked, offering me the fudgy backwaters of the Choco-Slurpo.When Gus wasn’t around, Mondo became smarter, kinder, and more afraid. “Are you guys doing this together? You and Eric?”

“No,” I said sadly. “Mutant, he moved. I checked his old house.”

“Huh? You what?” Out of habit, Mondo heaved up to chuck the junior cup into the Cone, our trash can of yore, momentarily forgetting that the Cone was now a sort of open grave for Eric Mutis; with the freakishness of blind coincidence, Mondo happened to look up and notice an inscription on the sunless side of the oak; not new, judging from its scarred and etiolated look, but new to us:

ERIC MUTIS

SATURDAY

The letters oozed beneath an apple green sap and were childishly shaped; the kid had pierced the heart with a little arrow.When I saw this epitaph — because that is how they always read to me, this type of love graffiti on trees and urinals, as epitaphs for ancient couples — my throat tightened and my heart raced in such a way that my own death seemed a likely possibility. Mayday, God! O God, I prayed: Please, if I am going to die, may it happen before Mondo Chu attempts CPR.

“Look!” Mondo was screaming. For a moment he’d forgotten that I was supposed to be the culprit, the engineer of this psychotic joke. “Mutant was here! Mutant had a girlfriend!”

So then I filled in some blanks for Mondo. I offered Mondo the parts of Eric Mutis that I had indeed been hoarding.

Something was alive in the corner. That was the first thing I noticed when I set foot in Mutant’s bedroom: a stripe of motion in the brown shadows near the shuttered window. It was a rabbit. A pet, you could tell from the water bottle wired to its cage bars. A pet was not just some animal, it was yours, it was loved and fed by you. Everybody knows this, of course, but for some reason the plastic water bottle looked shockingly bright to me; the clean good smell of the straw was an exotic perfume in the Mute’s bedroom. “You think this will fit you, Larry?” Eric held out a shrunken, wrinkled sweater that I recognized. “Uh-huh.”

“You better now, Larry?”

“Terrific. Extra super.” I was, in fact, almost out of my mind with embarrassment — I had been riding my bicycle on the suburban side of Anthem, on my way to see a West Olmsted kid who owed me money, when I felt a fierce pain in my side and I went flying over the handlebars — I landed a little way from my bicycle, where I sat in the street watching the front bicycle tire spinning maniacally with a pebble in my fist that turned out to be my tooth. I knew the car — it was the green Cadillac. It was that gargoyle from the school parking lot who had almost killed me. I was still sitting in the road, hypnotized by the blue sea glare on the asphalt, when I watched a pair of Hoops sneakers come jogging toward me.

“Hi, Larry,” he’d said. “You all right? Sorry. He didn’t see you there.”

I had been planning to say: “Is that maniac your dad? Mr. Hit and Run? Your caretaker or whatever? Because I could sue, you know.”

Instead I watched my hand slide inside of Mutant’s hand and form a complicated red-and-white mitt. It was a slippery handshake, my palm bleeding into it, my bike stigmata — I waited for Mutant to say something about that time I smashed his specs. But his ugly, big-eared face lowered to me and then I was on my feet, following him through a scarred wooden door, number 52, the knocker of which was a brass pineapple with filth-encrusted tropical checkers. Tackiness and incoherence, that’s what awaited me in Casa Mutis, as augured by that fruity knocker — the living room was a zombie zone of grime and confusion. Chaos. The furniture was arranged in a way that made it look like a family of illegal squatters, the plaid sofa rearing on its side, even the appliances crouched. Mutant made no apologies but hustled me into a bedroom, his, I guessed; here he was, going through drawers, looking for a change of clothes to lend me. If I went home covered in blood and toting the twisted blue octopus of my bicycle, I explained, my ma, terrified by how close I’d swerved toward death, would murder me. I pulled Mutis’s sweater on. I knew I should thank him.

“That’s a rabbit?” I asked like some idiot.

“Yeah.” Now Eric Mutis smiled with a brilliance that I had never seen before. “That’s my rabbit.”

I crossed the room, in Eric Mutis’s boat-striped sweater, to acquaint myself with Eric Mutis’s caged pet, feeling my afternoon curve weirdly. It was sitting on a little mountain of food, the rabbit. It had piled that food so high that its tall ears had pushed flat against its skull, which I thought made this rabbit look like a European swimmer.

“I think you are spoiling that rabbit, dude.”

Big fifty-pound bags of straw and food pellets filled all the corners of the room, sharing space with less bucolic stuff: a shitty purple tape deck and a vat of roach-zapping spray, grimy cartoon-print pajama pants and underwear that looked like free-range laundry to me, no hamper in sight. Mutis had stocked this place for the apocalypse, turned his room into a bunny stronghold. (Where did Mutis get his rabbit funds from? I wondered. He got the free lunch at school and dressed like a hobo.) Pine straw. Timothy, orchard, meadow. Alfalfa — plus calcium! said one bag below a humongous Swiss cheese–colored rabbit with what must have been, for a rabbit, a bodybuilder’s physique. The rabbit smiled gloatingly at me, flexing muscles you would never suspect a rabbit possessed.

“My Christ, do they put steroids in that alfalfa?” I peeled off the price sticker, feeling like a city bumpkin. “Twenty bucks! You got ripped off!” I grinned. “You need to buy your grass from Jamaica, dude.”

But he had turned away from me, bending to whisper something to the trembling rabbit. Seeing this made me uncomfortable; his whisper was already a million times too loud. I felt a flare-up of my school-day rage — for a second I hated Eric Mutant again, and I hated the oblivious rabbit even more, so smugly itself inside the cage, sucking like an infant at its water nozzle. Did Mutant know what kind of ammo he was giving me? Did he honestly believe that I was going to keep his lovenest a secret from my friends?

I strummed my fingernails along the tiny cage bars. They felt like petrified guitar strings. “What’s his name?”

“Her name is Saturday,” said Eric happily, and suddenly I wanted to cry. Who knows why? Because Eric Mutis had a girl’s pet; because Eric Mutis had named his dingy rabbit after the best day of the week? I’d never seen Eric Mutis say one word to a human girl, I’d never thought of Eric Mutis as a lover before. But he was kicking game to this rabbit like an old pro. Just whispering a love music to her, calling down to her, “Saturday, Saturday.” Behind the cage bars his whole face was changing. Mutant kept changing until he wasn’t ugly anymore. What had we found so repulsive about him in the first place? His finger was making the gentlest circle between the rabbit’s crushed ears, a spot that looked really soft to me, like a baby’s head. The rabbit’s irises were fiery and dust dry, I noted, swiping hard at my own with Eric’s sleeve.

Inside the cage, the rabbit twitched phlegmatically, breathing underneath waves of Eric Mutis’s love. The rabbit didn’t change at all. Not one whisker trembled. This struck me as pretty rude behavior, on the part of the rabbit. I was just a bystander to their little feeding here, and I could feel my heartbeat getting steadily faster. Behind the bars, Saturday was wrinkling her nose into a joyless, princessy expression, as if breathing air were an onerous obligation that she wished she could give up. What was the big attraction here? I wondered. This pet rabbit had all the charm and verve of a pillow with eyes.

“Want to pet her?” Mutant asked, not looking at me.

“No.”

But then I realized that I could do this; nobody was watching me but Mutant and his voiceless rabbit. Some hard pressure flew away from me like air out of a zigzagging balloon. I let Mutant guide my hand through the door of the cage and brushed the green straw off her fur. Still I thought this pet was pretty stupid, until I petted her hide in the same direction that Mutant was going and felt actually electrified — under my palm, a cache of white life hummed.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“Whatever. Sure.” At that moment, it was my belief that he safely could.

Eric Mutis opened a drawer; there was so much dust on the bureau that his elbow left a big tiger stripe on the wood. There was so much dust everywhere in that room that the clean gleam of Saturday’s cage made it look like Incan treasure.

“Here.” The poster he thrust at me read LOST: MY PET BUNNY, MISS MOLLY MOUSE. PLEASE CALL ###-####! The albino rabbit in the photograph was unmistakably Saturday, wearing a sparkly Barbie top hat someone had bobby-pinned to her ear, the owner’s joking reference, I guessed, to the usual, magical algorithm of rabbits coming out of hats — a joke that was apparently lost on Saturday, whose red eyes bored into the camera with all the warmth and personality of the planet Mars. Even “found,” hugged inside the photograph, the creature was escaping its owner. The owner’s name, according to this poster, was Sara Jo. “I am nine,” the poster declared plaintively. The date on the poster said “Lost on August 22.” The address listed was 49 Delmar, just around the corner.

“I never returned her.” His voice seemed to tremble at the exact same tempo as the rabbit’s shuddering haunches. “I saw these posters everywhere.” He paused. “I pulled them all down.” He stepped aside to show me the bureau drawer, which was filled with every color of the Miss Molly poster. “I saw the girl who put them up. She has red hair. Two of those, what are they called …” He frowned. “Pigtails!”

“OK.” I grinned. “That’s bad.”

Suddenly we were laughing, hard, even Saturday, with her rumpshaking tremors, appeared to be laughing along with us.

Eric stopped first. Before I heard the hinge squeak, Eric was on his feet, hustling across the room on ballerina toes to shut the bedroom door. Just before it closed I watched a hunched shape flow past and enter the maple cavity of their bathroom. It was the same old guy who had almost mowed me down in the snouty green Cadillac on Delmar Street not thirty minutes ago. Relationship to Eric: unclear.

“Is that your father?”

Eric’s face was bright red.

“Your, ah, your grandfather? Your uncle? Your mom’s boyfriend?”

Eric Mutis, whom we could not embarrass at school, did not answer me now or meet my eyes.

“That’s fine, whatever,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me shit about your situation. Honey, I can’t even say my own last name.”

I barked with laughter, because what the hell? Where the hell had that come from, my calling him “honey”?

Eric smiled. “Peaches,” he said, “that’s just fine.”

For a second we stared at each other. Then we roared. It was the first and last joke I ever heard him try to make. We clutched our stomachs and stumbled around, knocking into one another.

“Shh!” Eric said between gasps, pointing wildly at the bedroom door. “Shhh, Larry!”

And then we got quiet,me and Eric Mutis. The rabbit stood on her haunches and drank water, making a white comma between us; the whole world got quieter and quieter, until that kissy sound of a mouth getting water was all you could hear. For a minute or two, catching our breath, we got to be humans together.

I never returned Mutant’s sweater, and the following Monday I did not speak to him. I hid the cuts on my palms in two fists. It took me another week to find a poster for Saturday. I figured they’d all be long gone — Eric said he’d torn them all down — but I found one on the Food Lion message board, buried under a thousand kitty calendars and yoga and LEARN TO BONGO! fliers: a very poorly reproduced Saturday glaring out at me under the Barbie hat and the words LOST! MY PET BUNNY. I dialed the number. Sure enough, a girl’s voice answered, all pipsqueaky and polite.

“I have news that might be of some interest to you.”

She knew right away.

“Molly Mouse! You found her!” Which, what an identity crisis for a rabbit. What kind of name is that? Worse than Rubby-oh. Kids should be stopped from naming anything, I thought angrily, they are too dumb to guess the true and correct names for things. Parents too.

“Yes. That is correct. Something has come to light, ma’am.”

I swayed a little with the phone in my hand, feeling powerful and evil. For some reason I was putting on my one-hundred-year-old voice, the gruff one I used when I ordered pizzas on the phone and requested the Golden Years senior discount. I heard myself reciting in this false, ancient voice the address of the house where Saturday and Eric slept.

At school, I breathed easier — I had extricated myself from a tight spot. I had been in real danger, but the moment had passed. Eric Mutis was not ever going to be my friend. Twice I called Sara Jo to ask how Molly Mouse was doing; her dad had gone to the Mutis house and via some exchange of threats or dollars gotten her back. “Oh,” the girl squealed, “she’s doing beautiful, she loves being home!”

Eric Mutis’s eyes, locked inside the gray corrals of his Medicaid frames, now became a second, dewless glass. Whenever anybody called him Mucus or Mutant, and also when our teacher called him, simply, “Eric M.,” his face showed the pruny strain of a weight lifter, puckering inward and then collapsing, as if he were too weak to hoist up his own name off the mat. When we hit him behind the Science Building, his eyes were true blanks. When we finished with him they had looked like a doll’s eyes — open, staring, but packed solid with frost, like the blue Antarctic. Permafrost around each pupil. Two telescopes fixed on a lifeless planet. Nobody had understood Eric Mutis when he arrived late in October and then by springtime my friends and I had made him much less scrutable.

“Larry — ,” he started to say to me once in the bathroom, several weeks after they’d come for Saturday, but I wrung my hands in the sink disgustedly and walked out, following Mutant’s example and avoiding our faces in the mirror. We never looked at each other again, and then one day he was gone.

Mondo and I crossed the playground in a slow processional. “Jesus H., are we graduating from something?” I grumbled. “Mondo, are we getting married? Dude, let’s pick up the pace. Mondo?”

Mondo had stopped walking in the middle of the playground. One of the few pieces of playground equipment that had survived the city pogrom and the red foaming were the zoo pogos, the little giraffe and the donkey on a stick. Mondo sat on it; the pogo groaned beneath his weight. He turned and looked at me with the world’s most miserable face.

“I am not going.”

I said nothing.

“I am changing my mind,” he said, the little pogo donkey listing east and west beneath him. He leaned a fat hand on its head and broke its left ear off. “Goddamn it!” He stood up, as if some switch inside him had broken off. I was glad that I wouldn’t have to convince him of anything. I was glad, even, that he was afraid — I hadn’t known that you could feel so grateful to a friend, for living in fear with you. Fear was otherwise a very lonely place. We kept walking toward the scarecrow.

“This is stupid,” he mumbled. “This is crazy. No way did we make the scarecrow.”

“Let’s just get this done.”

An idea had come to me last night, after telling Mondo the story of Saturday. An offering to make, a way to satisfy whatever force was feeding on the doll of Eric. It wasn’t a good one, but the other option was to leave the scarecrow untouched down there until it disappeared.

“Get what done?” Mondo was muttering. “You won’t even tell me why you’re going down there…”

“Do you want to go home? Do you want to wait until he’s totally gone?”

Mondo shook his head. His chubby face looked tumescent and red, not unlike the playground foam, as if his cheeks were swelling preemptively to protect him. Far away a plane roared over Anthem, dismissing our whole city in twenty seconds.

“Shut up, Larry!” Mondo yelped near the duck pond, when a car backfired and I jumped and brushed the flabby skin of his arm. “Watch where you’re going!”

Our flashlight beams crossed and blinded one another. After this we did not talk. Night had fallen hours ago — I didn’t want to be interrupted by anyone. Nobody was around, not even the regular bums, but the traffic on I-12 roared reassuringly just behind the treeline, a constant reminder of the asphalt rivers and the lattice of lights and signs that led to our homes. Friendship Park looked one hundred percent different than it did in daylight. Now the clouds were blue and silver, and where the full moon shone, new colors seemed to float up around us everywhere — the rusty weeds on the duck pond looked tangerine, the pin oak bulged with purple veins.

“How’s it going tonight, Mutant?” Mondo asked in a nervous voice when we reached the oak. He chucked something into the Cone — the plaster donkey’s ear. It landed squarely on Eric’s back. This was all that was left of the doll of Eric Mutis, his last solid part. Something had drawn its delicate claws down the scarecrow’s back, and now there was no mistaking what the straw inside it actually was, where it had come from — it was rabbit bedding, I thought. Timothy, meadow, orchard. Pine straw. The same golden stuff I’d seen bagged that day in the Mute’s dark bedroom. I took a big breath; I wished that I could imitate the scarecrow and leap into the Cone, swim down to him, instead of crawling along the rock wall like a bug.

“It’s moving!” Mondo screamed. “It’s getting away.”

I almost screamed too, thinking he meant the doll. But he was pointing at my black knapsack, which I’d slouched against the oak: a little tumor bubble was percolating inside the canvas, pushing outward at the fabric. As we watched, the bag fell onto its side and began to slide away, inch by inch, the zipper twinkling in the moonlight as the pouch pushed over the roots.

“Oh, shit!” I grabbed the bag and slung it over my shoulders. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll explain later. You just hold the rope, bro. Please, Mondo?”

So Mondo, staring at me with real fear as if we’d never met, as if I’d only been impersonating his good friend Larry Rubio for all these years, helped me to tie the eighteen-meter phys ed rope to the oak and loop one end around my waist. It took almost forty minutes to lower myself into the Cone, but in fact my friends’ suspicions had prepared me for this descent — I had already imagined myself backing into the ravine. I stumbled once and let go of the rock wall, swinging out, but Mondo called down that it was OK, I was OK (and I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the love I felt in that moment for Mondo Chu) — and then I was crouching, miraculously, on the mineral blue bottom of the Cone. The view above me I will never forget: the great oak sprawling over the ravine, fireflies dotting the lacunae between its frozen roots like tiny underworld lights. Much farther away, in the real sky, snakes of clouds wound ball round and came loose.

I crouched over the scarecrow’s torso, which at this moment could not have looked less like a scarecrow’s anything — if you didn’t notice the seam of straw, you might have thought it was a battered sofa cushion. Featureless and beige. I plucked up a green straw and felt a lurching sadness. Anybody with a mirror in his house knows the strangeness of meeting himself, his flaws, in light. This doll was almost gone, the boy original, Eric Mutis, was nowhere we could discover, and somehow this made me feel as if I had broken a mirror, missed my one chance to really know myself. I tried to resurrect Eric Mutis in my mind’s eye — the first Eric, the kid we’d almost killed — and failed. A face started to stutter together, shattered whitely away.

“You made it, Rubby!” Mondo called. But I hadn’t, yet. I unzipped my backpack. A little nose peeked out, a starburst of whiskers, followed by a white face, a white body. I dumped it sort of less ceremoniously than I had intended onto the relic of the scarecrow, where she landed and bounced with her front legs out. It wasn’t Saturday — I couldn’t steal Saturday back, I’d figured that would appease or solve nothing, but then this doll wasn’t the real Eric Mutis either. I’d bought this nameless dwarf rabbit for nineteen bucks at the mall pet store, where the Dijon-vested clerk had ogled me with true horror — “You do not want to buy a hutch for the animal, sir?” Many of the products that this pet store clerk sold seemed pretty antiliberation, cages and syringes, so I did not mention to him that I was going to free the rabbit.

Mondo was screaming something at me from the near sky, but I did not turn — I didn’t want to letmy guard down now. I kept my feet planted but sometimes I’d move my arms crazily, as if in imitation of the huge oak dancing its branches far above me. When I thought a bird was coming our way, I hollered it away. Shapes caught at the corner of my eye.Would the thing that had carried off the doll of Eric Mutis come for me now? I wondered. But I wasn’t afraid. I felt ready, strangely, for whatever was coming. The substitute rabbit, I saw with wonderment, was rooting its little head into the pale fibers sprouting out of the scarecrow; it went swimming into the straw, a reversal of its birth from my black book bag — first went with its furry ears, its bunching back, the big, velour skis of its feet. I was there, so no birds dove for it or anything. I was standing right there the whole time. I stood with my arms stretched wide and trembling and I felt as if the black sky was my body and I felt as if the white moon, far above me, unwrinkled and shining, was my mind.

“La-arry!” I was aware of Mondo calling me faintly from the twinkling roots of the oak, lit up all wild by the underworld flies, but I knew I couldn’t turn or come up yet. Owls, I worried, city hawks. The rabbit bubbled serenely through the straw at my feet. Somewhere I think I must still be standing, just like that.

[duhragonball]

Babbling about Comics

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to get back in gear with my plan to read my entire collection of X-Men comics.   I had this big plan to do it in 2015, but I only made it about halfway, which put me around Uncanny X-Men #280 (September 1991).   That’s about 29 years’ worth of comics, though, so my plan was probably unrealistic.

Ever since I reblogged this, I’ve been thinking about how I used to be big into American comic books, but not so much anymore.  One person in that thread jokes about how complicated it is to start reading X-Men and Wolverine, and the thing is, I actually know how to do that, because I spent maybe a week in 2014 obsessively studying the Marvel Chronology Project website to come up with a good reading order.  Honestly, it’s kind of fun, but only because I’m a maniac.  I can’t see how any normal person would even want to bother untangling that mess.  The system was designed for only two kinds of immersion.

1) You bought the comics when they were published, and read them in more or less their intended reading order, because you had no other choice.

2) You’re a maniac like myself, who accumulated all this stuff after the fact and you’re determined to go back and figure out what happened.

Nowadays, it’s a lot easier for a new fan to dig into the past, because so much of Marvel’s back catalog is available in digital format, but it’s still a pretty big paywall when you think about how many X-Men comics they’ve made.   And even if you download torrents, you still have to read the whole thing, and who has time for that?  Generally, Marvel’s marketing strategy has been to try to make the new stories accessible enough for new readers to follow, while only reprinting the older material that’s important or popular.   As a collector and a completist, this always frustrated me, but I think I’ve finally begun to see the wisdom of that approach.

See, the real gateway to a franchise like this is to stick to the greatest hits.  For me, that’s Uncanny X-Men #94-167, which spans 1975-1983.  Then you jump all the way to Wolverine’s solo book, which started in 1988.  The first thirty issues of that are really, really good.   I like the stuff that Larry Hama did with Wolverine later, but it’s not for everyone.  If you want to read a crossover, I’d recommend “X-Tinction Agenda”, since it provides a decent snapshot of where the X-Books were at in 1990.  Now, I’m skipping over a lot of other material from the period, but a lot of it was pretty awful, and the good issues of X-Factor and New Mutants  were kind of inessential.   The point is that you have to sample the best stuff first, then decide if you care enough about the characters to go dumpster diving through the rest of it.   You’ll find some gems, but you have to be willing to put up with some real crap to get at it. 

For example, right now, I’m in the middle of 1992, which was sort of a defining period for the X-Men franchise.   Chris Claremont had ended a 17-year run as the writer, and they were trying to build everything around superstar penciller Jim Lee.  I don’t know what went wrong exactly, but by the end of the year Lee had left to start his own company, and a lot of the X-Men comics from that year have a long list of co-plotters, co-scripters, and guest artists.  The flagship title, X-Men v.2, held up reasonably well, but it’s sister Uncanny X-Men suffered from neglect.  UXM #281 was supposed to herald this bold new era, but instead it just looks like a tire fire, one that continued to burn until #293 at least.   But, those issues are notable because they introduce Lucas Bishop to the franchise. 

I never cared much about Bishop, except that he looks pretty cool, and he had a cool voice in the X-Men cartoon.  Otherwise, I only knew he was a guy from the future with a gun, just like the dozen other future-guys-with-guns in 90′s comics.    But when Bishop was introduced, he hailed from the year 2062, where he’s part of a Judge Dredd-style security force.  Bishop revered the X-Men as legends, but once he meets the real deal he quickly finds out they’re not what he expected.  Bishop sees himself as a peacekeeper, and he’s honored to join the X-Men, but he keeps finding his violent, hair trigger methods at odds with the X-Men’s rigid protocol. 

The thing is, I identify with the guy.   I used to write him off as a knock off of Cable, or one of the other loose-cannon hardcases the X-Men keep recruiting, but they actually found a way to make Bishop stand out from the crowd.   He loves the X-Men in theory,  but he really doesn’t understand what makes them work.  Which is sort of like me trying to read all these comics I only know by reputation.    A lot of of the things fans praise the X-Men for are vastly overrated or completely misrepresented.  The conventional wisdom I always got from the fans was that the X-Men were only great when Claremont wrote them, and then Scott Lobdell took over and Ruined Everything(tm).    The reality (from my perspective) is that Claremont ran out of mojo around Year Eight of his 17-year run, and he was running on fumes from ‘83 to ‘91.  I’ve seen fans carry a torch over what happened to Madelyne Pryor, but as far as I’m concerned Madelyne Pryor’s introduction was when the Claremont run jumped the shark.  Her whole character arc was a no-win scenario and their biggest mistake was in not ending it sooner.  I used to think the X-Men comics of the early 90′s were a creative train-wreck, but somehow it managed to generate Bishop, and that gives me hope. 

Also, there is something oddly comforting about reading these old comics.   Nothing ever really changes with the X-Men.   If a character gets killed, they just come back a few years later.   If a character quits or turns evil, it’ll get reversed later.  The X-Men never really win or lose any battles.  They just sort of show up and fight, and then something else happens and they get distracted by that for several issues.  Last night I read the issue where Forge gets upset because he’s in love with Storm and he hasn’t even gotten five minutes alone with her to rekindle their feelings from 1988.   He awkwardly proposes to her, and she punts, telling him she’ll think about it.   In the very next scene they have together, he leave the mansion before she can even give her answer.  Forge is convinced that Storm doesn’t really love him, and that she’ll never set aside her X-Men career long enough to make time for a serious relationship.   As he slams the door, she mutters “I would have said... yes.”    That’s classic X-Men for you.   All angst, all turmoil, no resolution.   We don’t know if Storm is sincere or not, and Forge won’t even stick around to find out.   Is he right about her, or is he just too afraid of rejection?   Maybe we’ll see in a later issue, but I bet we don’t.   It’s Schrödinger’s ship.   Everything sort of hangs in midair. 

Now, I might have said that this is why I’ve come to prefer anime lately, because the stories are more decisive.   Goku married Chi-Chi and that’s it.    Done.   There’s no hotshot editor trying to split that up or retcon it to clear the way for a fresh pairing.   The real tragedy of Storm is that she’s trapped in Comic Book Time, so she couldn’t have a long term relationship even if she wanted to.    If she had married Forge in 1992 they would have inevitably been divorced a short time later, because Marvel likes to rotate romantic partners around every few years.   Storm actually married the Black Panther later on, but I’m pretty sure that’s over now.   But Goku’s marriage to Chi-Chi is absolute.   I like certainty.   It helps make the characters feel more genuine, and less like imaginary dolls driven by editorial whims and sales charts.

But, having recently finished Revolutionary Girl Utena, I find the X-Men’s open-endedness kind of soothing.   I didn’t get what I wanted from the ending of the Utena TV series.  I’m not sure what I wanted, exactly, but what I got wasn’t completely satisfying.  I may warm up to it later on, or I’ll watch the movie version and see if that’s more to my liking, but that’s pretty much all I’m going to get.   With the X-Men, I’m not particularly invested in the characters, and I have a general knowledge of what happens to them, and that anything that happens to them is mutable and transient.  It takes a lot of the punch out of Forge walking out on Storm, but it’s still decent theatre, and I’m not in the mood for dramatic punch right now.   Utena was like getting dramatically punched by Star Platinum for five pages.   I’d watch one episode and then I’d have to take a break before moving to the next one.    Not everything needs to be like that.  Sometimes it can be Bishop possibly getting Storm on the rebound, only to discover that she’s not as good in bed as the history books said she was.

Nevertheless, I think this is something the comics industry needs to address.  I got fed up with following comics because the new ones are expensive and inconsistently produced, and nothing worthwhile ever happens in them either.  They keep relaunching series with new #1′s, or renumbering them every time they get close to a Big Round Number, so it’s probably even harder to keep the reading order straight than it was twenty or thirty years ago.   So it’s a lot of the same hassles you get from back issues, except my back issues are already bought and paid for, so I might as well waste my time reading them instead of paying for overpriced new stuff.   Their best bet is to introduce new characters, especially female, POC, and LBGT+ characters that are tough to find in the back issue rack, because that’s something novel they can use to draw modern audiences.   Because Thor’s dealt with Ragnarok about a dozen times already, and the X-Men haven’t accomplished anything tangible in 30 years, so eventually no one’s going to fall for the same corny “Nothing Will Ever Be the Same!” gimmick.

#disclaimer: i don't know if storm and bishop hook up or not #but the last issue i read sure seems to want me to think they could #but even if they did i know it wouldn't last because she ended up marrying t'challa in 2006 #but i have no idea what she was up to in between so maybe bishop had a shot #and that's what's neat about delving into a long run of comics #to find out if something just didn't happen or if it did and fans just never talk about it

[louisfeatharry]

* newly added fics to my fic rec page as of 07/28/17 (23 fics in total) all fics are larry unless specified otherwise • more recent recs

✨ indicates favorites of mine!

Barefoot in Blue Jeans by indiaalphawhiskey (24k) [au, kidfic, pining, slow burn]

AU. Louis Tomlinson is trying desperately hard not to fall for his son’s au pair, but he can’t, for the life of him, remember why.

call me home and i will build a throne by queenmcgonagall (13k) [au, music festival]

It’s just, he’s here and he’s found this boy and the sun is really hot and he’s got alcohol swishing through his veins and his two best friends are in love and making out next to him and Louis’s hand is hot and tight in his and god, this is such a good song, and Harry thinks he could live forever if he could stay in this spot with Louis warm against him and the deafening screaming of the crowds echoing in his ears.

✨ Coax the Cold by MediaWhore (86k) [au, historical, fantasy & supernatural, slow burn]

England, 1897.

English Professor Louis Tomlinson’s passion for the occult has been a source of mockery and derision for most of his life. When he hears whispers of a travelling freak show newly established in London claiming the existence of a monstrous sea hybrid, half-man, half-fish, Louis sees it as his ticket to credibility amongst his peers. The summer he spends undercover working on the show, however, gives him much more than that.

cook for me (if you can handle me) by yoursongonmyheart (13k) [au, fluff, crack]

louis tomlinson, much to his own despair, gets thrown into a four week cooking class taught by culinary student harry styles. pair that with his classmates zayn and niall who may or may not know his roommate liam, and you've got a recipe for fun.

aka, a wildly self-indulgent crack fic.

✨ Deuxsphere by sweetlullabies (156k) [au, university, soulmates, enemies to lovers, slow burn, pining]

The way the vines of the rose curled around the sharp straightness of the dagger was an image that was going to be forever embedded into his mind. The longer Harry craned his neck to look at it in the mirror, the more he realized—it was fucking creepy. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out why it was there, or why humans decided to make it mean something.

Harry's first year at uni is guaranteed to be a breeze as long as he stays focused, steers clear of flying footballs, and completely avoids boys who are in bands.

dream our dreams of dazzling blue by sweetrevenge (13k) [au, fluff]

Harry and Louis meet at a rollerskating rink. Louis might be a little bit in love with the boy who keeps fucking falling down.

or, the one where Harry and Louis start out as strangers but become so much more.

✨ Heart on an Open Highway by afirethatcannotdie (5k) [au, famous/non-famous, fluff]

AU. Harry's a popstar about to release his second album, and Louis is the Radio 1 intern who gets his heart racing.

✨ hush. by Wankerville (41k) [au, prose, coming out, high school, angst, hurt/comfort]

“I don't like you like that, Harry.”

“See,” Harry starts, Louis can hear the smile in his voice, “that's where I think you're lying.”

or an au where small towns suck, louis is losing it, and harry’s just too perfect.

✨ I Am the Blinking Light by dearmrsawyer (19k) [au, fantasy & supernatural]

There is a legend of a lighthouse far out to sea. It can’t be found on any map, and those who do find it never return. They say a ghost haunts the lighthouse, and you can hear it calling out in loneliness on the ocean waves.

if it’s me you’re looking for by eleadore (14k) [au, friends to lovers, angst, pining, neighbors/roommates]

Louis has a bad habit of getting drunk before he confesses--or maybe it's the other way around. AU.

✨ Keep Yourself Warm by navigator (19k) [au, friends to lovers, angst, pining, neighbors/roommates]

AU. Harry sleeps around.

King and Lionheart by stylinsoncity (46k) [ou, a/b/o, friends to lovers, pining, angst]

Louis can't remember a time when he didn't hate being an omega. But maybe he just needed Harry to come along and make him his.

King and Lionheart by haloeverlasting (30k) [au, royalty, coming out]

Prince Louis Tomlinson is the first out gay monarch in his small country's history. After facing a failed attack in town, he understands why. Expect the unexpected seems applicable, but nothing could have prepared him for his own mother's reaction -- a bodyguard by the name of Harry Styles.

✨ Makes Perfect by checkthemargins (8k) [ou, pwp]

"What if you practiced on like, a mannequin?" Louis presses. "Or one of those blow up sex dolls? Or even just like, I don't know, a pillow or something. Whatever it'd fit around."

Harry tilts his head thoughtfully, curls catching the light so entrancingly that Louis finds himself reaching up to push his fingers through them. "It's different, though, innit? When it's a real person. A pillow won't snog me."

"Why should it?" says Louis. "You can't even take its bra off."

Mutability by haloeverlasting (108k) [au, friends to lovers, slow burn, angst, pining, hurt/comfort]

Harry and Louis meet in a book club. Life and fiction have their parallels.

Salt & Vinegar by elsi_bee (77k) [au, road trip/travel, friends with benefits, pining, fluff]

Louis is ready to experience the local flavour during his next few weeks in beautiful Costa Rica. So why does the same British boy keep pulling him in?

‘Sexbot’ series by mediaville (14k) [ou, angst, smut]

Louis catches Harry getting off with a [sexbot] and is burdened with the knowledge of what Harry wants from him.

✨ Sometime Around Midnight by cherrystreet (3k) [au, exes to lovers, angst]

It's a Tuesday evening when Louis hears that the band is in town. It's poor timing, really; he has precisely a thousand and one documents to catch up on for work, his flat needs a desperate cleaning that he's put off for weeks, and he's been fighting off a cold since Friday that finally seems to be winning. He stares at the band’s flyer posted online - a bleak announcement that they're back for one night only at their old stomping ground, a shit time slot right around midnight - and he gives it about 90 seconds before he's leaping off the couch, looking for his wallet.

Or, Louis is trying to get over his ex, and he thinks that paying their favourite band a visit might help bring him some closure.

He's wrong.

Swallow My Words by YesIsAWorld (32k) [au, high school, secret relationship, coming out, sports]

Senior year is stressful. On top of balancing school work, family, and friends, Harry's lacrosse team is vying to win the state championship, he's not sure where he's going to college yet, and he has a secret boyfriend that no one can know about.

✨ The Melody You Never Heard by bananasandboots (30k) [au, road trip/travel, enemies to lovers]

It's one last adventure. One last chance to be young and carefree. One final weekend before they take up their internships, their corporate positions, before they enter the real world, fresh out of university. Niall's his best mate. Liam's been there for him since they were lost, little freshmen, trying to find their ways through an overwhelming first year. Harry can't disappoint them, even if it means enduring four days with Louis.

Louis, who he does share a history with, a history he's never told anyone about, not even Niall, a history he hasn't brought up in three years because it's stupid and embarrassing and confusing.

Or, the one where Harry gets roped into a four-day camping trip with the boy who kissed him and never called back.

we can take the long way home by eleadore (27k) [ou, friends to lovers, friends with benefits, smut]

“Fertile,” Louis says, and then laughs because it sounds stupid to say out loud. He hasn’t ever really thought of himself in those terms. Baby-making terms. It’s just one of those things his body can do, like exercise, or go without tea. Doesn’t mean he will.

or,

The band takes a break. Harry and Louis come together.

We Can Work It Out by Anonymous (24k) [au, university, friends to lovers, coming out, pining]

Louis Tomlinson had big plans for his last year of uni. He was going to hit the gym, he was going to get hot, and he was finally going to catch the eye of the girl of his dreams.

Enter Harry Styles, friend-of-a-friend and part-time personal trainer. Falling for him was never part of Louis’ plan.

When You Look Like That by hrrytomlinson (16k) [au, exes to lovers, fluff]

“You… you still have the dress form I got you for your eighteenth birthday? You've kept it for ten years, Harry?” Louis’ eyes flick around Harry’s studio. It’s big and modern, with floor to ceiling windows that help flood the room in bright sunlight, just like the lobby. However, he can't stop staring at the faded, but present, heart surrounding the “H + L” written delicately in Louis’ handwriting in the center of the mannequin.

Louis is a songwriter who is nominated for a Grammy and he needs a suit. Fast. He seeks out help from a very popular, very mysterious designer who just so happens to be his ex-boyfriend.

#fic rec list #recentrecs #tons of fics up in hurrrrr #hella good fics #deuxsphere is in my top 5

[the-counter-narrative]

Hello, I recently came to the fandom again after a hiatus I took and DAMN things have changed! I found all these blogs like yours focused only on hating on Larries or Ziams, I found solo stans hating and bashing on the other boys, I found OT4 stans hatefully talking about OT5 stans. I found LOTS of horrendous things. And I feel ashamed of the One Direction fandom. Thank god I left because this isn't the older fandom when we'd all laugh at the boys' sillyness [1]

[2] with the video diaries and such... What simpler times. It's sad. And I moved to support all artists, specially Michael Jackson. Because their fandom is full of love. Not to bash anyone in particular but I'm seriously disappointed at how toxic blogs like yours and those I previously mentioned are. You took someone else's post and just make fun of it, why for? What is the purpose of this whole blog anyway? Why can't people just focused on the boys' music and their efforts? Bye.

***

Oh, you silly goose.  Don’t be coy now, you just called out hating in the fandom by coming into my ask box and hating on me.  So, sure Jan, you have some great credibility there.

Me and my fellow Anti’s are not hating on anyone.  We’re calling bullshit, bullshit. Because that bullshit needed to be called out in 2012, and nobody like me or the other awesome Antis were here then.  But we are here now to say, Larrie isn’t real.  Ziam isn’t real.  Get over tinhatting and move on.

We have a fandom full of rampant unchecked misogyny and conspiracy theory treated as fact.  It spills over into the boys social media, and into their family and friends social media.  Babies are being dehumanized and treated like dolls because their reality threatens some conspiracy theory about boybanders in love.  Posts like the one I screen capped for posterity was totally deserving of the treatment I gave it.  

I am here for the OT4 and OT5 love, and for my fav.  But I choose not to stand silently by enabling the toxic tinhatting in this fandom.  You may be OK with that, but I am not.

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Sally Anne Morgan (of House and Land)

Photo by Judy Henson

No one does just one thing nowadays, and neither does Sally Anne Morgan. The Asheville NC resident is both a musician and a graphic artist. She sings and plays fiddle, banjo, and guitar in a myriad of settings. On her own, she calls square dances. Her duos Sally & Scott (with fiddler Scott Prouty) and House and Land (with singer/guitarist Sarah Louise dig deep into the roots of old time music. For the last five years she has been a member of the loose confederation known as the Black Twig Pickers, which also includes Isak Howell, Mike Gangloff  and Nathan Bowles. Thrill Jockey Records has just released House And Land’s debut LP on Thrill Jockey.

Shirley and Doll — Anthems in Eden

This suite instantly transports me to a medieval fairytale woodland. We both love Shirley Collins, her new record, her memoir, everything. Midcentury British folk rock has been a recent obsession of mine, but surprisingly few bands that I know of brought in the period instruments that are featured in this recording by early music historian David Munrow. I think this suite is a masterpiece and absolutely love it.  

Pharoah Sanders — Thembi

From peaceful transcendence on the astral plane to dissonant chaos and a six-minute bass solo, this album has everything you could wish for. Even jazz violin. I love the transportive flow of this album. I’m only starting to wade into the deep territories of spiritual and free jazz, but I am hooked.  

Midori Takada — Through the Looking Glass  

Sarah and I are both really into this record. I first heard this on YouTube and didn't know much about it, and then it was recently re-issued on vinyl where the liner notes filled me in. Midori went alone into the studio with a limited knowledge of recording but came out with a multi-layering recording technique that was as much a product of her creativity as her limitations.  I love the world music influences, and her take on minimalism as described in the liner notes is right on. I like how each piece in this album is so different, too. 

Mr. Fox — Salisbury Plain 

Haunting and droning and homespun. I love the simple fiddle, the drums, the sparseness of it all. I would like to be in a folk rock band like this some day. 

Selda Bagcan — Selda

Ripping Turkish psychedelica with probably the most emotional and compelling voice I've heard. Selda is a political activist and has gone to prison several times for her political views. A true badass! 

Van Morrison — Common One

This album from 1980 is frequently overlooked, and apparently was blasted by the critics. But this is probably my favorite Van album after Astral Weeks and Veedon Fleece. It ventures into the realms of free jazz, and I love the sax playing of Pee Wee Ellis. Some of the lyrics are maybe a bit on the nose, but I love them still. When I’m feeling down, I literally will put on the song Spirit, it’s so uplifting!  

Pete Steele — Coal Creek March 

Pete Steele plays the banjo beautifully, which is a rare compliment. I aspire to play two finger like him (but much slower). He was recorded in the1930s by Alan Lomax and again for the Smithsonian Folkways in the1950s. His wife, Lillie Steele, sings on some songs too with some striking harmonies. Pete Steele wrote the “Coal Creek March” about a mining disaster. 

Michaelangelo — One Voice Many 

I work at a record store and get to check out random records with cool covers when it's slow and found this infectious psychedelic gem. I think the universe is telling me to get an auto harp. 

Solange — Seat at the Table  

This album is beautiful and righteous. Sarah and I listened to this about 50times in a row on our last tour. The Song Exploder podcast on Cranes in the Sky is compelling too — the process behind contemporary music like R&B can feel unknowable, but hearing Solange describe how she wrote the song and created those layers of vocal harmonies opened this album up for me. I also love how much space there is in this — I can hear all the elements going on. 

 Jim and Jesse

I have a  love/hate relationship with bluegrass. But I do like a good brother harmony (even if it’s something along the lines of the Louvin Brother’s “The Word Broad Minded is Spelled S-I-N”!)  The harmonies on this song are wild. I also love a song with staggered singing like this, which I find very satisfying to listen to and to sing myself.  I sing this song with my partner Andrew, who is responsible for getting me into Jim and Jesse, Skaggs and Rice, J.D. Crowe and Larry Sparks, among others. 

Maddy Prior and June Tabor

 This is such a masterful example of harmony singing to me — switching who is singing melodies, sliding into unisons, switching high and low. Spare and powerful and effortless. I love the first Silly Sisters album and it's great to know Maddy and June are still killing it. Plus bonus points for a song that mentions eating nettles.

Weems String Band — Greenback Dollar

I first heard this on a compilation called Wink the Other Eye: Old Time Fiddle Band Music From Kentucky. Recently a copy of the prewar 78 came into the record shop I work at! The full band take on this song is so strange and woozily beautiful; and a small window into the world of sounds that were never recorded. I don’t think I’ll ever get into collecting 78s but I sure do appreciate some of the amazing people and labels issuing compilations of songs that would otherwise only ever be heard by a very few. 

#listed #sally anne morgan #house and land #dusted magazine #shirley collins #dolly collins #pharoah sanders #midori takada #mr. fox #selda bagcan #van morrison #pete steele #michaelangelo #solange #jesse and jim #maddy prior #june tabor #weems string band

[fuckyeahrtfanfic]

Rooster Teeth Rules & Guidelines 3.0

So my last posting of this was in 2015 so I feel it is time to remake this post so that anyone and every, old fans and new fans, can know exactly what is okay and what is not okay in terms of Shipping Fanart/Fanfic. I will not put this under a read more as it is extremely important to know.

Everything within this post is accurate until proven otherwise. If you have any information in regards to anything like this that is not found on the post, please contact me at thisandthensome.

Important points are bolded

This is a second repost of our original post. I wanted this new in the tags for any new members to the fandom and are not aware of this. I will be reposting it Probably either every 6 or 12 months to keep the cycle going.

Also, eventually I will be making a new page on ths blog that will outline each employee individually, about the information provided below so its not so…clustered.

Quick Summary:

Okay With It:

Kyle, Caleb, All of AH (with rules, see below), Miles, Caiti, Barbara, Matt, Jeremy, Kdin, Lindsay, All of Funhaus, Mica, Tina, J.J., Josh Flanagan, Steffie, Jeremy. The Support Team (Ashley, Neal, Kent, Larry, Matt, Steffie, Trevor, Alfredo)

Not Okay with it so KEEP OUT OF FICS:

Any kids. Jordan Denecour. Burnie’s ex-wife. Ryan’s wife and kids. Millie. Arryn Zech. Iris Jones.

Not only have I been seeing it a lot, but I’ve gotten a few… not complaints, but I’ve been informed of this issue as well - and I figure I’ll make a post to address it. Because yes, this is extremely important, and a lot of the newcomers don’t know.

Geoff Ramsey (Millie)

Back when the fandom was new and baby, and it got the attention of those at Rooster Teeth, Geoff explicitly said do not include Millie in any way into fanfiction. The original post and blog indicating this for proof has been passworded, but I found in fuckyeahot6 a nice summary of the rules, which include it so please, look these over. Some older original rules can be seen in those two links, but recently we’ve acquired the permission from Kyle’s girlfriend that she is now alright with us shipping Kyle. I’ve gone through our chat video with Ryan Haywood and he spoke that anything is alright, because he won’t ever read it so “let the creativity flow”

Some other points of interest that I’ve collected are from a few others. 

Caiti and Jack

Starting with Caiti, when she came into our chat, she told us that she, and Jack, are fine with it just make sure that no harm/noncon/abuse/cheating. You can view her answer here.

Caleb and Jordan Denecour

Caleb has mentioned time and time again, and he was the original one to bring forth Geoff’s request of Mille, that he is fine with the shipping; in fact he enjoys the ones where he dies. And in a TAB podcast at 1:01:55 ish Caleb also says he is alright with fanfics.

However, Caleb’s brother, Jordan, is not comfortable with shipping at all, so please do not include him in anyway , as is the same with all the children of Rooster Teeth that appear on the Game Kids Channel. Just don’t do it.

Kdin Jenzen

Kdin has also gotten an ask and replied to it that Kdin is fine with it, seeing it as a creative outlet and so long as we know it’s fictional, Kdin’s alright with it all.  We got an ask in regards to Kdin’s girlfriend saying no to shipping them, so we asked them and we got a positive confirmation that they are fine with it so long as it’s not explicit/gross. So no psychoteeth or the like.   Kdin does not want anything smut of her. Kdin has also clarified as to what pronouns to use, and Kdin uses female pronouns.

Tina

Tina is okay with shipping, she just asks that we keep the fics morally sound.

Jeremy Dooley

While going through the tags I saw this post here indicating that the new hire Jeremy was more that honoured to be written in fanfics.

Jeremy Dooley is 100% okay with anything written of him! He does like to read things where Trevor dies for some reason though…

Josh Flanagan

Josh Flanagan, creator of Ten Little Roosters and The Eleven Little Roosters, speaks out that it’s fine to have him in your writing. “I’m pretty ambivalent on it. Write away” (source)

JJ

Through our RT guest chats, we’ve tried to get their opinions to take a look through all that. Far as I can remember, they are all ok, with a few rules, JJ’s of no socks with sandals is the best.

Ryan Haywood

In regards to Ryan Haywood, I’ve recently gone back through our chat with him, and he said that anything is okay in regards with him since won’t ever read it - it doesn’t bother him. He understands its a creative outlet.  And it should not have to be mentioned, but please keep Ryan’s kids out of it too. In fact, keep all the kids out of it unless they are an OC child.

Michael and Lindsay Jones (Iris Jones)

As far as we know, theses two are okay with it, but the issue is with Iris Jones. Having a child does inspiring a ton of fanfics being written about this event, which is totally okay! The only this is to keep the baby/child as an OC and not as the actual baby. If this doesn’t make sense imagine Geoff and Griffon having a child, a girl named Rachel instead who’s very much into dresses and dolls. This is just an example.

In response to Game Kids Channel, under no circumstance are you to ship or even write about any of the kids. Jordan Denecour has been asked as well and he is not comfortable with it. While Caleb has said nothing sexual, I ask that we please keep him out of everything. Especially Incest.

Funhaus

Funhaus has said they’re okay with shipping! In fact, its an honour! If anything individually comes up with them, we’ll let you know :D

Mica Burton

Mica Burton gladly welcomes shipping with arm’s wide open and actually cannot wait to see what comes up!

Steffie Hardy

Steffie is honored people even want to create stuff with her in it. Honestly, do whatever you want. She’s okay with shipping!  

The Support Team

Everyone’s good with it. Right from AH’s mouth. This includes Ashley, Neal, Kent, Larry, Matt, Steffie, Trevor, and Alfredo. According to this post where they say whos in the support room.. 

Arryn Zech is not to be written in anything at all.

Keep family out of shipping. This goes for children and wives and siblings. I’ve noticed, and a few others in the community, that there is a rise in ships with Ryan’s wife/mentions of his children, not to mention the blatant disregard for Geoff wanting to keep Millie out of fics. Yes, I’ve seen many fics still having her in them since this post started circulating.

Keep. Family. Out

And another issue that I’ve seen many, many, many, many, many times is that there are shipping things that are tagged with name tags For example, freewood smut tagged with #Ryan Haywood and #Gavin Free, or reader inserts tagged with the person they are with. There is a strict reason why we keep shipping things out or name tags - it brings the hate. While, for the most part, all Ragehappy fans are Rooster Teeth fans, not all Rooster Teeth fans are Ragehappies. They do not want to see anything RPF and when they do, things like hate infect the shipping tags.

I hope this clears up a few things. Please stop writing Millie in fics. Please stop posting fics with name tags.

This post will be updated as new information arises, and I will keep posting it weekly with our ask box open/closings.

Please reblog and share this with other shippers you know of. It is extremely important to spread this information.

If you have any, arguments or comments, send them towards my main account at thisandthensome.

Thank you.

And a huge thank you to everyone that has been sending us information to help make this as accurate as possible!

Tats

#ragehappy #rvb #beaconship #shiphaus #gayzerteam

[orionsangel86]

12x11 Episode Review - What a Ride That Was!

Having just completed my second watch of this episode I have to say I am slightly stunned. I guess the best way to put it is ‘not what I expected’. But then what did I really expect? I was expecting pain, heartbreak, drama, interspersed with some humour and a big “no homo” scene to counteract last episode. I was expecting some dudebro Dean to appease certain types of viewer, along with a nice helping of deep subtext into Dean analysis for us to eat up that would go straight over that type of viewers head. I was certainly not expecting… Larry.

I haven’t looked at tumblr yet, except to glance at my askbox. I assume that you are all suitably going mad over Larry. Over the implications of Larry. Over the sheer insanity of the episodes biggest innuendo fuelled moments and probably laughing about it. I expect a hundred gifsets. I want to reblog those gifsets. I am also sure that Larry has already been meta’d to death… But what’s the harm in a little more meta to add to the massive pile gonna do? Because I wanna meta the FUCK out of Larry.

But there is a lot more to this episode than just Larry. We did get heartbreak. We did get drama and we did get some really nice character moments. Rowena particularly was amazing this episode (who am I kidding though she is always amazing) and I loved learning more about her thoughts. Overall I think it was entertaining, though not one of the best episodes, but that could be because the writing was a bit sloppy and sometimes the story didn’t make sense. I’ll get to why in a bit. Let’s just say that Meredith Glynn isn’t my favourite of the new writers by any means. I didn’t even review The One You’ve Been Waiting For because I didn’t feel particularly inspired by it at all.

But having said that she gave us Larry, and for that I will forever be thankful… even if she didn’t intend for us to take it the way I have (and I am guessing most of you reading this have too).

Anyway, main points to take away under the cut:

Regarding Dean

Obviously the main point of the episode was to delve a little further into Dean’s head and explore a very unconventional and unexpected fear. The fear of losing ones memory is actually horrifying. It is even more horrifying because this is something that the majority of us will have had at least some experience being first hand witnesses to. I am of course talking about dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. My grandmother had it, and in the later days when she didn’t even know who we were it was completely heart breaking. The fact that this is something that many of us fear as we get older is something that certainly wouldn’t be lost on the creators of this show, and with many many references in the later seasons to Dean’s getting older (including one in this episode) it is quite a fitting topic to explore. What if he doesn’t go out with a ‘bang’ the Hunter way? What if they do both end up in the Lebanon retirement home where Mildred currently hangs out enjoying sunsets? What if Alzheimer’s becomes an actual legitimate fear for them? This is most definitely the episode that Jensen talked about at a recent con that explores a very big fear. Because this fear is huge and very prevalent in society. It also makes me think of the film The Notebook and how that story deals with a loved one having to watch the person they care about most in the world forget all about them. (FYI I have never been able to sit all the way through that film without crying even though I usually despise sappy love stories).

Dean’s whole existence in this show revolves around his love for his family. The found family that he keeps close by that is. Sam and Cas and now Mary are his world, losing that would utterly destroy Dean. It is why that scene in front of the mirror is so so heartbreaking to watch. Next to Larry, it is the most memorable moment. Though I do think that the deeper themes and meanings to this particular MOTW story were a bit lost in all of the lighter humour. Hence why I said I wasn’t a huge fan of the writing. It could have gone deeper, it didn’t quite reach the impact that Yellow Fever had even though it tried very hard to pay homage to it.

Starting at the beginning then, Dean wakes up after being wammied by some mysterious witchy guy with a bunny rabbit by his side. I don’t get the point of the rabbit at all. I’ll be honest. It was completely non relevant to the plot. I thought at first that maybe the witch had turned himself into a rabbit but it was literally there for us to all “aww” over. For that reason though, have a pic:

Awwwwwwwwwwwww so CUTE!

It was interesting that this scene came so shortly after the “then” sequence which included a young and much less gruff voiced Dean saying ““Why does a rabbit always get screwed in the deal? Poor little guy”. Have we had many other rabbit references in this show? I don’t think so… except maybe Bugs Bunny in Hunteri Heroici which immediately brings Cas to mind “So we are dealing with some insect-rabbit hybrid?” Though this episode does also feature a character happily watching cartoons so maybe the connection there is totally valid. Rabbits are also a symbol of fertility, spring, new birth and most obviously sex. In an episode absolutely chocablock with innuendo. That is also an interesting point. Though I have no idea how to connect it to anything else so I am just throwing all this stuff out there for you guys to pick at. By all means tell me if you have any ideas!

Dean losing his means of communication means reaching out to people in other ways… A lady with a pram comes by and rejects him as a bum. Gives him money instead of even trying to listen. A guy comes along with a dog (our famous white dog whose name I can’t remember) and gives Dean his attention… before doing some stretches, jogging on the spot and wiggling his hips. (I found this guys movement kinda um… suggestive when considered in the context of the rest of this fucking episode). Without going into too much detail here, I just thought I’d point out that Dean is rejected by the woman and child (traditional family) but accepted by the guy with the dog. Because of course he fucking is.

The waffle house brings us our first promo scene, but knowing the context now makes it so much clearer. I was guilty of making assumptions. Just like Sam does. Thinking that Dean went out, got drunk, had a one night stand… he did no such thing. The promo mislead us and I think it did so deliberately. It is getting clearer and clearer all the time that that version of Dean that Rowena so kindly spells out later in the episode “manners of a Neanderthal and the dining habits of a toddler” the “season 1” version of Dean, if you like, just isn’t the guy we see on our screen anymore. We aren’t getting these moments anymore. Have we even seen the Asian porn yet this season? Personally I hope it never makes another appearance.

Sam’s comment “Dean, you’ve had a good run, but maybe lets pump the breaks a little bit I mean you’re not 20 anymore…” is pretty much what I was thinking the whole promo. The waitress is far too young for him, that kind of behaviour fooling around in bars just isn’t really any kind of behaviour for a man his age, and in an episode with a heavy underlying theme that could easily be compared to the worst potential problems that come with growing older I don’t think it was accidental.

“I would be dead okay, I wouldn’t be Dory.”

“Dory?”

“Not gonna apologise for loving that fish. Not to you, not to anyone”.

I love that we have yet another thing to add to the list of things that Dean Winchester loves that don’t fit in with his macho image. This is wonderful. Dean likes Disney films. This is canon. If he can admit to loving that fish, this means that at times he will go out and watch Disney films and get excited about them and actually have strong feelings about them. Now I am totally headcanoning that he forces Cas to watch them with him and I BET that Cas’s favourites are The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. Why I hear you ask? Because they would resonate with him. If you don’t get it, rewatch those movies from a destiel perspective.

“smooth like a Ken doll” This is the second time the show has compared Dean to a Ken doll. Probably just a tease at Jensen Ackles very perfect features, but I keep thinking about Ken from Toy Story 3 and after the Finding Nemo/Dory reference a moment ago I think it is valid. Ken in Toy Story 3 had a very... um... loud personality.

The cowboy bar… How do I even BEGIN to meta the cowboy bar? All I can say was this seems like the kind of place that Gabriel would send Dean in fanfiction to work on his gay panic before ultimately hooking up with Castiel.

The third place they come to (and I’ll talk about Sam’s lack of Dean knowledge a bit later) and the first thing we see is a shot of:

Well that’s a rather large phallic object hanging over the Winchesters heads! Yeah this is totally Dean’s kind of place. He does have a cowboy fetish after all. This sign also caught my eye:

Because Chuck is certainly off having some “R&R” right now with his sis… It also seems to be the kind of place that Chuck would have hung out in his stint living on earth… ya know, playing his music, since there is clearly a stage set up with band equipment, picking up girls… and guys. Like we are ever gonna forget that GOD in the Supernatural universe is bisexual.

Lets talk about Larry

Consider this a sub point to my “regarding Dean” point because it all technically falls under the same category.

“he’d ordered burgers to go, it was gonna be a minute, we were slammed, then you knocked back four shots of tequila? Put some “sick jams” on the juke and then you hit the bull.”

“oh yeah, you had the hots for larry as soon as you walked in”.

Now, there is innuendo, and then there is this line. Why give the mechanical bull a guys name? Specifically so you can make this into one big innuendo. This entire scene is about Dean riding dick. I’m sorry, deny it all you like but that’s the joke. That’s the bottom line (pun unintentional until reread then found hilarious). On checking my ask box yesterday once I first watched the episode this is what I got:

Thanks guys by the way for sending these. I am with you. Consider this review your asks answered if that’s okay (I’m being lazy because I still have a load of asks to answer and I have no idea when I’ll get to em). So Dean rode Larry. Haha. It gets brought up again later in the episode by Sam when he is trying to tease Dean about it. What I am interested in is Dean’s reaction. When Sam first asks “You rode Larry?” Dean hesitates, but he isn’t embarrassed. Yeah he’s still hexed at this point and regressing but he doesn’t get defensive about it. Just asks if he was good. This is then revisited later on once Dean is cured “I can’t believe you rode Larry” and Dean’s only defence is “I was awesome on that Bull… like a God.” Which is also a call back to Chuck again, in the bar that had a Chuck sign and really did seem to be Chuck’s kind of place… Is Dean like God? Well yes. For one thing they are both bisexual.

Perhaps mechanical bullriding isn’t seen as homoerotic in the kind of places where you would actually get mechanical bullriding. It could even be considered as a very macho thing to be able to “tame the bull”. But the way the episode frames it… the way they shove the innuendo at us over and over again. It is intentionally played out to be a gay joke. What I can’t decide is whether or not this is the creators joking along with us or whether they are doing it to take the piss. There is a level of regression here back to the pre carver era spn where the gay jokes were rife and not ever really taken seriously. Dean’s subtextual bisexuality used to be a joke in the show. It hasn’t been framed as a joke since pre season 8 and yet I can’t help but wonder if this new writer hasn’t yet got with the programme. Because Dean’s bisexuality is not a joke. Especially when this episode is framed by two very Cas heavy episodes, the first of which was loaded with destiel subtext that was deep, meaningful and very very serious. Looking at the promo for next episode, I have a feeling that we are only going to get more of that. So why sandwich a Dean episode full of gay jokes in between two Cas episodes full of serious destiel heavy storyline? If their intention was to make it into a joke again, they have failed. Because when taken with 12x10, the humour is stripped away and what is left is the viewer wondering whether Dean really does have a hankering for dick? Specifically Castiel’s. I know that my language here is very blunt. I also know that the chances are this review could find its way to some antis who would like to take the piss out of this… but seriously? Go ahead. Try. With the show playing up to the things we like, and with very little “no homo” moments to counteract it, I don’t see how you can view this any other way than the way we do.

Dean left Sam, went to this specific bar, had some Dutch courage and rode the bull. He also flirted with a waitress but that never went very far. His main concern was how good he was with Larry…How good his riding skills were… and spoiler alert… he was awesome.

(yes nonny - Dean could totally ride dick like a porn star. This is now true. Since we have seen him in action with our own eyes. Its not like most of those ‘Larry riding’ shots at the end even had the bull in them. It was all Dean from the waist up just having the time of his life and going up and down... up and down... like this wasn’t subtle. This totally wasn’t subtle.)

I also need to point out that all this happened before Dean got hexed. This was all Dean Winchester. This wasn’t performing Dean. The Dean who puts on a mask which half the time seems to be specifically for Sam. Nope. This was Dean as himself, the same Dean that owns booty shorts, likes ballet and has a thing for Dr Sexy.

The moment that the waitress says “you were…amazing” can be taken as the “no homo” to the Larry narrative of course. The way she says those words can easily be taken to be a comment on Dean’s sexual prowess. But its only there to cover up the underlining sexual nod to Dean’s “amazing” ability to ride the bull. The bull being called ‘Larry’ and therefore along with all the other phallic references this is, as I said previously, all one big “Dean rides dick” joke. And I can’t actually fucking believe the show did that.

Actually that’s a lie. I fucking well can. They have been flirting with this idea of Cas being a top and Dean being a bottom for AGES but THIS takes the biscuit.

So Dean rides dick. Thanks for confirming bottom!Dean show. Great job.

I wonder if even this went over poor ‘innocent’ Jensen Ackles head… Is he Charlton Heston? REALLY? Or is he 100% on board with this because how can you possibly act this out. INCLUDING THAT RIDICULOUS MONTAGE AT THE END and NOT see it? You do realise how fandom is gonna take this Jensen? You do realise this will probably DOUBLE the number of destiel fics where Dean is happily riding Cas’s dick all night long?!? (as a disclaimer here that is not what destiel fic is all about but there is still a lot of smut out there so I feel like the show is only encouraging this) (on the other hand I expect to find 20 12x11 coda’s on my dash where Dean goes home, finds Cas, tells him about Larry and how he wants to “show Cas his skills” *nudge nudge wink wink* and Cas will be like “oh. yes please!” and yeah... that happens. That totally happens.)

The other takeaway from this scene so loaded with meta potential is the waitress’s explanation of what happened. Because it seems weird and makes no sense. The question I’m sure a lot of people will be asking is Did Dean sleep with the waitress? But when you consider her explanation of what happened, how could he possibly have?

Ooh I actually got an ask about this too:

She said they were slammed, Dean had to wait for his burgers, hence he had time for 4 shots of tequila and a ride with Larry. So how did they get talking and “blew off some steam”? Because she didn’t even see him leave, it was her bartender that saw him run out of there like his pants caught fire (liar liar)

Is that the hint? Liar liar pants on fire? Was she lying about fooling around with Dean? If so why did she slap him earlier? She must have been insulted that he didn’t remember her and didn’t meet up with her later but it still doesn’t make any sense. How did she have time to fool around with Dean somewhere if they were slammed? If the place was slammed they surely wouldn’t have been able to find a quiet space to actually do the fooling around either? This whole thing smells like a lie and when you consider Dean’s later line “first action in I don’t know how long and its like it never even happened” seems to me that the writer wanted us to consider that maybe all is not a it seems. The only action Dean got in that cowboy bar was from Larry.

Consider another ask answered! Dean did not have sex with the waitress! They possibly squeezed in a kiss when she was on break but there is no way they had time to properly fool around.

Another thing I liked about this scene was the way the waitress then apologises for possibly taking advantage of Dean when he was “roofied”. After the mess and drama of the Amara stuff last season this is refreshing. Dean gets an apology for being sexually harassed, which from a meta perspective could also be the writer apologising for the Amara situation. I dunno if that’s really the case but I like the idea of it so I’m sticking with it.

Back to Regarding Dean

Once the Winchesters start tracing Dean’s steps into the forest Dean loses more memory. We have another call back to season 4 and Yellow Fever with the flashlight moment and Sam has to remind Dean what they do since he has now forgotten all about witches and monsters. The difference between his reaction to being a monster hunter here and in yellow fever is huge though. In yellow fever he thought they were both insane, horrified at the thought of actively going after these dangerous supernatural beings. In Regarding Dean he is excited about the idea, finds it awesome and calls them both “heroes”. It’s nice to know that without his memories of the horrible things they’ve done Dean is able to accept that he does something good and is able to be happy about that.

Another call back to season 4 with the mention of the Siren “Siren’s aren’t all hot chicks?” Nope. Sorry Dean some of them are hot guys who are totally your type. To bring up the Siren (an episode absolutely full of homoerotic subtext) in this episode (an episode absolutely full of homoerotic subtext) seems like another subtle nod to Dean’s bisexuality. Like a ‘hello! Remember this? Dean’s siren was a dude come on guys catch up!’ At moments like this I feel like the show is specifically trying to tell the audience what we (as fandom) already know. Dean is bisexual, like last episode they were trying to tell us that Cas is in love with Dean. This is all extremely promising.

THEN right after we are reminded of the Siren, but right before Dean totally randomly brings up Cas we get this:

I mean of course I was gonna bring up the handprint! Although I admit I have been lacking in my watchfulness lately for any hand or hand print symbolism in the show. But this is definitely meant to pique the audiences interest. Because why is it there at all? Why bother with the hand print if they are gonna find the sigil shortly after? It doesn’t seem to add much to the plot except to be there to ping a memory in Dean’s mind. Of Castiel.

“And our best friends an angel! Whaaaaatt!”

This is another season 4 callback after all. Season 4 being the season of Cas’s handprint. When their ‘profound bond’ was formed. There is no way this handprint isn’t supposed to invoke the memory of that most famous of handprints. Dean remembers Cas fondly. Even when he doesn’t remember him he still thinks he is awesome. This makes me so happy. As Cas fans we are so used to Cas just being forgotten about in MOTW episodes, but like I have been saying for ages now, Andrew Dabb is the biggest Cas fan and he won’t let our angel be forgotten about at all now that he is showrunner.

Moving on and Rowena shows up a her awesome self and Dean is nice to her. His base nature is actually to be nice to people regardless of who they are. Its something we don’t see very often from our very grumpy and deeply traumatised monster hunter. “your hair it’s all so bouncy” he says. Noticing the smallest things. Its cute. Its so very un-dean-like and yet at the same time it is exactly the kind of thing Dean would do. We know he likes to take care of his own appearance, his room, and often teases Sam about his hair and Cas about his trenchcoat. These are more in-sights into how Dean’s mind works.

Dean is sat down to watch an episode of Scooby Do whilst Rowena and Sam talk about the curse, firstly thinking he gets to watch porn. Nope. Instead we get this:

Which… in an episode full of sexual innuendo is *ahem* something I’m not going to comment on. Yes my mind did go there. No I am not specifying where “there” is. Look at the picture and figure it out for yourself. Flowers and dogs also have specific symbolism in this show. Maybe this wasn’t intentional but with everything else? I think it is. I am partly laughing and partly crying at how obvious this is to me at least. But like I said I ain’t going there. LOL.

Then, once Sam has explained to Dean once again what is happening we get this beautiful scene:

Honestly Jensen killed it. The fear in his eyes, the horror and confusion. “My name is Dean Winchester. Sam Winchester is my brother, Mary Winchester is my mother, and Casti- Cas is my best friend” This was beautiful and painful to watch. My heart breaks for him. Amongst all the humour and silliness of Larry and Rowena and Sam’s squabbles, this moment showed the truth. That the situation is dark and terrible and frightening. I wish they had given us more moments like this than all the humour to be honest. Because this was real. This was Dean vulnerable and terrified. Once again a scene where he faces his reflection and struggles with what he sees, though this time for a totally different reason. Dean has never had a good time with mirrors in this show. Ever since Bloody Mary they just tend to be bad luck for him. This moment is no different.

As Dean continues to forget more and more Rowena leaves him to go and save Sam (how awesome is it that Rowena is technically saving them now?!?) and leaves Dean in the Impala surrounded by notes. This is where Dean really has forgotten everything and yet his hunter instincts still kick in.

We get another moment where Sam denies the use of the grenade launcher. Three times and it’s a pattern. I would bet money on Dean getting to use that thing by the end of the season.

Dean finds his way to the witches mansion and is able to save Rowena and Sam by firing the gun and killing the witch. Proof that hunting really is in his blood, part of his soul. He will always be a hunter. No witches spell can take that away. In a way it is quite sad because it kind of implies that however this show ends, it won’t be with Dean giving up hunting. Even with the talks of retirement in previous episodes, I can’t see Dean doing it. Its who he will always be.

Once the witches are dead and the spell reversed, Dean admits that he wouldn’t be better off forgetting all their crap, because he would have forgotten everything else too. No matter how happy he might have been.

“Was it nice to drop our baggage? Yeah maybe, hell probably, but it wasn’t just the crap that got lost it was everything, what we do, all of it. So, that’s what being happy looks like, I think I’ll pass.”

Of course Dean wouldn’t choose to forget everything. Like the previous scene proved, Its in Dean’s blood to be a hunter, and he wouldn’t ever wanna forget his family. The people he loves. Forgetting the people who love you is not happiness in any way shape or form.

I feel like maybe this episode was lacking an emotional final scene. This was short and sweet but it didn’t seem to have the satisfaction that I thought it would, regarding Dean’s memory loss and fear and dependence on his loved ones. But it was still a great analysis of Dean’s character nevertheless.

Sam Winchester isn’t looking hard enough

This episode was predominantly about Dean, but there was a lot of stuff about Sam in here too. Specifically how he doesn’t really seem to notice much about his brother. I don’t mean this as a dig, but it’s honestly quite surprising. When we compare episodes where Sam has been changed somehow, it has taken Dean no time at all to realise something is wrong. Sam however, seems to shrug it off as Dean being a dumbass, or Dean being drunk, or Dean doing something to make Sam roll his eyes again. It seems like Sam has got an idea of who Dean is in his mind and it is so deeply ingrained that he is kinda blinded by it. He has his expectations of his brother, and he has got it so so wrong. Sam judges Dean. He doesn’t mean to, but the problem is that Dean has been building on his ‘character’ on his ‘performing Dean’ persona just for Sam for his entire life. Sam sees the performance, he doesn’t see what’s underneath. Its episodes like this that make me question all our fics with “shipper!sam” because I sometimes doubt if that’s the case. Does Sam actually see it for what it is? Or is he so blinded by his version of Dean that he cannot see the truth? Clearly Cas and Dean’s tension makes him uncomfortable, as last episode all but proved. But does Sam really understand what is going on here?

If he can be surprised that Dean loves Dory, what else surprises him? How much of Dean does he not know about?

What I found really striking in this episode is how Sam doesn’t find it easier to track Dean’s movements of the night before, because if it was the other way around Dean would have figured Sam out straight away. This was shown to us back in season 4 (again with the season 4 references in this episode!) when Dean was able to locate Sam based on how well he “knows that kid”. If Sam had truly known his brother well, he would have known that the cowboy joint was the first place he’d go. Sam knows that Dean has a ‘cowboy fetish’ and therefore it make the most sense? Dean wanted to ride the bull, but Sam was so surprised that Dean rode Larry that he “couldn’t believe it.”  

Even the end scene, Sam admits that he was kinda jealous. For him, forgetting everything they have done is a weight off their shoulders. Something he would like to experience. I think this is also a hint towards Sam not entirely accepting that hunting is his life. Whereas Dean is generally happy with what he does, because it is in his blood Sam doesn’t feel that way. I know we have seen previous episodes where Sam has seemed to accept it. But he only accepts it if he can do it with Dean. The co-dependency is extremely strong with Sam at the moment. Sam also always seems to be looking for something more. I don’t just mean relationship wise, though he did admit this in 11x04, but something more than just hunting.

We have always known that Dean was more like Mary. Mary’s family are the hunters. Dean is one of them. Sam though? Sam was all John. And John might have taken to hunting once his revenge had consumed him, but hunting was not in John’s blood. Nope, John’s blood is all Men of Letters. This is the path that Sam seems destined for.

What also seems to encourage this theory is that it is usually Sam who is paired up with Rowena in any of her episodes. It is common in this show for most side characters to develop a better relationship with Dean than to Sam. Dean is charismatic like that, but Sam has ‘bonded’ with Rowena if you wanna call it that, far more than Dean has, and it is always Sam who calls Rowena in to help. Is Sam attracted to magic? This is something that we have been speculating for a while. The Men of Letters use magic this we know, even their grandfather Henry was able to “harness the power of his soul” to cast spells. It was Sam who spoke to Lily last episode about how she developed her power. It is Sam who finds all of that stuff very interesting, and it is Sam who holds on to the Grimoire at the end of the episode. Will we get witch!sam in the future? I think it is still a possibility, but if nothing else he will become a true men of letters eventually… that I am sure of.

I said I was slightly disappointed with the end of this episode as it seemed to brush over the deeper, more meaningful conversation that could have been had. Another moment of missed potential I think was this one:

“Brother. Witch”

Isn’t it all a bit too easy? What if the witch had turned around and said “no! I’m your brother! He’s a witch!” and it could have got confusing for Dean. I think this moment could have really been great for Sam to have to convince Dean somehow why he was indeed his brother… revealing something about himself and their relationship? It would have been nice to see that moment of doubt from Dean followed by pleading from Sam to believe him rather than the witch. It’s an old TV cliché though so maybe that’s why they didn’t do it.

The next great Sam moment was this one: “Who’s this hippy?”

Sam looked broken here. For a moment he was really worried that his brother had forgotten him… that is the moment I was talking about earlier about the horrors of Alzheimer’s. Thinking that your loved one doesn’t know who you are is horribly painful. Jared did really well to capture that moment, even though it turned out to be Dean joking around. I’m with Sam here, that wasn’t funny Dean. That was mean.

Rowena’s future

Rowena was totally awesome in this episode. We first see her playing poker with some shady characters and cheats her way into winning. I’m so interested in what Rowena is up to off screen. First the rich businessman who Crowley blew up, now this. She is clearly completely done with other witches, but she isn’t quite ‘out completely, and still comes to Sam and Dean’s aide even though she could easily tunr them down. Like Crowley, could Rowena be starting to care for the Winchesters?

“Am I saved to your contacts now? Tell me, have I got my own ringtone?” Lol. So Rowena is flirting with Sam. Which is fun but also reminds me of 10x19 and Sam’s hallucination of Rowena that got all flirtatious with him. That was Sam’s mind remember so is there actually something in this? Oh god do we need a ship name for this now? We had Drowley now we have Samena/Sawena? Eek I dunno about this! Though I might just go with it purely for the look on Crowley’s face.

Anyway I just love Rowena and Sam’s banter okay?

Then she turns up at their door and as much as Sam brushes it off as Rowena having her eyes on the Loughlin’s book, partly I think Rowena actually enjoys their company.

“altruism isn’t exactly your style”

Isn’t it though? Because she seems like she is also putting on a performance of villainess when really it’s not who she is at all. Like Dean, it’s all a performance.

“You’re a killer, Dean Winchester”

“But, though you may be a stubborn pain in the ass, with the manners of a Neanderthal and the dining habits of a toddler, everything you’ve done, you’ve done for the greater good.”

“Oh and that’s supposed to make it okay?”

“I wouldn’t know. You help those other than yourself, but me? I’ve done horrible things. I told myself it was fine. It was the price of power and powers what matters right? Then I meet god and his sister, the two most powerful beings in the universe, wasted on squabbling with each other. I thought if they can’t be happy or at least satisfied how can there be any hope for me?”

This is such a fascinating insight into Rowena’s mind, how she thinks. For ages it was all about getting power but since God and Amara she has given that up. It’s not about power. She still wants money so she can support herself, but like her son what she is missing is love. This is why I think she helped the Winchesters. She likes them, even if she acts like she doesn’t. They are technically the only people she really knows and I can see this being part of her storyline that she tries to build on a relationship with Sam and Dean. As an ally at first, but then at some point a friend.

After all, when she hears Sam is in trouble, she goes to rescue him. She doesn’t flee and decide it’s not her problem. If she didn’t care, she wouldn’t have put herself at risk for Sam. She doesn’t even get the book in the end. So what did she possibly risk her life for? If not to save Sam. This is a huge turning point for Rowena. She made a decision to save Sam’s life. So much for being a villain.

When Rowena does face Catrina, her story is horrible and sad, we are starting to learn more and more why Rowena is the way she is. Though nothing has come too close to her speech to Crowley in 11x10. Rowena hated being weak, being at the mercy of others. Her experience with the Loughlin’s shows just how awful it was for her. The way she was treated does not excuse the horrible things she has done, but it seems as though since meeting God and Amara she is trying to make up for some of that. She is not unkind or uncaring at all. She has always cared maybe too much. Otherwise she would have easily left both Winchesters to die.

This goes back to her speech to Crowley. “If I didn’t hate you, I’d love you. And love, love is weakness.” This I think is the theme of Rowena’s arc. For her to learn that love is not a weakness, that to have people who love and support you only makes you stronger. It coincides with Cas’s arc as well, where he is constantly being told that his weakness is his love for “humanity”. Castiel already said himself that “my friendship with Sam and Dean makes me stronger”. Rowena just needs to learn this too.

Overall

This episode wasn’t one of the strongest but it had some very good moments. I didn’t like the villains. I found them rather boring, but then they weren’t the focal point of the episode. The writing was sloppy in places and some of the plot didn’t quite make sense, but ultimately it worked. Just, what the hell was the end montage? I get that it was supposed to be another call back to Yellow Fever but seriously? The song was kinda fun. About innocence lost by the sounds of it.. but seriously? I was suffering from a bit of second hand embarrassment I’ll be honest. I think they just really needed an excuse to put Dean riding Larry into the episode for real. 

This makes me think that we totally missed out on a booty shorts dance from Dean at the end of 11x04.

Main takeaways from the episode?

Meredith Glynn binge watched season 4 and used it for all her references.

Sam really needs to pay more attention to what Dean isn’t telling him.

Sam may be tempted by witchcraft.

Rowena cares. A lot.

Dean likes to ride dick. (but then we already knew that.)

:P

#supernatural #episode review #spn meta #dean winchester #destiel #sam winchester #rowena #12x11 #spn spoilers #season 12 #dean is bi #destiel dreaming #my thoughts #dean analysis

[lucyariablog]

3 Toy Brands Unexpectedly Spark a Content Marketing Adventure



I am a bit of a nerd and I hold to that moniker with pride. From comic books and artwork to action figures and movie memorabilia, my office (and any corner of the house my better half allows me to have) is packed with pieces of pop culture.

Speaking of my lovely wife, she accepted her fate when she married this “man-child” 20 years ago, and a bit of a hat tip to her, as she finally has agreed to let me put Star Wars sheets on our bed. (Thanks, Honey!)

As I sit in my office looking at the flair that adorns my walls and shelves, I think of the unique stories behind each piece. The stories are not just the personal memories, but the stories of what each manufacturer did to entice me to become one of its brand evangelists.

Netflix recently released a documentary series, The Toys That Made Us, an in-depth look behind some of the most popular toy lines from the ’70s and ’80s – Star Wars, Barbie, GI Joe, and He-Man and Masters of the Universe. What makes this series compelling is the interviews with the toy developers, engineers, marketers, and executives of each brand. For a toy or pop culture enthusiast, this peek behind the curtain reveals how these iconic brands not only developed the toys but how they marketed to children.

A few of the brands really put the “battle grip” on content marketing with incredible results. What makes this more interesting is how three brands – Kenner (Star Wars), Hasbro (GI Joe), and Mattel (Masters of the Universe) – used similar content marketing strategies, almost feeding and building off each other’s efforts.

.@StarWars, @GIJoeCon, & #MastersoftheUniverse used #contentmarketing in the '70s & ‘80s. @jkkalinowski Click To Tweet

I now realize that my experiences with these toy lines were my first experiences with content as a retail marketing strategy.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How Content Can Ring Up a Better Retail Experience

Star Wars

During the film’s production in 1976, director George Lucas signed a deal with Stan Lee and Marvel comics to release the official Star Wars comic book. The release of the first two issues of the comic book happened before the movie’s release to drum up publicity for the film. Not only did it succeed in what George and Stan intended, the release of the Star Wars series of comics may have single-handedly saved Marvel comics, which was in a financial slump due to poor sales.

Image source

According to Buddy Scalera, content strategist and president of Comic Book School: “Marvel Comics was a significant piece of the Star Wars content marketing effort. Between films, the comic books were a monthly fix for fans of the Star Wars universe. Marvel Comics kept the flame alive between releases of the original trilogy and long after the final frames of Return of the Jedi had flickered out. From 1977 to 1987, fans could immerse (and console) themselves in the 107-issue run of Star Wars comic books, most of which are not considered part of the official Star Wars canon.”

.@Marvel Comics kept the flame alive with its 107 issues of @StarWars comic books, says @BuddyScalera. Click To Tweet

As Buddy explains, the comics were an integral piece of the Star Wars brand marketing strategy, as many of the toys (produced by Kenner from 1977 through 1985) were promoted through the comics.

After the mega-success of the toy line, original content was produced for novels, newspaper comics, and radio dramas. The success of Star Wars’ content strategy set the stage for the competition, too.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Brands Often Overlook This Superhero of Storytelling

He-Man and Masters of the Universe

As Kenner found success with the Star Wars line, rival Mattel, which had the Barbie line, was looking to break into the action-figure market for boys and came up with a new line of figures, He-Man and Masters of the Universe.

Content became an integral afterthought to the toy line’s creation. At a pitch presentation, one of the retailers said Star Wars toys were popular because of the movie and asked how kids were supposed to know He-Man. On the fly, Mattel’s Mark Ellis said a comic book would be in the package of each figure. By enclosing a piece of original content, Mattel would help kids learn the backstory of He-Man, his friends, and his foes. In addition, Mark and the Mattel team partnered with DC comics (much like George Lucas partnered with Marvel) to launch a He-Man and Masters of the Universe series of comics to promote the toy line.

Image source

Mattel marketing executives went in front of a group of buyers once again with the new toys and the comic book. One major buyer questioned how kids around the age of 5 (a target audience for He-Man toys) would be able to read the comics. Another lightbulb went off for Mark, who announced that Mattel was planning a television show.

?’s from buyers led Mattel to create comic book & animated series to sell He-Man toy line. @jkkalinowski Click To Tweet

His original idea called for two one-hour specials to tell the story of He-Man and the cast of characters. The executive team at Filmation, the company behind Fat Albert and The New Adventures of Batman, convinced Mattel to pursue multiple half-hour episodes instead. The cartoon series became an instant hit. It ran from September 1983 to 1985 and contained 130 episodes. It was the main marketing vehicle for the Masters of the Universe toy line as it was used to introduce new characters, vehicles, and playsets.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Brand Backstory: Where Your Content Marketing Strategy Is Born

GI Joe: A Real American Hero

Hasbro created a line of large-scale GI Joe dolls in the ’60s and early ’70s for boys to create adventures. The era of the larger action figures faded with the introduction of the 3 3/4-inch action figures for Star Wars (a line Hasbro had passed on when approached by George Lucas), but GI Joe was resurrected to compete with the Star Wars line. This time, GI Joe was reimagined as a member of an elite anti-terrorism task force standing up to the world’s most dangerous terror organization, Cobra.

Image source

While the toy line was in production, Hasbro partnered with Marvel comics and writer Larry Hama to create a series based on the new GI Joe figures and playsets. A series of animated commercials promoted the launch of the comic. The ads, comic, and ultimately the toy line were all successful. That prompted Hasbro to release two five-part animated mini-series cartoons in 1983 and 1984, and a syndicated series in 1985 and 1986. Each episode featured characters and toys that could be purchased on the shelves and, just as with the Masters of the Universe line, the series was used as a launch pad for new products.

Conclusion

I never realized how much content marketing I was exposed to as a child. After watching interviews with the toy developers of Star Wars, He-Man, and GI Joe, I am sure they were unaware they were developing what would come to be known as a content strategy for the industry.

Nowadays, as content marketing is a huge part of my life, I see successful examples throughout all the programming and feeds that my children watch or subscribe to. It’s a strategy that works extremely well with toy lines, and brand managers know it.

Who would have thought that I would dedicate my career to the same tactic that made me spend all of my allowance on toys and comics? I am so glad I did.

Author’s note: After completing this article, I learned of the passing of the great Stan Lee. Stan will always remain an incredible influence not just in the comic book industry but in the creative world as a whole. The world he created through his storytelling inspired so many to pursue their dreams. I, like millions of others around the world, will be eternally grateful for his inspiration. Rest in peace, Stan. Excelsior!

Want to be the He-Man or She-Ra of your content marketing program? Enroll now for the winter semester of Content Marketing University.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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from https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2018/11/toy-brands-content/