#but i’m happy to inform you that dick is also catholic. to me. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hopeonmyphone · 9 months

Text

Reminiscences:

Will the Real Jung Ho-seok Please Stand Up: “Jack In The Box” Album Review [VOA]

While Jack In The Box is J-Hope’s first solo album, it is not his first outing without the other BTS’ members

On 2nd March 2018, the triple threat (rapper, dancer, vocalist) released his debut mixtape, Hope World, which peaked on the Billboard 200 at 38, despite being a free mixtape, available on SoundCloud as well as directly from Big Hit’s website. This followed RM’s first mixtape released on 20th March 2015, and Agust D’s (Suga’s) on 15th August 2016. However, none of these were readily available in South Korea and were promoted as informal side projects rather than formal individual ones. Moreover, while most of the songs on Hope World depicted J-Hope as being inherently vivacious and cheerful, with “Blue Side”, being the main exception, Jack In The Box is more personal, rawer, and perhaps, less hopeful. The album is made up of ten songs, including the pre-release single “More”, an instrumental, “Music Box: Reflection”, just over mid-way through, and the single “Arson” which is the last track. Only available via streaming services, the focus in Jack In The Box is on artistry and musicality, stripping back the shiny exterior of the idol, for an introspective journey into selfhood, and identity within and without BTS.

As the first two songs on Jack In The Box detail, Jung Hoseok’s stage name, J-Hope, was decided on pre-debut, in order to cement his place in the group as the happy, hope[ful] one. In concerts and on stage, J-Hope has come to introduce himself in the following manner: “I’m your hope, you’re my hope, I’m J-Hope”, referring to the symbiotic relationship between BTS and their fans, ARMY, thereby positioning himself as the shiny, bright member. In the spoken “Intro” to Jack In The Box, a female voice introduces us to the myth behind the man by recounting the story of Pandora, whose despair at the opening of the box (which had been forbidden by Zeus), is only assuaged by hope, described as “a small, bright, most beautiful creature” who “gave people the will to carry on living amidst the pain and strife”. In the subsequent track, “Pandora’s Box”, J-Hope describes the birth (burden) of his moniker, “They call me hope / Do you know why I am hope? / Pandora’s history, that’s my birth / The sincerity of the sacred heart given to man by great gods / The ray of light that is left in the Pandora box / Put it into a pure-hearted boy / Till the end, framed to become Bangtan’s hope”. This can be seen in his referring to his mixtape, Hope World, as something which was inevitable. The lyrics also reference the film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Fincher, 2008) alongside the story of the frog in the well”, from the Zhuangzi, one of the foundational texts of Taoism, which is also a well-known idiom in South Korea. While Benjamin Button, like Philip K Dick’s Counter-Clock World, deals with time going backwards, an old man becomes a child, a reversal of normality, the story of the frog in the well warns us against narrow-mindedness as in the failure to understand our place in the world around us. Cleverly J-Hope uses the chorus to make a transition from the luminous hope of Pandora’s box to Jack (the devil trapped in the box). Indeed, the Jack in the Box origin story is perhaps the opposite of that of hope. Jack in the Box in folklore tells of the incarceration of the devil who is fooled by a Catholic saint, John Schorne, when he promises his sole (soul) to the devil in exchange for wonderful magical powers. The song concludes: “Jack in the box / Pandora’s hand / The last hope / Jack in the box”. Like Schrödinger’s cat, it is impossible to know what is in the box, unless you open it.

youtube

The third track, and pre-release single, “More”, moves onto the process of creation, the artistic impulse, more goth-emo than idol rap, referencing the surrealistic work of the Spanish painter, Salvador Dali, whose paintings mapped the unconscious thoughts and dreams of the self-drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud. Indeed, the lyrics directly refer to the painter: “Drunk in the artistic painting, keep hypin’ up Dali”, while the music video pays homage to Dali’s most famous work “The Persistence of Memory”. By doing so, “More” formalises the thematic concern of the mechanics of subjectification, the acknowledgement of the vulnerability of the self to the other, a necessary process through which all subjects must go. If J-Hope wants ‘more’, it is a desire rooted in the understanding that fame is ephemeral but artistry is perpetual. The vibe itself is old skool hip-hop, the water imagery in the lyrics doubles for the flow of the rap itself. The tempo escalates as the song moves towards the crescendo of the chorus and the electric guitar kicks in. The lyrics in the second half of “More”, self-reflexively refer to the musical processes of the song itself: “snare drums”, “hit that” and “drive to the beat”, mimicking the rapper’s flow while at the same time mediating on inevitable criticism of one’s art or “feedback” as a necessary part of the art of artistic creation.

This is followed by “Stop”, the subtitle of which is ‘There are no bad people in the world”. The lyrics mediate on the nature of good and bad, in our deeply divided society. With voice-over sample provided by Tim Chantarangsu, “Stop” is perhaps the most ‘hopeful’ track on the album. J-Hope calls for a contextual understanding of why people behave in what seems to be an inhumane manner. The lyrics move from: “Actions of humans are worse than brutes / It is so dirty, so foul / I wonder if they call themselves human” to “Look at them again / Living environment, education, system / What is different from mine?” Unlike the previous three tracks, “Stop” is more didactic and represents a moving outwards from self, reaching towards the other, the marginalised, the unrecognised, the criminalised. The belief in the transformative power of love, or perhaps empathy, is asserted at the end: “Because small beginnings can make huge steps / The world is changing because there are no bad people”. There is a natural thematic progression from “Stop” to “Equal Sign” which again mediates on the importance of change, asking “Why is being different a sin? / Beyond age / Beyond gender”. While this can be understood as a commentary on the racism and xenophobia that BTS have faced throughout their careers, it is also an explicit critique of hate crimes committed because of perceived differences.

In the visualiser for the song, the symbols for man and woman flash up on the screen, before being combined into the sign for trans/intersex/nonbinary people. Since the 1970s, the combined male and female symbol has been used for members of the LGBTQ community whose identity does not fit into rigid gender binaries. The equal sign is also the logo of the Human Rights campaign, which has been in use since 1995 and is synonymous with the fight for equality. Further, the equal sign was used in 2013 on social media as a show of support for same-sex marriage. “Equal Sign” encapsulates BTS’ message of self-love as well as the humanity of all people while being much more explicit in its meaning through the combination of word and image, remembering that marginalised people in South Korea face societal discrimination on a day-to-day basis.

The sixth track “Music Box: Reflection”, performed by P Dogg, brings a third type of box into the mix, the music box, the first automatic device capable of playing a preprogrammed tune, which would later be largely replaced by the record player. Unlike many K-pop records, this is an instrumental with a purpose, and not something merely tacked onto the end of the album. This also marks a transitional point between the past, present, and future.

youtube

“What if” asks what the future-tense J-Hope would feel if all his achievements and accolades were to suddenly disappear (or perhaps be forgotten in the fullness of time). When you have everything, what about your dreams and hopes? J-Hope’s lyrics are self-reflective: “You have everything now / Money, glory, fortune, even followed by people you like / Can you still tell [people/yourself] to love [yourself/oneself] and have hope / If it means all of those things will be taken from you / And you’ll be at the bottom? (I wish)”. At the heart of “What If” is a song weighed down by sadness and loss where animals are the only constant companions whose fidelity is assured. Further “What If’ continues the homage and engagement with old skool hip-hop. It samples Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s, “Shimmy Shimmy Ya’ (1995). One of the founders of the Wu-Tang Clan, the rapper’s irreverent and innovative style, somewhere between singing and rapping, and his politics of class and race, has influenced many with “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” having been sampled and referenced 92 times as of 2020. While ODB’s song continues to reverberate in contemporary popular culture, it is significant that the song itself sampled the work of another prolific and important African-American star, Richard Pryor. “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” uses a phrase of Pryor’s from “Have Your Ass Home By 11:00 pm” (1974), a comedic story about a young man whose attempts to get laid are continually thwarted, partly because as one of the girls tells him “You can’t even sing”. It becomes the first line of “Shimmy Shimmy Ya”: “Oh fuck, you can’t even sing”. The sampling of ODB’s infamous song in “What If” draws a circular connection between African American culture and South Korean popular music. As such, it acknowledges the centrality of black music in the popularity of contemporary K-pop and its importance in the development of the genre. It also draws a personal connection between J-Hope and ODB in terms of their rap styles, their ability to avoid the conventions of rap, and subvert the rules of flow including that of vocal pitch.

“Safety Zone” is the eighth song on the album and shows J-Hope at his most vulnerable. While fame might seem to be a multi-splendored thing, it comes at a heavy price, as evidenced here. The old skool hip-hop vibe is replaced by a smoother R&B groove. The song asks the whereabouts of a safe zone, a place of safety and familiarity, perhaps an escape from the humdrum and hubris of idol life, where friendships are fleeting, and trust fragile. Is it home? And where is home? If not friends, then is it family? What about familial and societal duties? What is the self, the I, the breathing, living person? This is followed by the thoughtful “Future” in which J-Hope tackles the notion of a future yet uncharted in comparison to the regime of his idol training and performances with BTS. Again he uses the word ‘flow’ in reference to ‘going with the flow’ as well as the flow of his rap. He also uses ‘rhythm’ as a lyrical device as a reference to cadence, ‘rhythm’ (in the lyrics with reference to positivity), and the rise and fall of vocals which J-Hope uses effectively throughout the album. While the future is uncertain, one thing that is certain is there is no stopping the temporal flow of time, or becoming Benjamin Button whose life reveals itself in reverse.

The final song “Arson” and the official single, uses the imagery of fire (something which has been used both throughout BTS’ career and within the individual works of the members). ‘Fire’ as a term in rap slang is ubiquitous and as an adjective refers to something which is dope or amazing, or is used in reference to a rapper who ‘spits fire’ in their delivery. In US rap, it has particular significance in terms of gun culture, but here, it is used in the former meaning. Arson also has a double meaning, on one hand, it refers to the crime, or setting things on fire metaphorically with the rap. Here, J-Hope utilises it in this dual sense, as a crime against [polite] society and as a self-reflexive reference to his rap. While the album begins with the ‘birth’ of J-Hope, as the sunshine member of BTS, it ends with his rebirth, in his own terms: If anyone asks me / “Right, I lit the flame” / Now I ask myself, choose what / Do I put out the fire, or burn even brighter, yah, yah, yah, yah / (Arson).”

Jack In The Box is an accomplished album from an accomplished rapper. It is an introspective look inside as change beckons and J-Hope begins his individual journey, which will be carried out in tandem, with that of BTS. Here, he deals with the expectations that come with adopting a certain role in an idol group, and the restrictions associated with it. To conclude using another box as a metaphor, Jack In The Box is like a Chinese box, a set of nested boxes. In the gothic, a Chinese box structure is used to refer to a frame narrative, in which a narrative inside a narrative, allows the voicing of different perspectives. Here, J-Hope’s different personas meet in a dialogue about the future, which is unknowable, except for the surety that it will be fire.

Jack In The Box has considerable appeal for a wider audience outside of BTS’ ARMY. In the album, J-Hope demonstrates that he is a multi-talented rapper whose flow and style offer a distinctive voice, bridging the gap between Korean popular music and Western rap with authenticity and sincerity. His is a voice that deserves to be heard.

Source: VOA

#jung hoseok #hoseok #jhope #BTS #정호석 #호석 #제이홉 #방탄소년단 #jhope news #Youtube

1 note · View note

delusion-of-negation · 3 years

Text

top 10 (ish) ridiculous or annoying FAQs:

(click at your own discretion)

1) "kids today rely on others to do everything"

ah yes, damn those participation trophies! if it wasn't for them my hands wouldn't be fucked, and I wouldn't need people to write for me. but seriously, stop reading boomer comics, and go outside to meet some actual young people.

2) "sus that a non-american says mom"

yeah, because it's clearly the superior version, and I'm not too patriotic to concede a defeat.

3) "sweaty, the victims of abuse by catholics are real people, stop appropriating their pain just because you want to hate catholics; plus teachers abuse people just as often anyway"

so firstly, I don't hate anybody. and secondly, regarding the fact that victims really do exist, [insert "of course I know him, he's me" meme here]; although I don't often talk much about the abuse I went through or what my religious beliefs are. but, more importantly, statements like "survivors are people" can be phrased like "some people are survivors", and when you're unable to act according to the latter (like when you don't even consider that somebody might be one) then you display a failure to recognise the former - you're projecting; a survivor can't be appropriating their own pain, but you can be appropriating it to silence one. and thirdly, teachers do abuse - the problem isn't and has never been purely religion, rather that abuse is often done by somebody in a position of trust, power, and familiarity; and that the lack of a global minimum enables totally legal abuse on top of the illegal stuff. people with access and respect have more opportunity to abuse than those without, and that goes for teachers too. but, once again, you can be appropriating the pain of survivors to deflect and silence people. please remember this before you say that shit.

4) "get help/therapy"

way ahead of you - years ahead of you. but it's not magic - people who say this often act as if you'll start behaving differently overnight. not only are some things simply beyond the ability of talking therapy to completely rectify, it also takes time and has to be selective. you've got to pick your priorities, and that's definitely not whatever ship or joke you're mad at me about today. therapy is a slow, arduous process that can't guarantee results - it isn't "anti-recovery" to recognise that, it's honesty. while I've been in therapy for a long time, it is not necessarily going to change whatever you don't like about me - whether that's because it can't, because my focus now is on more important or urgent things, or because I don't want to change that.

5a) "tell your family you ship incest, see how that goes; normal people find it disgusting"

actually, some know, and they're fine with it. in fact, one prefers sibling pairings in fiction to all other dynamics because, to paraphrase, "it's a deeper level of messed up co-dependence". so unfortunately for you, my remaining family (by which I mean those not dead or cut out of my life after abuse and so forth) actually are able to distinguish between fiction and reality. plus, my reasoning for caring if they find it gross or not pertains only to recommending books and such - their opinions do not dictate my tastes.

5b) "don't sexualise/appropriate incestuous abuse" and "I bet you enjoyed being raped" and other attempts to upset me over 5a

firstly, as I've already said here, survivors can't be appropriating ourselves. in addition, you're not owed people's history or trauma - it's not okay to require people's personal information, or else you'll send anon hate and accusations of appropriation. secondly, I'm not sexualising our abuse (not just because I write horror, and so a lot of my writing is intended to be creepy, not sexy); these stories aren't about us, they're not us at all. entire dynamics/people (fictional or otherwise) aren't all going to be applicable to us or identical to us, just because they have something in common with us; they're not us and they're not accountable to us. thirdly, the fact that people send this stuff (attempting to trigger people's trauma over ships) is so much more worrying to me than somebody making our communal imaginary friends kiss. you're trying to hurt people. and finally, to the "I bet you enjoyed it" crowd (if you're at all serious): do you think you'd enjoy being in a real zombie apocalypse, alone, afraid, and really at risk of being eaten alive? a fictional scenario does not feel remotely the same as a real one. this isn't rocket science - things that look like you aren't you; fiction isn't reality; don't send anon hate. (edit: comparable "just leave me alone, I'm not hurting anyone" sentiments for yandere stuff, and anything else you decide I'm naughty for.)

6) "you'll be sent off to do manual labour once your communist revolution happens"

while I don't know why people think that I'm a communist, a dictatorial regime probably isn't going to want me to do manual labour. they're more likely to just shoot me; I'm useless and a liability. call me crazy, but something tells me that "ah yes, we shall give ze deranged cripple ze power tools" isn't the communist position.

7a) "they/them can't be singular pronouns"

yes they can, and they're used as such in both shakespeare and the bible. but you don't have to say this - I'm also okay with he/him, so you could've just used those and chilled out. also, do I look like somebody who views the rules of grammar as fully immutable and imperative?

7b) "enbies/aros/pan/etc aren't valid"

do you really think that you're going to change any hearts or minds by putting that in my ask box or under my funny maymays? chill out, it's not worth the effort - you could be planning a party (in minecraft) and having fun instead. it isn't worth my time to rant at everybody who's saying something isn't valid, updating how I'm explaining it as my opinions grow and general discourse around it evolves; I'm just who I am, somebody else is who they are - why bicker in presumptuous ways about if that's enough? it ultimately is valid, in my opinion, but that isn't an invitation to keep demanding that I debate. (edit: old posts of mine probably don't phrase things incredibly, on this or anything... I tried.)

8) "what are your politics?"

my politics are informed first and foremost by the knowledge that I'm not cut out to be some kind of leader - I don't want to be the guy who tells everyone else what to do, I just offer what seem to me like valid criticisms of how we are doing things now, and general pointers on the values and ethics that I would prefer to move towards. things like individual freedom, taking the most pacifist route where possible, trying not to give excessive power to small groups of people (governments or corporations), helping those in need even when they're not palatable, and letting me suck loads of dicks. but please refrain from decreeing me something - there's not enough information in what I said, so you'll just be filling in the blanks with assumptions. (edit: workplace democracy seems cool to me; benefits are good; fair fines and taxes; and the "sperm makes you loopy" saga: 1, 2, 3, and 4.)

9) "you're a narcissist"

no, I don't meet the diagnostic criteria. joking on the internet that you're hot doesn't make a person a narcissist. the fact that I've chosen to keep my actual self-esteem issues to myself is not proof that they don't exist - you're just not entitled to that information about me. but it's also not narcissism to really like how you look. (edit: don't throw labels around carelessly too.)

10a) "kin list?"

the fabric of the universe, a zombie, dionysus, maned wolf/arctic fox hybrid, a comedian, big gay, big rock, ambiguously partial insincerity. (edit: kin list may or may not be incomplete.)

10b) "kin isn't valid/that's just being insane"

haven't we established that I'm deranged, and that sending stuff like this on anon is simply a waste of your precious time? besides, I do not care if it's invalid or insane - it's fun, I'm happy. (edit: see 7b for my opinion on sending me yet another ask with "that's invalid" in it; I'm not in the mood to discuss the nature of validity.)

bonus: "it gets better" and "trigger list?"

as I've said before, things just don't always get better for everyone - sometimes things can't be cured or even treated, sometimes they kill you; in some cases it could get better if not for a blockade or lack of time. the world is messy. it needs to be more normalised to reassure or comfort people without relying on saying that their issue will get better or be cured. it does suck to be this ill, but it also sucks to be made out to be a lazy pessimist, just because I have the audacity to not play along. and as for the trigger list, I don't like providing people with an easily accessed list of ways to hurt my feelings or harm me - upsetting me is supposed to be challenging, and thus rewarding. if you want a cheat sheet then you're out of luck, I'm afraid.

bonus #2: "FAQ stands for frequently asked questions, it doesn't need that s at the end!"

yeah, I know, I just enjoy chaos and disarray.

bonus #3 (edit): "what are your disabilities and how exactly are they incurable and/or deadly?"

again, I don't tell the internet everything about me, especially when it poses a risk, especially not as an easily accessible list for you to refer back to whenever you feel inclined to hurt my feelings. that is understandably a sore subject. (edit: that includes physical health issues btw.)

bonus #4 (edit): "so we shouldn't be critical?"

if it wasn't clear from my answer about politics or my post in general, you can have opinions about things, and you can voice that. it's just not realistic to exist at extremes: to think that you alone should dictate what exists in fiction, or to think that people shouldn't be expressing disdain or criticism of any calibur. say how you feel about things, that's fine, but it's also fine if people find that they don't value your input. plus we're all flawed, we can all be hypocritical from time to time, we all get bitchy, and we all make mistakes, or even knowingly fuck things up. that's important to keep in mind, whether we're talking about the one being criticised or the one doing the criticising - poor choices of words, imperfect tone, or contradictory ideas are inevitably going to happen occasionally.

congrats on reaching the end! if you have, at any point, said one of these to me, you owe a hug to your nearest loved one (once it's safe).

edit: might add more links/bonus points in the future when I think of things, but it's late now. (sorry for links where prior notes in the thread have my old url, that may get a tad confusing; also, not all links are my blog or my op, since it is to illustrate points/vibes, not to self-promo.)

#don't take life too seriously #nobody gets out alive anyway #tw abuse mention #tw csa mention #tw incest mention #tw for any tws I missed #idk why I did this

15 notes · View notes

sophiepowers · 4 years

Text

since @petrlosingwendy is mad about me talking about jordan here’s my anger in an essay under the cut

All right, Petunia. Wish me luck out there. You will die on August 7th, 2037. That’s pretty good. All right. Hello. Hello, Chicago. Nice to see you again. Thank you. That was very nice. Thank you. Look, now, you’re a wonderful crowd, but I need you to keep your energy up the entire show, okay? Because… No, no, no. Thank you. Some crowds… some crowds, they have big energy in the beginning and then they run out of places to go. So… I don’t judge those crowds, by the way, okay? We’ve all gone too big too fast and then run out of room. We’ve all made a “Happy Birthday” sign… Wait. You get that poster board up, and you’re like, “I don’t need to trace it. I know how big letters should be. To begin with, a big-ass ‘H’. Followed by a big-ass ‘A’ and… Oh, no! Oh, God! Okay, all right. Real skinny ‘P’ with a high hump, and then we’ll put the second ‘P’ below the hump of that first ‘P’, sort of like a motorcycle sidecar situation. And now I have no room for the ‘Y’, so I’ll do a kind of curled-up noodle ‘Y’. Block letters and cursive look good together.” And then you go to write “Birthday” and you totally forget the lesson you just learned with “Happy.” You’re like, “Yeah, but the past is the past. Big-ass ‘B’. Surely more letters will fit in the same space.”You’re very friendly here in Chicago. I mean, we’re all violent here, but you’re very friendly. No, really. And I don’t like confrontation, ’cause I’ve never been in a fight before. Though, maybe you could tell that from the first moment I walked out on stage. I don’t give off that vibe. Some people give off a vibe of… Right away, they’re like, “Do not fuck with me.” My vibe is more like, “Hey, you could pour soup in my lap and I’ll probably apologize to you.” When I walk, for real, my feet go out like this. I’m so open and vulnerable. I look like a doll that you point out molestation on. “Show us on this white comedian where the man touched you.”It’s been a while since I’ve been home to Chicago. I got married since then. Thank you. I married my wife. I love saying “my wife.” It sounds so adult. “That’s my wife.” It’s great, you sound like a person. I said it even before we were married. We were just dating, and we were once getting on an airplane, and Anna’s ticket didn’t say anything and my ticket said “priority access.” It doesn’t matter why. But we were getting on and I said, “Uh, can my wife board with me?” And they were like, “Yes, of course. Right this way.” And I was like, “Oh, that is so much better than all those times I was like, ‘Can my girlfriend come?'” And, yeah, I shouldn’t have said it that way, but still. “My wife” just has some kick-ass to it, you know? “Get away from my wife! No one talk to my wife!” Marriage is gonna be very magical. “I didn’t kill my wife!” That’s like, “Ooh, who’s that fella? I bet he did kill his wife.” Being married is so nice. I never knew relationships were supposed to make you feel better about yourself. That’s not really a joke, that’s just a little sweet thing I like to say. ‘Cause I’d been in relationships where I got cheated on, like, long ones. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a long relationship where you got cheated on, but it changes your whole worldview. ‘Cause when I was a kid, I used to watch America’s Most Wanted. You know how kids do. And I would always think to myself, “How could another person kill someone? How could a human being kill another human being?” And then I got cheated on, and I was like, “Oh, okay.” “I’m not gonna do it, but I totally get it.” And I don’t mean in that way of, like, “No one else can have you.” I don’t care about that. It’s just creepy to have an ex out there after things have ended badly. They have a lot of information. Anyone who’s seen my dick and met my parents needs to die. I can’t have them roaming around.I talked to a lot of people before I got engaged, you know. And I heard this expression about whether or not you should get married. This is an old expression. People say this. They say, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” You ever heard that before? It’s a bananas insulting expression… to an entire gender. But also, it makes no sense. “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” You’re not allowed to milk a cow that you don’t own. That’s not even a situation. Was that a problem at one point? Like, in the dairy community? Was that happening a hundred years ago in some village? Some Dutch prick was sneaking in at night being like, “Ah-ha-ha, I take your milk.” And the farmer was like, “Well, then, this is your cow now.” And he was like, “No, no proof of purchase.” And he ran off into the night. That sounded Dutch, right? You know what that… you know what that expression means? It means, “Why would you marry a woman if she’s already having sex with you?” Which has nothing to do with what relationships are even like anymore. Now, it’s like, “Why buy the cow?” Uh, maybe because, every day, the cow asks you when you’re gonna buy it. And… … you live in a really small apartment with the cow, so you can’t avoid that question at all. And also, the cow is way better at arguing than you are. And the cow grew up in a family that knows how to argue. “Why buy the cow?” Uh, maybe because every time another cow gets bought, you have to go to the sale and you have to sit next to your cow at the sale, and your cow looks over at you the entire time like… And does not enjoy the sale at all… even though she’s the one that wanted to go to the sale. And she’s especially mad because that farmer and cow met, like, eight months after you guys met. “Why buy the cow?” Well, let’s be real here. You’re very lucky to have the cow that you do have. “Roping in cows and getting milk out of them was never anything you were known for, John.” By the most liberal of estimates, there have been about eight cows total, several unmilked, and… a lot of people think that you like bulls, and if you just bought… They assume it. When you search your name, the third thing to come up is like, “John Mulaney bull?” And if you just bought the cow, nobody would say that anymore. They’ll still say it. ‘Cause there are those guys who, they buy a cow, and then on the side, total matador, but… But, for real, Chicago, why buy the cow? Let’s be real. Why buy the cow? Because you love her. You really do. And, yeah, yeah… Sure, she’s a bossy little Jew, but… … she takes care of you. And you don’t wanna be some old man stumbling around, like, “Hey, you seen any loose milk?”My wife is Jewish. She’s a New York Jew. I did it! Now, I was raised Catholic. I don’t know if you can tell that from the everything about me. My wife is Jewish, I grew up Catholic, so we got married by a friend. Being married by a friend is a beautiful ceremony that alienates both families’ religions, while confusing the elderly people at the wedding. “What’s the name of the bishop?” “That’s actually stand-up comedian Dan Levy. He was the host of MTV’s Your Face or Mine?” I saw a lot of Catholic weddings, though, because I was an altar boy… And a hush falls over the room. Isn’t it weird how that became a scandalous thing? That was just some boring shit I had to do on weekends. But now, it’s like saying, “I was a French maid for a period of time. I was treated well in my day. I worked for a variety of sirs.” No, being an altar boy was just a boring gig, you know? You’d serve Mass and then you’d serve weddings sometimes. My brother was once an altar boy at a wedding, and he was standing there with another altar boy in this big, packed church in Chicago where we grew up. And the bride was coming down the aisle, and the organ was playing, and all the pews were filled, and the bride got all the way to the altar, and the groom lifted the veil off of the bride, and right at that moment the other altar boy said, “Aw, she’s ugly.” And then they looked, and they were right next to the video camera. And I know that’s awful, but wouldn’t you give a million dollars to see that wedding video? It was the best moment of this stupid woman’s life, and she’s walking down the aisle, and the organ’s like… And she gets all the way to the altar to her betrothed, and he unveils her to the world and to the eyes of God. And right at that second, for no reason at all, some Cheeto-fingered, rat-mustached, 13-year-old prick decides to go, “Aw, she’s ugly!” Hopefully the videographer knew some sound editing so he could fix it to be like, “Aw, she’s beautiful. She’s enchanting.”I grew up Catholic. I don’t go to church anymore. But I went on Christmas Eve with my parents, ’cause you know how you lie to your parents. So… we go into the church and I was like, “I got this under control.” And then I got schooled because they introduced a bunch of new shit. No, I was going through Mass and I was batting, like, .400. And then in the middle of Mass, the priest said, “Peace be with you.” And everyone said, “And with your spirit.” And I was the one pre-Y2K asshole going, “And also with you. What? Huh? What? Huh? What? When? When?” For those of you that aren’t Catholic, I don’t mean to exclude you, even though we love to exclude you, but… There’s a part in church where the priest says, “Peace be with you.” And for many, many years, we all said… – “And also with you.” – Very good. But they changed it to “And with your spirit.” Because that’s what needed revamping in the Catholic Church. That was the squeaky wheel that needed the grease. In Rome, they were like, “Let’s see. What problems can we solve? Problem one. No.” I’m actually glad they changed that, though. I never liked “And also with you.” I always found that clunky. “And also with you.” That’s not how you talk. – “Have a nice day.” – “And also you having one.” It’s just a little bit wrong, isn’t it? It’s just a little off. Like, when someone’s like, “How are you?” And you’re like, “Nothing much.” And it sort of makes sense. Never begin a sentence with “And also.” You just immediately sound caught off-guard. It sounds like if at the first church ever, like, they weren’t expecting it. Like, the priest was like, “Hey, this is the first time we’ve ever had church. I just wanna say, ‘Peace be with you.'” And they were like… “What? Oh. Uh, yeah. And also you should have some.” “Hey, that’s good. Let’s keep that for 2,000 years. And then change it to trick John.”My wife and I don’t have any children, we have a dog. We have a little puppy named Petunia. She’s a tiny little French bulldog puppy. I like having a puppy that’s a bulldog, ’cause it’s like having a baby that is also a grandma. Her body is young, her face is as old as time. She definitely saw the Nazis march into Paris. She always gives me this look of like, “Oh, the things I have seen, you cocksucker. You have no idea. The Gestapo threw my printing press into a river. But, go, tell your fucking jokes. Bring me my dish.” She said that. Petunia… Petunia is my best friend in the world. I give her a million kisses a day. She does not like me, and barks at me and bites me all day long. We had to get a dog trainer into the apartment because Petunia is a bad dog. We tell her that every day. We go, “Hey, you’re bad at being a dog.” So, the trainer came into the apartment. Sorry, didn’t even walk into the apartment, walked into the threshold and went, “Oh, okay.” Like she was an exorcist or something. She said, “I see what the problem is.” She said, “Petunia has become the alpha of the house.” And then she pointed at me, she said, “You are no longer the alpha of the house.” And in the back of my head, I was like, “I was never the alpha of the house.” I turned to my wife, I was like, “Let’s pretend. It’ll be fun. Yes… My title of alpha, which I once had, how can I reclaim it? Because that was a thing that existed at one time.” She said, “You need to show dominance over your puppy.” These are things people say to me. I said, “How do I do that?” She said, “Well, let me ask you this. Who eats dinner first, you or Petunia?” I was like, “Petunia eats dinner first. She eats dinner at 5:00 p.m., ’cause she’s a foot long and two years old.” She said, “No, you need to eat dinner first. Because the king eats before anyone else eats.” Oh, yes, and what a mighty king I will be, eating dinner at 4:45 in the afternoon. “Look upon your sovereign, Petunia, and tremble. My lands stretch across this entire one bedroom, and I eat dinner whenever I choose, as long as it works for the schedule of a dog.” She said, “Now, you don’t actually have to eat dinner before Petunia. You just have to convince Petunia that you’ve already eaten.” So… for the past month, I shit you not… before my wife and I give Petunia her dish, we take down empty bowls and spoons, and in front of her, we go, “Mmm, dinner. Mmm, good dinner.” Like we’re space aliens in a play about human beings that they wrote, but they didn’t work that hard on. “Mmm, we’re eating dinner.” Meanwhile, Petunia’s just staring at us with her Paul Giamatti face, like… “You’re not eating dinner, cocksucker. Dish, now.”I have a wife and a dog, and we just bought a house. We have a new house. It was built in the ’20s, but it was flipped in 2014. Which means it’s haunted, but it has a lovely kitchen backsplash. Actually, we didn’t buy a house. A bank bought a house, and I’m allowed to keep my shirts and pants there while I pay it off for 30 years. The woman from the bank came over and she showed me my mortgage broken down month by month for 30 years. And she said, “So, for instance, this is what you’ll pay in July of 2029.” And I burst out laughing. I was like, “2029? That’s not a real year. By 2029, I’ll be drinking moon juice with President Jonathan Taylor Thomas. I’m not gonna be writing you a paper check.” I like having a house, but I loved looking for a house, ’cause I love real estate agents. I mean, they are the true heroes. They really are. Have you ever watched HGTV? Real estate agents have to deal with the dumbest people in the world making the biggest decisions of their lives. Every episode of HGTV is like, “Craig and Stacia are looking for a two-story A-frame that’s near Craig’s job in the downtown, but also satisfies Stacia’s need to be near the beach which is nowhere near Craig’s job. With three children and nine on the way, and a max budget of $7… let’s see what Lori Jo can do on this week’s episode of You Don’t Deserve A Beach House.”I loved our real estate agent. It was so fun to hang out with her. It was like hanging out with my mom. ‘Cause, you know, real estate agents always look like your mom. And they have various Chico’s accoutrements. They always have kind of fun mom energy. And they’re always, “So excited to see you two.” We would have little conferences before we walked into a house. She’d go, “Let’s talk. Let’s talk before we go in.” We’re, like, two feet from the door. “So, there’s no toilets. And I know that was on your list. But I think I can get him to budge. Let’s go.” So, we’d have a real estate agent, and then, like, the house would have a real estate agent who’s just some guy sitting in a big chair. And these two always hated each other. They’d be like, “Hi, Tony.” “Hi, Kim.” It’s like, “Jesus Christ! What, were you two in the Eagles together? What is the animosity about?” Our real estate agent wanted us to have a baby more than anyone else in our lives, more than anyone in our family. She hinted about it constantly. Every room she walked into, she’d be like, “So, this could be an office.” “Or maybe a nursery.” “Yeah. No, like we said, we don’t know if we’re gonna have… ” “No, no. I know, I know, you know. You don’t know if you’re gonna have ’em, but you know. You know, you never know. Sometimes you don’t know what’s gonna happen, and then… you know, something happens.” “Well, yeah, that’s how all of life works.” “Okay, all right. Okay. Uh-huh. Mmm. This is an on-fire garbage can. Could be a nursery.” She showed me a backyard once. She goes, “I don’t even like this backyard for you.” I was like, “Oh, do tell.” She said, “It’s all pavement. I think you should have some grass out there. You know, in case you have a couple… little guys… running around in the grass.” And I got offended on behalf of my imaginary kids. I was like, “Hey, lady. I went outside about as much as Powder from the movie Powder. My children are not gonna be playing out on grass. They will be up in their rooms playing violent video games and catfishing pedophiles. These are my children. And that’s my wife!”I didn’t mean to make it sound like we don’t want children. We don’t, but I didn’t mean to make it sound like that. See, I just don’t think babies like me very much. Sometimes babies will point at me, and I don’t care for that shit at all. Like, I’ll be on an elevator, and a baby will be there in its big, like, stroller activity tray, just, like, working on one Cheerio with Bobby Fischer-like intensity. And it’ll look up at me and go… I like to lean in and go, “Stop snitchin’, motherfucker.” And then walk off. ‘Cause you’re never too young to learn our national no-snitching policy. My friends have babies and I don’t do so well with them. I had a run-in with a two-year-old girl. I know there are better ways to start that story, but… My friend, Jeremy, has this two-year-old girl, and I really like her. She’s a sweet kid. I really like his daughter a lot. But I was over at his family’s house for the Fourth of July, and he had his daughter on his knee. And it was a very lovely day. His whole extended family was there. And he was bouncing his two-year-old up and down, and he pointed at me and he said to his two-year-old, “Do you know who that is? That’s your Uncle John.” And I was like, “Oh, my God. That’s so sweet. I’m her Uncle John.” And then the baby pointed at me and said, “Uncle John has a penis.” I thank you for laughing, because no one did that day! Fell deadly silent, is what they all did. Hey, do you know what you’re supposed to say when a baby points at you and knowingly says, “He has a penis”? No, I’m asking, ’cause I don’t know what to say in that situation. Here’s what I went with that day. I said, “Oh, come on!” I don’t know. I thought that’d be good. But then it just made it worse, ’cause it sounded like the baby and I had an arrangement not to talk about it, and she had violated my trust. Like, the baby had been like, “Do you have a penis?” And I was like, “Yes, I do, but you’re a baby, so discretion is key.” And then the next day she goes, “He has a penis,” and I go, “Oh, come on! Someone can’t keep a secret!” Luckily, Jeremy’s wife saved the day. The baby’s mom saved the day. She came in and she picked up the baby, and she was like, “It’s okay. She’s just going through that phase where she says penis and vagina a lot.” Aren’t we all? And, by the way, it would’ve been a totally different situation if the baby had said vagina. Like, if a grown woman had walked in the room, and the baby had been like, “She has a vagina,” the woman could be like, “Yes, I do, and it’s magnificent.” And we would all be like, “Hooray! You are brave!” No one wants to applaud the penis of a 32-year-old weirdo.It’s fun to be married. I’ve never been supervised before. I’m supervised. She studies what I do. Like an anthropologist. She’ll be like, “Sometimes, he will watch a movie on TV even though he already owns that movie on DVD. Pointing this out to him confuses and upsets him.” I had no supervision when I was a kid. We were free to do what we wanted. But also, with that, no one cared about kids. I grew up before children were special. I did. Very early ’80s, right before children became special. Like, I remember when milk carton kids became a thing. When they were like, “Hey, we should start looking for some of these guys. I don’t think they’re just blowing off steam.” No one cared about my opinion when I was a little kid. No one cared what I thought. Sometimes, people would say, “What do you think you’re doing?” But that just meant “Stop.” They didn’t actually wanna know my thought process. They didn’t want me to be like, “Well, I was gonna put this bottle rocket into this carton of eggs, so that when I lit off the bottle rocket, the eggs would explode everywhere.” “Oh, well, that’s very interesting. And what brought you to this experiment?” “Oh, well, thank you for asking. Well… you know how I’m filled with rage? I’m so horny and angry all the time… and I have no outlet for it. So… eggs.” Your opinion doesn’t matter in elementary school either. It matters in college. College is just your opinion. Just you raising your hand and being like, “I think Emily Dickinson’s a lesbian.” And they’re like, “Partial credit.” And that’s a whole thing. But in elementary school, it doesn’t matter what you think, it just matters what you know. You have to have answers to questions. And if you say, “I don’t know,” you get an X on your test, and you get it wrong and that’s not fair, ’cause your brain has never been smaller. Also, that’s not how life works. I’m in my 30s now. If you came to me now and you were like, “Hey, John, name three things that the Stamp Act of 1775 accomplished.” I’d go, “I don’t know. Get out of my apartment,” you know? But when you’re a little kid, you can’t say, “I don’t know.” You should be able to. That should be an acceptable answer on a test. You should be able to write in, “I don’t know. I know you told me. But I have had a very long day. I am very small. And I have no money. So you can imagine the kind of stress that I am under.” Or if it’s one of those true or false questions, you should be able to add a third option which is, “Who’s to say?” Kids are much more supervised now, but also, they have a lot of rights. Like, that’s the biggest civil rights increase I’ve seen in my lifetime. The rights of children have gone through the roof. I had no rights when I was a little kid. I remember, one time, I walked into a supermarket by myself, and I walked in through the double doors, and the woman behind the register just looked at me and she went, “No!” And I went, “All right.” And I turned around and left. That’s how broken I was.And there weren’t special things for kids the way there are now. Like, we would just go see movies. Any movie. Like Back to the Future. That was a movie everyone could see. Kids could kinda see it. Great movie, right? I rewatched it recently. It’s a very weird movie. Marty McFly is a 17-year-old high school student whose best friend is a disgraced nuclear physicist. And, I shit you not, they never explain how they became friends. They never explain it. Not even in a lazy way, like, “Hey, remember when we met in the science building?” They don’t even do that. And we were all fine with it. We were just like, “What, who’s his best friend? A disgraced nuclear physicist? All right, proceed.” What a strange movie to sell to be a family movie. Two guys had to go in and do that. They had to be like, “Okay… we got an idea… for the next big family-action-comedy. All right, it’s about a guy named Marty, and he’s very lazy. He’s always sleeping late.” “Okay. Is he cool like Ferris Bueller?” “No. But he does have this best friend who’s, you know, a disgraced… nuclear physicist.” “I’m confused here. This best friend, this is another student?” “No, no, no. No, this guy’s either, like, 40 or 80. Even we don’t know how old this guy’s supposed to be. But one day, the boy and the scientist, they go back in time and they build a time machine. Whoa!” “Okay. I think I see where you’re going here. They build a time machine, and they go back in time, and they stop the Kennedy assassination.” “Ah! Oh, wow, that’s a really good idea, I mean, we didn’t even think of that.” “All right, well, what do they do with the time machine?” “Well, now I’m embarrassed to say. Ah, well, all right, all right, all right. We thought… We thought it would be funny, you know, if the boy, if he went back in time and, you know, he tried to fuck his mom.” “I don’t know. We thought that’d be fun for people. But, no, good point. No, he doesn’t get to, he doesn’t get to. ‘Cause this family friend named Biff, he comes in and he tries to rape the mom in front of the son. The dad’s gotta beat the rapist off of her. And also, we’re gonna imply that a white man wrote ‘Johnny B. Goode.’ So, we’re gonna take that away from ’em.” “Well, this is the best movie idea I have ever heard in my life. We’re gonna make three of them. Now, you say they go to the past. How about we call it Back to the Past?” “No, no, no. Back to the Future.” “Right, but they go to the past.” “Yeah.”Kids have it very good now. My friend’s a teacher. She told me that, uh… the parents will take the kids’ side over the teacher now. That’s insane. That never happened. My parents trusted every grown-up… more than they trusted me. I don’t mean coaches and teachers. Any human adult’s word… was better than mine. Any hobo or drifter could have taken me by the ear up to my front door and been like, “Excuse me! Your kid bit my dick.” And my mom would be like, “John Edmund Mulaney, did you bite this nice man’s dick?” And I would be the only one who’s like, “Hey, doesn’t anyone wanna know why… his dick was near my biters… in the first place? Isn’t anyone curious… as to how I had access?” Don’t get me wrong, my parents love us. They just didn’t like us. We weren’t friends. People are now like, “My mom’s my best friend.” I was like, “Oh, is she a super bad mom?” My parents didn’t trust us, and they shouldn’t have trusted us. We were little goblins. We were terrible. I remember, one time, we were going to this resort for a vacation when we were little kids. Three weeks before we went to the resort, my dad sat us down and he said, “All right, we’re going to a resort, and I’ve just been informed that the man who owns the resort only has one arm.” And we were like, “Oh, yes! Yay! Yes!” “Now, I’m telling you three weeks in advance, so that you will not freak out when you see that he only has one arm.” “Oh, we’re gonna freak out so bad!” “Yes, John, you have a question?” “How did he lose his arm?” “That’s exactly what you won’t ask.” And then I did ask. I went into the kitchen one day, and I was like, “So, how’d you lose your arm?” And he was like, “Well, I was born with only one arm.” And I was like, “Nah.”No, my parents loved us. It’s just, like, they were the cops, you know? And we were criminals. So, we didn’t get along. We only got along in that way that, like, cops will sometimes be chummy with criminals. Like, when my dad and I would talk, it was like that scene in the movie Heat, when Robert De Niro and Al Pacino sit down in that diner. We kind of had that rapport of, like, “Hmm, we’re not so different, you and I. You have your law practice, and me, I have all these fucking markers.” “I guess we both have responsibilities when you look at it that way.” My dad would respect it if I could get away with breaking a rule. We had a rule in our house, you were not allowed to watch TV on a school night. So, every school night, I would 100% be watching TV. And I would hear my dad coming, I would immediately turn the TV off and grab any book, magazine, periodical, anything. And I’d open it and pretend to be doing homework. My dad would walk in the room and he would go, “What are you doing? Are you watching TV?” And I’d go, “No, man. I’m not watching TV.” And the TV wouldn’t even be dark yet. It would still have, like, a neon green halo around it. It’d be sizzling like a glass of Pepsi. And I would look my dad in the eyes and go, “No, I’m just reading this Yellow Pages.”My dad loved us. He just didn’t care about our general happiness or self-esteem. I remember, one time, we were really little kids. I have two sisters and a brother, and all four of us were in our family car ride for three hours going to Wisconsin. My dad was driving, going down the highway in our white van with wood around the side. ‘Cause you remember when you wanted your car to be made of wood? You remember that era? Where we were like, “How much wood can we get on this car… without it catching on fire?” But then the big announcement. “We here at Plymouth-Chrysler can put a saucy stripe of wood safely on the outside of your car, for all those times you’ve looked at your minivan and thought, ‘Huh! It needs a belt.'” So, we’re going on the highway. We’ve been on the road for three hours. And in the distance, we see a McDonald’s. We see the golden arches. And we got so excited. We started chanting, “McDonald’s! McDonald’s! McDonald’s! McDonald’s!” And my dad pulled into the drive-thru, and we started cheering. And then, he ordered one black coffee for himself. And kept driving. And, you know, as mad as that made me as a little kid, in retrospect, that is the funniest thing I have ever seen in my entire life. How perfect is that? He had a vanload of little kids, and he got black coffee. The one thing from McDonald’s no child could enjoy. My dad is cold-blooded. He once shushed a kid during Lion King on Broadway. That actually happened. We were at Lion King on Broadway, and there was a five-year-old behind us going, “Look, it’s Pumbaa! Look, it’s Timon!” And my dad turned around and said, “Are you going to talk the entire time?” He’s my hero.The weirdest thing when I was a kid was how much they scared us about smoking weed. They scared us about it constantly. And I’ve been on tour this year… Marijuana is legal in 18 or 19 states in some form or another. It’s insane. Yeah, well… All right, don’t “whoo” if you’re white. It’s always been legal for us. Come on, sir. We don’t go to jail for marijuana, you silly billy. When I was arrested with a one-hitter at a Rusted Root concert, I did not serve hard time. I think I got an award. Eighteen or 19 states. And, by the way, I agree, it’s a very good thing. But it’s also a really weird thing, because this is the first time I’ve ever seen a law change because the government is just like, “Fine.” You know? I’ve never seen it before. Like, gay marriage and healthcare, we have to battle it out in the Supreme Court, and be like, “Gay people are humans.” And they’re like, “We’ll think about it.” But with weed, it was just something we wanted really badly, and we kept asking them for 40 years, like, “Excuse me.” And then suddenly the government became like cool parents, and they’re just like, “Okay, here. Take a little. We’d rather you do it in the house than go somewhere else… blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Those stupid parents. And that’s a big deal because they scared us about weed constantly. It would be on our sitcoms. We’d be watching Saved by the Bell, we’d be having a great old time. And then, suddenly, a character we had not seen before would show up with some weed and the episode would stop cold in its tracks. And they’d always hold the joint… The bad guy would hold the joint in a villainous way. They’d always offer the joint in a way that no one ever holds a joint. Like it’s a skull in a Shakespeare play. And now it’s legal, and that is great news. Unless you’re a weed dealer, and then it is terrible news. And I don’t just mean because they’re about to lose out to Amazon.com. I more feel bad for weed dealers ’cause they’re about to find out that we only showed them a certain amount of politeness because they had an illegal product. And we don’t show that same politeness to people who deliver legal products. Like, when the Chinese food delivery guy comes, we don’t let him hang out after he’s delivered the Chinese food. And we don’t look the other way when he says weird shit to the girls we’re hanging out with… to try to preserve the relationship. And we definitely don’t give him some of the Chinese food. He’s never like, “Hey, can I get in on those dumplings?” And we’re like, “Yeah, we’re all friends.”What are you, on your phone? Hey, V-neck. Hey! – What’s your name? – Sam. Sam? Cool! What do you do to afford V-necks, Sam? Typing numbers. Ah… numbers, the letters of math. I’m sorry to bother you. I don’t mean to single you out. I hate when people get pulled out of the audience. Like, are you familiar with the Cirque du Soleil, Sam? They’re a group of French assholes that are slowly taking over America by humiliating audience members one by one. We once went to see Cirque du Soleil at Navy Pier when I was a kid, and my brother came, and he was 12 years old. You remember being 12, when you’re like, “No one look at me or I’ll kill myself.” And these French bastards come into the crowd, being like, “Le volunteer!” And they pulled my brother up on stage, and I was like, “No!” And they brought him up, and they reached into his sweatshirt, and they were like… And they had planted a bra, and they pulled out a bra and they were like… And everyone at Navy Pier was like “Ah, ha, ha, ha, ha!” And my brother was like, “That’s great!” I have had other jobs besides comedy.I was an office temp for a while. I really miss that. I loved being a temp, because I would just go from office to office and be terrible at a different job for a week. And then you just get to retire like Lou Gehrig. You’re like, “Thank you. No one will ever see me again.” And they’re like, “Goodbye!” I worked at an office once on 57th Street in New York City. I was there for a couple weeks. I was in a cubicle next to this other cubicle. This woman named Mischa sat in the other cubicle. I want to get the number right. I think Mischa had… about 900,000 photos of her daughter up in her cubicle. Almost like she was trying to solve a conspiracy about her daughter, A Beautiful Mind-style. I think about Mischa two times a week… because of a phone call she had next to me one day. It was one of my first days, and I was sitting next to her. And her phone rang, and this was her call, and I’m quoting. Her phone rang and she said, “Hello? Hush!” And then she hung up. Think about that two times a week. And I didn’t know her well enough by then to be like, “Hey, what kind of a person are you?” You know? Who could she have been talking to? “Hello? Hush!” This was a place of business. My only thought was that it was the CEO of the company being like, “Mischa, help. I’m doing a crossword puzzle. I need a four-letter word for ‘be quiet’ right now.” – “Hush!” – “You’re promoted.”I temped at a little web company on 25th Street in New York City. It was a small web company owned by this old man who was old, old, old money New York. His name was Henry J. Finch IV. Like old, old, old money. Like, his money was in molasses or something. He owned this web company. I have no idea why he owned this web company. I think he won it in a rich man’s game of dice and small binoculars, or something. Mr. Finch wore linen suits. He had suspenders, he had a bow tie, he had a hat, he had a cane with an ivory handle. I’m giving you more description than you need, ’cause I need you to believe me. This was a real person I knew in the 21st century. Mr. Finch was in his 70s. He had an assistant named Mary. She was in her 50s, she was Korean. I don’t know why he had an assistant. He did not need one. Unless he needed someone to be like, “Remember, Mr. Finch, at five o’clock, you need to keep looking like a hard-boiled egg.” One day, Mr. Finch came into the office. It had been raining. Everything I’m about to say to you was said in front of me on that afternoon. Mr. Finch walked into the office, and he was wearing a raincoat, he was wearing a rain hat, and he had his cane. And he walked in and he said, and I’m quoting, “Ah! One feels like a duck splashing around in all this wet! And when one feels like a duck, one is happy!” And then Mary yelled, “Ooh, ducklings!” To which Mr. Finch replied, “Too old to be a duckling. Quack, quack.” And then walked into his office. I think about that every goddamn day. I mean, imagine you’re me. You’re a 22-year-old temp, and you’re so hungover, and you just wanna die every day. And then that happens in front of you, and I don’t know, gives you hope? And I did that a little fast. Let me break that conversation down for you. Mr. Finch walked in, and he began a conversation the way anyone would. “Ah!” “One feels like a duck splashing around in all this wet!” The rain. “And when one feels like a duck, one is happy!” Now, that’s debatable. But rather than debate that point, Mary brought up a new, separate, but interesting point… which was, “Ducklings!” But Mr. Finch, ever the realist about his own age and mortality… said, “Ah, too old to be a duckling!” As if to say, “My duckling days are behind me. Mary, don’t you see? I’m a duck now. And to prove it… Well, I’ll say just about the most famous catchphrase a duck has… ‘Quack, quack.'” And I knew right at that moment, by the way, that it meant nothing to Mr. Finch, what he had said. Crazy people are like that. They have unlimited crazy currency. Like, if I had gone into his office a couple weeks later and been like, “Hey, Finch, you remember that time you were like, ‘Too old to be a duckling. Quack, quack’?” He would just be like, “Ah, perhaps I did quack! But such is life for an old knickerbocker like me.” Like, he’d say something else crazy.That’s the wonderful thing about crazy people, you know? Is that they just have unlimited currency. The things they say mean nothing to them, but they mean everything to me. I was once walking into Penn Station in New York. I was walking down 31st Street towards Eighth Avenue. I’m walking down 31st, there’s this woman standing at Eighth and 31st. I have my little roller suitcase. You can all imagine. I’m walking towards her. She’s smoking a cigarette that is not lit anymore. She’s watching me walk, kind of scanning me up and down, as if she had Terminator vision… where she could see little bits of data, like, “Little honky ass,” and could read information. As I walked past her, she said this to me. I walked past her and she said, and I’m quoting, “Eat ass, suck a dick and sell drugs.” Very dirty, yes? A very upsetting thing to hear, yes? I’m sorry you all had to hear that, but at least you all got to hear it as a group. I was alone out there that afternoon. And she said this totally unprompted. “Eat ass, suck a dick and sell drugs.” It wasn’t like I had paused in front of her and been like, “What should I do with my life?” So, I walk away from her with this to-do list. And I like structure, I like a to-do list. It did dawn on me that that list of things does get better as it goes along, when you really think about it. ‘Cause it starts in a pretty rough place. It starts with just about the worst task a to-do list can start with. But by the end, you have your own small business. And isn’t that the American dream when all’s said and done? That if you eat enough ass and suck enough dick, one day you can sell drugs. Imagine you did all that to sell drugs and then they legalize drugs, and you were like, “But I…” This has been a real thrill to perform here, by the way. I just wanna say that in all sincerity. Thanks for coming to this. Really, really appreciate it.I wanna tell you one more story before I get out of here, about the night I met a guy named Bill Clinton. Now, I don’t… Some of you know who that is? For those of you that don’t, he was President of the United States from 1993 until 2001, and he is a smooth and fantastic hillbilly who should be declared Emperor of the United States of America. Now, I know you know who Bill Clinton is. But I was doing a show at a college, and I mentioned Bill Clinton, and, like, they kind of didn’t know who he was. Like, sorry, they knew the name, right? But they only knew this 2015 Bill Clinton, who’s a very different Bill Clinton. Have you seen his ass lately? What the hell is he trying to pull? He’s all thin now, and he wears these little tight suits, and he’s got these grandpa reading glasses, like, “Hey, I can’t do nothing to nobody no more.” “Oh, me? I’m just an old, old man. I don’t have the appetites.” You know? And he’s always flying around the world with Bill Gates trying to cure AIDS.That is not the Bill Clinton that we all signed up for 20 years ago. Our Bill Clinton was like a big, fat Buddy Garrity from Friday Night Lights-looking guy, who played the saxophone on Arsenio, and his work in the STD community was not in curing anything at that time. That was the man we all elected president. That was the Bill Clinton that I met. I got to meet Bill Clinton when he was Governor Clinton in 1992, when he was first running for president.And I got to meet Bill Clinton because my parents had gone to the same college as Bill Clinton. They’re a little younger, but they went to the same college. So, when he was first running for president, he would have all these big, like, alumni fundraisers, and everyone who went was invited to go. Now, this was really cool for a couple reasons. One, I got to meet Bill Clinton. But two, I got to watch my parents watch someone they went to school with become the president. And that is super funny to see, ’cause think about some of the people you went to school with. Now imagine they’re becoming the president. Imagine Sam was becoming the president. It would stir up strong emotions. And my parents had very different opinions on Bill Clinton.My mom loved Bill Clinton, ’cause Bill Clinton was always a really charismatic, handsome guy. I mean, think about how many women he got in the 1990s when he looked like Frank Caliendo doing John Madden. Now… imagine him as a college student. And my mom tells me that there was this sort of chivalrous policy on campus back then, where, late at night, if female students were leaving the library unaccompanied, male students were encouraged to wait out in front and offer to walk them home. That sounds good, right? So, my mom tells me that Bill Clinton would be out in front of the library every single night… just being like, “Hey, can I walk ya home? Hey, can I walk ya home? Hey, can I walk ya home? Hey, can I walk ya home?” And one night, my mom was leaving the library, and Bill Clinton was like, “Hey, can I walk ya home?” And my mom was like, “Hell, yes.” So… This is absolutely true. My mom, little Ellen Stanton, walked arm-in-arm with Bill Clinton to her dorm. And she was like, “You know, I wanted to invite him up for a beer.” And I was like, “Thanks, I’m nine.” But… her roommate was upstairs, so she lost her chance with Bill Clinton.Now, my dad, on the other hand, hated Bill Clinton, because my parents were dating during this time. And also, my dad’s a much more morally-upright, conservative kind of guy. He always told me that he hated it in college that Bill Clinton could, quote, “Get away with anything.” Can you imagine how he felt later?So, one day, this invitation arrives for a fundraiser where you could meet Bill Clinton. My mom opens it first and she goes, “Oh, we have to go. We have to go see Bill.” And without looking up at her, my dad just says, “Why? It’s not like he’s gonna remember you.” One black coffee. Same motherfucker. So, my mom says, “Fine! I’ll go and I’ll take John.” And I was like, “Hell, yeah.” And I slid in the room in my First Communion suit, ready to go. ‘Cause I loved Bill Clinton. I was ten years old. If you were a kid when Bill Clinton was first released, it was the most exciting thing ever. We’d never seen a cool politician before. And he would go on MTV, and he’d have cool answers to kids’ questions. They’d be like, “Governor, what’s your favorite food?” And he’d be like, “I don’t know, fries?” And we’d be like, “Yay, we eat fries!”I learned to play his campaign song on the piano. It was “Don’t Stop” by Fleetwood Mac… from Rumours, an album written by and for people cheating on each other. He let us know who he was right away. So, I went with my mom, as her date… to reconnect with Governor Bill Clinton. We walked into the ballroom. It was a big hotel ballroom. It was the Palmer House Hilton, big Hilton hotel ballroom. Walked into the ballroom, it was packed with people. It’s actually the ballroom from the end of the movie The Fugitive, remember? So, that ballroom. So, my mom and I walk in, it’s packed with people, the… Sorry, the end where Harrison Ford, as Dr. Richard Kimble, bursts in to confront Dr. Charles Nichols, right? Okay. So, that ballroom. So, my mom and I walk in, it’s packed with people. Why does Kimble confront Nichols? Well, I know we all know this, but… No, no. But, but, but… Kimble, he found out that Nichols, along with Devlin MacGregor and Lentz, who has mysteriously died, they had hired Frederick Sykes, the one-armed man, to kill Kimble. Kimble’s wife wasn’t even the target. I know we all know this. But they were gonna kill Kimble because he wasn’t gonna approve certain liver samples to pass RUD-90. So, Kimble finds out about all of this, and, of course, he’s furious. And he bursts into the ballroom and he goes, “You switched the samples!” And Dr. Nichols is like, “Ladies and gentlemen, my friend, Dr. Richard Kimble.” What accent did that guy have, by the way? He goes, “You switched the samples! And you doctored your research! So that you could have Provasic!”Anyway, so it’s that ballroom. So, we walk into that ballroom. It was packed with people. It was packed with people. A real Who’s Not of Chicago celebrities. Walter Jacobson was there. Walter Jacobson was the local Fox anchor. He’d do fun things where he’d go undercover as a homeless person. And he’d be like, “Oh, what time is the soup?” And they’d be like, “Man, you’re Walter Jacobson.” He was there. Everybody. And on the far side of the ballroom, under a spotlight, we saw a little bit of silver hair. And it was him… Bill Clinton. The Comeback Kid. But he was surrounded by reporters, and photographers, and Secret Service. So, what are you gonna do? Well, if you’re my mom, you ball up the back of my sport coat, and you push me forward like a human shield. And then you start jogging while yelling, “This ten-year-old boy has to meet the next president of the United States!” Kind of implying that I might be dying. My feet were not on the ground. She was swinging me like a snowplow. I was just mowing down fat Chicago Democrats. I pushed past all the reporters, I pushed past all the photographers. We pushed past all the Secret Service.We land at Bill Clinton’s feet. Bill Clinton turns, looks at my mom and says, “Hey, Ellen,” ’cause he never forgets a bitch, ever. My mom melts. She goes, “Hi, Bill.” Then it is revealed that she has no plan. So… she pushes me towards Clinton and she goes, “This is my son, John, and he’s also going to be president.” And I was like, “What the hell are you talking about? I’m not gonna be president.” And I know now that I’m definitely never gonna be president. Not unless everyone gets real cool about a bunch of stuff really quickly. Based on my ten-year-old memory, Bill Clinton is about 13 feet tall. And he leaned down, because, well, I was wearing this button that I bought outside the fundraiser. It was a cartoon button of George H. W. Bush, and it had a quail flying over his head, and it was shitting on his head. And it said, “Bird-brained.” And I thought it was very funny. And Bill Clinton leaned down so that only I could hear and he said, “Hey, man, I like your button.” And I said, “You can do whatever you want forever.” And he took my advice. And… it was the best night of my entire life.And I got home that night… I got home that night, and my dad was still awake, like, reading angry under one lamp, just like… And I went up to him and I went, “Hey! I’m gonna be a Democrat.” “And I’m gonna vote for Bill Clinton.” And without looking up at me, my dad just said, “You have the moral backbone of a chocolate éclair.” You know, how you talk to a child. So, here’s the end of that story. That was 1992.Let’s flash forward five years to 1997. It is now 1997. I am a sophomore in high school, Bill Clinton is in his second term as president. And on the morning that the Monica Lewinsky scandal breaks on the cover of The New York Times. It had been on the Drudge Report, and then it was on the cover of The New York Times. That morning, I wake up to the newspaper hitting me in the face. I am a teenager asleep in bed, and the newspaper hits me in the face and falls open on my stomach. And I open my eyes to see my dad standing there dressed for work, and he says, “The other shoe just dropped.” And then my dad went in to work to find out that his law firm had been hired to defend Bill Clinton.Good night, Chicago. and thats mulaney for ya

#loml: fish #jordan fisher

8 notes · View notes

archtroop · 4 years

Text

So just binged Titans (2018) on Netflix and -

I want to say stuff. Lets start with the basics. I’m not a hardcore DC comics fan. I’m your occasional TV viewer who watched Teen Titans, and loved the Batman cartoons. I’m your ordinary Joe. That would mean, for me, this show is my introduction into these characters. I’m viewing these stories as manifestations of archetypes, I am not familiar with “classic” characterizations, or “the right way of this one to talk” and so on.

I enjoyed the show a lot. Like, I literally binged the whole two seasons in the expense of some very cherished sleep time. It sucked me in.

And I became very curious about the backgrounds of the characters, and I looked some of it up (fucked up stuff! good!) and I was interested in maybe some reviews or hardcore fans sating their... say.

And. Guys. Guys.

So much negativity? Over... it being too violent?... Too dark...? Too... new?

I watched this show right now with virgin eyes. And I have to say that,

A. Dick Grayson of this Titans is the definition of “Dick Move”, and is literally trope co founder. And I love it. GO GRAY MORALITY GO. Also his introduction was. GOOD STUFF. I am rooting for this broken brain. His choices and inner struggles were very intriguing to watch, also his choices, morals and oh overall, a beautiful rendition of an adult, a grownup person that comes to terms with some very fucked up implicaitons.

B. For all the reviewers trashing Raven, calling her OOC and HotTopicRaven, guys, F U I loved her, I loved Teen Titans Raven as a kid, and this one is 16 and goddammit she is allowed to be emo and rock her style. And that she does. The “possession” thing she has is creepy cringe AWESOME STUFF. She rocks it, The actress ROCKS IT. Her whole journey was so engaging. TEAM RAVEN!

C. I was not familiar with Hawk and Dove, but I’m here rooting for them. Like full on SHIP THAT SHIP. I want them to be together, and I don’t care they broke my heart and then patched it up and I’m here for this couple.

D. Gar. OH PRECIOUS GAR, thanQ for righting the wrongs of decades of werepeople by transforming in and out while naked. I’m just so so grateful for this, but also, SO SO likable and the amount of empathy that was dragged out of me for the poor dude, I just want more screen time of him doing whatever he wants to do. I will literally watch an episode of Gar making various veggie shakes. I would. But also I want him to have more plot. Like, yesterday.

E. Kory/Starfire. Whoever trashes her costumes, go sleep on some legos. She rocks it, the actress rocks it, SHE ROCKS THAT RING ON HER LONG BEAUTIFUL FINGERS, and if anyone even dares to oink anything about her being black as apologetic, I say F U, she literally ABSORBS SUN POWER in this version, that melanin is rightfully hers. Also if you want to call me racist have fun, but I love the idea that genetics are applied with scientific purposes rather then, just, um, representation fodder launching pad. Fuck this shit, SHE IS THE SUN, GORGEOUS SUN. I love her discovery of self, maybe a hasty one. but damn poignant. I enjoyed her way of going around not remembering who she is. I root for her and her upcoming clash with her sister.

D. Donna. I kinda felt she will be in and then out and I didn’t really get attached to her BUT she was introduced as this very independent and firmly grounded person, and I was so happy to see her keeping her ground, good for her.

E. Jason Todd. Now here is a surprise. What a bomb of character that one. Now after doing minimal research about the fucked up origins of that one, I wasn’t surprised to see how he is probably the most twist and broken mess of them all. And he is the embodiment of DC’s wrongs, so it seems. This one is the ghost that Corp couldn’t get rid of or something. This one carries so so much nuance. But what really got me is how ensemble DarkHorse this one is. The actor is amazing. It reminds me how Dylan O’Brien of Teen Wolf out-shined the ever-living crap out of his co-stars cast back in the day. This one has similar energy. I literally squeezed on my couch into a little bulb of fright and pity when he had his outburst in front of Rose. His violence is so spot on brutal - I mean, while Dick’s violence is vicious, this one is brutal and I’m here for this. Also, his very introduction? Shivers down my spine and that feeling of “shit he had it REAL BAD as a kid. THE WORST”.

E.02 I... don’t care for Rose. Right now anyway. Maybe later on with her half brother as her copilot in S3? We’ll see. For now...? meh Sorry.

F. Conner. From the very moment the name Superman was dropped I was like, there is going to be a supersomething. Now I am not familiar with all the comics and I barely remember Teen Titans, but I am on tumblr, so. OK his origins are creepy AF, also intriguing, and Lex, you obsessed fucker. GOOD. But then Jason was falling of the building and it was literally 2+2 “oh Conner is gonna save the poor soul”, but oh no they had to go full-on “catch you as you fall Lois Lane style” but except no flying up - instead crashing on a car. This character, just broke out of a laboratory, had a random journey, and was alive for like two days in total just to be at the right time at the right place to save Jason falling from that building? ?? What am I suppose to do with this information??? I mean, Someone DID THIS. And I mean, that is kinda spot on. The writers should be VERY CAREFUL NOW with that, coz it can be either beautiful stuff or a very gruesome publicity fodder.

G. THEME. This Titans is. HORRIFICALLY IN YOUR FACE OOZES DARK TRAUMA AND CHILD ABUSE. While watching it I lost count of either abused/used children and crappy fathers. Dick is introduced while investigating a child abuse case. Raven was literally conceived so her demonic father could pass through her into this world. AND SO ON. And that literally includes Bruce and Dick themselves under that category, as the bad fathers. GOOD STUFF. You should really meditate on that. The amount of usage of children under the hands of adults in all the verity of forms, from sexual assault and rape and whatever violence to selling for profit (Conner is brainwashed and has a bid put on him, as a soldier for sale. He is a few weeks old.) is shockingly overwhelming. Like, this is THE THEME. Obviously this is a Found Family Trope kind of show, but oh my GOD they all are running from is just like, I dunno a mass of horny catholic priests?

IN CONCLUSION

Titans may have a messy output with many plots but it is not that hard to follow. It’s not just darker and edgier, it’s just NOT THAT COMIC. This seems to be a show that might tackle some of the darkest stuff media doesn’t outright... tackles. It’s more then just “oh crap daddy issues”. It has the actual feeling of “I will not be avenged. How do I move forward. Who needs me, who do I need to heal?” If it plays it right, it can be a thing of beauty. Or, if it will hear to all those negative shallow reviews, it will go crashing down in shamble.

Signed, a satisfied, average viewer.

#titans #netflix titans #titans 2018 #I have more on my mind but need to wrap up

24 notes · View notes

things2mustdo · 3 years

Link

I went to visit my family for Thanksgiving, and as usual, I was confronted with numerous blue pill beliefs. While I’m no longer annoyed by these things, because I’ve gone through the “Return Journey” phase of swallowing the red pill, I did notice something that was extremely disturbing.

As I grew tired of arguing over basic political, economic, and gender points, I meandered downstairs to my family’s recreation room. There was a group of my younger relatives, aged 16-20, watching some show on Netflix about trans-gendered individuals.

I don’t know what the show was called, but one thing that really struck me was the show’s uncanny ability to use emotionally charged scenes and drama to elicit a feeling of compassion for the characters. In other words, numerous TV shows are now starting to take advantage of our natural empathy, and using it to sway our political and social opinions.

Emotionally Gripping

As I stood behind the couch watching a few minutes of this transgender show, I saw a very heart wrenching scene take place. Although the nuances of the story line were lost to me, I gathered enough information to see what was going on.

Basically, some guy was getting surgery to turn into a woman. As he was in the operating room, something went terribly wrong, and despite the surgeons’ desperate attempts to save him, he ended up perishing.

The following scene was comprised of extremely grief-inducing piano music played to various clips of the man’s children all mourning their loss. While this may seem innocuous, or like it’s just “creative, dramatic television,” I believe that it’s actually something far more sinister.

What’s going on here, is that the elites (because remember, this is a top down operation) are trying to traumatize the average American youth with images of the “horrors that transgender people go through!” They’re using television to create these emotional “triggers,” if you will, that will be ignited anytime someone says something against transgenders.

In other words, the trauma that occurs from becoming engrossed in this TV show (in our example) leaves an emotional residue of sorts, so that whenever the topic of transgenderism is brought up in conversation, the viewer subconsciously remembers the emotions associated with the topic which the TV show implanted into his mind.

Emotional Triggers

This became abundantly clear to me as I was arguing with a friend from the West Coast over transgenderism. I very calmly said that I believe it’s a mental illness, and should be treated as such. I said that these people need help, and we shouldn’t encourage them. I backed my assertion by referencing how the chief psychologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital has vehemently called out doctors who perform transgender surgeries as “collaborating with a mental illness for profit.”

Despite my calm and collected assertions, she grew EXTREMELY emotional and automatically assumed a whole host of things about me:

I’m a disgusting, careless sociopath

I have no sympathy for others’ suffering and I’m a cold-hearted bastard

I vehemently hate anyone who’s different than me

Despite the fact that none of these things are true, it became clear to me why she automatically believed this about me: the TV shows that she watches had been subtly implanting little emotional biases into her brain. This is how manipulative our “real” media is.

What happened, in psychological terms, was that as I was calmly explaining my perspective on transgenderism, her subconscious was flooded with all of the EMOTIONS that she associates with the topic:

All of the pain and grief she experienced from TV shows depicting transgender “issues”

How Bruce Jenner is a “hero,” and how much mainstream “opposition” he encountered when coming out

All of the anger she experienced when the token “anti-transgender person” in each show was a huge dick to the main character (more on this in the next section)

All rational thought was completely stopped, as she had literally been trained to elicit a certain response whenever the topic of transgenderism is brought up. Do you see my point? By repeatedly exposing people to scenes that elicit sympathy for transgenders, the media is engineering a widespread social response in favor of it.

Token Characters

As I alluded to before, another underhanded tactic that mainstream TV shows use is that they never have a rational, level-headed man who supports traditional marriage and normal heterosexuality. Any time someone in mainstream media doesn’t support the main character’s disorder, he’s always portrayed as a complete asshole.

This can take the form of him beating up the main character, bullying the main character, or what have you. I recall several years ago there was ample talk at the work place over some “anti-homosexual” character in glee that smothered a smoothie onto a guy just because he was homosexual, or something ridiculous like that.

Despite the fact that NOBODY I know would do something like this, the elite-sponsored TV utilizes token characters in order to implant a certain idea into our heads—the idea that everyone who opposes deviant sexual orientations is a cold-hearted bully. I recall that this was pointed out to me by a Catholic high school teacher, and it didn’t make any sense to me back then (before homosexuality was normal).

Now, in retrospect, I’m extremely thankful that he planted that seed in my class’s mind. The more that I look at television through this lens, the more I see what he was talking about. There’s never a level-headed, confident, genuine man that has game, either. It’s always either a completely meek beta male, or a chauvinistic “bad boy” Hank-Moody type character (although I do love me some Hank Moody).

This phenomena is taken even further as the transgender or homosexual person in mainstream TV is almost always portrayed as some brave, sweet, sensitive soul, with a hard life. In other words, the elites are engineering a dichotomy as Roosh has referenced before.

The dichotomy is that you’re either a sweet, empathetic, gentle-hearted person who supports transgenderism and deviant sexual preferences, or you’re a complete asshole who bullies and berates people just because “you’re mean.” This use of labeling brainwashes others into IMMEDIATELY putting you into the “sociopathic jerk” category if you don’t support transgenderism, making any and all rational discourse folly.

Subtle Desensitization

Another terrifying event that comes to mind of the media’s disgusting methods was when I was watching a popular kid’s TV show known as “Adventure Time,” a year or two ago. Again, I was with my family for some holiday event (I can’t remember which), and recall some of the kids watching this show.

Despite the fact that it’s labeled as a kid’s show, I saw an insidious little dialogue take place that was meant to desensitize children to pedophilia. In the show, there was some ball going on (I assume it was like a “prom” type deal), and the old wizard was looking for a partner.

He ended up going with some underage girl, who was probably 60 years his prior, and when the main character pointed this out, the old wizard simply stated: “Age…is nothing but a number!” Upon which the characters started dancing and doing comical things to prevent any sort of rational thought occurring after this was said.

After seeing this I became extremely disgusted and turned off the television, but that’s beyond the point. Why is this type of dribble being used to brainwash our youth? Anyone with half a brain can see that the point behind this scene was to start subtly implanting the seeds of pedophilia into a child’s mind.

Again, the words of my wise old Catholic high school teacher come to mind. I’ll never forget when he told me that “in 15 years, pedophilia will become normal.” My entire class was shocked, and couldn’t comprehend such a thing happening. He said this in 2009, and it seems that his prediction is coming true.

“First it will start with the media,” he said. “They’ll have some show where they make jokes about it and they’ll keep the humor very lighthearted, never showing the actual act. They’ll begin the process of desensitizing you, then eventually some politician will bring it up, and it will be an official stance that other politicians will be forced to take. This will begin the process of slowly normalizing it.”

My God was this man spot on, because this is EXACTLY how the media sways our opinions.

Keep in mind that their methods are SUBTLE, and that’s the point—they want to keep it below the level of thought so that you never question what they’re teaching you. Any time a strange or ridiculous belief is asserted, they very quickly move into a joyful scene or celebration to not only prevent you from thinking too much about the ridiculous belief, but to have you associate happiness with it, as well, which brings me to my next point.

Association And Correlation Bias

There’s a very powerful phenomena in psychology known as association; this is sometimes also called the correlation bias, or “Illusory Correlation.” This is basically your mind’s tendency to look for relationships where there aren’t any.

For example, why do you think most modern girls aren’t girlfriend material? Why do you think that the average man is weak, pathetic, and emasculated? It’s because of the media’s tendency to slowly create illusory associations within your mind.

The media causes women to associate happiness and a successful life with the following:

Being a man-hating feminist, who can’t submit to a strong, confident man

Not cooking or cleaning, because that’s “sexist”

Riding the alpha male cock carousel, and not getting married, because marriage is “oppressive”

The media creates a false correlation in women’s minds by constantly portraying bitchy, overly-masculine, slutty women as being empowered, sought-after, and happy. As any man who’s been learning game knows, this is absolute nonsense.

It doesn’t matter, though—once your brain has an association, it’s extremely difficult to get rid of it. This is why so many men are emasculated nowadays. It teaches us to associate:

Being a weak bitch with getting a hot girlfriend

Being a feminist and leftist with having girls think you’re noble and heroic

Courting a slut with being a gentleman

As any modern man who reads the manosphere knows, these are completely fallacious beliefs. Being a weak, low-testosterone man will not in fact land you the girls. Being a screaming leftist who holds those “I’m a feminist because,” signs will not get you the approval of women, and courting a washed up slut does not make you a gentleman (it makes you stupid).

Despite the obvious illogical nature of these beliefs, because the mainstream media has 8 hours a day to indoctrinate us, most men end up buying into them wholeheartedly, and will even berate you for having game when you CLEARLY get more women than them.

“So What Can I Do?”

First things first, stop watching mainstream media. In case you haven’t noticed, the MSM is starting to feel the effects of men waking up; in fact, they’ve recently gone on a long, drawn-out tirade about “fake news,” or in other words, news that is red-pilled.

I haven’t watched mainstream media EVER—the only time that I ever watch MSM is if they’re interviewing a pickup artist, a manosphere blogger, or if I’m trying to debunk their ludicrous reporting. I get almost all of my news from sites like ROK, Danger And Play, Info Wars, Natural News, and the people that I follow on Twitter.

In addition to only consuming a red-pilled information diet, ensure that your children don’t watch TV unarmed. I saw a phenomenal post recently on “How to Raise Red-Pilled Daughters,” and the ROK author talks about how he doesn’t flat out ban TV, but rather teaches his daughters to think rationally and learn to see the foolishness of MSM.

Aside from not watching MSM and raising your family to be skeptical of it, you can also support alternative media sites by simply tuning in. You don’t have to buy any of their products (although it helps); simply giving them your attention and leaving a thoughtful comment or two is enough to generate interest.

All in all, we’re facing extremely tumultuous times. More and more people are starting to break free of the MSM’s grip on their mind, but the men who get left behind end up more brainwashed than ever. Eventually, once the MSM dies, we can begin the long and arduous process of reclaiming our country—and this, my friends, is something I believe is worth fighting for.

Read More: Fact Checking Emotional Propaganda

When I was making a purchase at my local bookstore last week, the cashier solicited me for a donation. This donation was for a charity dealing with sick children or something. I told cashier I came here to buy a book not make donations. I guess she realized I am not one to be guilt tripped into doing things and told me that many people do not have the courage to say no. This pressure to comply due to emotional appeal has run rampant in America. When people make decisions on how they feel or manipulated by their feelings, not many good things can come of it.

Usually I do not delve into the details of the various schemes and manipulations that powerful people do in order to influence people’s behaviors. Someone actually fact checked one sales pitch for the limitation of guns. This exercise in breaking down an argument outside of the emotional shows that emotion is all it has. While the premise is guns, the method is pure emotional appeal.

The Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg has decided to throw his hat in, as well as his capital, in a political fight against the NRA by spending an estimated fifty million dollars to start up Everytown for Gun Safety @ Everytown.org. If you go to his website, one of the articles pops out on the front page is an “analysis” of the over sixty “school shootings” that have taken place since the Newtown massacre on December 12th, 2012.

In this era of political rhetoric and ideological echo-chambers, there is little in the way of fact-checking and realism with statistical data. The media is off panicking the masses of soccer moms and metrosexual dads that mass shootings are a growing epidemic, apparently none of whom look at the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports of homicides every year. Of the sixty-two incidents on Everytown’s “analysis”, only one can be classified as a mass murder. The FBI is quite clear that a “mass murder” involves the homicide of four or more individuals with no cooling off period between the murders. The article would lead readers to believe that there have been sixty-two incidents of similar scope as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. But this is simply not the case.

With a total combined death toll between the sixty-two “school shootings” of 39, it’s hard to match them up to Newtown, which in one incident saw 28 deaths, including the perpetrator, Adam Lanza. Despite what the media might portray for politics, ratings, or profit, such shootings are exceptionally rare. Of course, a large amount of the focus is on the AR-15 reportedly used,the gun control advocates would like gullible Americans to think without which Adam Lanza would not have been capable of such carnage. But if you remember the Virginia Tech shooting on April 16th, 2007. Seung-Hui Cho managed to kill 32 people, then himself, with nothing more than a .22LR caliber Walther P22 and 9mm Glock 19; the Walther with a magazine capacity of ten rounds and the Glock a bit more at fifteen. There is little discussion of firearms in the Everytown analysis, probably because they are virtually all handguns or the suggested firearm for home defense of Vice President Joe Biden, a shotgun.

Let’s look at that the lack of analysis this “analysis” gives us, as it’s little more than a picture of a crying woman and a list of schools at which a firearm was discharged on or nearby campus grounds since December 2012. Thirty-nine people dead, because of school shootings, between December 13th, 2012 and mid-April 2014. It’s hard to find statistics for causes of death even near that number. The United States averages roughly 51 deaths due to lightning strikes per year, over the last 20 years; according to NOAA. According to the CDC, there was an average of 3,533 unintentional drownings per year for the years of 2005-2009. Yet where is a politically motivated and affluent billionaire to launch a safety campaign outlining the dangers of pools or thunderstorms?

The fact that Mayor Bloomberg has taken Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s now infamous quote “never let a good crisis go to waste” to heart, is no surprise. But who thinks about the political realities of why someone is making moves against one of the GOP’s biggest political lobbies, using a tragedy like Newtown as the crest on their flag; when they are busy being emotionally compromised by the idea of children being gunned down in their school classrooms?

Among the 39 deaths, there is a justified case of self-defense, a possible case of self-defense, and seven cases of nothing more then suicides by firearm. The biggest trend among these “school shootings” is the shooters and victims are young black men. This reality is in stark contrast to the media image of upper-class white elementary school kids gunned down by socially awkward psychopaths with AR-15’s or other “assault weapons”. Few if any of the mainstream gun safety campaigns reflect the reality of gun violence. Remember, you are more likely to be killed by bee stings than you are to be shot on or around a school campus.

In conclusion, this emotional appeal by Mr. Bloomberg seems to be all about coercing a population into following his politics through emotional appeal. His advocacy gives them an audience of motivated people controlled by their emotions. What could a powerful person do with this audience aside from campaign against guns. I signed up at this website to get the newsletter. This newsletter only talks about political activism for those that seem to not be able to make up their own mind. Be aware of those that appeal to your emotion, because they may not appeal to your interests.

Note: The author received help from “Glocktopus”, a member of the notorious “Donk Chat” in writing this article.

1 note · View note

lambourngb · 4 years

Text

I was tagged by @aewriting to list my top 10 favorite male characters. Everyone should read her list, btw because it made me very nostalgic! I’m listing these historically, starting with the oldest.

1. Jim Craig from ‘The Man From Snowy River’ and ‘Return to Snowy River’ - As my icon reveals, I’m a horse person, so I can comfortably tell you I have seen both movies 1001 times, still cry in the second 1. But I loved the story of a man trying to prove himself in the wake of his father’s death, using his smarts, but also his compassion to succeed.

2. Alex Krycek -the X-Files oh man my first serious fandom love. I was swept up into it, and really my first experience with fanon- because good lord a million words were written about this character we knew nothing about, but he was pretty.

3. Dr. Julian Bashir- I’m a long time fan of trek- didn’t get into Jim Kirk until the reboot, but I loved Bashir and his enduring sense of compassion. Deep Space Nine was an intensely political, I loved how awkward Bashir was in making friends, how he seemed like he was way too much for people- how he slowly won over Miles, and then reveal of his estranged relationship with his parents over illegal genetic alterations? Ugh yes please.

4. Jack McCoy of Law & Order - I dunno, I’m a procedural cop/law show junkie, and I know Dick Wolf turns out a ton of them in cookie-cutter packages, but this guy was amazing, growing up Catholic with a drunk abusive dad forming how he advocated for victims of crime?? Also I’m forever sad about Claire and Jack.

5. Nicholas Fallin - The Guardian, -- so before Simon Baker was the clever and smug Patrick Jane, he played Nicholas Fallin, a rich lawyer who gets caught with drugs, and is sentenced to work for Child Services to represent kids in court. Listen, so many things are wrong with this premise because black/brown guys do hard time for drug offences- but there was something about seeing this slick, closed off man start to examine his own privilege, make changes, fight for sobriety, and work on his outside relationships, especially his tortured relationship with his dad.

6. Lt. Colonel John Sheppard - Stargate: Atlantis -his floppy brown hair and seeming disregard for his own life if it meant saving others? Plus a secret math genius from a very wealthy family with an estranged relationship with his dad? Yeah, I dug it.

7. Raylan Givens - Justified. While Breaking Bad was being hyped as the best off-network show, I was quietly dying at the quality and writing for Justified on Fx. Raylan had all of my kinks as you can see- tortured relationship with his dad, dead mother, firm sense of justice, continually making dumbass decisions with his dick, and he was clever.

8. Brad Colbert - Generation Kill. An outlier in the daddy issues, although he was adopted and has commitment issues after his fiancé left him for his best friend- Brad won my heart in his steely cool, squared away depiction of a Force Recon Marine in Iraq. Smart, resourceful, devoted to his men, and clever enough to gently guide his younger commanding officer in battle decisions (Nate! oh man) - I just loved his competence.

9. Bellamy Blake - The 100. Like from day 1 I loved this guy- he was loyal, protective, but tortured by the actions he had to take to protect his sister- like his overly developed responsibly gland was visible from space. Was I happy at how he fell morally in season 3? No, but it beautifully set up his redemption over the next few years. The man has made mistakes, he tries to do better, he forgives himself on some levels, but he never forgets it.

10. Alex Manes - no surprise fam that I love this character with my whole heart. I just wrote over 100,000 words in his POV. I loved the goth clothes and makeup as a fuck-you senior in high school, I love the sad plaid shirts as an adult. Obviously tortured relationship with his dad ticks that box I have. I just see him as a coolly competent, loyal, smart and compassionate person who will do what it takes to shield others from pain or disappointment, even at the cost of his own self. I think he has a complicated relationship with duty and military service, but ultimately sees it as a useful tool to better himself. It’s only 1 season of information, so I hope I get 7 seasons like I did with Bellamy, to see him rise, fall, and rise again as man who is able to forgive himself.

Next meme let’s do 10 Ten Female characters!

Thanks for the tag! Tagging from my recent notifications- @zuluoscarecho , @caitlesshea , @larenoz, @malexforlife , @soberqueerinthewild and @unbreakablejemmasimmons

#meme #tagged meme #personal #fandom positivity

9 notes · View notes

allurefm-blog · 5 years

Text

hey ! my name is link ! i go by he / they pronouns , am 21+ & live in the cst timezone ! i’m an obnoxious aries , but i promise i’m nice for a clown . i’m excited to be here ‘cause i’m a slice of life h*e . & this here is my weirdo tommy , who i hope you’ll like a lot . under the cut , you’ll find some misc. info & wanted connections , but here’s his dossier & pinterest board , which has more information for you . feel free to like this if you’d like to plot & i’ll swing by in your ims ( or ask for discord which is honestly easier for me but it’s okay if you don’t ) !

☕ . ˚ ◝ ( kim jongin. genderfluid. he/they. ) thomas “tommy” song is a twenty-five year old gemini. the deja brew barista’s go-to order is matcha lemonade and grilled cheese. they like to listen to tempo by lizzo feat. missy elliott while they wait for their order. the employees of the deja brew think they are inconsistent but swear they’re totally versatile as well. maybe that’s why collected sketchbooks that remain empty, horror movie marathons, band tees paired with perpetually messy hair remind me of them.

misc. info : ( content warning for : emotional abuse & neglect, negative religious imagery )

they’ve always lived in the la area & don’t really see themselves leaving even if they hate it here sometimes for whatever reasons they made up in their heads

their father owns several businesses & is generally well off. he has people convinced that he’s a really good guy but in private he’s an unbearable asshole. just really nitpicky about everything & overbearing in forcing his opinions on his family

their mother was a struggling actress & the few projects she was in flopped & then she became too old by society’s standards to get work & tommy’s dad ragged on her for it, poking at her appearance / weight until she finally gave up & settled for being his assistant

not only is their dad just a dick he’s also extremely catholic which intensified his already aggressive personality. for as long as tommy can remember their dad nagged him for anything possible. they never seemed to be “enough of a man” for him which absolutely tainted the way they viewed themselves

this plays a large part into why they decided to dump the idea of being a man period. all their life they never felt comfortable with being masculine & felt like a failure any time they tried but it wasn’t until their late teens that they felt comfortable identifying as nonbinary

they also suffer from a lot of catholic guilt. their dad was that typical shitty religious guy who went on homophobic rants at random so those views affect them even now

while they consider themselves closeted & default to saying they’re straight when asked they don’t keep up with it very well. any time a pretty guy makes eye contact with them they’re gonna go for it then beat themselves up for it later

they’re a thot. they enjoy physical intimacy but don’t really believe in the idea of romantic love ( yep his dad ruined that for them too ) so they prefer to sleep around than try to get close to anyone

whatever relationships they’ve been in they probably ruined it by not being affectionate or caring enough because they never learned how to be like that with another person ( whatever feelings they and their mother shared were more out of pity than actual love )

also they might be a cheater. i haven’t fully decided if they have or not but they definitely consider it constantly when they’re dating ( if you want some kind of plot like this let’s goooo )

so basically they struggled growing up but just emotionally & mentally. they were great in school but they hated the experience & everything along with their parents caused them to become pretty anxious & introverted in their adulthood

they can & will go out but they prefer not to & they’re terrible at socializing. things can be pretty awkward with them without them meaning to. & their sense of humor is very dry so it can come off as mean ( again without meaning to )

they’re really interested in drawing & painting but they went to college for computer science & honestly it makes them pretty miserable but they’d rather suffer than deal with their dad jumping down their throat

they took a couple of years off from school to gather themselves mentally ( basically had a breakdown in the middle of a semester & their dad still drags him for it ) but are in their senior year now

they only answer to tommy. if you call them tom or thomas you’ll just get a scowl in response then ignored

basically they’re both a fake goth & art hoe. they wear black sometimes but not constantly but always refer to themselves as a goth & they buy more sketchbooks than they need ‘cause they never draw in them ( they prefer using napkins & their textbooks )

they roll up their jeans and their sleeves because they’re bisexual

dogs are some of the only things that will make them outwardly happy if you want them to lose their mind then just show them a dog or even pics / videos

they love matcha it’s their favorite flavor but they actually hate coffee despite working in a cafe. but they’re really good at making latte art & getting tips because they’re pretty & and good at flirting with customers

they’re obsessed with horror movies. they relate a lot to movie monsters for trans reasons & find them comforting even when they’re super gory. currently their favorite movie is midsommar so you can catch them going off about it a lot

they love slushies & smoothies. if it’s blended & has a lot of sugar then they fuck with it heavily. also most of the time they’re too lazy to make their own food so they use drinks a lot as meal replacements

they can’t cook worth a damn. they probably get most of their food from deja brew

they love plants a lot & keep a bunch of them at all times

they’re a hipster they love collecting vinyls & patches for their many denim jackets

they love going on drives to anywhere everywhere at random. they don’t need a destination they just wanna drive

they sleep in small four hour bursts & are pretty much always tired

they love pizza & pasta. if it’s italian they’re a stan

they’re super clumsy. probably run into things or trip five times a day

they’re secretly dramatic & gets upset when their friends / lovers don’t give them enough attention but they will never bring it up other than through playing it up

they collect band tees even for bands they don’t listen to & they don’t care if they get called out for it

wanted connections :

rooommates ( one or two )

exes ( any gender. it can be messy or friendly. i’m willing to have tommy be the issue since they can be rather uncaring & we could even do a cheating plot if you want maximum angst. also bonus points if they’re exes that are still “involved”. )

hookups / fwbs ( any gender. singular experiences or regular type things )

childhood plots for those who’ve lived in la ( childhood friends, first kisses / crushes, all that good stuff )

high school sweethearts

their first sexual experience with someone masculine. i want the awkward teen ( or early twenties whichever ) experience & it’s probably something that tommy gets ( dare i say it ? ) shy about even now

flirtationships that don’t go anywhere

maybe a regular customer that they keep flirting with & the customer thinks they actually have a thing for them but they don’t & it’s weird & awk

maybe they fuck up your drink and your muse is mad about it but they try to flirt their way out of it with either good or disastrous results

your muse is the person that has to deal with this behavior

one-sided crushes ( don’t mind who has the feelings ! )

mutual pining but they’re both idiots & have no idea

anything from this tag

party buddies. horror movie buddies. video game buddies. road trip buddies. any of these can be combined

tinder date ( it can go well or not )

literally anything you can think of i’m probably down for it

#hqbrew:intro #⟨ * o13 . ━━━ 𝑳𝑰𝑽𝑬 𝑫𝑬𝑳𝑰𝑪𝑰𝑶𝑼𝑺𝑳𝒀 ╱ ooc ⟩

13 notes · View notes

holy-mountaineering · 5 years

Note

Western occultism and either info or aesthetic would be fine. also Thank you!

I realized how pointless of a question I asked after I asked it, haha, sorry I’m like this.

Holy Mountaineering’s List of “Occult” Blogs that aren’t Bigots, Bastards, or Bullshitters, 2019©

@danskjavlarnaThe home tumblr home of Professor Oddfellow aka author Craig Conley is stacked up with images from old newspapers to old yearbooks to just who knows what the hell type of images. If not “occult” per se, then definitely esoteric, Prof. Oddfellow is almost certainly a vampire (not an insult from where I’m sitting) who has accumulated a horde of knowledge he is kind enough to share with mortals. Like Prometheus, but fun.

@draugadottir

Okay, this isn’t an occult blog but this is the go to friend for Norse information and imagery. There’s some Thelema and chaos mess mixed in and overall a good blog by a good friend.

@glorytobabalon

I’m totally plugging my friends here but this bud has been a Thelemite and practicing occultistsince most people on this site blogging about fucking Supernatural and peeing their pants. If I need a take on something, this is my go to.

@astranemus

This blog is good and run by a good person. Lots of quotes and interesting other tid bits.

@amntenofre

@grandegyptianmuseum

These are my two go-to Kemetic or Ancient Egyptian blogs. The former is more for the practitioner and the latter is more for the eyes. They’re both excellent.

@chaosophia218

Long running (and favorite of this blog) tumblr with images and information that’ll give you something to research for years to come. This blog consistently posts good and varied content and is highly recommened.

I know I’m missing some but if you look through my reblogs you’ll see who I can vouch for.

As far as people to avoid on here, I’d say the Circle Jerk Crowd of Flavor of the Week Magicians who can’t decide if they feel like the psychological model of magick is The One™ or if they maybe got into a fight with a licensed psychologist that week because they in fact don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about, a Roman Catholic take on magick they lifted from various indigenous syncretic methodologies, or better yet Andrew Chumbley after spending a year trying to bag on the very same author. There is a difference between being diverse and using whatever is handy to sound like an Expert© when you are a hack with a limited pool of knowledge and experience to pull from. Talking a good game doesn’t mean you know dick and posting and changing your very firm opinion so often you can seamlessly shift through assholier than thou opinion after assholier than thou opinion makes you a fraud, not to mention a fucking jerk. I won’t post URLs because I’m trying to be less shitty but if you DM me, I’d be happy to list these dipshits by name. If someone is more interested in appearing to be a mysterious cool-person magician than a helpful traveller on the road, they aren’t worth your time and their magick is pure shit.

Hope this helps and again, you can always go through my reblogs for new people to follow!

7 notes · View notes

disregardcanon · 6 years

Text

so..... raven cycle characters in the good place au? featuring pynch and chengsey but not in large doses

contains major spoilers for the good place if anyone hasn’t seen that and would like to go in unspoiled. for real, you don’t want to be spoiled for this show by a textpost version of an au

for those of you that have seen it, this only follows up to the end of s1 but i might continue that later. if that were to happen the chengsey would probably become sarchengsey

THIS IS MORE THAN 5K WHAT THE FORK

a very brief, approximate rundown of character roles

ronan as eleanor shellstrop with some hints of jason mendoza

henry as jason mendoza... in the jianyu way but not the jason way, really

gansey as chidi anagonye

adam parrish as tahani al-jamil

blue sargent as michael

noah czerny as mindy st. claire

“you, ronan lynch, are dead,” blue sargent tells him, “welcome to the good place.”

blue sargent is apparently the architect of the neighborhood and not human (who would name a real human baby blue sargent?) and not actually a tiny human woman with kinky hair and light brown skin and a face that goes from perky, service worker smile to resting bitch face at the drop of a hat. she gives him the rundown of being in the good place. she informs him that he was an avid environmentalist who used his personal fortune to help fund national parks, efforts to save endangered animals, and animal shelters across the country.

this, however, was not ronan lynch’s life... and he definitely isn’t supposed to be here. after his worthwhile life of blowing through his trust fund, spiting his brother for thinking that he’s better than ronan is and trying to control him, doing drugs in the back of kavinsky’s mitsubishi. and then setting off illegal fireworks and setting shit on fire and having angry hate sex with kavinsky and street racing with kavinsky. he died after stealing his brother’s car and wrapping it around a tree, half on purpose. so yeah, there’s no way that he’s supposed to be here in the good place and he knows it.

blue sargent, however, does not need to know that. so ronan lynch does something that he’s never done before, he lies.

“yeah, that was me,” he says. because really? if he’d done good things in his life, saving animals probably would have been one of them. that’s a life he could have led, if he were less of a shitbag. he always liked animals.

sargent brings him to a frozen yogurt place to meet his soulmate, and pretty much everything about that statement seems ridiculous and out there, but he’s in the afterlife, and it sure as fuck ain’t the pearly gates or the fire and brimstone his catholic raised ass was expecting, so he supposes that this is just his new normal.

“some soulmate pairings are romantic,” sargent says, “and some are platonic. yours is platonic. fated to be best friends- closer than brothers”

“great,” ronan says, which is not great at all because he was hoping that maybe there would be some sap on earth who was fated to fall in love with him, and not just be a dude he hated but couldn’t stop having sex with. since they have the wrong history for him, he can’t even complain about declan or talk about how no one would EVER be a better brother than matthew, who was ripped from the world far too young.

he hopes that matthew and his parents are in another neighborhood somewhere, living it up as happy as they could ever be. if anyone deserves to be in the good place, it’s his family, or at least the dead parts of it.

“ronan lynch, this is your soulmate, richard gansey the third” blue says with a wide smile. seeing him makes it even worse, because he’s handsome, but he’s off limits because it’s “platonic” and ronan wants to put his hand through the fucking wall.

“just call me gansey,” he says with a big, wide smile, “that’s what all my students called me.”

“students?”

“i was a professor of moral philosophy,” gansey says, “but i also taught a few courses on welsh mythology and history.”

“what a nerd,” ronan says before he can shut his god damn mouth. gansey smiles

“that’s the other thing that my students called me,” he says. ronan’s not sold yet, but ronan might not totally hate this guy. that would be a first since his family died.

they tour the neighborhood, sargent telling them all about how new and improved this place is over earth even though it just looks like suburbia. at least, somehow, the afterlife is environmentally friendly? that’s what sargent says, at least. ronan doesn’t know how that would even work.

sargent introduces them to another pair of soulmates about halfway through. the first is adam parrish, who was apparently a high powered lawyer back in life who helped like, the environment or some shit (suspiciously close to ronan’s fake backstory, ronan will have to be careful treading around that topic with him), and his soulmate jiyanu, a taiwanese monk who took a vow of silence.

at least ronan got someone who talks. he’d feel bad for parrish, if the dude weren’t so fucking pretentious that it makes him want to puke. parrish is also really attractive and has hands out of ronan’s dreams but like.... that’s not relevant. the point is that he’s a pretentious dick not that he’s an ATTRACTIVE ONE okay? okay.

ronan is probably pricklier than someone who’s actually good place bound would be, but parrish responds with exactly the level of passive aggressive that ronan would expect from a jerk back on earth, so ronan’s probably alright. if this dude deserves to be here, then ronan can at least match his level of passive aggression without people suspecting that he’s not supposed to be here.

no matter how little ronan wants to admit it, though, he always sort of enjoys talking to parrish. it’s nice to have a break from gansey’s overwhelming cheer or sargent’s “benevolent alien anthropologist” act. jiyanu doesn’t talk, so it’s harder to get to know him. or even care about getting to know him. he looks perpetually uncomfortable, though, which is a weird thing to look in paradise. ronan hopes that he doesn’t look that uncomfortable.

but then again, ronan’s a big, muscly guy with a full back tattoo and leather jacket and a shaved head in a neighborhood that looks like suburbia ate candyland and then shat this monstrosity out, so he was probably going to stand out no matter what.

he stands out a whole lot more the next morning when the good place malfunctions in a multitude of ways that tell him that HE’S the cause. so, he decides that he should probably talk to his ethics professor soulmate to figure out htf he’ll get to stay here.

“so, you’re my soulmate. soul friend?”

“best bud,” gansey suggests.

“and you would never do anything to hurt me, right?”

“yes?” and then ronan confesses that he doesn’t belong here and gansey’s like yup i guess this is my life now and it increases his anxiety tenfold but he promises to help if ronan promises to take ethics classes so that he can learn to be the person that deserves to be in the good place and ronan’s like okay, sure, i guess. books are stupid and learning is stupid but being tortured? is probably more stupid so he’ll deal with books and schools to not do that

he finds out that jiyanu doesn’t belong here pretty soon afterwards, after having a fucking heart attack that the guy was going to rat him out. it turns out that jiyanu isn’t even named jianyu. his name is henry cheng and he’s a drug dealing, backpacking dj from vancouver. his mother’s a mob boss. he’s sometimes involved in her business, sometimes not. he’s always a wayfaring stranger, or a hopeless wanderer, or a druggie bum from vancouver, one of those words that means he’s a traveling dude with no life prospects.

“i’m not even taiwanese, dude. i’m forking korean,” henry groans, and ronan feels like he’s found a kindred spirit in all of this shit. this is way easier to deal with than an actual monk knowing his secret. now they just get to be assholes together.

they meet up in henry’s “bud hole” which he definitely doesn’t call a bud hole, because he has some class. he calls it mr roboto because it’s his secret secret he’s got a secret. he actually says this aloud, singing and all, and ronan starts singing the murder squash song and a beautiful friendship is born.

friends. weird. ronan never had a lot of those. or any, if he’s being honest.

“not being able to talk? that’s the worst thing for me,” henry says, “do you know how much i like to talk?”

“i can guess,” ronan says.

“like, words don’t always work right for me, but i still love to talk,” henry reiterates

“yes, cheng, i get it,” ronan says, because he really would like for the silent monk to go back to being silent, please.

“it’s like torture, lynch, absolute torture. like, if i actually were in the bad place, they couldn’t have come up with a better way to torture me than that.” ronan thinks that’s a bit of stretch, when in the bad place they could literally pour lava over you for all of eternity, but the thought sends a bit of a shiver up his spine.

the good place isn’t so good.

he pushes the thought to the back of his mind. it probably means nothing. he and henry might be here and miserable, but they’re not supposed to be here. gansey? parrish? they might be assholes sometimes, but they did do legit good things. gansey was a fucking ethics professor, and it sounds like parrish took a lot of cases for charity and did all kinds of philanthropy. even though ronan and henry aren’t supposed to be here, those two still are.

---------

back on the topic of henry, henry cheng was a backpacker who dealt drugs and was working through a trust fund of his own and working through more romantic and sexual partners than ronan can even imagine. apparently, his mother was a crime lord from vancouver. he was kidnapped for ransom as a child, and his mother barely cared to get him back. the last thing that happened to him was when one of his former, scorned lovers kidnapped him and demanded ransom from his mother, she refused and that’s how henry cheng died. the scorned lover killing him part is a point of pride. the fact that his mother let them? not so much

---------

gansey finds out about henry soon afterwards. he agrees not to rat out henry either in exchange for even more ethics classes.

“gansey, you are a prince among men,” henry says. and gansey does not blush, he DOESN’T but ronan glares at the ground. the universe gave him a soulmate who’s actually into dudes but not into him? what the fuck, universe. what the fuck.

they take ethics classes, and they get better. and better, and better while feeling worse, and worse, and worse. the neighborhood deteriorates. it seems like everyone’s mental state deteriorates too, even the two that are supposed to be here.

sargent tries to find gansey a new hobby after ripping into the book he spent his life writing. parrish snoops around sargent’s office, and finds out that he had the lowest good person score out of anyone in the neighborhood. he tries as hard as he can to up his score, until he realizes that because he’s dead, he can’t. it eats away a little at him to know that he’s even below ronan lynch, even if the guy isn’t quite as bad as he first thought. at least he can TALK to him, unlike his soulmate monk-ey mcsilence

everything seem to be getting worse.

and then, sargent tries to take credit for all of it. the breakdowns- the tremors- all the things that ronan being here has caused, and tells them all that she will basically be brutally murdered for her failures- ronan’s failures. he hates that gansey made him grow a little bit of a conscience. ronan comes clean. he’s pretty sure that gansey’s disappointed face as he stares at henry is the only thing that gets henry to come clean with him.

parrish doesn’t seem delighted that ronan isn’t supposed to be here, but he does seem pleased- almost smug about it.

“all you rich kids had everything handed to you, and i had to work so hard to get where i got. even here, in the good place. you glided in here on a technicality.”

“you want them to send me to the bad place?” ronan asks, “that’s still a possibility, you know.” if parrish wanted him damned, he probably could make it happen. with lawyer powers and social clout combined, he could probably get it done.

“well, no,” parrish says, “i don’t.” and of course, no actual good person would want another person to be tortured to spite them. to be honest, ronan doesn’t really wish that on any other person, not even declan or kavinsky.

“plus, that gives me at least two people i’m better than here,” parrish says. ronan raises his eyebrow.

“points wise,” parrish says, like that explains everything. they have an in depth conversation about when he snuck into sargent’s office and searched through the scores and his existential crisis about how low his numbers were, and ronan can’t help but laugh. perfect parrish was the worst one here?

“hey,” parrish says, “at least i deserved to be here.” it might have been the least out of any of them, but he still got in on his own merits. ronan got here due to a clerical error.

“you probably had like, ten thousand more points than me if that helps,” ronan says. parrish tries to shrug it off, but ronan can tell that it does. gansey’s across the room, looking like he’s coaching henry on how to get through this situation, and ronan wonders if there wasn’t a clerical error with the soulmates too.

if any of them are soulmates, romantically, it certainly isn’t the pairings they’ve been assigned. gansey and henry might be soulmates, really. and well, looking at the way parrish smiles and the way that his hand curl and the way that he’s feeling- god- fuck- ronan thinks that they might have a possibility too.

adam and henry have a Talk which consists of

“sorry for not speaking for six months”

“i don’t really think i like what you have to say, anyways.”

“that’s fair. we’re definitely not soulmates, are we?”

“i’m not sure we’re even friends”

“ouch, parrish, harsh” and then eventually, they kill each other a million times in video games and decide that it’s alright, i guess. kind of. they’re not going to be friends, but they’re not going to hate each other either. not even enough for hate sex, don’t worry, henry checked.

they bring the person that ronan was apparently switched with up from the bad place. he’s a real environmental lawyer who’s also named ronan lynch, a clean cut Black man with a warm smile and no tattoos who seems liked someone who would have walked across hot coals to help a stranger.

by pretending to belong here, ronan condemned him to months of torture. he probably deserved it when people start calling the other one “real ronan” and him “fake ronan”. that doesn’t mean he likes, it, though. they could call them suit ronan and leather jacket ronan or something.

apparently, henry cheng was somehow switched with an actual taiwanese monk named jiaynu because they died at the same time. who knew?

there’s a whole big plot to try to keep ronan and henry here in the good place, spearheaded by parrish’s lawyer brain and gansey’s ethical heart, and maybe a lawyer heart and an ethical brain too. he thinks that both of them possess both organs, at least.

the bad place sends a demon named trevor to pick up him and henry. trevor reminds ronan too much of kavinsky for comfort. much more than any person should, really. it’s uncanny, and it sets off that same unpleasant feeling in his stomach as henry’s comment about not being able to talk did. the same way that he feels whenever sargent pulls gansey off to do something that gives him anxiety attacks.

gansey tries to balance his best friend energies very carefully between the two ronans, as to not play favorites when either one of them could be his soulmate, really? how are we supposed to know hahaha oh isn’t this gREAT. gansey’s anxiety is a fragile thing, always like a bottle of soda that’s been shaken to the point where if you open it, it WILL burst. people were always too difficult, which was why he avoided them most of the time. they were hard to put up with, harder still to please. gansey preferred his own company.

--------

gansey loves learning. that’s kind of always been his thing. he loves school. he loves knowing things. he loves sinking into a good book and trying to piece together what information from it is relevant. people? not so much. people are tricky. people involve interactions constantly, love and affection. he knows that he could, but that involves taking time away from whatever the obsession of the day is, and gansey never met someone who was interesting enough to detract from his obsession of the day back on earth, even his family.

his sister tried to get him to come to his mother’s congressional campaign events, even one. so did his father and his mother.

“yes, i’ll be there,” gansey promised absentmindedly, not really planning to. he did not come. he was reading through phillipa foot’s “moral beliefs”.

“your studies will always come first, won’t they?” his mother

“shit, dick. this is just- this is too much. can’t you do this one thing? fuck you” helen

helen didn’t call again. neither did either of his parents. gansey tried not to think much about the sting. learning was his thing. he was doing it. that’s all that matters.

he tries to grab the first copies of his dissertations and his copy of death and that original welsh manuscript he picked up a while ago and oh god, he can’t forget his laptop that has so much work on it and-

the flimsy remains of the roof collapse on him, and richard gansey iii burns to death in that building, along with his research.

---

gansey’s not decisive, and he’s not a big fan of people, but he cares about ronan and he cares about henry, and he goes to sargent to demand that they remain in the good place. which, for a boy whose indecision killed him, is a pretty big step. sargent is quite impressed, and decides to accept the request and do everything that she can to make it happen.

parrish suggests that they accrue points so that they can stay, which is an admirable suggestion but doesn’t work because they’re already dead. it’s the reason that he couldn’t move any further up the list to begin with. sargent calls in an impartial “undead judge” to hear the case to see if ronan and henry will get to stay in the good place.

ronan decides to say fuck it instead and and he and henry steal the dude’s train and hightail it somewhere no one can touch him. apparently, there’s a medium place where everything kind of sucks but no one gets tortured.

it has exactly one inhabitant, a guy named noah czerny. he was a cokehead skaterbro when he was alive, and the night before he died he came up with an idea to end world hunger and save a ton of kids: the most comprehensive idea for a charity ever, really. his best friend hit him over the head with a skateboard and stole it, but he started up the program that noah thought up. no one could decide whether or not noah should get the points, so they made him a place in the middle.

a sucky, medium place. like cincinnati. or being dead but not dead in the first place. it’s just a sub par house in the desert with warm beer and mediocre movies, but it’s better than eternal damnation.

at least, it would be if they didn’t get a message about a decision to send gansey and parrish to the bad place in their stead if they don’t come back. what the fuck is that? who decided that was fair.

“i guess we need to go back,” henry says sadly.

“yeah,” ronan says. they do need to go back. ronan doesn’t want to, but he knows they need to.

“you don’t if you don’t want to,” noah says, “you’re free to stay here.” but ronan grew a conscience back in the good place, and that conscience’s name is gansey. and gansey doesn’t deserve to go to the bad place, and frankly, neither does parrish. ronan’s not about to say that one out loud, though. just because the dude’s hot doesn’t mean that ronan wants to confess any sort of affection for him.

he’s not an affectionate sort of guy. he loved his dad, and his mom, and his little brother, but all of them are dead. after that, he told exactly two people i love you: stone cold steve austin and a guy in a dark club that he mistook for stone cold steve austin. so yeah, any sort of affection is foreign to him. his only long lasting relationship consisted solely of hate sex.

they get back to the good place, and they go see sargent. it seems that the problem has become worse since they left. or, maybe better. apparently, they aren’t demanding gansey and parrish specifically anymore, or even ronan and cheng. the immortal judge, apparently, doesn’t give a fuck who they decide to give him, as long as they send two people to the bad place.

the other ronan (good ronan, real ronan) offers to go, but that still leaves two spots to fill, one of which he is DEFINITELY taking.

exactly none of this ends well, with a combination of self sacrificing and pure selfishness as they shout at each other, like something out of the lord of the flies or some shit. it finally clicks in ronan’s brain why he’s had that feeling of wrongness.

“gansey and i are going to the bad place,” ronan says firmly.

“i didn’t agree to that,” gansey says.

“what about real ronan?” blue asks.

“nope,” ronan says, “gansey and i have this covered. call the train.”

“actually,” the judge says, “ronan and henry were the ones that were originally bad place bound-”

“nope,” ronan says, “you said any two of us. gansey and i are going.” bambajan bursts into the room with an enormous book open in his arms.

“i found a way to keep all of you in the good place!” bambajan says.

“shut up, bambajan,” ronan says. sargent’s eyes widen for a moment. she knows that he’s caught on to her throne of lies.

“ronan, what’s happening?” gansey asks.

“i just figured out what’s been wrong about this place the whole time. they can’t call us a train to the bad place, because we’re already here. this is the bad place” sargent seems shocked for a moment, but only a moment, before she regains her composure.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she says smoothly.

“bullshirt, sargent,” he says, “i’m right.” gansey laughs, nervously.

“this is a joke, right? please tell me it’s a joke,” he looks down at his hands, “my stomach hurts-”

“of course it is,” sargent says firmly. shit, this can’t be good. if sargent denies it and no one else believes him, then it won’t make any difference that he knows. it will all just go by the same way until she finally gets him to shut up about it.

“no,” henry says, “lynch is right- he’s got to be.” sargent sits down, and puts her head in her hands.

“you’re going to tell them they’re crazy, right?” parrish demands. sargent looks up, and lets out a maniacal laugh.

“five years of planning,” she says between laughs, “five years down the drain because ronan lynch grew a brain.”

“actually, i’d say i grew a heart,” ronan says smoothly.

“that’s a reference to something,” blue says, far too calmly for someone who just admitted to torturing them, “that musical about the green woman who’s in love with the pink one?”

“close enough,” ronan says. gansey looks like he’s going to die of his stomach ache.

“what is going ON?!?!”

“i’ve been torturing you,” blue says, “this is the bad place, do keep up.”

“what do you mean?” parrish asks, “that can’t be. it can’t be.” sure he was ambitious, but he never did anything wrong. maybe he didn’t do as much right as he could have, but he never did anything actively wrong.

he wasn’t corrupt- he was smart. he never did anything that was wrong, really, and he tried to do some good too. he belongs in the good place- he has to.

he worked his way up from nothing, less than nothing really, starting with a loveless, abusive upbringing, then onto a good college and a law degree in record time. he lived the american dream.

when he finished school, he started defending the highest bidder at any cost, in any case. and he took a few charitable cases, stuff that would make him look better.

blue sargent keeps on laughing.

“you rich boys, boys who never did anything to help anyone- the definition of idle wealth. all humans are awful, but the four of you?” blue laughs again, that harsh, strident laugh that cuts through the air directly into his soul, “you’re something else.”

“i wasn’t born rich,” adam says adamantly. he might have gotten there, but he wasn’t born into it like the other three. he had to climb a mountain of lava to get where the rest of them started.

“you weren’t,” blue says, “but did you do anything to help people who were still poor?” adam gets really quiet.

“you know, how ‘bout i just show you how you died. that’ll clear this all up.”

“no-” adam says, because he doesn’t remember how he died, but he doesn’t care to. dying has to be traumatic, right? he’s got enough traumatic memories from his lifetime, thank you. he doesn’t need to add deathtime memories onto the scars that his parents left him. apparently, blue doesn’t care what he wants, though, and he’s pulled into the memory.

---

he’s at a resort, somewhere tropical. he can’t quite remember where he’d decided to go, but it was tropical and set on a cliff side, only about a twenty minute drive from the beach. he always preferred the view from higher up. he could see above the tree tops and the resorts and then the beach and the ocean. swimming in a pool’s simpler than swimming on the beach anyway.

no sand in his toes or his hair or his ears or anywhere else he won’t be able to wash out for months. he’d tried to like the beach, he really had, because it’s supposed to be a rich leisure activity, but he just couldn’t force himself to. he spent enough of his life getting grimy, thank you very much. now he’ll just appreciate the pool and the view. it’s one of the many things that his high profile job can buy.

the job was a way to acquire status, same as smoothing over the accent and befriending celebrities and charity banquets and speeches and whatever else he did for his image.

he’s walking to the pool along a mountain path, beside a small wall separating him from the cliff side and the ocean far below. he’s wearing nothing but a soft t-shirt, a pair of swim trunks, and sandals that cost more than his entire high school wardrobe cost. life is good, at least until he meets up with another guest on the path.

“adam parrish,” the guy says, like it’s a curse word. adam hasn’t heard his name said that way in a long time. he can’t say that he misses it.

“yeah?” adam demands. who the fuck is this guy? what’s his problem? he seems familiar, but adam can’t quite place him. he’s known a lot of people in his life, and a lot of them he’s tried to forget.

“born in 1985 in henrietta virginia,” the guy rattles off, “grew up in a trailer.”

“i did,” adam says in his clipped off fake east coast accent, “i’m not ashamed of it.” he is, actually, that’s why it’s not public knowledge. he’s not about to let this guy know that, though.

“you know what you should be ashamed of? getting a murderer off the hook.”

“alleged,” adam says. there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him in the minds of the jury, so there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him in adam’s mind either. he’s just doing his job.

“yeah, well that “alleged” murderer killed my mother,” the guy spits.

“i’m sorry about your mom,” adam says.

“you aren’t yet,” the kid says, “but you will be.” he takes off his backpack, and then takes out a fucking scrapbook. then he shows it up for adam to see everything he’s ever been embarrassed by staring him back in the face.

every single incriminating to embarrassing thing that has ever happened to him- every case he’s ever taken that might make him look bad, familial information he’s hidden- ex boyfriends he’s buried for the sake of staying ostensibly straight for his career- every single thing he’s never wanted to come out confined to a single blackmail scrapbook. the craftsmanship is actually impressive. the kid’s dug up secrets that adam has forgotten about himself.

“what do you want for it?” adam says, handing the book back to him. he’s a little freaked out that the kid dug up this sort of dirt on him, angry to have it shoved in his face, but he’s mainly impressed. it’s the sort of thing that he could and would do.

“nothing,” the kid says.

“what?”

“you can’t have it. i’m taking it to the press.”

“then why the fuck did you show it to me?” adam says. you don’t pull a play like this without demanding the ransom. you can’t just rip the rug out from under them-

“i wanted to see the look on your face,” the kid says. then, he turns around to stomp off. adam reaches forward to grab him by the shoulder and turns him back around.

“you can’t do that,” adam says.

“yeah,” the boy says, “i can.” he breaks free of adam’s hold, and then grabs his book as he starts to walk away. adam feels rage boiling inside of him. he can’t just- just do that.

adam doesn’t know if this would be a career ender, but it could hurt him badly. badly enough that he can’t deal with it, not now not ever. he runs towards the guy, in between him and the edge, and grabs the book. the kid keeps his grip tight.

“let go,” he growls.

“you let go,” adam demands.

“fuck off,” the guy shouts as he tries to rip it back away from adam. adam’s more determined, though, and he clutches it as tightly as he can, digging his fingernails into the flimsy material. he has a stronger grasp on it, and then he throws his weight to the side- the side with the short wall over the cliff. he flies into the wall, and then he flies over the edge. he plummets directly down to the rocks below.

--------

“holy shirt,” adam says.

“yeah,” blue says, “wonderful, wasn’t it? you all had such entertaining deaths. i’ll need to figure out how to incorporate them better for the next try.”

“next try?” henry asks.

“oh yes,” blue says, “i’m going to clear your memories and then try again. really, this was such a learning experience. next time i’ll work all the bugs out.”

“you can just do this over?” henry asks, sounding horrified.

“of course,” blue says, “you’ll have your memories erased and we’re going to start again. can’t just leave you like this. it’s no fun torturing you this way if you already know what’s going on.” this explains so much about all of their experiences here in the good place. everything makes sense now.

“well, i’m a demon,” blue says, “comes with the territory.”

“a demon,” gansey says, like he still can’t believe what he’s hearing. gansey obviously isn’t present enough to figure out a way out of this mess, and parrish is still reeling from reliving his death. henry’s slightly more put together, but ronan doesn’t think he’s got any ideas for how to stop this either. that means that ronan has to figure out something to save them from this cycle.

blue did say that this happened because he grew a brain. maybe he can write himself a note or get another tattoo or-

“i promise after i fix this, you’ll all have long, unhappy lives,” blue sargent says with her widest service worker smile. she snaps her fingers, and then the world goes white.

bum bum BUMMMMMMMMMMMMM

if anyone’s interested in a continuation of this, i might do season 2. but the most important part of season 2 is the millions of reboots with different soulmates so here are a few examples

“gansey, this is your soulmate, the physical manifestation of henrietta virginia”

“jianyu, this is your soulmate, madonna”

“adam, this is your soulmate, ronan lynch”

“ronan, this is your soulmate, stone cold steve austin”

“this is your soulmate, a raven”

“this is your soulmate, orla,” blue says, gesturing to the woman. female person. not someone that ronan’s sexually attracted to in the least.

“this is the bad place, isn’t it?”

“ah fork it all,” blue curses. then, she snaps her fingers and the world resets.

#trc #trc aus #chengsey #pynch #the gangsey #ronan lynch #adam parrish #henry cheng #noah czerny #blue sargent #tgp #trc tgp au #jill don't look

28 notes · View notes

transpeterman · 7 years

Note

Marvel Team Red tho

long post woo

-peter, wade, and matt first met up at an abandoned apartment building-a large operation that was stealing and manufacturing old stark industries weapons were operating in the basement-peter had heard Tony mention it to Happy and had decided to get on it, wade had been hired to kill the big boss, and it was based in Hell’s Kitchen-thus all three got involved-it was entirely unplanned; they all just kinda showed up-well Spider-man and Daredevil just kinda showed up-Deadpool insisted on having a soundtrack-they ended up succeeding in stopping the operation and Daredevil stopped Deadpool from killing anyone-deadpool compensated by calling him anything but Daredevil the rest of the night-after the fight, matt absently told peter to “get some sleep, kid” and gave deadpool a whole new ballpark of nicknames-”Dad-devil”-”No.”-”Devil-dad?”-”Deadpool.”-”Dee-dad? WAIT-”-”do not fini-”-”DAD-D”-”im going to throttle you.”-”choke me dad-d”-peter’s on the verge of tears he’s laughing so hard-the next time they teamed up was during the summertime-it was a long fight and peter got a few serious gashes so they decided to go back to Matt’s apartment since it was nearest-matt called claire to stitch him up and while they waited for her to arrive the had some Quality Bonding Time™-Deadpool has an existential crisis when peter eventually gives up that he’s 15 (after 30 minutes of nonstop asking)-”i made a daddy kink joke in front of a middle-schooler”-”i’m in high school”-”oh thank god you’ve heard worse”-”even if he was in middle school the daddy thing was not the worst thing you’ve said in front of him”-Peter decides its only fair that since he gave up something about him that they do it too-matt tells them that he’s blind and peter just??????? stops working-like his suit is red, his glasses are red, a good portion of his things are red and he can’t even appreciate how good of a color red is-Deadpool’s just like “so whats with the bible over here is it in braille or,,”-and peter’s losing his shit because this man who dresses up as the devil and pushes people off buildings is catholic-deadpool decides to tell them that his name is Wade Wilson-”thats crazy your initials are WW, mine are PP, and- what about you dude?”-”…MM.”-”oh my god”-”My initials are actually WWW”-”mine are MMM”-”You’re fu-freaking kidding me”-”I really wish I was and you’re not slick spider-kid i heard what you were going to say”-”the writers must really have a thing for alliteration”-”????”-”spidey how did you say that out loud”-after their bonding time they go their separate ways-they do team ups a lot more frequently and eventually they begin to trust each other a lot more-they all know each other’s secret identities and tend to hang out after fights when there’s no real need to-wade keeps hitting on matt, stating his lack of sight as nothing but an advantage here-matt is always done with wade and peter keeps encouraging him its such a problem-once matt let wade mess with his hair because the alternative was having wade shoot bullets into his wall and he was not dealing with that-10 minutes later peter was cackling because wade gave him the hairstyle of an “edgy preteen boy” (his own words)-peter refused to call him anything other than ‘MattyBRaps’ for the next week-matt got them both back by handcuffing with (hella reinforced handcuffs) them together and “Misplacing” the key (wade refused to let peter witness him sawing off his own appendage)-basically they’re a bunch of children who should never be left alone-they wreak serious havoc-also Matthew Michael Murdock is such a fuckin dad its ridiculous he’s constantly giving peter food and making sure he’s getting enough sleep-one time peter had been binding too long and matt could hear the rattling in his chest and this boy was treated to a hardcore lawyer style lecture-wade wasn’t present for that thankfully-peter doesn’t think wade would be a dick about the trans thing he is just hesitant to share such personal information-maybe one day he’ll tell him-more like wade will find out somehow but ya know-(wade does find out- he’s chill about it obvi)-but seriously these three should never be alone together they could accidentally level new york

#headcanon lists #team red #marvel team red #deadpool #daredevil #trans peter parker #trans peter #trans spiderman #peter parker #peter parker headcanons

1K notes · View notes

milquetoast-on-acid · 7 years

Text

Sanctuary City p2, A Reactionary Post

Lacking Faith

Major Crimes, S6xE2: Episode Review What this episode is about: Provenza's Printer Pricing & Prickly Page & Knowledgeable Nolan The Question of Father Jonas' Guilt Rusty goes to Stepdad Looming threat of Stroh Sharon's Office & Fish Art Two Mothers The Morgue & The Church: Sharon and Sarah Fire & Water: Dealing with our emotions Sarah & Mateo Garza Sharon & Andy Conflicting Missions Sharon & Father Stan The Ending Scene(s)

I really enjoyed this episode, more so than the first part. I see the first part as exposition and this part as the start of the emotional meat to the episodic arc. There is a lot to unpack in this episode but it's focus is on emotions this time.

Hyphenated Nation: Mike Pointing out the Hypocrisy in people Mike gives me life. I love it when he points out hypocrasy in people. "What about Irish American's or German Americans?" "Doesn't seem to come up."

"Michael" I don't know why but hearing Provenza shout out Mike's full name gives me life. When the team serves the search warrant at Ian’s house. Like when have we heard anyone call him Micheal? About as rare as we hear Louie, Andrew, Francis, Fernando and Russell. Page punching Ian was pretty badass, though.

The News Vultures Can I love how each of the news casters have their own spin on what's going on since the police haven't released any information on the Joseph's three.

This one is obviously Fox news.

Sanctuary City I love when Sharon lits into Vega and gets on her soap box. Love the rant so much. Her pointing out that them threatening deportation is going to get them no where.

"I'm not giving up my jurisdictional authority over this case without cause." Sharon was not happy when Mason negotiated their case over to the FBI if it was a kidnapping. If it does end up coming to that you can bet damn sure that Sharon is going to fight tooth and nail for it back.

Provenza's Printer Pricing & Prickly Page & Knowledgeable Nolan

Last week I thought that the printer was new because I had thought it was white. And then this episode went and proved that was not the case. "Look you just have to do it." I love how, Wes doesn't even know why everyone has to pay Provenza to use his printer. And takes the moment to tell Page about everyone's various quirks and how to work around them. Not that he can understand why they are the way they are. He has just learned to go with the flow - so to speak. He does get a bit snarky when he tells Page she really shouldn't interrupt Sharon.

Question: Does Page only express one emotion? Why does she always have this dower look on her face?

"This is a new federal tax." This scene reminds of when Provenza made Taylor pay ten cents a page instead of five cents. And as everyone knows five cents is the friends and family discount. Except here he's really pushing the price up really high for the feds.

Mason as a Leader "Commander Raydor leads or we go our separate ways. The End." I love this and another comparison to Taylor. I don't think I would have ever seen this much support for Sharon (as a leader) in Taylor. Taylor usually humors the FBI but didn't ever put his foot down quite like this. "Uh ever hear of money laundering?" "Uh ever hear of house flipping?" I do love this moment of the FBI thinking they found some really good information only having it turn out that it was just how the couple made their money.

The Hollywood Strangler Buzz is really terrible at coming up with an on the spot story. And I can't believe the FBI actually bought it. And I wish Andy would have given one of the FBI agent's the cursed desk.

The Question of Father Jonas' Guilt I wasn't so convinced about about Father Jonas in the last episode but now he's looking very suspicious. Especially with him flying the coop right as the kid he had so much feeling for was found dead and they hadn't even determined if he'd been killed or not. Especially since Father Jonas is someone the kids would go with willingly and would definitely be someone who'd leave Lucas at the church. Not to mention him moving to five different diocese in six years. Some things that could be alarming... "Ryan is not interested in Kelly Garret that I can promise you." "My bond with Ryan is more intense." Both statements sound soo creepy.

"This is exactly the ending I want to avoid." Father Jonas is kind of stuck in the 50's. And as much as I want to blame Provenza, Wes and Page for their pushy interrogation. I have to put some of the blame at Sharon's feet. They are the wrong detectives to interrogate him. I would have sent either, Mike, Amy or Buzz in there. The three of them have a much gentler touch that was needed for him. Provenza hates the Catholic church, Page doesn't know subtly if it hit her in the head and Wes is a bit of a snark king.

While everyone is preoccupied with Ma Garza's explosion over the death of her son. It seems that everyone is missing the most important thing that's happening at that moment. Father Jonas seems just a little too close to Miss Rojas. "So Ryan didn't do it. Thank God." Sounds like she inadvertently told the cops that Ryan killed his step father.

Rusty goes to Step Dad "Why ask me about a gun instead of Sharon?" The answer to that question is that Rusty knows exactly what he's doing. And knows that he's got a much better chance of getting the gun and a concealed permit by speaking to Andy first. This way Rusty has someone else on his side about getting the gun. If Rusty were to go to Sharon first she'd be much more likely to say no. He's got someone as a buffer to Sharon and that will help soften the blow for him. And I also love Andy's reaction. "What!" "At least your not completely crazy." "Oh my god."

Looming threat of Stroh

Sharon's Fish Artwork and her Office

In my review of pt1 I talked about one of the kid's book Moby Dick that Sharon had on her desk and how that symbolizes Stroh and Sharon's relationship. Sharon's new artwork on her walls. One of the paintings is of a giant whale being caught by a tiny fishermen. MC is very deliberate with it's details this not a coincidence. Especially considering this really isn't the kind of artwork you would think Sharon would have. It isn't anything like any of her other artwork. And when has she ever talked about her love of fishing?

Not to mention that since Sharon's office has blown up all of her furniture and artwork is completely new. Her furniture is very sixties vintage looking to me. While the condo might have a touch of that this it's much more so prevalent here. I also really like the colors they choose. Lots of soft blues and a few splashes of bright yellow. Blue is a very calming color and Sharon would want to feel comfortable in her office. A space that's a home away from home to her. The yellow gives it a bright vibrancy to the room but there's only a small touch of it. To the point that it wouldn't overwhelm you, it's an inviting room.

Andrea Hobbs and her slightly awkward speech about her feelings on Rusty Can we talk about how awesome this little speech Andrea gives Rusty. Her I didn't like you because I don't like kids and you were annoying but now you're an adult and mostly have out grown that annoying. Is pure awesome. And I love how she gives this speech because it's her worrying over him because he doesn't want protection.

I don't understand why Sharon doesn't compromise. She loves making deals. I could see her making a deal with Rusty. He can get a gun and a CPL if he accepts undercover officers. And I am kind of surprised that Sharon didn't put her foot down more about the protection. I get that it's been a few years since Stroh was around - but this is Sharon we're talking about. She knows how to negotiate. I think the only thing I can think of is that...

1. Rusty is older and wiser. Rusty has grown up since season 3. He's not the same person he was before and he's not as naive as once he was.

2. Sharon ordered undercover officers without Rusty knowledge and she saw the effects of that from a different perspective. And how something like a mother's obsessive protectiveness ended up putting a wedge between a mother and her child.

3. Rusty is an adult. Who is capable of making his own decisions. 4. If he doesn't accept police protection he's going to need some kind of way to defend himself.

5. Seeing that Lucas died because he didn't have access to food or his insulin. Prompts Sharon into thinking that Rusty should have a gun. In case he's separated from Protection. And this sound an awful lot like foreshadowing to me.

Wait...Is Rusty tracking Stroh's kills? huh....why?

Shooting Range Seeing Sharon load a gun is such a contrast to Rusty firing the gun. She's instructing him but all the while she's completely focused on the gun. Rusty's confidence isn't his problem but focus might be. He certainly needs a lot of practice that's for sure.

Fire & Water: Dealing with our emotions

Sarah & Mateo Garza

This arc really seems to make a huge point in the way that Sarah deals with her emotions and grief verses the way Mateo deals with them. Sarah is volatile and angry. She feels her emotions very intensely and often lets them control her. Look at how she explodes with anger at everyone closest to her when confronted about her sons death. Her husband, priest and her son's closest friend's parents. When the search warrant is executed at their house in part one. That's the first time we get some intense emotions coming off of her. She explodes with anger at Mateo, yelling at him. Which gives the detectives a sense that there are some real problems in their marriage.

Mateo on the other hand doesn't deal with his emotions at all. He's intensely repressed. It's not that he doesn't feel the same emotions. In fact I may argue he may feel them more intensely which may explain why he's an addict. He doesn't want to feel them. He doesn't want to feel out of control. Especially his behavior at the morgue. He was so numb almost like a walking corpse. The way he talked about his son, about how they removed his organs and stitched his body back up. In such a clinical detached way almost like he was talking about a doll or a car.

I find it interesting that these two are married, yet so very different. It's obvious that things aren't rosy between the two of them. There's so much going on with Mateo that he's not dealing with and may even feel that he needs to hold it together to deal with Sara's volatile moods. They are such a spot light in these episodes with their emotions and the way the deal with them that they are most definitely a mirror to...

Sharon & Andy Sharon and Andy are two very different people. Something all of us fans know very well. Like Sarah Garza, Andy is an intense ball of emotions. He feels and acts first and thinks second. There have been many times when Sharon (most often) has had to hold Andy back from his emotions. Like in "Heart Failure" when the killer punched Sharon in the face. Sharon had to yell at Andy to defuse his emotions. Like Mateo, Andy is also an addict. Fortunately for Andy, he's sober and clear enough to feel his emotions.

Since we really don't know what it was that caused Andy to drink so heavily. I suspect that it was a combination of different things. The stuff that you see as a cop could drive anyone to drink. And since Andy feels his emotions so deeply there might not have been anyone he could have talked to about them. It was also suggested in "The Ecstasy and The Agony" that Andy may have drunk because their was an emptiness inside of himself that he was desperately trying to fill.

Sharon is much like Mateo Garza. Repressed and reserved. She feels emotions quite deeply but does not express them very easily. She takes her time in dealing with her emotions, usually by herself. Sharon is similar to Mateo in another way in that she desperately does not want to feel out of control. She has a hugely hard time feeling vulnerable in front of others. So much like the way she dealt with shooting Dwight Darnell. She detached herself from her own emotions. She was cold, probably more cold than we'd ever seen her. It's a defense mechanism for her, in that she's trying to protect herself from the intensity of her feelings.

Unlike, Sarah and Mateo. Sharon and Andy have a much healthier relationship. They have managed to balance themselves out with the other. In a way that I can't see Sarah and Mateo ever getting to. Sharon is still Sharon and Andy is still Andy but the two of them are better people for having been in a relationship with the other.

Andy has his anger issues but he's become a much calmer person that he was before. A lot of that has to do with his own work on himself and a lot of that has to do with his relationship with Sharon. And how her calm personality and influence temper the flame inside of himself. Like wise with Sharon. She's still very reserved and always will be but not like she was before. Andy's bright and passionate personality has helped to push Sharon much more out of her shell. She is able to enjoy life more now that she has a supportive partner.

Two Mothers

The Morgue & The Church: Sharon and Sarah

The way the morgue was lit and shot. Felt like another funeral scene. The stark colors, the natural light. The organ/funeral music that has played very subtly throughout both parts. I don't think we've had music quite like that on MC ever before. Most of it's pretty standard stuff so to me to have it so tailor made for an arc is something that stands out.

The morgue scene is very similar in tone and the way it's shot to the ending of part 1. But where's the church scene focused on Sharon's emotions. The morgue focus' on Sarah's emotions. Lucas' mother.

Conflicting missions

Sharon & Father Stan

Anyone find it odd that Father Jonas Alcaraz has a full name but Father Stan is just called Father Stan. And I don't even know if that's his first name or last name. Maybe Father Stan has only one name. You know like Cher.

"Are you suggesting are mission's conflict?" I also really like how Sharon talks to Father Stan in her office. Notice that she doesn't take him to her conference room or an interrogation room, the break-room or the murder room. It's her office she talks to him. Why? Because it's her inner sanctum and the place she feels most comfortable. Her office really represents her heart.

Sharon bares her soul to him. Sometimes in matters that even Andy doesn't know or understand (as we have seen in White Lies). Father Stan is one of the very few people that she trusts to be open and vulnerable with. So got to be extremely troubling for her to find herself on the opposite side of him.

Sharon being pulled in two different directions by challenging her faith in the catholic church verse her belief in the justice system. Is about a million times more interesting of an arc for her than her being sick. I am so jazzed about the next few episodes and seeing how she's going to have to struggle in dealing with being on the opposite side of her priest/church. This is a position that she never expected that she would ever be in but somehow has found her way to. She has dealt with the church before but this is different because this is not just any church and not just any priest.

Speaking of Sharon being sick....whatever happened to that storyline? It's such a odd thing for them to subtly hint about it in pt1 and not doing anything with it in pt2.

I love how Sharon speaks to Father Stan after Father Jonas leaves their interrogation. Almost like she's talking to a little boy and leaving out the part that they pissed him off. I mean I understand what she was trying to do. Trying to talk it down and smooth some edges before he hears Father Jonas' side of the story.

Unfortunately for her it doesn't work.

"We have nothing to hide." Father Stan goes from being open and very cooperative in the beginning of the episode. But by the end of the episode only a court order will force him to let the police into the church's private rooms. I find it interesting that he tells Sharon that there's no need for them to have a search warrant but he won't let them in. Neither did he tell them that Father Jonas had left until Sharon asked him. He knew what they were there for. And I understand his need to protect him but if Father Jonas hurt those boys he needs to answer for it. And While I don't think it was Father Jonas that took the boys I do think he it very likely he was molesting Ryan.

It's also interesting that since Sharon is so open to Father Stan with herself and her own heart. He's not as reciprocal when it becomes too tough for himself. And by that I mean his emotions regarding Father Jonas. Sharon let him into her heart and now he won’t let Sharon into his.

The ending scene(s)

I really really love what their doing for the Sanctuary City arc. The first two episodes and I'm guessing their going to continue doing this throughout the arc. Each ending scene is an poignant moment for Sharon. Part 1 features a Sharon who is almost blown away by the death of a child. To the point where she had to take a moment for herself before she broke down in front of her team. Part 2 features Sharon as she has to battle her own priest for access to a potential suspects room. And if we want to boil down the emotions that Sharon expresses in each scene. It would be...

Sadness (or depression) Anger

Could each episodes's ending express a different emotion in the stages of grief? Interestingly there are five of them and their are five episodes in this arc. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.

I don't know if I'm reading too much into it but I think it would be kind of cool if they did that. What is becoming clear is that Sharon is at the focus of these very poignant scenes. And do you know how much I love that!

Speculation: Let's gather what we do know. Lucas may not have been murdered and his death looks like the result of him not getting insulin to treat his diabetes. He did not have access to food or was not allowed to have any. He was left at the church, wrapped in a blanket and left on the flower bed. The boys were not coherst into the car that drove them away from the field trip. All three boys had family issues. Two with father issues and one with the looming threat of deportation. Father Jonas Alcaraz left in the middle of the missing boys not being found.

What does this information tell us? The person who took them was someone they knew and trusted. The person who dumped Lucas' body cared about him. Probably someone with a connection to the church. Like a member of the church or one of the parents.

Which makes me think definitely not Marvin Garret or Ryan's father. Both of them wouldn't think twice about putting Lucas' body at the church. Garret wouldn't care where he would have left his body and Ian doesn't have enough care for Lucas to put his body there. My new suspect, Ryan's mother. Miss Rojas.

What I don't like: Lots of over acting. While I like the contrasting between the two parents, Sarah's extreme emotional outbursts verses Mateo's calm almost corpse like manner. And I talk about the reason why their portrayed the way they are but Sarah was just was just too over the top. If they could have held her back a bit on that I think she would have nailed it. I think for the case with The Garza’s mirroring Shandy the point could have gotten across the same but with more subtly. I'm all for annoying FBI agents doing their job in a shitty way and MC walking all over them. But the two of them are written so brusque that they could be scaled back a bit too.

the face of crazy

What I do like: Sharon getting an emotional arc! Sharon battling her own priest in her own church. Makes it so intensely personal for her and I love it so much! The Garza's as a mirror for Sharon and Andy's relationship. The ending scene, the morgue scene. Rusty going to Andy about a gun. Because he's smart and also because fathership. Every time I view this episode I like it more and more. And I am really excited to see how the rest of this arc is going to play out and what it will ultimately do to Sharon's psyche.

#major crimes #sharon raydor #sharon finally geting an arc!#andy flynn #provenza #rusty beck #andrea hobbs #a reactionary post #mc season 6 a reactionary post

33 notes · View notes

polyrolemodels · 7 years

Video

youtube

Poly Role Models: Dr. Liz Powell of Sex Positive Psych and the Life on the Swingset podcast

PolyRoleModels: All right. Thank you for taking your time and being a part of Poly Role Models.

Dr. Liz Powell: I'm happy to be here, Kevin.

PolyRoleModels: You want to introduce yourself?

Dr. Liz Powell: Sure. I'm Dr. Liz from sexpositivepsych.com. I am a psychologist, a coach and a speaker and I love working with folks who are nonmonogamous, and kinky, and queer, and helping people in general find ways to have great sex because great sex can change the world.

PolyRoleModels: All right. Let's start up. How long have you been polyamorous or been practicing polyamory?

Dr. Liz Powell: I had my first consensual non-monogamy relationship when I was 17. I was in a dating quad in high school and I've been nonmonogamous on and off since then in different ways, in different forms. I've been 100% not doing any monogamy since 2011 so we're looking like six years now that I'm coming up on which is great.

PolyRoleModels: What does your current relationship dynamic look like?

Dr. Liz Powell: Oh, this is such an interesting time to ask me that question. Right now, I identify as solo poly and in general for me what that means is no one ever gets to tell me what to do with my heart, my time, my mind or my body. I'm not currently seeing anyone seriously. I have some casual lovers most of whom are long distance. The last person I was dating died just over two months ago and so it's been a little challenging to think about dating since that happened.

PolyRoleModels: What aspect of polyamory do you excel at?

Dr. Liz Powell: I'm really good at compersion. I am naturally just great at compersion. I'd naturally don't have a lot of jealousy and so I'm great at cheerleading my partners and all of the fun things that they want to do with other people.

PolyRoleModels: What aspects of polyamory do you struggle with?

Dr. Liz Powell: I think one of the ones I struggle with ... I'll give a couple. One is, as a solo poly person, it's tough to get people to take your relationship seriously because a lot of people have this misconception that solo poly means you don't ever want to do anything more than casual and so I think that there is this way in which it's hard to communicate adequately to people that I want a super serious, very intimate committed relationship. I just don't want you to have any control over me.

Then the other thing that I struggle with is just finding time. I'm a workaholic and so I spend a ton of my time working on my business and figuring out what I want to do. This year, I was out of town for work almost as much as I was in town so it's just been hard to find time to put people on my calendar.

PolyRoleModels: How do you address and/or overcome these struggles?

Dr. Liz Powell: For the first one, I am working hard on making solo poly more of a thing that people know about so that I can address those misconceptions and I try to tell people directly what solo poly means for me and what it means I am or I'm not open to.

PolyRoleModels: Welcome to Poly Role Models.

Dr. Liz Powell: Right? Hey, Poly Role Models. Solo poly, it’s not just for casual. Then for the latter one, there is this constant struggle when you're self-employed of figuring out how to have a work-life balance which is something that I value and that I think is very important and I tell everyone else to do and not panicking that if you stop working, you're going to be broke and not be able to afford food anymore.

My practice and my business are finally getting to the point where I'm less like, "Am I going to be able to pay my bills this month?" every month. I think it's easier to start focusing on setting aside time for other things, but it's still a thing I'm doing as a work in progress. I'm really good at putting things into my calendar but unfortunately that has looked in the recent past let me schedule in dates a minimum of six weeks out and it's hard to get excited for a date for six weeks. I don't know. I'm still figuring it out.

PolyRoleModels: Well, in terms of risk aware and safer sex, what do you and your partners do to protect one another?

Dr. Liz Powell: I definitely practice a risk aware sex model. I get tested every six months for STIs. I'm a veteran and so the VA does testing for me and once I told them that I have sex with a lot of people, they're happy to do all of the tests. It's great. They don't oral or anal swabs which I'm going to try to educate them on but I get all of the blood and urine tests and then HPV is a little bit less frequent just because they don't tend to do those as often.

I also use condoms for penetrative sex with toys or bio cocks. In group settings, I tend to use gloves for hand play. It's just easier that way, especially if someone who has a vulva and plays with people with vulvas. If I have a glove on one hand and not a glove on the other, I know which hand touches my pussy and which hand touches their pussy. There's a lot less fluid going between us. Barriers for oral are negotiable but I personally don't let bio dicks ejaculate in my mouth.

PolyRoleModels: What is the worst mistake you've ever made in your polyamorous history and how did you rebound from that?

Dr. Liz Powell: I think probably the worst mistake I made, I was dating this guy when I lived in Savannah and he was new to poly. I tend to struggle in general with dating people who are new to poly because my expectations are pretty high and I'm super upfront and communicative but I also tend to be sensitive to fuck ups in ways that some other people aren't.

We had started dating and I've been pretty clear like you can do whatever you want with other people just let me know so I can make decisions about what I'm going to do with my body given that information. Not once, not twice, but three separate times he had sex with other people without using protection and didn't tell me about it.

The first time I was like, "Hey, this is new to you. I'm sure this is a mistake. Let's just re-communicate this. In the future, just tell me if you fuck someone else. I think it's great that you're having sex with other people. Just fill me in." After the second time, I was like, "I don't understand why you're not getting this. This is really simple. Let's rehash this. Here you go. These are the agreements that we have." Then the third time, I flipped the fuck out because sometimes, right?

PolyRoleModels: Yeah.

Dr. Liz Powell: I decided we were done. It was over and then ... The thing I need to tell you is he had the most adorable dog I've ever seen. Violet is a treasure and she is just such a sweet darling puppy. We were getting together to have a conversation where I was going to just yell at him about what an asshole he was but he brought Violet and started talking all this talk about how he was going to work on stuff and he had talked to these people. It's going to be better and he knows what he did and he's going to fix it. The person he had hooked up with was someone who was married whose husband thought that she was monogamous with him. I had met the person I was dating through an atheist club and she was a strict Catholic. I was like, "This is a terrible idea." But for some reason, I decided to give him a chance.

For me, giving him a chance looked like setting a bunch of traps. I was like, "Here are the rules you will abide by to re-earn my trust. You have to text me when you get together with her and text me when you leave. She's allowed on your porch but not inside your house." All of this bullshit little legislate-y stuff to get him opportunities to fail. Of course every time he'd fail, I'd get pissed and create new rules. More opportunities, more traps. After about three weeks of that and me just blowing up at him all the time, of course he kept failing and of course he decided to just go back to doing what he was doing and the relationship ended.

What I learned is not that he's a terrible person. He was shitty at poly but what I learned is that you can't create rules to keep yourself safe. And, if you're trying to give someone a chance to come back after a mess up, it has to be a real chance. It can't be you setting up an opportunity for them to fail again, you setting up the chance for them to just prove to you that they're exactly as bad as you think they are. It has to be a real chance or not a chance.

Since then I've been much better about if someone does something that I don't like or that I'm not a fan of, I instead ask myself, "Well, what are my boundaries given what I know about this person?" In that situation, I think it would have been better for me if I had said, "Okay. Given that I know that he is going to hook up with other people and not use protection with them, what do I feel comfortable doing with him in those circumstances?" Most likely the answer would have been, we can be friends. Maybe we can make out but that's probably about the limit of what I'm willing to do. Instead of doing that and taking responsibility on myself for respecting his choices and letting him do whatever that he wants to do I tried to rule him into nonexistence and that doesn't work.

PolyRoleModels: It's a good learn.

Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah.

PolyRoleModels: This is the optional one. What self-identities are important to you and how do you feel being polyamorous intersects or affects these identities?

Dr. Liz Powell: I am queer. I am a genderqueer woman. I am a disabled veteran. I am kinky. I'm a switch. And I think the ones that are easiest to intersect with polyamory in a lot of ways are being queer and being genderqueer. I live in San Francisco. In San Francisco, everyone is pretty savvy on genderqueer stuff, especially in the poly community. Everyone is pretty savvy on queer people and how queer people do things so I don't tend to get a lot of blow back on those. But, being disabled, especially someone with an invisible disability, I've had people from the very best place in their hearts tell me that I don't look disabled or it must not be that bad. Since my disability is something that I was discharged from the military for, that I'm like military disabled but not like regular people disabled.

PolyRoleModels: Wow.

Dr. Liz Powell: Again, it's coming from a good place of our internalized ableism telling us that disabled people are bad or to be disabled is bad and so they want to reassure me that I'm not that way and that that's not me but I am disabled. I have chronic pain. I have very real limitations of my body.

The most difficult one is being a veteran. I work in the sex field. I'm a sex therapist. I present at sexuality conferences and I've had people say some really heinous things to me because I'm a veteran or say really heinous things about the military or veterans around me not knowing that I am one of those people. Things like someone on Twitter told me that I was a genocidal murderer because I had served in the military. I had someone in one of my panels about military tell me that they think having military members or veterans at one of their classes would harm other attendees, just their presence would harm other attendees. There's just been a lot of experiences I've had with people who don't understand military and are so completely disconnected from people who have served and from the military at large that they don't necessarily understand the impact of what they're saying.

I am very public and out about being a veteran and I still encounter a lot of people who don't know that about me. I'm lucky in that I'm able to find people who are helping me change some of this culture and how we react to military and veterans in sex positive communities, but it is still really challenging, and I wish that more folks would bring the kind of awareness to talking about military and veteran issues that they bring to other issues that we have in our community.

PolyRoleModels: All right. Let's wrap it up with do you have any groups, projects, websites, blog, etc. that you're involved with that you would like to promote?

Dr. Liz Powell: Shameless self-promotion. My website is sexpositivepsych.com. I have online classes at sexpositivepsych.teachable.com. The two that I have up as of the recording of this video are Nasty, Naughty Negotiation which is getting what you want in a way that's fun and sexy and Your Erotic Voice which is a six week deep dive into building the skills you need to find your voice and get what you want in the bedroom and beyond. I am currently working on a book called Building Open Relationships and it's going to be a practical how-to, hands-on guide for doing this non-monogamy shit. It's going to have all of the worksheets and checklists you could dream of, and I'm so excited about it because it's going to be nerdy and practical. I love so many of the books that are out there but they're so strongly theory focused and I want people to have tools they can use to dive in, have conversations, with their partners, create their own safer sex kits, do the things that they need to do in order to be able to be successful in non-monogamy.

I'm also a cohost on the Life on the Swingset podcast which is Swingset.FM. What else do I do? Holy shit. I teach everywhere. I'm all over the internet. I'm on Twitter @sexpospsych. If you check out my website, I try to keep it pretty up to date about what's going on with me.

PolyRoleModels: Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time and being a part of Poly Role Models.

Dr. Liz Powell: Thanks for having me, Kevin. I appreciate it.

PolyRoleModels: All right.

Dr. Liz Powell: Night.

—

Support Inclusive Polyamorous Representation at https://www.patreon.com/PolyRoleModels

#polyamory #polyamorous #solo poly #queer #bisexual #military #veteran #disability

19 notes · View notes

mutualhighmaintenancemachin-blog · 5 years

Text

I need a fix cus I'm going down

Made the mistake of appraising myself sufficiently healthy to attend a bonfire with normal decent tax-payer type folks. Stood up too fast in my chair and blacked out completely, hit my head on concrete. When I came to i had no earthly fucking memory of having driven to the bonfire, nor could i really recall the names of the three concerned hipsters perched over my limp doughy abscessed jaundiced shit heap of a body. Told them it was a problem with blood sugar, i had forgotten to imbibe my afternoon orange juice! Translation-haven’t slept in four days, taking in roughly two hundred calories a day all in ginger ale. Meth heads opt to sustain themselves on a diet of paranoid resentment in lieu of proteins and grains. The cook gets super spun and lectures us like we’re babes about the dark leftist forces presently waging war on the masculinity of the white man-for one thing, he's convinced that jews run the porn industry and that fucking pornhub is riddled with overtures both overt and subliminal intended to brainwash white guys into identifying as weak and feminine and to associate men of color with heroism and strength. He also believes that soy causes gender dysphoria. All of these batshit crazy delusions act like stars in the broad constellation of the cooks worst dystopian fears-a workforce with no room left for traditionally male-centered leadership characteristics dominated from top-down by a host of future ladies who make their trade in creative collaboration, rather than fear and theft of other peoples ideas. Without a need for a provider, our nazi-bespectacled methamphetamine cook envisions a new sexual economy in which women will jettison their attachments to the family structure in favor of like, industrialism, i guess, and men will have no other resort but a desperate turn to cross-dressing and dick-taking and i guess maybe stitching scarves. It was at this point that i was really tempted to tell the cook something he needs to hear-if you really believe that large shadow societies are orchestrating history just cus they want to make you some dudes boyfriend, its probably cus part of you wants to be. I get that, sucking dick is a blast. if you’re terrified that you can’t compete in a post-modern job market, it might just be because you aren’t. There’s no place left for cowboys or outlaws or methcooks cus those professions only make sense in the context of an insanely violent frontier. You feel obsolete and useless because you are, but make no mistake, that hurt has nothing to do with the world everything to do with your soul being severely malnourished. I know cus mine is too! Real moral christian courage is showing up to your crucifixion with a smile on your face ready to graciously thank the romans for every nail they put through your wrist. You feel empty because your a paranoid fascist meth cook, i feel bad cus I'm a junkie. We are bad. The nazi pilots who blitzed france in two sleepless, speed-fueled nights probably felt fucking fantastic, as if they were aloft on the trade winds of history itself and their momentum across europe must have seemed like proof enough of the moral righteousness of the german cause. But then the morning comes and the meth wears off and your skin smells like piss and your back aches and you can’t stop grinding your jaw and the first wave of survivors begin to trickle out from the camps and presumably in that moment a few nazis had the epiphany-that the very same starved beaten traumatized jewish women and men and children they had aspired to extinguish from human memory were now going to tell the story of what had happened. Power loses, grace is its own kingdom, etc etc. Furthermore those german officers who managed to transition back to civilian life and start families must have experienced a very strange new parental dynamic-can you imagine a family at a dinner table and the proud head of household instructs his small son to finish his vegetables and after pausing to mull it over for a few moments his son turns to him and says Father having thought about it a great deal i don’t think ill be following your instructions-after all you were only following instructions yourself when you helped to engineer the greatest cruelty in human history! To which ostensibly the father mumbles to clear his throat and asks his wife to pass the potato salad. Not even to invoke the possibility that the Fuhrer himself Mr. Adolph Hitler probably died surrounded by a swarm of shadow people, fucking hilarious just the thought, him yelling in that distinctive manic patois of his that he’s the leader and the abeyance of his will is sacrosanct blah blah blah while the little invisible mites under his pale skin shift and swell and scratch and the shadow people dancing around his peripheral vision taunting and cajoling and ridiculing him and the absurdity of his final solution and because he didn’t know speed the way we now know speed he probably didn’t know anything about the shadow people at all from his perspective they might just as well have been the ghosts of his victims come to taunt and ridicule him in his lowest hour pointing and laughing and daring him to pull the trigger!

The same entitlement motivates the mass shooter who imagines a world full of seven billion perfect strangers as an attack on his rightful pursuit of happiness. No one will sleep with him and he can’t make sense of his place in a world built on fucking so he begins to indulge in fantasies of coercion, revenging himself on the very public space he so craved Now if our hypothetical douchebag had any pretense of self-awareness he might have looked into the possibility of adopting several dogs, and in turn coming to see his life as a story about caring unconditionally for animals. That’s a helluva life-Saint Francis got into the catholic hall of fame for doing not a whole lot more. Or perhaps he could adjust his expectations of intimacy in consideration of the countless plain-to middling-to ugly folks who are forced to come to terms with the truth early on that all of our bodies are grotesque and hideously deformed billboard advertisements for our big beautiful impossibly dense souls-come see a kernel of divine inspiration made self-aware, shimmering in the glory of creation, just two exits past the tits and chin and ankles and all the rest of our faulty parts.

Now a discerning reader(however unlikely you’d be to find one in an audience consisting of absolutely fucking nobody lol) might have already begun to detect a certain heady strain of hypocrisy in this authors conclusion. Because while I'm not much of anything the one thing i certainly am is a self-destructive drug addict. So maybe its one thing for me to make fun of the cook for his wrath-filled flu-stricken infants tantrum of a way of viewing the world, assigning to his solipsism a generation-hopping solidarity with his nazi forefathers who came before and identifying in his politics the germinal seed of fascisms future, a politics so personal and self-contained that every divorce will be debated as if it were a stand in for larger cultural decay, every morning hangover a portent of spiritual decline, the vitals of the stock market remeasured and reassessed each time someone finds on the sidewalk a loose dollar bill. Political assemblies with real largesse exclusively devoted to trolling the instagram of a nebraskan man named doug’s now ex-wife for pictures of her maui vacation with husband number two drinking mojitos on a beach with sand bleached white as bone and both of them grinning with surgical precision an opulent almost confrontational kind of public grinning Doug couldn't recall that bitch ever having felt for him and the kids off playing in the surf and well how could any concerned and conscientious citizen fail to see the basic threat to democracy that whole scene represents? Donald Trump is probably the loneliest man in the world. He’s never met another person. He spends his time wandering the halls of his head checking for reoccurrences of his own reflection, a lifetime spent pathologically re-telling the same story about how he came to be the most powerful person in the world, so that by the time he really became who he had always pretended to be, the most influential figure in the free world, he had long-since bought into his own fraud to such a great extent that even the real thing couldn’t compare. Only a selfishness and self-centeredness as grandiloquent as his could explain the mindset of the modern mass shooter and the micro-politics informing him. He confuses his head for the world and then becomes enraged when it won’t do as he wishes, cursing the rain for its cold lash against his shoulder where he’d rather there have rested warm summer glow, furious at the thought of all the people he would never meet in far-off places he would never see who never paid him any attention whatsoever. Playing peek-a-boo a little bit of cheating peer through chubby fingers arrayed like a geisha’s fan and for the first time see that objects don’t disappear without our gaze to ontologically anchor them to earth. What a hurt. Now it might be technically correct that my addiction does to my loving family what the selfishness of the mass shooter does to public space. It intrudes like an alien thing and turns the air chilly in our childhood home and it transforms the medicine cabinet into a contested territory in need of defensive fortification and now that Cassies marriage has crashed on the rocks of addiction nobody could blame her if she never allowed another addict to darken her doorstep again and there was the sight of Jan opening my trucks passenger side door and a few rigs fell out onto the floor and all the spoons in the house have one side burnt-and-bruised like a black-eye you say you got from falling down a flight of stairs despite body language that says something entirely else why is it we don’t have a single spoon in the house what ghost spends all night punching the walls full of holes

recently went to an Alanon meeting to sneak a glimpse of how the other half lives...this lady said my addiction is to loving my addict. Bawled rivers out from red raw-rubbed rubber eyes and said my addiction is to my addict Not her person or qualifier or partner but her addict. Syntax almost seeming to suggest that something about the existential plight of the addict gets her intoxicated dizzy on pain. It’s quaint though cus that sort of sentiment is for fucking rookies-guarantee you no ones crying over me like a romantic. Not anymore. My thing these days is of a distinctly more shakespearian strand of tragedy, with wittgenstein and derrida’s influences also undeniable. I’m sick now in a way where people stop crying and praying you’ll find God and change and decide instead it’d be easier to just cross the street. Schizophrenics lost in a chorus meant only just for them, apocalyptic street preachers who stand on soap boxes while reeking of shit and give voice to visions of an America not our own, an alternate dimension where european arrival at the shores of the new world stalled out somewhere halfway across the pacific ocean on a wave so tall it scraped the heavens and America grew up a nation of nomads who set their watches to the rumbling migration of herds of buffalo and not even the highest priest could dream of a more beautiful idea than that of motion, movement without cease, the only acceptable fixed still frozen property being the burial mounds where the dead went after all their motion had gone-if they could view us on the other side of the looking glass stolen away in our own personal homes they would almost certainly come to the conclusion that this place where we live is just the land of the dead, a negative photograph of everything vital and good. Who would i be to disagree though, right?

The point is anyway that some alchemical reaction of A. Mental illness and B. Amphetamine abuse has more or less stranded me in words. Verbs and nouns and adjectives and adverbs in place of sky and grass. What Fredric Jameson called the prison house of language. Where derrida’s difference goes to play for eternity, never quite meaning what it had meant to say. What shook wittgenstein speechless. The president’s rhetoric so hollow that you can almost see him suffering a kind of dementia or spiritual torpor that results from the badness of his faith. Chewing and chomping consonants and sounds till they all are made to mush and shearing syllable after syllable off the network of signification until all that’s left is one satellite pinging a distress call hello is anyone there off of its own side. It’s own side like Adam plucked Eve from his rib and said put on this dress-after they ate the fruit and God cast him/her out to walk the world alone reportedly God said have fun all alone you worthless slut. Imagine trumps final state of the union-i am very sick, i have been alone for as long as I can remember, i wish i hadn’t lied so often, i wish i had occasionally told the truth, i would trade all of it to have known just one person.

Anyways, barring that miracle of political theater, the body gets sick and dissolves while the spirit is lost in words. I’d like to die in a bathroom stall in haughville with a rig stuck in my arm and the words I'm sorry stuck at the tip of my tongue and God decides to show some compassion and makes me a deal says you were never much good to people didn’t believe in a thing but you sure could do some impressive vomiting up of nonsense words and so what ill do is your soul will dissolve and turn into ink and for the rest of eternity you’ll be a naughty joke or a half-scribbled doggerel scrawled on the wall of a piss-soaked bathroom stall in the ghetto or you could say call this number here for a good time and don’t forget to ask for large marge and nobody’d ever suspect you were trapped in there or maybe a joke like this favorite of mine about my son it goes something like Jesus Christ was a God-awful carpenter, couldn’t pull a nail to save his own life. Christ was a God-awful, couldn’t pull a nail to save his own life. Couldn't pull a nail. Christ was God-awful. Couldn’t nail his own couldn’t save a carpenter terrible couldn’t pull god-awful a terrible carpenter he couldn’t pull a nail to save his own life. I can’t pull this nail to save my own life. It’s right there sticking out of my wrist, but for whatever reason I just can’t find the right words to pull it out he was a carpenter who couldn’t pull a nail even if his life depended on it couldn't save his own life he couldn't-

For a good time call this number 1-555-555-5555 and don’t forget to ask for-

0 notes

candyredterezii · 7 years

Text

rnagyars submitted:

All right, Petunia. Wish me luck out there. You will die on August 7th, 2037. That’s pretty good. All right. Hello. Hello, Chicago. Nice to see you again. Thank you. That was very nice. Thank you. Look, now, you’re a wonderful crowd, but I need you to keep your energy up the entire show, okay? Because… No, no, no. Thank you. Some crowds… some crowds, they have big energy in the beginning and then they run out of places to go. So… I don’t judge those crowds, by the way, okay? We’ve all gone too big too fast and then run out of room. We’ve all made a “Happy Birthday” sign… Wait. You get that poster board up, and you’re like, “I don’t need to trace it. I know how big letters should be. To begin with, a big-ass ‘H’. Followed by a big-ass 'A’ and… Oh, no! Oh, God! Okay, all right. Real skinny 'P’ with a high hump, and then we’ll put the second 'P’ below the hump of that first 'P’, sort of like a motorcycle sidecar situation. And now I have no room for the 'Y’, so I’ll do a kind of curled-up noodle 'Y’. Block letters and cursive look good together.” And then you go to write “Birthday” and you totally forget the lesson you just learned with “Happy.” You’re like, “Yeah, but the past is the past. Big-ass 'B’. Surely more letters will fit in the same space.” You’re very friendly here in Chicago. I mean, we’re all violent here, but you’re very friendly. No, really. And I don’t like confrontation, 'cause I’ve never been in a fight before. Though, maybe you could tell that from the first moment I walked out on stage. I don’t give off that vibe. Some people give off a vibe of… Right away, they’re like, “Do not fuck with me.” My vibe is more like, “Hey, you could pour soup in my lap and I’ll probably apologize to you.” When I walk, for real, my feet go out like this. I’m so open and vulnerable. I look like a doll that you point out molestation on. “Show us on this white comedian where the man touched you.” It’s been a while since I’ve been home to Chicago. I got married since then. Thank you. I married my wife. I love saying “my wife.” It sounds so adult. “That’s my wife.” It’s great, you sound like a person. I said it even before we were married. We were just dating, and we were once getting on an airplane, and Anna’s ticket didn’t say anything and my ticket said “priority access.” It doesn’t matter why. But we were getting on and I said, “Uh, can my wife board with me?” And they were like, “Yes, of course. Right this way.” And I was like, “Oh, that is so much better than all those times I was like, 'Can my girlfriend come?’” And, yeah, I shouldn’t have said it that way, but still. “My wife” just has some kick-ass to it, you know? “Get away from my wife! No one talk to my wife!” Marriage is gonna be very magical. “I didn’t kill my wife!” That’s like, “Ooh, who’s that fella? I bet he did kill his wife.” Being married is so nice. I never knew relationships were supposed to make you feel better about yourself. That’s not really a joke, that’s just a little sweet thing I like to say. 'Cause I’d been in relationships where I got cheated on, like, long ones. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a long relationship where you got cheated on, but it changes your whole worldview. 'Cause when I was a kid, I used to watch America’s Most Wanted. You know how kids do. And I would always think to myself, “How could another person kill someone? How could a human being kill another human being?” And then I got cheated on, and I was like, “Oh, okay.” “I’m not gonna do it, but I totally get it.” And I don’t mean in that way of, like, “No one else can have you.” I don’t care about that. It’s just creepy to have an ex out there after things have ended badly. They have a lot of information. Anyone who’s seen my dick and met my parents needs to die. I can’t have them roaming around. I talked to a lot of people before I got engaged, you know. And I heard this expression about whether or not you should get married. This is an old expression. People say this. They say, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” You ever heard that before? It’s a bananas insulting expression… to an entire gender. But also, it makes no sense. “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” You’re not allowed to milk a cow that you don’t own. That’s not even a situation. Was that a problem at one point? Like, in the dairy community? Was that happening a hundred years ago in some village? Some Dutch prick was sneaking in at night being like, “Ah-ha-ha, I take your milk.” And the farmer was like, “Well, then, this is your cow now.” And he was like, “No, no proof of purchase.” And he ran off into the night. That sounded Dutch, right? You know what that… you know what that expression means? It means, “Why would you marry a woman if she’s already having sex with you?” Which has nothing to do with what relationships are even like anymore. Now, it’s like, “Why buy the cow?” Uh, maybe because, every day, the cow asks you when you’re gonna buy it. And… … you live in a really small apartment with the cow, so you can’t avoid that question at all. And also, the cow is way better at arguing than you are. And the cow grew up in a family that knows how to argue. “Why buy the cow?” Uh, maybe because every time another cow gets bought, you have to go to the sale and you have to sit next to your cow at the sale, and your cow looks over at you the entire time like… And does not enjoy the sale at all… even though she’s the one that wanted to go to the sale. And she’s especially mad because that farmer and cow met, like, eight months after you guys met. “Why buy the cow?” Well, let’s be real here. You’re very lucky to have the cow that you do have. “Roping in cows and getting milk out of them was never anything you were known for, John.” By the most liberal of estimates, there have been about eight cows total, several unmilked, and… a lot of people think that you like bulls, and if you just bought… They assume it. When you search your name, the third thing to come up is like, “John Mulaney bull?” And if you just bought the cow, nobody would say that anymore. They’ll still say it. 'Cause there are those guys who, they buy a cow, and then on the side, total matador, but… But, for real, Chicago, why buy the cow? Let’s be real. Why buy the cow? Because you love her. You really do. And, yeah, yeah… Sure, she’s a bossy little Jew, but… … she takes care of you. And you don’t wanna be some old man stumbling around, like, “Hey, you seen any loose milk?” My wife is Jewish. She’s a New York Jew. I did it! Now, I was raised Catholic. I don’t know if you can tell that from the everything about me. My wife is Jewish, I grew up Catholic, so we got married by a friend. Being married by a friend is a beautiful ceremony that alienates both families’ religions, while confusing the elderly people at the wedding. “What’s the name of the bishop?” “That’s actually stand-up comedian Dan Levy. He was the host of MTV’s Your Face or Mine?” I saw a lot of Catholic weddings, though, because I was an altar boy… And a hush falls over the room. Isn’t it weird how that became a scandalous thing? That was just some boring shit I had to do on weekends. But now, it’s like saying, “I was a French maid for a period of time. I was treated well in my day. I worked for a variety of sirs.” No, being an altar boy was just a boring gig, you know? You’d serve Mass and then you’d serve weddings sometimes. My brother was once an altar boy at a wedding, and he was standing there with another altar boy in this big, packed church in Chicago where we grew up. And the bride was coming down the aisle, and the organ was playing, and all the pews were filled, and the bride got all the way to the altar, and the groom lifted the veil off of the bride, and right at that moment the other altar boy said, “Aw, she’s ugly.” And then they looked, and they were right next to the video camera. And I know that’s awful, but wouldn’t you give a million dollars to see that wedding video? It was the best moment of this stupid woman’s life, and she’s walking down the aisle, and the organ’s like… And she gets all the way to the altar to her betrothed, and he unveils her to the world and to the eyes of God. And right at that second, for no reason at all, some Cheeto-fingered, rat-mustached, 13-year-old prick decides to go, “Aw, she’s ugly!” Hopefully the videographer knew some sound editing so he could fix it to be like, “Aw, she’s beautiful. She’s enchanting.” I grew up Catholic. I don’t go to church anymore. But I went on Christmas Eve with my parents, 'cause you know how you lie to your parents. So… we go into the church and I was like, “I got this under control.” And then I got schooled because they introduced a bunch of new shit. No, I was going through Mass and I was batting, like, .400. And then in the middle of Mass, the priest said, “Peace be with you.” And everyone said, “And with your spirit.” And I was the one pre-Y2K asshole going, “And also with you. What? Huh? What? Huh? What? When? When?” For those of you that aren’t Catholic, I don’t mean to exclude you, even though we love to exclude you, but… There’s a part in church where the priest says, “Peace be with you.” And for many, many years, we all said… - “And also with you.” - Very good. But they changed it to “And with your spirit.” Because that’s what needed revamping in the Catholic Church. That was the squeaky wheel that needed the grease. In Rome, they were like, “Let’s see. What problems can we solve? Problem one. No.” I’m actually glad they changed that, though. I never liked “And also with you.” I always found that clunky. “And also with you.” That’s not how you talk. - “Have a nice day.” - “And also you having one.” It’s just a little bit wrong, isn’t it? It’s just a little off. Like, when someone’s like, “How are you?” And you’re like, “Nothing much.” And it sort of makes sense. Never begin a sentence with “And also.” You just immediately sound caught off-guard. It sounds like if at the first church ever, like, they weren’t expecting it. Like, the priest was like, “Hey, this is the first time we’ve ever had church. I just wanna say, 'Peace be with you.’” And they were like… “What? Oh. Uh, yeah. And also you should have some.” “Hey, that’s good. Let’s keep that for 2,000 years. And then change it to trick John.” My wife and I don’t have any children, we have a dog. We have a little puppy named Petunia. She’s a tiny little French bulldog puppy. I like having a puppy that’s a bulldog, 'cause it’s like having a baby that is also a grandma. Her body is young, her face is as old as time. She definitely saw the Nazis march into Paris. She always gives me this look of like, “Oh, the things I have seen, you cocksucker. You have no idea. The Gestapo threw my printing press into a river. But, go, tell your fucking jokes. Bring me my dish.” She said that. Petunia… Petunia is my best friend in the world. I give her a million kisses a day. She does not like me, and barks at me and bites me all day long. We had to get a dog trainer into the apartment because Petunia is a bad dog. We tell her that every day. We go, “Hey, you’re bad at being a dog.” So, the trainer came into the apartment. Sorry, didn’t even walk into the apartment, walked into the threshold and went, “Oh, okay.” Like she was an exorcist or something. She said, “I see what the problem is.” She said, “Petunia has become the alpha of the house.” And then she pointed at me, she said, “You are no longer the alpha of the house.” And in the back of my head, I was like, “I was never the alpha of the house.” I turned to my wife, I was like, “Let’s pretend. It’ll be fun. Yes… My title of alpha, which I once had, how can I reclaim it? Because that was a thing that existed at one time.” She said, “You need to show dominance over your puppy.” These are things people say to me. I said, “How do I do that?” She said, “Well, let me ask you this. Who eats dinner first, you or Petunia?” I was like, “Petunia eats dinner first. She eats dinner at 5:00 p.m., 'cause she’s a foot long and two years old.” She said, “No, you need to eat dinner first. Because the king eats before anyone else eats.” Oh, yes, and what a mighty king I will be, eating dinner at 4:45 in the afternoon. “Look upon your sovereign, Petunia, and tremble. My lands stretch across this entire one bedroom, and I eat dinner whenever I choose, as long as it works for the schedule of a dog.” She said, “Now, you don’t actually have to eat dinner before Petunia. You just have to convince Petunia that you’ve already eaten.” So… for the past month, I shit you not… before my wife and I give Petunia her dish, we take down empty bowls and spoons, and in front of her, we go, “Mmm, dinner. Mmm, good dinner.” Like we’re space aliens in a play about human beings that they wrote, but they didn’t work that hard on. “Mmm, we’re eating dinner.” Meanwhile, Petunia’s just staring at us with her Paul Giamatti face, like… “You’re not eating dinner, cocksucker. Dish, now.” I have a wife and a dog, and we just bought a house. We have a new house. It was built in the '20s, but it was flipped in 2014. Which means it’s haunted, but it has a lovely kitchen backsplash. Actually, we didn’t buy a house. A bank bought a house, and I’m allowed to keep my shirts and pants there while I pay it off for 30 years. The woman from the bank came over and she showed me my mortgage broken down month by month for 30 years. And she said, “So, for instance, this is what you’ll pay in July of 2029.” And I burst out laughing. I was like, “2029? That’s not a real year. By 2029, I’ll be drinking moon juice with President Jonathan Taylor Thomas. I’m not gonna be writing you a paper check.” I like having a house, but I loved looking for a house, 'cause I love real estate agents. I mean, they are the true heroes. They really are. Have you ever watched HGTV? Real estate agents have to deal with the dumbest people in the world making the biggest decisions of their lives. Every episode of HGTV is like, “Craig and Stacia are looking for a two-story A-frame that’s near Craig’s job in the downtown, but also satisfies Stacia’s need to be near the beach which is nowhere near Craig’s job. With three children and nine on the way, and a max budget of $7… let’s see what Lori Jo can do on this week’s episode of You Don’t Deserve A Beach House.” I loved our real estate agent. It was so fun to hang out with her. It was like hanging out with my mom. 'Cause, you know, real estate agents always look like your mom. And they have various Chico’s accoutrements. They always have kind of fun mom energy. And they’re always, “So excited to see you two.” We would have little conferences before we walked into a house. She’d go, “Let’s talk. Let’s talk before we go in.” We’re, like, two feet from the door. “So, there’s no toilets. And I know that was on your list. But I think I can get him to budge. Let’s go.” So, we’d have a real estate agent, and then, like, the house would have a real estate agent who’s just some guy sitting in a big chair. And these two always hated each other. They’d be like, “Hi, Tony.” “Hi, Kim.” It’s like, “Jesus Christ! What, were you two in the Eagles together? What is the animosity about?” Our real estate agent wanted us to have a baby more than anyone else in our lives, more than anyone in our family. She hinted about it constantly. Every room she walked into, she’d be like, “So, this could be an office.” “Or maybe a nursery.” “Yeah. No, like we said, we don’t know if we’re gonna have… ” “No, no. I know, I know, you know. You don’t know if you’re gonna have 'em, but you know. You know, you never know. Sometimes you don’t know what’s gonna happen, and then… you know, something happens.” “Well, yeah, that’s how all of life works.” “Okay, all right. Okay. Uh-huh. Mmm. This is an on-fire garbage can. Could be a nursery.” She showed me a backyard once. She goes, “I don’t even like this backyard for you.” I was like, “Oh, do tell.” She said, “It’s all pavement. I think you should have some grass out there. You know, in case you have a couple… little guys… running around in the grass.” And I got offended on behalf of my imaginary kids. I was like, “Hey, lady. I went outside about as much as Powder from the movie Powder. My children are not gonna be playing out on grass. They will be up in their rooms playing violent video games and catfishing pedophiles. These are my children. And that’s my wife!” I didn’t mean to make it sound like we don’t want children. We don’t, but I didn’t mean to make it sound like that. See, I just don’t think babies like me very much. Sometimes babies will point at me, and I don’t care for that shit at all. Like, I’ll be on an elevator, and a baby will be there in its big, like, stroller activity tray, just, like, working on one Cheerio with Bobby Fischer-like intensity. And it’ll look up at me and go… I like to lean in and go, “Stop snitchin’, motherfucker.” And then walk off. 'Cause you’re never too young to learn our national no-snitching policy. My friends have babies and I don’t do so well with them. I had a run-in with a two-year-old girl. I know there are better ways to start that story, but… My friend, Jeremy, has this two-year-old girl, and I really like her. She’s a sweet kid. I really like his daughter a lot. But I was over at his family’s house for the Fourth of July, and he had his daughter on his knee. And it was a very lovely day. His whole extended family was there. And he was bouncing his two-year-old up and down, and he pointed at me and he said to his two-year-old, “Do you know who that is? That’s your Uncle John.” And I was like, “Oh, my God. That’s so sweet. I’m her Uncle John.” And then the baby pointed at me and said, “Uncle John has a penis.” I thank you for laughing, because no one did that day! Fell deadly silent, is what they all did. Hey, do you know what you’re supposed to say when a baby points at you and knowingly says, “He has a penis”? No, I’m asking, 'cause I don’t know what to say in that situation. Here’s what I went with that day. I said, “Oh, come on!” I don’t know. I thought that’d be good. But then it just made it worse, 'cause it sounded like the baby and I had an arrangement not to talk about it, and she had violated my trust. Like, the baby had been like, “Do you have a penis?” And I was like, “Yes, I do, but you’re a baby, so discretion is key.” And then the next day she goes, “He has a penis,” and I go, “Oh, come on! Someone can’t keep a secret!” Luckily, Jeremy’s wife saved the day. The baby’s mom saved the day. She came in and she picked up the baby, and she was like, “It’s okay. She’s just going through that phase where she says penis and vagina a lot.” Aren’t we all? And, by the way, it would’ve been a totally different situation if the baby had said vagina. Like, if a grown woman had walked in the room, and the baby had been like, “She has a vagina,” the woman could be like, “Yes, I do, and it’s magnificent.” And we would all be like, “Hooray! You are brave!” No one wants to applaud the penis of a 32-year-old weirdo. It’s fun to be married. I’ve never been supervised before. I’m supervised. She studies what I do. Like an anthropologist. She’ll be like, “Sometimes, he will watch a movie on TV even though he already owns that movie on DVD. Pointing this out to him confuses and upsets him.” I had no supervision when I was a kid. We were free to do what we wanted. But also, with that, no one cared about kids. I grew up before children were special. I did. Very early '80s, right before children became special. Like, I remember when milk carton kids became a thing. When they were like, “Hey, we should start looking for some of these guys. I don’t think they’re just blowing off steam.” No one cared about my opinion when I was a little kid. No one cared what I thought. Sometimes, people would say, “What do you think you’re doing?” But that just meant “Stop.” They didn’t actually wanna know my thought process. They didn’t want me to be like, “Well, I was gonna put this bottle rocket into this carton of eggs, so that when I lit off the bottle rocket, the eggs would explode everywhere.” “Oh, well, that’s very interesting. And what brought you to this experiment?” “Oh, well, thank you for asking. Well… you know how I’m filled with rage? I’m so horny and angry all the time… and I have no outlet for it. So… eggs.” Your opinion doesn’t matter in elementary school either. It matters in college. College is just your opinion. Just you raising your hand and being like, “I think Emily Dickinson’s a lesbian.” And they’re like, “Partial credit.” And that’s a whole thing. But in elementary school, it doesn’t matter what you think, it just matters what you know. You have to have answers to questions. And if you say, “I don’t know,” you get an X on your test, and you get it wrong and that’s not fair, 'cause your brain has never been smaller. Also, that’s not how life works. I’m in my 30s now. If you came to me now and you were like, “Hey, John, name three things that the Stamp Act of 1775 accomplished.” I’d go, “I don’t know. Get out of my apartment,” you know? But when you’re a little kid, you can’t say, “I don’t know.” You should be able to. That should be an acceptable answer on a test. You should be able to write in, “I don’t know. I know you told me. But I have had a very long day. I am very small. And I have no money. So you can imagine the kind of stress that I am under.” Or if it’s one of those true or false questions, you should be able to add a third option which is, “Who’s to say?” Kids are much more supervised now, but also, they have a lot of rights. Like, that’s the biggest civil rights increase I’ve seen in my lifetime. The rights of children have gone through the roof. I had no rights when I was a little kid. I remember, one time, I walked into a supermarket by myself, and I walked in through the double doors, and the woman behind the register just looked at me and she went, “No!” And I went, “All right.” And I turned around and left. That’s how broken I was. And there weren’t special things for kids the way there are now. Like, we would just go see movies. Any movie. Like Back to the Future. That was a movie everyone could see. Kids could kinda see it. Great movie, right? I rewatched it recently. It’s a very weird movie. Marty McFly is a 17-year-old high school student whose best friend is a disgraced nuclear physicist. And, I shit you not, they never explain how they became friends. They never explain it. Not even in a lazy way, like, “Hey, remember when we met in the science building?” They don’t even do that. And we were all fine with it. We were just like, “What, who’s his best friend? A disgraced nuclear physicist? All right, proceed.” What a strange movie to sell to be a family movie. Two guys had to go in and do that. They had to be like, “Okay… we got an idea… for the next big family-action-comedy. All right, it’s about a guy named Marty, and he’s very lazy. He’s always sleeping late.” “Okay. Is he cool like Ferris Bueller?” “No. But he does have this best friend who’s, you know, a disgraced… nuclear physicist.” “I’m confused here. This best friend, this is another student?” “No, no, no. No, this guy’s either, like, 40 or 80. Even we don’t know how old this guy’s supposed to be. But one day, the boy and the scientist, they go back in time and they build a time machine. Whoa!” “Okay. I think I see where you’re going here. They build a time machine, and they go back in time, and they stop the Kennedy assassination.” “Ah! Oh, wow, that’s a really good idea, I mean, we didn’t even think of that.” “All right, well, what do they do with the time machine?” “Well, now I’m embarrassed to say. Ah, well, all right, all right, all right. We thought… We thought it would be funny, you know, if the boy, if he went back in time and, you know, he tried to fuck his mom.” “I don’t know. We thought that’d be fun for people. But, no, good point. No, he doesn’t get to, he doesn’t get to. 'Cause this family friend named Biff, he comes in and he tries to rape the mom in front of the son. The dad’s gotta beat the rapist off of her. And also, we’re gonna imply that a white man wrote 'Johnny B. Goode.’ So, we’re gonna take that away from 'em.” “Well, this is the best movie idea I have ever heard in my life. We’re gonna make three of them. Now, you say they go to the past. How about we call it Back to the Past?” “No, no, no. Back to the Future.” “Right, but they go to the past.” “Yeah.” Kids have it very good now. My friend’s a teacher. She told me that, uh… the parents will take the kids’ side over the teacher now. That’s insane. That never happened. My parents trusted every grown-up… more than they trusted me. I don’t mean coaches and teachers. Any human adult’s word… was better than mine. Any hobo or drifter could have taken me by the ear up to my front door and been like, “Excuse me! Your kid bit my dick.” And my mom would be like, “John Edmund Mulaney, did you bite this nice man’s dick?” And I would be the only one who’s like, “Hey, doesn’t anyone wanna know why… his dick was near my biters… in the first place? Isn’t anyone curious… as to how I had access?” Don’t get me wrong, my parents love us. They just didn’t like us. We weren’t friends. People are now like, “My mom’s my best friend.” I was like, “Oh, is she a super bad mom?” My parents didn’t trust us, and they shouldn’t have trusted us. We were little goblins. We were terrible. I remember, one time, we were going to this resort for a vacation when we were little kids. Three weeks before we went to the resort, my dad sat us down and he said, “All right, we’re going to a resort, and I’ve just been informed that the man who owns the resort only has one arm.” And we were like, “Oh, yes! Yay! Yes!” “Now, I’m telling you three weeks in advance, so that you will not freak out when you see that he only has one arm.” “Oh, we’re gonna freak out so bad!” “Yes, John, you have a question?” “How did he lose his arm?” “That’s exactly what you won’t ask.” And then I did ask. I went into the kitchen one day, and I was like, “So, how’d you lose your arm?” And he was like, “Well, I was born with only one arm.” And I was like, “Nah.” No, my parents loved us. It’s just, like, they were the cops, you know? And we were criminals. So, we didn’t get along. We only got along in that way that, like, cops will sometimes be chummy with criminals. Like, when my dad and I would talk, it was like that scene in the movie Heat, when Robert De Niro and Al Pacino sit down in that diner. We kind of had that rapport of, like, “Hmm, we’re not so different, you and I. You have your law practice, and me, I have all these fucking markers.” “I guess we both have responsibilities when you look at it that way.” My dad would respect it if I could get away with breaking a rule. We had a rule in our house, you were not allowed to watch TV on a school night. So, every school night, I would 100% be watching TV. And I would hear my dad coming, I would immediately turn the TV off and grab any book, magazine, periodical, anything. And I’d open it and pretend to be doing homework. My dad would walk in the room and he would go, “What are you doing? Are you watching TV?” And I’d go, “No, man. I’m not watching TV.” And the TV wouldn’t even be dark yet. It would still have, like, a neon green halo around it. It’d be sizzling like a glass of Pepsi. And I would look my dad in the eyes and go, “No, I’m just reading this Yellow Pages.” My dad loved us. He just didn’t care about our general happiness or self-esteem. I remember, one time, we were really little kids. I have two sisters and a brother, and all four of us were in our family car ride for three hours going to Wisconsin. My dad was driving, going down the highway in our white van with wood around the side. 'Cause you remember when you wanted your car to be made of wood? You remember that era? Where we were like, “How much wood can we get on this car… without it catching on fire?” But then the big announcement. “We here at Plymouth-Chrysler can put a saucy stripe of wood safely on the outside of your car, for all those times you’ve looked at your minivan and thought, 'Huh! It needs a belt.’” So, we’re going on the highway. We’ve been on the road for three hours. And in the distance, we see a McDonald’s. We see the golden arches. And we got so excited. We started chanting, “McDonald’s! McDonald’s! McDonald’s! McDonald’s!” And my dad pulled into the drive-thru, and we started cheering. And then, he ordered one black coffee for himself. And kept driving. And, you know, as mad as that made me as a little kid, in retrospect, that is the funniest thing I have ever seen in my entire life. How perfect is that? He had a vanload of little kids, and he got black coffee. The one thing from McDonald’s no child could enjoy. My dad is cold-blooded. He once shushed a kid during Lion King on Broadway. That actually happened. We were at Lion King on Broadway, and there was a five-year-old behind us going, “Look, it’s Pumbaa! Look, it’s Timon!” And my dad turned around and said, “Are you going to talk the entire time?” He’s my hero. The weirdest thing when I was a kid was how much they scared us about smoking weed. They scared us about it constantly. And I’ve been on tour this year… Marijuana is legal in 18 or 19 states in some form or another. It’s insane. Yeah, well… All right, don’t “whoo” if you’re white. It’s always been legal for us. Come on, sir. We don’t go to jail for marijuana, you silly billy. When I was arrested with a one-hitter at a Rusted Root concert, I did not serve hard time. I think I got an award. Eighteen or 19 states. And, by the way, I agree, it’s a very good thing. But it’s also a really weird thing, because this is the first time I’ve ever seen a law change because the government is just like, “Fine.” You know? I’ve never seen it before. Like, gay marriage and healthcare, we have to battle it out in the Supreme Court, and be like, “Gay people are humans.” And they’re like, “We’ll think about it.” But with weed, it was just something we wanted really badly, and we kept asking them for 40 years, like, “Excuse me.” And then suddenly the government became like cool parents, and they’re just like, “Okay, here. Take a little. We’d rather you do it in the house than go somewhere else… blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Those stupid parents. And that’s a big deal because they scared us about weed constantly. It would be on our sitcoms. We’d be watching Saved by the Bell, we’d be having a great old time. And then, suddenly, a character we had not seen before would show up with some weed and the episode would stop cold in its tracks. And they’d always hold the joint… The bad guy would hold the joint in a villainous way. They’d always offer the joint in a way that no one ever holds a joint. Like it’s a skull in a Shakespeare play. And now it’s legal, and that is great news. Unless you’re a weed dealer, and then it is terrible news. And I don’t just mean because they’re about to lose out to Amazon.com. I more feel bad for weed dealers 'cause they’re about to find out that we only showed them a certain amount of politeness because they had an illegal product. And we don’t show that same politeness to people who deliver legal products. Like, when the Chinese food delivery guy comes, we don’t let him hang out after he’s delivered the Chinese food. And we don’t look the other way when he says weird shit to the girls we’re hanging out with… to try to preserve the relationship. And we definitely don’t give him some of the Chinese food. He’s never like, “Hey, can I get in on those dumplings?” And we’re like, “Yeah, we’re all friends.” What are you, on your phone? Hey, V-neck. Hey! - What’s your name? - Sam. Sam? Cool! What do you do to afford V-necks, Sam? Typing numbers. Ah… numbers, the letters of math. I’m sorry to bother you. I don’t mean to single you out. I hate when people get pulled out of the audience. Like, are you familiar with the Cirque du Soleil, Sam? They’re a group of French assholes that are slowly taking over America by humiliating audience members one by one. We once went to see Cirque du Soleil at Navy Pier when I was a kid, and my brother came, and he was 12 years old. You remember being 12, when you’re like, “No one look at me or I’ll kill myself.” And these French bastards come into the crowd, being like, “Le volunteer!” And they pulled my brother up on stage, and I was like, “No!” And they brought him up, and they reached into his sweatshirt, and they were like… And they had planted a bra, and they pulled out a bra and they were like… And everyone at Navy Pier was like “Ah, ha, ha, ha, ha!” And my brother was like, “That’s great!” I have had other jobs besides comedy. I was an office temp for a while. I really miss that. I loved being a temp, because I would just go from office to office and be terrible at a different job for a week. And then you just get to retire like Lou Gehrig. You’re like, “Thank you. No one will ever see me again.” And they’re like, “Goodbye!” I worked at an office once on 57th Street in New York City. I was there for a couple weeks. I was in a cubicle next to this other cubicle. This woman named Mischa sat in the other cubicle. I want to get the number right. I think Mischa had… about 900,000 photos of her daughter up in her cubicle. Almost like she was trying to solve a conspiracy about her daughter, A Beautiful Mind-style. I think about Mischa two times a week… because of a phone call she had next to me one day. It was one of my first days, and I was sitting next to her. And her phone rang, and this was her call, and I’m quoting. Her phone rang and she said, “Hello? Hush!” And then she hung up. Think about that two times a week. And I didn’t know her well enough by then to be like, “Hey, what kind of a person are you?” You know? Who could she have been talking to? “Hello? Hush!” This was a place of business. My only thought was that it was the CEO of the company being like, “Mischa, help. I’m doing a crossword puzzle. I need a four-letter word for 'be quiet’ right now.” - “Hush!” - “You’re promoted.” I temped at a little web company on 25th Street in New York City. It was a small web company owned by this old man who was old, old, old money New York. His name was Henry J. Finch IV. Like old, old, old money. Like, his money was in molasses or something. He owned this web company. I have no idea why he owned this web company. I think he won it in a rich man’s game of dice and small binoculars, or something. Mr. Finch wore linen suits. He had suspenders, he had a bow tie, he had a hat, he had a cane with an ivory handle. I’m giving you more description than you need, 'cause I need you to believe me. This was a real person I knew in the 21st century. Mr. Finch was in his 70s. He had an assistant named Mary. She was in her 50s, she was Korean. I don’t know why he had an assistant. He did not need one. Unless he needed someone to be like, “Remember, Mr. Finch, at five o'clock, you need to keep looking like a hard-boiled egg.” One day, Mr. Finch came into the office. It had been raining. Everything I’m about to say to you was said in front of me on that afternoon. Mr. Finch walked into the office, and he was wearing a raincoat, he was wearing a rain hat, and he had his cane. And he walked in and he said, and I’m quoting, “Ah! One feels like a duck splashing around in all this wet! And when one feels like a duck, one is happy!” And then Mary yelled, “Ooh, ducklings!” To which Mr. Finch replied, “Too old to be a duckling. Quack, quack.” And then walked into his office. I think about that every goddamn day. I mean, imagine you’re me. You’re a 22-year-old temp, and you’re so hungover, and you just wanna die every day. And then that happens in front of you, and I don’t know, gives you hope? And I did that a little fast. Let me break that conversation down for you. Mr. Finch walked in, and he began a conversation the way anyone would. “Ah!” “One feels like a duck splashing around in all this wet!” The rain. “And when one feels like a duck, one is happy!” Now, that’s debatable. But rather than debate that point, Mary brought up a new, separate, but interesting point… which was, “Ducklings!” But Mr. Finch, ever the realist about his own age and mortality… said, “Ah, too old to be a duckling!” As if to say, “My duckling days are behind me. Mary, don’t you see? I’m a duck now. And to prove it… Well, I’ll say just about the most famous catchphrase a duck has… 'Quack, quack.’” And I knew right at that moment, by the way, that it meant nothing to Mr. Finch, what he had said. Crazy people are like that. They have unlimited crazy currency. Like, if I had gone into his office a couple weeks later and been like, “Hey, Finch, you remember that time you were like, 'Too old to be a duckling. Quack, quack’?” He would just be like, “Ah, perhaps I did quack! But such is life for an old knickerbocker like me.” Like, he’d say something else crazy. That’s the wonderful thing about crazy people, you know? Is that they just have unlimited currency. The things they say mean nothing to them, but they mean everything to me. I was once walking into Penn Station in New York. I was walking down 31st Street towards Eighth Avenue. I’m walking down 31st, there’s this woman standing at Eighth and 31st. I have my little roller suitcase. You can all imagine. I’m walking towards her. She’s smoking a cigarette that is not lit anymore. She’s watching me walk, kind of scanning me up and down, as if she had Terminator vision… where she could see little bits of data, like, “Little honky ass,” and could read information. As I walked past her, she said this to me. I walked past her and she said, and I’m quoting, “Eat ass, suck a dick and sell drugs.” Very dirty, yes? A very upsetting thing to hear, yes? I’m sorry you all had to hear that, but at least you all got to hear it as a group. I was alone out there that afternoon. And she said this totally unprompted. “Eat ass, suck a dick and sell drugs.” It wasn’t like I had paused in front of her and been like, “What should I do with my life?” So, I walk away from her with this to-do list. And I like structure, I like a to-do list. It did dawn on me that that list of things does get better as it goes along, when you really think about it. 'Cause it starts in a pretty rough place. It starts with just about the worst task a to-do list can start with. But by the end, you have your own small business. And isn’t that the American dream when all’s said and done? That if you eat enough ass and suck enough dick, one day you can sell drugs. Imagine you did all that to sell drugs and then they legalize drugs, and you were like, “But I…” This has been a real thrill to perform here, by the way. I just wanna say that in all sincerity. Thanks for coming to this. Really, really appreciate it. I wanna tell you one more story before I get out of here, about the night I met a guy named Bill Clinton. Now, I don’t… Some of you know who that is? For those of you that don’t, he was President of the United States from 1993 until 2001, and he is a smooth and fantastic hillbilly who should be declared Emperor of the United States of America. Now, I know you know who Bill Clinton is. But I was doing a show at a college, and I mentioned Bill Clinton, and, like, they kind of didn’t know who he was. Like, sorry, they knew the name, right? But they only knew this 2015 Bill Clinton, who’s a very different Bill Clinton. Have you seen his ass lately? What the hell is he trying to pull? He’s all thin now, and he wears these little tight suits, and he’s got these grandpa reading glasses, like, “Hey, I can’t do nothing to nobody no more.” “Oh, me? I’m just an old, old man. I don’t have the appetites.” You know? And he’s always flying around the world with Bill Gates trying to cure AIDS. That is not the Bill Clinton that we all signed up for 20 years ago. Our Bill Clinton was like a big, fat Buddy Garrity from Friday Night Lights-looking guy, who played the saxophone on Arsenio, and his work in the STD community was not in curing anything at that time. That was the man we all elected president. That was the Bill Clinton that I met. I got to meet Bill Clinton when he was Governor Clinton in 1992, when he was first running for president. And I got to meet Bill Clinton because my parents had gone to the same college as Bill Clinton. They’re a little younger, but they went to the same college. So, when he was first running for president, he would have all these big, like, alumni fundraisers, and everyone who went was invited to go. Now, this was really cool for a couple reasons. One, I got to meet Bill Clinton. But two, I got to watch my parents watch someone they went to school with become the president. And that is super funny to see, 'cause think about some of the people you went to school with. Now imagine they’re becoming the president. Imagine Sam was becoming the president. It would stir up strong emotions. And my parents had very different opinions on Bill Clinton. My mom loved Bill Clinton, 'cause Bill Clinton was always a really charismatic, handsome guy. I mean, think about how many women he got in the 1990s when he looked like Frank Caliendo doing John Madden. Now… imagine him as a college student. And my mom tells me that there was this sort of chivalrous policy on campus back then, where, late at night, if female students were leaving the library unaccompanied, male students were encouraged to wait out in front and offer to walk them home. That sounds good, right? So, my mom tells me that Bill Clinton would be out in front of the library every single night… just being like, “Hey, can I walk ya home? Hey, can I walk ya home? Hey, can I walk ya home? Hey, can I walk ya home?” And one night, my mom was leaving the library, and Bill Clinton was like, “Hey, can I walk ya home?” And my mom was like, “Hell, yes.” So… This is absolutely true. My mom, little Ellen Stanton, walked arm-in-arm with Bill Clinton to her dorm. And she was like, “You know, I wanted to invite him up for a beer.” And I was like, “Thanks, I’m nine.” But… her roommate was upstairs, so she lost her chance with Bill Clinton. Now, my dad, on the other hand, hated Bill Clinton, because my parents were dating during this time. And also, my dad’s a much more morally-upright, conservative kind of guy. He always told me that he hated it in college that Bill Clinton could, quote, “Get away with anything.” Can you imagine how he felt later? So, one day, this invitation arrives for a fundraiser where you could meet Bill Clinton. My mom opens it first and she goes, “Oh, we have to go. We have to go see Bill.” And without looking up at her, my dad just says, “Why? It’s not like he’s gonna remember you.” One black coffee. Same motherfucker. So, my mom says, “Fine! I’ll go and I’ll take John.” And I was like, “Hell, yeah.” And I slid in the room in my First Communion suit, ready to go. 'Cause I loved Bill Clinton. I was ten years old. If you were a kid when Bill Clinton was first released, it was the most exciting thing ever. We’d never seen a cool politician before. And he would go on MTV, and he’d have cool answers to kids’ questions. They’d be like, “Governor, what’s your favorite food?” And he’d be like, “I don’t know, fries?” And we’d be like, “Yay, we eat fries!” I learned to play his campaign song on the piano. It was “Don’t Stop” by Fleetwood Mac… from Rumours, an album written by and for people cheating on each other. He let us know who he was right away. So, I went with my mom, as her date… to reconnect with Governor Bill Clinton. We walked into the ballroom. It was a big hotel ballroom. It was the Palmer House Hilton, big Hilton hotel ballroom. Walked into the ballroom, it was packed with people. It’s actually the ballroom from the end of the movie The Fugitive, remember? So, that ballroom. So, my mom and I walk in, it’s packed with people, the… Sorry, the end where Harrison Ford, as Dr. Richard Kimble, bursts in to confront Dr. Charles Nichols, right? Okay. So, that ballroom. So, my mom and I walk in, it’s packed with people. Why does Kimble confront Nichols? Well, I know we all know this, but… No, no. But, but, but… Kimble, he found out that Nichols, along with Devlin MacGregor and Lentz, who has mysteriously died, they had hired Frederick Sykes, the one-armed man, to kill Kimble. Kimble’s wife wasn’t even the target. I know we all know this. But they were gonna kill Kimble because he wasn’t gonna approve certain liver samples to pass RUD-90. So, Kimble finds out about all of this, and, of course, he’s furious. And he bursts into the ballroom and he goes, “You switched the samples!” And Dr. Nichols is like, “Ladies and gentlemen, my friend, Dr. Richard Kimble.” What accent did that guy have, by the way? He goes, “You switched the samples! And you doctored your research! So that you could have Provasic!” Anyway, so it’s that ballroom. So, we walk into that ballroom. It was packed with people. It was packed with people. A real Who’s Not of Chicago celebrities. Walter Jacobson was there. Walter Jacobson was the local Fox anchor. He’d do fun things where he’d go undercover as a homeless person. And he’d be like, “Oh, what time is the soup?” And they’d be like, “Man, you’re Walter Jacobson.” He was there. Everybody. And on the far side of the ballroom, under a spotlight, we saw a little bit of silver hair. And it was him… Bill Clinton. The Comeback Kid. But he was surrounded by reporters, and photographers, and Secret Service. So, what are you gonna do? Well, if you’re my mom, you ball up the back of my sport coat, and you push me forward like a human shield. And then you start jogging while yelling, “This ten-year-old boy has to meet the next president of the United States!” Kind of implying that I might be dying. My feet were not on the ground. She was swinging me like a snowplow. I was just mowing down fat Chicago Democrats. I pushed past all the reporters, I pushed past all the photographers. We pushed past all the Secret Service. We land at Bill Clinton’s feet. Bill Clinton turns, looks at my mom and says, “Hey, Ellen,” 'cause he never forgets a bitch, ever. My mom melts. She goes, “Hi, Bill.” Then it is revealed that she has no plan. So… she pushes me towards Clinton and she goes, “This is my son, John, and he’s also going to be president.” And I was like, “What the hell are you talking about? I’m not gonna be president.” And I know now that I’m definitely never gonna be president. Not unless everyone gets real cool about a bunch of stuff really quickly. Based on my ten-year-old memory, Bill Clinton is about 13 feet tall. And he leaned down, because, well, I was wearing this button that I bought outside the fundraiser. It was a cartoon button of George H. W. Bush, and it had a quail flying over his head, and it was shitting on his head. And it said, “Bird-brained.” And I thought it was very funny. And Bill Clinton leaned down so that only I could hear and he said, “Hey, man, I like your button.” And I said, “You can do whatever you want forever.” And he took my advice. And… it was the best night of my entire life. And I got home that night… I got home that night, and my dad was still awake, like, reading angry under one lamp, just like… And I went up to him and I went, “Hey! I’m gonna be a Democrat.” “And I’m gonna vote for Bill Clinton.” And without looking up at me, my dad just said, “You have the moral backbone of a chocolate clair.” You know, how you talk to a child. So, here’s the end of that story. That was 1992. Let’s flash forward five years to 1997. It is now 1997. I am a sophomore in high school, Bill Clinton is in his second term as president. And on the morning that the Monica Lewinsky scandal breaks on the cover of The New York Times. It had been on the Drudge Report, and then it was on the cover of The New York Times. That morning, I wake up to the newspaper hitting me in the face. I am a teenager asleep in bed, and the newspaper hits me in the face and falls open on my stomach. And I open my eyes to see my dad standing there dressed for work, and he says, “The other shoe just dropped.” And then my dad went in to work to find out that his law firm had been hired to defend Bill Clinton. Good night, Chicago.

Fuck you Maddi im posting it.

#long post #really long post #long. long post.#rnagyars #im fucking gloing to fucking #submission

9 notes · View notes

tahanismoved · 4 years

Text

don’t know who needs to hear this today but

You’re very friendly here in Chicago. I mean, we’re all violent here, but you’re very friendly. No, really. And I don’t like confrontation, ’cause I’ve never been in a fight before. Though, maybe you could tell that from the first moment I walked out on stage. I don’t give off that vibe. Some people give off a vibe of… Right away, they’re like, “Do not fuck with me.” My vibe is more like, “Hey, you could pour soup in my lap and I’ll probably apologize to you.” When I walk, for real, my feet go out like this. I’m so open and vulnerable. I look like a doll that you point out molestation on. “Show us on this white comedian where the man touched you.”

It’s been a while since I’ve been home to Chicago. I got married since then. Thank you. I married my wife. I love saying “my wife.” It sounds so adult. “That’s my wife.” It’s great, you sound like a person. I said it even before we were married. We were just dating, and we were once getting on an airplane, and Anna’s ticket didn’t say anything and my ticket said “priority access.” It doesn’t matter why. But we were getting on and I said, “Uh, can my wife board with me?” And they were like, “Yes, of course. Right this way.” And I was like, “Oh, that is so much better than all those times I was like, ‘Can my girlfriend come?'” And, yeah, I shouldn’t have said it that way, but still. “My wife” just has some kick-ass to it, you know? “Get away from my wife! No one talk to my wife!” Marriage is gonna be very magical. “I didn’t kill my wife!” That’s like, “Ooh, who’s that fella? I bet he did kill his wife.” Being married is so nice. I never knew relationships were supposed to make you feel better about yourself. That’s not really a joke, that’s just a little sweet thing I like to say. ‘Cause I’d been in relationships where I got cheated on, like, long ones. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a long relationship where you got cheated on, but it changes your whole worldview. ‘Cause when I was a kid, I used to watch America’s Most Wanted. You know how kids do. And I would always think to myself, “How could another person kill someone? How could a human being kill another human being?” And then I got cheated on, and I was like, “Oh, okay.” “I’m not gonna do it, but I totally get it.” And I don’t mean in that way of, like, “No one else can have you.” I don’t care about that. It’s just creepy to have an ex out there after things have ended badly. They have a lot of information. Anyone who’s seen my dick and met my parents needs to die. I can’t have them roaming around.

I talked to a lot of people before I got engaged, you know. And I heard this expression about whether or not you should get married. This is an old expression. People say this. They say, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” You ever heard that before? It’s a bananas insulting expression… to an entire gender. But also, it makes no sense. “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” You’re not allowed to milk a cow that you don’t own. That’s not even a situation. Was that a problem at one point? Like, in the dairy community? Was that happening a hundred years ago in some village? Some Dutch prick was sneaking in at night being like, “Ah-ha-ha, I take your milk.” And the farmer was like, “Well, then, this is your cow now.” And he was like, “No, no proof of purchase.” And he ran off into the night. That sounded Dutch, right? You know what that… you know what that expression means? It means, “Why would you marry a woman if she’s already having sex with you?” Which has nothing to do with what relationships are even like anymore. Now, it’s like, “Why buy the cow?” Uh, maybe because, every day, the cow asks you when you’re gonna buy it. And… … you live in a really small apartment with the cow, so you can’t avoid that question at all. And also, the cow is way better at arguing than you are. And the cow grew up in a family that knows how to argue. “Why buy the cow?” Uh, maybe because every time another cow gets bought, you have to go to the sale and you have to sit next to your cow at the sale, and your cow looks over at you the entire time like… And does not enjoy the sale at all… even though she’s the one that wanted to go to the sale. And she’s especially mad because that farmer and cow met, like, eight months after you guys met. “Why buy the cow?” Well, let’s be real here. You’re very lucky to have the cow that you do have. “Roping in cows and getting milk out of them was never anything you were known for, John.” By the most liberal of estimates, there have been about eight cows total, several unmilked, and… a lot of people think that you like bulls, and if you just bought… They assume it. When you search your name, the third thing to come up is like, “John Mulaney bull?” And if you just bought the cow, nobody would say that anymore. They’ll still say it. ‘Cause there are those guys who, they buy a cow, and then on the side, total matador, but… But, for real, Chicago, why buy the cow? Let’s be real. Why buy the cow? Because you love her. You really do. And, yeah, yeah… Sure, she’s a bossy little Jew, but… … she takes care of you. And you don’t wanna be some old man stumbling around, like, “Hey, you seen any loose milk?”

My wife is Jewish. She’s a New York Jew. I did it! Now, I was raised Catholic. I don’t know if you can tell that from the everything about me. My wife is Jewish, I grew up Catholic, so we got married by a friend. Being married by a friend is a beautiful ceremony that alienates both families’ religions, while confusing the elderly people at the wedding. “What’s the name of the bishop?” “That’s actually stand-up comedian Dan Levy. He was the host of MTV’s Your Face or Mine?” I saw a lot of Catholic weddings, though, because I was an altar boy… And a hush falls over the room. Isn’t it weird how that became a scandalous thing? That was just some boring shit I had to do on weekends. But now, it’s like saying, “I was a French maid for a period of time. I was treated well in my day. I worked for a variety of sirs.” No, being an altar boy was just a boring gig, you know? You’d serve Mass and then you’d serve weddings sometimes. My brother was once an altar boy at a wedding, and he was standing there with another altar boy in this big, packed church in Chicago where we grew up. And the bride was coming down the aisle, and the organ was playing, and all the pews were filled, and the bride got all the way to the altar, and the groom lifted the veil off of the bride, and right at that moment the other altar boy said, “Aw, she’s ugly.” And then they looked, and they were right next to the video camera. And I know that’s awful, but wouldn’t you give a million dollars to see that wedding video? It was the best moment of this stupid woman’s life, and she’s walking down the aisle, and the organ’s like… And she gets all the way to the altar to her betrothed, and he unveils her to the world and to the eyes of God. And right at that second, for no reason at all, some Cheeto-fingered, rat-mustached, 13-year-old prick decides to go, “Aw, she’s ugly!” Hopefully the videographer knew some sound editing so he could fix it to be like, “Aw, she’s beautiful. She’s enchanting.”

I grew up Catholic. I don’t go to church anymore. But I went on Christmas Eve with my parents, ’cause you know how you lie to your parents. So… we go into the church and I was like, “I got this under control.” And then I got schooled because they introduced a bunch of new shit. No, I was going through Mass and I was batting, like, .400. And then in the middle of Mass, the priest said, “Peace be with you.” And everyone said, “And with your spirit.” And I was the one pre-Y2K asshole going, “And also with you. What? Huh? What? Huh? What? When? When?” For those of you that aren’t Catholic, I don’t mean to exclude you, even though we love to exclude you, but… There’s a part in church where the priest says, “Peace be with you.” And for many, many years, we all said… – “And also with you.” – Very good. But they changed it to “And with your spirit.” Because that’s what needed revamping in the Catholic Church. That was the squeaky wheel that needed the grease. In Rome, they were like, “Let’s see. What problems can we solve? Problem one. No.” I’m actually glad they changed that, though. I never liked “And also with you.” I always found that clunky. “And also with you.” That’s not how you talk. – “Have a nice day.” – “And also you having one.” It’s just a little bit wrong, isn’t it? It’s just a little off. Like, when someone’s like, “How are you?” And you’re like, “Nothing much.” And it sort of makes sense. Never begin a sentence with “And also.” You just immediately sound caught off-guard. It sounds like if at the first church ever, like, they weren’t expecting it. Like, the priest was like, “Hey, this is the first time we’ve ever had church. I just wanna say, ‘Peace be with you.'” And they were like… “What? Oh. Uh, yeah. And also you should have some.” “Hey, that’s good. Let’s keep that for 2,000 years. And then change it to trick John.”

My wife and I don’t have any children, we have a dog. We have a little puppy named Petunia. She’s a tiny little French bulldog puppy. I like having a puppy that’s a bulldog, ’cause it’s like having a baby that is also a grandma. Her body is young, her face is as old as time. She definitely saw the Nazis march into Paris. She always gives me this look of like, “Oh, the things I have seen, you cocksucker. You have no idea. The Gestapo threw my printing press into a river. But, go, tell your fucking jokes. Bring me my dish.” She said that. Petunia… Petunia is my best friend in the world. I give her a million kisses a day. She does not like me, and barks at me and bites me all day long. We had to get a dog trainer into the apartment because Petunia is a bad dog. We tell her that every day. We go, “Hey, you’re bad at being a dog.” So, the trainer came into the apartment. Sorry, didn’t even walk into the apartment, walked into the threshold and went, “Oh, okay.” Like she was an exorcist or something. She said, “I see what the problem is.” She said, “Petunia has become the alpha of the house.” And then she pointed at me, she said, “You are no longer the alpha of the house.” And in the back of my head, I was like, “I was never the alpha of the house.” I turned to my wife, I was like, “Let’s pretend. It’ll be fun. Yes… My title of alpha, which I once had, how can I reclaim it? Because that was a thing that existed at one time.” She said, “You need to show dominance over your puppy.” These are things people say to me. I said, “How do I do that?” She said, “Well, let me ask you this. Who eats dinner first, you or Petunia?” I was like, “Petunia eats dinner first. She eats dinner at 5:00 p.m., ’cause she’s a foot long and two years old.” She said, “No, you need to eat dinner first. Because the king eats before anyone else eats.” Oh, yes, and what a mighty king I will be, eating dinner at 4:45 in the afternoon. “Look upon your sovereign, Petunia, and tremble. My lands stretch across this entire one bedroom, and I eat dinner whenever I choose, as long as it works for the schedule of a dog.” She said, “Now, you don’t actually have to eat dinner before Petunia. You just have to convince Petunia that you’ve already eaten.” So… for the past month, I shit you not… before my wife and I give Petunia her dish, we take down empty bowls and spoons, and in front of her, we go, “Mmm, dinner. Mmm, good dinner.” Like we’re space aliens in a play about human beings that they wrote, but they didn’t work that hard on. “Mmm, we’re eating dinner.” Meanwhile, Petunia’s just staring at us with her Paul Giamatti face, like… “You’re not eating dinner, cocksucker. Dish, now.”

I have a wife and a dog, and we just bought a house. We have a new house. It was built in the ’20s, but it was flipped in 2014. Which means it’s haunted, but it has a lovely kitchen backsplash. Actually, we didn’t buy a house. A bank bought a house, and I’m allowed to keep my shirts and pants there while I pay it off for 30 years. The woman from the bank came over and she showed me my mortgage broken down month by month for 30 years. And she said, “So, for instance, this is what you’ll pay in July of 2029.” And I burst out laughing. I was like, “2029? That’s not a real year. By 2029, I’ll be drinking moon juice with President Jonathan Taylor Thomas. I’m not gonna be writing you a paper check.” I like having a house, but I loved looking for a house, ’cause I love real estate agents. I mean, they are the true heroes. They really are. Have you ever watched HGTV? Real estate agents have to deal with the dumbest people in the world making the biggest decisions of their lives. Every episode of HGTV is like, “Craig and Stacia are looking for a two-story A-frame that’s near Craig’s job in the downtown, but also satisfies Stacia’s need to be near the beach which is nowhere near Craig’s job. With three children and nine on the way, and a max budget of $7… let’s see what Lori Jo can do on this week’s episode of You Don’t Deserve A Beach House.”

I loved our real estate agent. It was so fun to hang out with her. It was like hanging out with my mom. ‘Cause, you know, real estate agents always look like your mom. And they have various Chico’s accoutrements. They always have kind of fun mom energy. And they’re always, “So excited to see you two.” We would have little conferences before we walked into a house. She’d go, “Let’s talk. Let’s talk before we go in.” We’re, like, two feet from the door. “So, there’s no toilets. And I know that was on your list. But I think I can get him to budge. Let’s go.” So, we’d have a real estate agent, and then, like, the house would have a real estate agent who’s just some guy sitting in a big chair. And these two always hated each other. They’d be like, “Hi, Tony.” “Hi, Kim.” It’s like, “Jesus Christ! What, were you two in the Eagles together? What is the animosity about?” Our real estate agent wanted us to have a baby more than anyone else in our lives, more than anyone in our family. She hinted about it constantly. Every room she walked into, she’d be like, “So, this could be an office.” “Or maybe a nursery.” “Yeah. No, like we said, we don’t know if we’re gonna have… ” “No, no. I know, I know, you know. You don’t know if you’re gonna have ’em, but you know. You know, you never know. Sometimes you don’t know what’s gonna happen, and then… you know, something happens.” “Well, yeah, that’s how all of life works.” “Okay, all right. Okay. Uh-huh. Mmm. This is an on-fire garbage can. Could be a nursery.” She showed me a backyard once. She goes, “I don’t even like this backyard for you.” I was like, “Oh, do tell.” She said, “It’s all pavement. I think you should have some grass out there. You know, in case you have a couple… little guys… running around in the grass.” And I got offended on behalf of my imaginary kids. I was like, “Hey, lady. I went outside about as much as Powder from the movie Powder. My children are not gonna be playing out on grass. They will be up in their rooms playing violent video games and catfishing pedophiles. These are my children. And that’s my wife!”

I didn’t mean to make it sound like we don’t want children. We don’t, but I didn’t mean to make it sound like that. See, I just don’t think babies like me very much. Sometimes babies will point at me, and I don’t care for that shit at all. Like, I’ll be on an elevator, and a baby will be there in its big, like, stroller activity tray, just, like, working on one Cheerio with Bobby Fischer-like intensity. And it’ll look up at me and go… I like to lean in and go, “Stop snitchin’, motherfucker.” And then walk off. ‘Cause you’re never too young to learn our national no-snitching policy. My friends have babies and I don’t do so well with them. I had a run-in with a two-year-old girl. I know there are better ways to start that story, but… My friend, Jeremy, has this two-year-old girl, and I really like her. She’s a sweet kid. I really like his daughter a lot. But I was over at his family’s house for the Fourth of July, and he had his daughter on his knee. And it was a very lovely day. His whole extended family was there. And he was bouncing his two-year-old up and down, and he pointed at me and he said to his two-year-old, “Do you know who that is? That’s your Uncle John.” And I was like, “Oh, my God. That’s so sweet. I’m her Uncle John.” And then the baby pointed at me and said, “Uncle John has a penis.” I thank you for laughing, because no one did that day! Fell deadly silent, is what they all did. Hey, do you know what you’re supposed to say when a baby points at you and knowingly says, “He has a penis”? No, I’m asking, ’cause I don’t know what to say in that situation. Here’s what I went with that day. I said, “Oh, come on!” I don’t know. I thought that’d be good. But then it just made it worse, ’cause it sounded like the baby and I had an arrangement not to talk about it, and she had violated my trust. Like, the baby had been like, “Do you have a penis?” And I was like, “Yes, I do, but you’re a baby, so discretion is key.” And then the next day she goes, “He has a penis,” and I go, “Oh, come on! Someone can’t keep a secret!” Luckily, Jeremy’s wife saved the day. The baby’s mom saved the day. She came in and she picked up the baby, and she was like, “It’s okay. She’s just going through that phase where she says penis and vagina a lot.” Aren’t we all? And, by the way, it would’ve been a totally different situation if the baby had said vagina. Like, if a grown woman had walked in the room, and the baby had been like, “She has a vagina,” the woman could be like, “Yes, I do, and it’s magnificent.” And we would all be like, “Hooray! You are brave!” No one wants to applaud the penis of a 32-year-old weirdo.

It’s fun to be married. I’ve never been supervised before. I’m supervised. She studies what I do. Like an anthropologist. She’ll be like, “Sometimes, he will watch a movie on TV even though he already owns that movie on DVD. Pointing this out to him confuses and upsets him.” I had no supervision when I was a kid. We were free to do what we wanted. But also, with that, no one cared about kids. I grew up before children were special. I did. Very early ’80s, right before children became special. Like, I remember when milk carton kids became a thing. When they were like, “Hey, we should start looking for some of these guys. I don’t think they’re just blowing off steam.” No one cared about my opinion when I was a little kid. No one cared what I thought. Sometimes, people would say, “What do you think you’re doing?” But that just meant “Stop.” They didn’t actually wanna know my thought process. They didn’t want me to be like, “Well, I was gonna put this bottle rocket into this carton of eggs, so that when I lit off the bottle rocket, the eggs would explode everywhere.” “Oh, well, that’s very interesting. And what brought you to this experiment?” “Oh, well, thank you for asking. Well… you know how I’m filled with rage? I’m so horny and angry all the time… and I have no outlet for it. So… eggs.” Your opinion doesn’t matter in elementary school either. It matters in college. College is just your opinion. Just you raising your hand and being like, “I think Emily Dickinson’s a lesbian.” And they’re like, “Partial credit.” And that’s a whole thing. But in elementary school, it doesn’t matter what you think, it just matters what you know. You have to have answers to questions. And if you say, “I don’t know,” you get an X on your test, and you get it wrong and that’s not fair, ’cause your brain has never been smaller. Also, that’s not how life works. I’m in my 30s now. If you came to me now and you were like, “Hey, John, name three things that the Stamp Act of 1775 accomplished.” I’d go, “I don’t know. Get out of my apartment,” you know? But when you’re a little kid, you can’t say, “I don’t know.” You should be able to. That should be an acceptable answer on a test. You should be able to write in, “I don’t know. I know you told me. But I have had a very long day. I am very small. And I have no money. So you can imagine the kind of stress that I am under.” Or if it’s one of those true or false questions, you should be able to add a third option which is, “Who’s to say?” Kids are much more supervised now, but also, they have a lot of rights. Like, that’s the biggest civil rights increase I’ve seen in my lifetime. The rights of children have gone through the roof. I had no rights when I was a little kid. I remember, one time, I walked into a supermarket by myself, and I walked in through the double doors, and the woman behind the register just looked at me and she went, “No!” And I went, “All right.” And I turned around and left. That’s how broken I was.

And there weren’t special things for kids the way there are now. Like, we would just go see movies. Any movie. Like Back to the Future. That was a movie everyone could see. Kids could kinda see it. Great movie, right? I rewatched it recently. It’s a very weird movie. Marty McFly is a 17-year-old high school student whose best friend is a disgraced nuclear physicist. And, I shit you not, they never explain how they became friends. They never explain it. Not even in a lazy way, like, “Hey, remember when we met in the science building?” They don’t even do that. And we were all fine with it. We were just like, “What, who’s his best friend? A disgraced nuclear physicist? All right, proceed.” What a strange movie to sell to be a family movie. Two guys had to go in and do that. They had to be like, “Okay… we got an idea… for the next big family-action-comedy. All right, it’s about a guy named Marty, and he’s very lazy. He’s always sleeping late.” “Okay. Is he cool like Ferris Bueller?” “No. But he does have this best friend who’s, you know, a disgraced… nuclear physicist.” “I’m confused here. This best friend, this is another student?” “No, no, no. No, this guy’s either, like, 40 or 80. Even we don’t know how old this guy’s supposed to be. But one day, the boy and the scientist, they go back in time and they build a time machine. Whoa!” “Okay. I think I see where you’re going here. They build a time machine, and they go back in time, and they stop the Kennedy assassination.” “Ah! Oh, wow, that’s a really good idea, I mean, we didn’t even think of that.” “All right, well, what do they do with the time machine?” “Well, now I’m embarrassed to say. Ah, well, all right, all right, all right. We thought… We thought it would be funny, you know, if the boy, if he went back in time and, you know, he tried to fuck his mom.” “I don’t know. We thought that’d be fun for people. But, no, good point. No, he doesn’t get to, he doesn’t get to. ‘Cause this family friend named Biff, he comes in and he tries to rape the mom in front of the son. The dad’s gotta beat the rapist off of her. And also, we’re gonna imply that a white man wrote ‘Johnny B. Goode.’ So, we’re gonna take that away from ’em.” “Well, this is the best movie idea I have ever heard in my life. We’re gonna make three of them. Now, you say they go to the past. How about we call it Back to the Past?” “No, no, no. Back to the Future.” “Right, but they go to the past.” “Yeah.”

Kids have it very good now. My friend’s a teacher. She told me that, uh… the parents will take the kids’ side over the teacher now. That’s insane. That never happened. My parents trusted every grown-up… more than they trusted me. I don’t mean coaches and teachers. Any human adult’s word… was better than mine. Any hobo or drifter could have taken me by the ear up to my front door and been like, “Excuse me! Your kid bit my dick.” And my mom would be like, “John Edmund Mulaney, did you bite this nice man’s dick?” And I would be the only one who’s like, “Hey, doesn’t anyone wanna know why… his dick was near my biters… in the first place? Isn’t anyone curious… as to how I had access?” Don’t get me wrong, my parents love us. They just didn’t like us. We weren’t friends. People are now like, “My mom’s my best friend.” I was like, “Oh, is she a super bad mom?” My parents didn’t trust us, and they shouldn’t have trusted us. We were little goblins. We were terrible. I remember, one time, we were going to this resort for a vacation when we were little kids. Three weeks before we went to the resort, my dad sat us down and he said, “All right, we’re going to a resort, and I’ve just been informed that the man who owns the resort only has one arm.” And we were like, “Oh, yes! Yay! Yes!” “Now, I’m telling you three weeks in advance, so that you will not freak out when you see that he only has one arm.” “Oh, we’re gonna freak out so bad!” “Yes, John, you have a question?” “How did he lose his arm?” “That’s exactly what you won’t ask.” And then I did ask. I went into the kitchen one day, and I was like, “So, how’d you lose your arm?” And he was like, “Well, I was born with only one arm.” And I was like, “Nah.”

No, my parents loved us. It’s just, like, they were the cops, you know? And we were criminals. So, we didn’t get along. We only got along in that way that, like, cops will sometimes be chummy with criminals. Like, when my dad and I would talk, it was like that scene in the movie Heat, when Robert De Niro and Al Pacino sit down in that diner. We kind of had that rapport of, like, “Hmm, we’re not so different, you and I. You have your law practice, and me, I have all these fucking markers.” “I guess we both have responsibilities when you look at it that way.” My dad would respect it if I could get away with breaking a rule. We had a rule in our house, you were not allowed to watch TV on a school night. So, every school night, I would 100% be watching TV. And I would hear my dad coming, I would immediately turn the TV off and grab any book, magazine, periodical, anything. And I’d open it and pretend to be doing homework. My dad would walk in the room and he would go, “What are you doing? Are you watching TV?” And I’d go, “No, man. I’m not watching TV.” And the TV wouldn’t even be dark yet. It would still have, like, a neon green halo around it. It’d be sizzling like a glass of Pepsi. And I would look my dad in the eyes and go, “No, I’m just reading this Yellow Pages.”

My dad loved us. He just didn’t care about our general happiness or self-esteem. I remember, one time, we were really little kids. I have two sisters and a brother, and all four of us were in our family car ride for three hours going to Wisconsin. My dad was driving, going down the highway in our white van with wood around the side. ‘Cause you remember when you wanted your car to be made of wood? You remember that era? Where we were like, “How much wood can we get on this car… without it catching on fire?” But then the big announcement. “We here at Plymouth-Chrysler can put a saucy stripe of wood safely on the outside of your car, for all those times you’ve looked at your minivan and thought, ‘Huh! It needs a belt.'” So, we’re going on the highway. We’ve been on the road for three hours. And in the distance, we see a McDonald’s. We see the golden arches. And we got so excited. We started chanting, “McDonald’s! McDonald’s! McDonald’s! McDonald’s!” And my dad pulled into the drive-thru, and we started cheering. And then, he ordered one black coffee for himself. And kept driving. And, you know, as mad as that made me as a little kid, in retrospect, that is the funniest thing I have ever seen in my entire life. How perfect is that? He had a vanload of little kids, and he got black coffee. The one thing from McDonald’s no child could enjoy. My dad is cold-blooded. He once shushed a kid during Lion King on Broadway. That actually happened. We were at Lion King on Broadway, and there was a five-year-old behind us going, “Look, it’s Pumbaa! Look, it’s Timon!” And my dad turned around and said, “Are you going to talk the entire time?” He’s my hero.

The weirdest thing when I was a kid was how much they scared us about smoking weed. They scared us about it constantly. And I’ve been on tour this year… Marijuana is legal in 18 or 19 states in some form or another. It’s insane. Yeah, well… All right, don’t “whoo” if you’re white. It’s always been legal for us. Come on, sir. We don’t go to jail for marijuana, you silly billy. When I was arrested with a one-hitter at a Rusted Root concert, I did not serve hard time. I think I got an award. Eighteen or 19 states. And, by the way, I agree, it’s a very good thing. But it’s also a really weird thing, because this is the first time I’ve ever seen a law change because the government is just like, “Fine.” You know? I’ve never seen it before. Like, gay marriage and healthcare, we have to battle it out in the Supreme Court, and be like, “Gay people are humans.” And they’re like, “We’ll think about it.” But with weed, it was just something we wanted really badly, and we kept asking them for 40 years, like, “Excuse me.” And then suddenly the government became like cool parents, and they’re just like, “Okay, here. Take a little. We’d rather you do it in the house than go somewhere else… blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Those stupid parents. And that’s a big deal because they scared us about weed constantly. It would be on our sitcoms. We’d be watching Saved by the Bell, we’d be having a great old time. And then, suddenly, a character we had not seen before would show up with some weed and the episode would stop cold in its tracks. And they’d always hold the joint… The bad guy would hold the joint in a villainous way. They’d always offer the joint in a way that no one ever holds a joint. Like it’s a skull in a Shakespeare play. And now it’s legal, and that is great news. Unless you’re a weed dealer, and then it is terrible news. And I don’t just mean because they’re about to lose out to Amazon.com. I more feel bad for weed dealers ’cause they’re about to find out that we only showed them a certain amount of politeness because they had an illegal product. And we don’t show that same politeness to people who deliver legal products. Like, when the Chinese food delivery guy comes, we don’t let him hang out after he’s delivered the Chinese food. And we don’t look the other way when he says weird shit to the girls we’re hanging out with… to try to preserve the relationship. And we definitely don’t give him some of the Chinese food. He’s never like, “Hey, can I get in on those dumplings?” And we’re like, “Yeah, we’re all friends.”

What are you, on your phone? Hey, V-neck. Hey! – What’s your name? – Sam. Sam? Cool! What do you do to afford V-necks, Sam? Typing numbers. Ah… numbers, the letters of math. I’m sorry to bother you. I don’t mean to single you out. I hate when people get pulled out of the audience. Like, are you familiar with the Cirque du Soleil, Sam? They’re a group of French assholes that are slowly taking over America by humiliating audience members one by one. We once went to see Cirque du Soleil at Navy Pier when I was a kid, and my brother came, and he was 12 years old. You remember being 12, when you’re like, “No one look at me or I’ll kill myself.” And these French bastards come into the crowd, being like, “Le volunteer!” And they pulled my brother up on stage, and I was like, “No!” And they brought him up, and they reached into his sweatshirt, and they were like… And they had planted a bra, and they pulled out a bra and they were like… And everyone at Navy Pier was like “Ah, ha, ha, ha, ha!” And my brother was like, “That’s great!” I have had other jobs besides comedy.

I was an office temp for a while. I really miss that. I loved being a temp, because I would just go from office to office and be terrible at a different job for a week. And then you just get to retire like Lou Gehrig. You’re like, “Thank you. No one will ever see me again.” And they’re like, “Goodbye!” I worked at an office once on 57th Street in New York City. I was there for a couple weeks. I was in a cubicle next to this other cubicle. This woman named Mischa sat in the other cubicle. I want to get the number right. I think Mischa had… about 900,000 photos of her daughter up in her cubicle. Almost like she was trying to solve a conspiracy about her daughter, A Beautiful Mind-style. I think about Mischa two times a week… because of a phone call she had next to me one day. It was one of my first days, and I was sitting next to her. And her phone rang, and this was her call, and I’m quoting. Her phone rang and she said, “Hello? Hush!” And then she hung up. Think about that two times a week. And I didn’t know her well enough by then to be like, “Hey, what kind of a person are you?” You know? Who could she have been talking to? “Hello? Hush!” This was a place of business. My only thought was that it was the CEO of the company being like, “Mischa, help. I’m doing a crossword puzzle. I need a four-letter word for ‘be quiet’ right now.” – “Hush!” – “You’re promoted.”

I temped at a little web company on 25th Street in New York City. It was a small web company owned by this old man who was old, old, old money New York. His name was Henry J. Finch IV. Like old, old, old money. Like, his money was in molasses or something. He owned this web company. I have no idea why he owned this web company. I think he won it in a rich man’s game of dice and small binoculars, or something. Mr. Finch wore linen suits. He had suspenders, he had a bow tie, he had a hat, he had a cane with an ivory handle. I’m giving you more description than you need, ’cause I need you to believe me. This was a real person I knew in the 21st century. Mr. Finch was in his 70s. He had an assistant named Mary. She was in her 50s, she was Korean. I don’t know why he had an assistant. He did not need one. Unless he needed someone to be like, “Remember, Mr. Finch, at five o’clock, you need to keep looking like a hard-boiled egg.” One day, Mr. Finch came into the office. It had been raining. Everything I’m about to say to you was said in front of me on that afternoon. Mr. Finch walked into the office, and he was wearing a raincoat, he was wearing a rain hat, and he had his cane. And he walked in and he said, and I’m quoting, “Ah! One feels like a duck splashing around in all this wet! And when one feels like a duck, one is happy!” And then Mary yelled, “Ooh, ducklings!” To which Mr. Finch replied, “Too old to be a duckling. Quack, quack.” And then walked into his office. I think about that every goddamn day. I mean, imagine you’re me. You’re a 22-year-old temp, and you’re so hungover, and you just wanna die every day. And then that happens in front of you, and I don’t know, gives you hope? And I did that a little fast. Let me break that conversation down for you. Mr. Finch walked in, and he began a conversation the way anyone would. “Ah!” “One feels like a duck splashing around in all this wet!” The rain. “And when one feels like a duck, one is happy!” Now, that’s debatable. But rather than debate that point, Mary brought up a new, separate, but interesting point… which was, “Ducklings!” But Mr. Finch, ever the realist about his own age and mortality… said, “Ah, too old to be a duckling!” As if to say, “My duckling days are behind me. Mary, don’t you see? I’m a duck now. And to prove it… Well, I’ll say just about the most famous catchphrase a duck has… ‘Quack, quack.'” And I knew right at that moment, by the way, that it meant nothing to Mr. Finch, what he had said. Crazy people are like that. They have unlimited crazy currency. Like, if I had gone into his office a couple weeks later and been like, “Hey, Finch, you remember that time you were like, ‘Too old to be a duckling. Quack, quack’?” He would just be like, “Ah, perhaps I did quack! But such is life for an old knickerbocker like me.” Like, he’d say something else crazy.

That’s the wonderful thing about crazy people, you know? Is that they just have unlimited currency. The things they say mean nothing to them, but they mean everything to me. I was once walking into Penn Station in New York. I was walking down 31st Street towards Eighth Avenue. I’m walking down 31st, there’s this woman standing at Eighth and 31st. I have my little roller suitcase. You can all imagine. I’m walking towards her. She’s smoking a cigarette that is not lit anymore. She’s watching me walk, kind of scanning me up and down, as if she had Terminator vision… where she could see little bits of data, like, “Little honky ass,” and could read information. As I walked past her, she said this to me. I walked past her and she said, and I’m quoting, “Eat ass, suck a dick and sell drugs.” Very dirty, yes? A very upsetting thing to hear, yes? I’m sorry you all had to hear that, but at least you all got to hear it as a group. I was alone out there that afternoon. And she said this totally unprompted. “Eat ass, suck a dick and sell drugs.” It wasn’t like I had paused in front of her and been like, “What should I do with my life?” So, I walk away from her with this to-do list. And I like structure, I like a to-do list. It did dawn on me that that list of things does get better as it goes along, when you really think about it. ‘Cause it starts in a pretty rough place. It starts with just about the worst task a to-do list can start with. But by the end, you have your own small business. And isn’t that the American dream when all’s said and done? That if you eat enough ass and suck enough dick, one day you can sell drugs. Imagine you did all that to sell drugs and then they legalize drugs, and you were like, “But I…” This has been a real thrill to perform here, by the way. I just wanna say that in all sincerity. Thanks for coming to this. Really, really appreciate it.

I wanna tell you one more story before I get out of here, about the night I met a guy named Bill Clinton. Now, I don’t… Some of you know who that is? For those of you that don’t, he was President of the United States from 1993 until 2001, and he is a smooth and fantastic hillbilly who should be declared Emperor of the United States of America. Now, I know you know who Bill Clinton is. But I was doing a show at a college, and I mentioned Bill Clinton, and, like, they kind of didn’t know who he was. Like, sorry, they knew the name, right? But they only knew this 2015 Bill Clinton, who’s a very different Bill Clinton. Have you seen his ass lately? What the hell is he trying to pull? He’s all thin now, and he wears these little tight suits, and he’s got these grandpa reading glasses, like, “Hey, I can’t do nothing to nobody no more.” “Oh, me? I’m just an old, old man. I don’t have the appetites.” You know? And he’s always flying around the world with Bill Gates trying to cure AIDS.

That is not the Bill Clinton that we all signed up for 20 years ago. Our Bill Clinton was like a big, fat Buddy Garrity from Friday Night Lights-looking guy, who played the saxophone on Arsenio, and his work in the STD community was not in curing anything at that time. That was the man we all elected president. That was the Bill Clinton that I met. I got to meet Bill Clinton when he was Governor Clinton in 1992, when he was first running for president.

And I got to meet Bill Clinton because my parents had gone to the same college as Bill Clinton. They’re a little younger, but they went to the same college. So, when he was first running for president, he would have all these big, like, alumni fundraisers, and everyone who went was invited to go. Now, this was really cool for a couple reasons. One, I got to meet Bill Clinton. But two, I got to watch my parents watch someone they went to school with become the president. And that is super funny to see, ’cause think about some of the people you went to school with. Now imagine they’re becoming the president. Imagine Sam was becoming the president. It would stir up strong emotions. And my parents had very different opinions on Bill Clinton.

My mom loved Bill Clinton, ’cause Bill Clinton was always a really charismatic, handsome guy. I mean, think about how many women he got in the 1990s when he looked like Frank Caliendo doing John Madden. Now… imagine him as a college student. And my mom tells me that there was this sort of chivalrous policy on campus back then, where, late at night, if female students were leaving the library unaccompanied, male students were encouraged to wait out in front and offer to walk them home. That sounds good, right? So, my mom tells me that Bill Clinton would be out in front of the library every single night… just being like, “Hey, can I walk ya home? Hey, can I walk ya home? Hey, can I walk ya home? Hey, can I walk ya home?” And one night, my mom was leaving the library, and Bill Clinton was like, “Hey, can I walk ya home?” And my mom was like, “Hell, yes.” So… This is absolutely true. My mom, little Ellen Stanton, walked arm-in-arm with Bill Clinton to her dorm. And she was like, “You know, I wanted to invite him up for a beer.” And I was like, “Thanks, I’m nine.” But… her roommate was upstairs, so she lost her chance with Bill Clinton.

Now, my dad, on the other hand, hated Bill Clinton, because my parents were dating during this time. And also, my dad’s a much more morally-upright, conservative kind of guy. He always told me that he hated it in college that Bill Clinton could, quote, “Get away with anything.” Can you imagine how he felt later?

So, one day, this invitation arrives for a fundraiser where you could meet Bill Clinton. My mom opens it first and she goes, “Oh, we have to go. We have to go see Bill.” And without looking up at her, my dad just says, “Why? It’s not like he’s gonna remember you.” One black coffee. Same motherfucker. So, my mom says, “Fine! I’ll go and I’ll take John.” And I was like, “Hell, yeah.” And I slid in the room in my First Communion suit, ready to go. ‘Cause I loved Bill Clinton. I was ten years old. If you were a kid when Bill Clinton was first released, it was the most exciting thing ever. We’d never seen a cool politician before. And he would go on MTV, and he’d have cool answers to kids’ questions. They’d be like, “Governor, what’s your favorite food?” And he’d be like, “I don’t know, fries?” And we’d be like, “Yay, we eat fries!”

I learned to play his campaign song on the piano. It was “Don’t Stop” by Fleetwood Mac… from Rumours, an album written by and for people cheating on each other. He let us know who he was right away. So, I went with my mom, as her date… to reconnect with Governor Bill Clinton. We walked into the ballroom. It was a big hotel ballroom. It was the Palmer House Hilton, big Hilton hotel ballroom. Walked into the ballroom, it was packed with people. It’s actually the ballroom from the end of the movie The Fugitive, remember? So, that ballroom. So, my mom and I walk in, it’s packed with people, the… Sorry, the end where Harrison Ford, as Dr. Richard Kimble, bursts in to confront Dr. Charles Nichols, right? Okay. So, that ballroom. So, my mom and I walk in, it’s packed with people. Why does Kimble confront Nichols? Well, I know we all know this, but… No, no. But, but, but… Kimble, he found out that Nichols, along with Devlin MacGregor and Lentz, who has mysteriously died, they had hired Frederick Sykes, the one-armed man, to kill Kimble. Kimble’s wife wasn’t even the target. I know we all know this. But they were gonna kill Kimble because he wasn’t gonna approve certain liver samples to pass RUD-90. So, Kimble finds out about all of this, and, of course, he’s furious. And he bursts into the ballroom and he goes, “You switched the samples!” And Dr. Nichols is like, “Ladies and gentlemen, my friend, Dr. Richard Kimble.” What accent did that guy have, by the way? He goes, “You switched the samples! And you doctored your research! So that you could have Provasic!”

Anyway, so it’s that ballroom. So, we walk into that ballroom. It was packed with people. It was packed with people. A real Who’s Not of Chicago celebrities. Walter Jacobson was there. Walter Jacobson was the local Fox anchor. He’d do fun things where he’d go undercover as a homeless person. And he’d be like, “Oh, what time is the soup?” And they’d be like, “Man, you’re Walter Jacobson.” He was there. Everybody. And on the far side of the ballroom, under a spotlight, we saw a little bit of silver hair. And it was him… Bill Clinton. The Comeback Kid. But he was surrounded by reporters, and photographers, and Secret Service. So, what are you gonna do? Well, if you’re my mom, you ball up the back of my sport coat, and you push me forward like a human shield. And then you start jogging while yelling, “This ten-year-old boy has to meet the next president of the United States!” Kind of implying that I might be dying. My feet were not on the ground. She was swinging me like a snowplow. I was just mowing down fat Chicago Democrats. I pushed past all the reporters, I pushed past all the photographers. We pushed past all the Secret Service.

We land at Bill Clinton’s feet. Bill Clinton turns, looks at my mom and says, “Hey, Ellen,” ’cause he never forgets a bitch, ever. My mom melts. She goes, “Hi, Bill.” Then it is revealed that she has no plan. So… she pushes me towards Clinton and she goes, “This is my son, John, and he’s also going to be president.” And I was like, “What the hell are you talking about? I’m not gonna be president.” And I know now that I’m definitely never gonna be president. Not unless everyone gets real cool about a bunch of stuff really quickly. Based on my ten-year-old memory, Bill Clinton is about 13 feet tall. And he leaned down, because, well, I was wearing this button that I bought outside the fundraiser. It was a cartoon button of George H. W. Bush, and it had a quail flying over his head, and it was shitting on his head. And it said, “Bird-brained.” And I thought it was very funny. And Bill Clinton leaned down so that only I could hear and he said, “Hey, man, I like your button.” And I said, “You can do whatever you want forever.” And he took my advice. And… it was the best night of my entire life.

And I got home that night… I got home that night, and my dad was still awake, like, reading angry under one lamp, just like… And I went up to him and I went, “Hey! I’m gonna be a Democrat.” “And I’m gonna vote for Bill Clinton.” And without looking up at me, my dad just said, “You have the moral backbone of a chocolate éclair.” You know, how you talk to a child. So, here’s the end of that story. That was 1992. Let’s flash forward five years to 1997. It is now 1997. I am a sophomore in high school, Bill Clinton is in his second term as president. And on the morning that the Monica Lewinsky scandal breaks on the cover of The New York Times. It had been on the Drudge Report, and then it was on the cover of The New York Times. That morning, I wake up to the newspaper hitting me in the face. I am a teenager asleep in bed, and the newspaper hits me in the face and falls open on my stomach. And I open my eyes to see my dad standing there dressed for work, and he says, “The other shoe just dropped.” And then my dad went in to work to find out that his law firm had been hired to defend Bill Clinton.

#comeback kid #themis' big brain #mulaney!

0 notes