#this has been my favorite book of the Bible since I was NINE

[cyarsk52-20]

The Vindication of Ariana Madix

By Perrie Samotin

Photography by Celeste Sloman

June 8, 2023

It’s far better for a man to live on the roof than with a contentious woman. Bible scholars might recognize this (shamelessly) paraphrased adage from Proverbs 21:9, while the rest of us might nod knowingly because we recognize its point from simply being alive. It’s been roughly 1,007 years since that particular portion of the Old Testament was said to have been written and precisely 97 days since the modern world was given a new chapter in a different kind of bible, the book of Bravo. And in the story of Scandoval, the woman—not contentious but not servile either—has a name, and it’s Ariana Madix. The man in question wasn’t living on the roof of the Valley Village farmhouse he shared with her but decided to fuck her best friend in order to escape his reality. The more things change, as they say. 

It's here we must pause and wonder whether anyone reading this really needs a comprehensive rundown of the Vanderpump Rules drama that has captivated everyone from a roomful of politicians to Jennifer Lopez. You already know the players, you’ve already pored over the timeline. What you do need to know is that Madix, a 37-year-old former bartender, had a partner in work and in life for nine years before he cheated on her with their 28-year-old dear friend and costar Rachel Leviss. Madix’s sex life and sexuality has since been publicly scrutinized, her known apathy toward marriage and procreation is now a thing to be reexamined, her struggles with mental health have been weaponized by someone she once trusted. A less enterprising woman might have done nothing but shriek into a pillow for the last 97 days, but Madix has chosen to leverage her pain and lend some of it to Bic. And Uber 1. And Lays. And Bloomingdale’s. And finance app SoFi. And Nutrafol. And the custom merch for Something About Her, the sandwich shop she’s about to open with costar Katie Maloney, which has brought in around $200,000. All in, Madix has reportedly netted upwards of $1 millionon the back of her breakup. Having a boyfriend is great, but have you ever had corporate money hurtling into your checking account? 

Madix used to be one half of a brand, a fact her ex-boyfriend valued and claimed was partially why he stayed in the relationship. She is now a brand of one, barely checking the rearview mirror on the way to the bank. She has said yes to almost every sponsored opportunity that has come her way and will continue to do so with the goal of financial independence. “We have no generational wealth in our family,” she says. “I want to make enough money to be able to take care of my mom and my brother and any other family members who may or may not need it. I never want to worry about it ever, ever, ever. So I will work as much as possible to not have to.” She’s lived out of her car before and never wants to go back. She’s rumored to have snagged a spot on Dancing With the Stars. And the press! The New York Times, the Today show, Call Her Daddy, this cover story. Why, yes, she’s totally open to a spin-off with Maloney, she’s open to everything. She is the moment and she is a woman vindicated. Somewhere in the great beyond, Mary Wollstonecraft is beaming.  

Ariana Madix tells me her favorite part of reading a magazine profile is when the writer describes the subject’s clothing. “Like when they say, ‘She sauntered in wearing….’” She was already seated at a table on the patio of a private club in Hollywood when I arrived—not only a resilient queen but a punctual one!—so there was no saunter to speak of, but I managed to clock the ’fit for this very reason. Black jeans, white ribbed tank, black blazer, high-top Jordans, and a white mini backpack I found out later was 50 bucks. Because she said she likes when writers do this, I’ll go on. Her makeup was natural, her skin glowing, her icy blonde hair pulled back in a low bun with a part more centered than a Vanderpump Rules fan after a yoga retreat. 

Here before me is a woman who looks entirely at peace with the garbage hand she has been dealt—a hand that has, for better or worse, turned a fun but somewhat deflated 10-year-old reality show into must-see TV. Literally: The May 17 season 10 finale drew a combined audience of 4.1 million viewers across Bravo, on-demand, and the Peacock streaming platform within three days, more than double the amount of people that tuned in for last season’s finale. The May 28 series finale of HBO’s prestige drama Succession, by the way, drew a combined audience of 2.9 million.

I’d argue that the Scandoval, as it’s referred to for obvious reasons, has reached Aniston-Pitt-Jolie levels of public fervor despite the fact that nobody involved would be classified as global superstars. Why, oh why, do people care this much? 

“There are layers to it,” Madix says after we order a smoked salmon flatbread and a round of spritz-y cocktails. “The best-friend layer, the fact that [he] and I were together for so long and so many people, including myself, saw us as endgame. It’s the deception, the trying to manipulate a narrative, the fact that so many people have been through this themselves and they recognize parts of it.” Madix also acknowledges the impact social media has had on what ordinarily might seem like a shitty but not unheard-of situation. When you’re on a reality show and your relationship has played out in real time for more than a decade, it’s easy for amateur sleuths to go back to the beginning and look for signs that things were amiss and post their theories to Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok. But: “I can get bogged down in scrolling,” she says. 

One of the phrases Madix uses when describing the moment she found out her ex-boyfriend was cheating is “women’s intuition.” Despite being a “snooper” in past relationships, she says she made a conscious decision to not be that version of herself when she started dating her ex nine years ago. How she discovered his betrayal has been well documented—she was holding on to his phone for safekeeping while he was performing with his band one night, when something made her punch in the (unchanged) passcode. One sexually explicit video later, here we are. “I think the shock prevents you from being sad immediately,” she says when I ask what she felt at that moment. “It was like the air was sucked out of my lungs. It was shock, disbelief on some level, but then also anger.” And his reaction when she confronted him? “When you've been caught red-handed like that, there's no denying it,” she says. “It's cold, hard evidence. So I think he was struggling. I think he was really mad that his little house of cards was crumbling.”

According to Madix, her ex promptly changed his phone passcode as soon as they got home that night, and generally would hide proof of the affair in innocent-seeming apps—vault apps made to look like the iPhone calculator, or the Notes app which she says was synced to their shared laptop—just in case she did ever peek. 

“A few weeks after all of this [broke], I was just doing stuff on the laptop—I bought it, so it's mine now—and I found all kinds of stuff in the Notes app. It would be a note labeled ‘restaurant,’ but then way down at the bottom there's screenshots of text messages and things like that.” 

A woman would never be that dumb, I tell her. “No,” she says. 

She admits it’s occasionally been hard seeing the man she shared her life with for nine years become the internet’s collective punching bag, but the reality of what he did erases any lingering empathy. It’s difficult, as a woman, to watch the current season of Vanderpump Rules and not be slightly sickened by the ex-boyfriend’s self-pity, the pouty schtick he puts on to justify his actions. It’s familiar territory for any woman who has been cheated on: You weren’t giving your man enough time, you always talked down to him, you never wanted to have sex, you weren’t supportive enough. It’s unfortunate that it went down the way it did, but surely Madix has got to feel some sort of relief, a little bit of weight being lifted? “I definitely feel this sense of freedom because I was the adviser,” she says, “the sounding board. And he didn't like that he wasn't getting constant validation from his adviser. Now I feel like I don't have to worry about anybody but myself.”

The narrative around sex—or rather, the lack of it—is particularly hard to watch. “I feel like I'm someone who craves intimacy outside of just penetrative sex,” Madix says. “And that was something that I was deprived of for so long. As women, we might bring something up a bunch of times and then we just stop. That's where I was at. I was like I cannot keep nagging this man to want to come home and spend time with me.” 

I nod, and then she says: “The way that so many men act like they are entitled to your body and entitled to sex because you're in a relationship with them. I am not your Fleshlight. I spelled out what I needed, but hello. It's a two-person situation.”

Madix wasn’t able to confront Leviss in person that night, as she was in New York for Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live, but she did send her a succinct text message—“You’re dead to me”—before calling her up and demanding answers. “She was somewhat emotionless,” she says of her former friend’s reaction, a word that’s become synonymous with Leviss during the last 97 days. “And I was devastated.”

Public humiliation is the lifeblood of reality television. If fans wanted prize-winning narrative arcs or themes worthy of Shakespeare, Sophocles, or Goethe, we’d have The Sopranos or The Wire or even The Simpsons on loop. No, we want table flipping, we want catchphrases, we want proposals and retracted proposals, we want Scary Island, we want shocking exits. We don’t so much want jail sentences, fake cancer diagnoses, or genuinely horrific monsters, but we understand those are often byproducts of a genre that exists without scripts. We aren’t watching idols or finely drawn characters dreamed up in the writers room. These are real people who, as we love to point out, signed up for—gestures wildly—all of this. Maybe we won’t admit it, but we enjoy feasting on the bones of other people’s poor choices. Even the people who try to do the right thing on reality TV are often considered jesters, jokes, sad sacks. Almost everybody appears to have an unquenchable thirst for fame or infamy and it shows. But Ariana Madix, as fans of Vanderpump Rules will surely attest, always seemed a little bit different. More content being her actual self, less me, me, me! 

Madix was born in 1985 and raised on Florida’s Space Coast, a 72-mile stretch along the Atlantic Ocean that’s home to orbital-launch stations like Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center and describes her upbringing as “pretty great.” Her late father was a commercial roofing contractor, and her mother is a project manager who deals primarily with space-related companies. “My parents both worked really hard,” Madix says. “We weren’t rich by any means, but we certainly had the best that they could have given.” Growing up as a ’90s kid, Madix became infatuated with horses and begged her mom for lessons, something she says her mother never got growing up and wanted to give her daughter. At the age of six, she started riding and also got into theater. “Horse girl, theater kid. Those were the two things,” she says. She was also an exceptional student—the phrases “big overachiever” and “teacher’s pet” get thrown around—excelling mostly at math and science. By high school she was in AP classes and had added cheerleading to her list of extracurriculars. “I think my senior year, I was in eight or 10 different clubs,” she says. 

I ask whether her parents ever pushed her and she says no, but she does have some newfound realizations that came from doing inner-child work in therapy as an adult. “My dad would not come home,” Madix shares.“He’s no longer with us and I love him and feel like he was going through some stuff and doing his best in a lot of ways, but he would have a tendency to be done with work and be at the dive bar as opposed to helping us with our homework. And my mom did everything.” Therapy has helped her realize that maybe her overachieving was a coping mechanism. “If I’m perfect, then he’ll want to be there.” 

A point of contention with both parents after high school centered around the fact that she got accepted to an acting conservatory in New York, but no matter how prestigious, programs like that don’t come with a bachelor’s degree—something that seems to possess an almost mythic importance to some Gen X and boomer parents. “They said, ‘No, you need to get a real degree,’” Madix says. And so off she went to Flagler, a small private college in Saint Augustine, Florida, where she says she’s made lifelong friends. “Looking  back, I would never change it, but in the moment, I was begrudgingly going because I wanted to go to New York and be on Broadway.”

She did make it to New York. After college and summer programs at NYU, she packed all her shit and moved into an apartment on Manhattan’s East 13th Street. She stayed for five years during what the internet now calls the “Indie Sleaze” era, hostessing and bartending at Butter, an exclusive restaurant and lounge that helped usher in the city’s early-aughts nightlife resurgence. There was no social media, only digital cameras to capture, as Madix puts it, “late nights at Home Sweet Home just pouring sweat or The Box.” She bartended at a touristy Western-themed bar near Rockefeller Center with a mechanical bull, she go-go-danced at clubs in the Meatpacking District, she promoted cigarettes. “I was a hustler,” she says, matter-of-factly. The hustling was warranted: Everyone knows you do what you can to get by in a prohibitively expensive place like New York if you’re not a trust-fund kid or a finance bro, especially if you want to be an actor. 

Like many aspiring performers during the dawn of social media, Madix gravitated toward indie web series and College Humor videos. “I was doing acting stuff, but I couldn’t push past whatever [I needed to] because I didn’t have legitimate television credits or anything to be able to move into the next level,” she says. Los Angeles was never on her bucket list—she says she imagined a world in which she’d find success without ever having to move to Hollywood—until she and a friend made a list weighing the pros and cons of leaving New York for California. The pros were bountiful, she says, and so in October of 2010, she headed west and picked up a bartending gig at a glitzy Beverly Hills restaurant called Villa Blanca owned by entrepreneur and newly minted Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Lisa Vanderpump. Madix—having come from New York with no cable—never heard of the show. When a spin-off was floated that would focus on Vanderpump’s attractive young staff, Madix’s coworker and friend, Scheana Shay, convinced her to take part but she was hesitant. 

Eventually, it was her acting teacher who convinced her to try it out. She was featured sporadically in early seasons after hooking up with her now ex-boyfriend—who was in a relationship with another castmate at the time, Kristen Doute, it should be noted—and became an official cast member in season three and emerged as a cooler-headed foil to everyone else’s hysteria. Madix’s storylines tend to carry more gravitas than others, and often center around her struggles with mental health, body image, and personal losses—the deaths of her father, her grandmother, and her beloved dog Charlotte, were all heavily documented. And then came the Scandoval. Suddenly the cast member with the least proclivity for drama is the reason that people who have never seen a single episode of VPR were starting from season one just to join the cultural conversation. Still, she hopes the worst is behind her. “Sometimes I’m like, Can’t I just have a really fun summer where nothing bad happens, where I’m great, you know?” she says. “Maybe this is the year.” 

During a two-and-a-half-hour conversation—which took place the day after the second installment of the Vanderpump Rules reunion—our server checks in on us no less than six times and the restaurant not only sends over free dessert but also picks up a round of drinks. The reservation wasn’t made in her name and the venue isn’t open to the public, so this speaks to the power that Vanderpump Rules has, and the visibility it’s given Madix. Unlike with some traditional celebrity interviews, she didn't decline to answer questions, giving quick and candid replies to anything I ask. No, she did not threaten to kill herself if her ex-boyfriend dumped her, which is the narrative he’s been pushing. Yes, she did say that if they split she probably wouldn’t do the show anymore. “He was very offended by that idea,” she says. “He’s like ‘I helped you build this whole brand and this Instagram following [but] who the fuck cares?” Did she ever have an inkling he was capable of this, or maybe turned a blind eye? “No. I literally thought he was a completely different person than he is.” She still has not heard from her ex’s family. Is she still friends with Tom Schwartz? That’s a no. “He was very instrumental in all of it. And I was not aware of that at the time. He knew about all of it since August, at least.”

I imagine starring on TV as yourself has its ups and downs. It’s an odd sort of fame, one that opens the door for people to say whatever they want about you because they feel like they know you. Like most female reality personalities, Maddix says her face and body have been relentlessly scrutinized—too skinny, not skinny enough, too natural, too injected. This is something she’s come to terms with, although for someone who has struggled with disordered eating and anxiety, it’s hard to shake. Another downside for some might be fans assuming you’re always game to chitchat and take photos when they see you out and about—she claims her ex-boyfriend would go out, get recognized by a bunch of girls, and complain about it when he got home—but she just won’t go out if she’s not in the mood to engage because she says she never wants to be rude to anybody. For the most part though, the direct line she’s able to have with fans is sacred. And that’s part of the reason she’s so willing to let us in on this painful chapter in her life.  

“I feel close to a lot of people who watch the show or who will come to BravoCon or who I'll message with on Instagram,” she says. “I know maybe it sounds silly—we're strangers—but I do feel close to them.” She says many have thanked her for openly talking about her struggles with mental heath and loss. “I feel like we're a community. And so with this, I hope that in talking about it and allowing [Bravo] to capture it, maybe I’ll be able to connect with a community of people who will be able to say, ‘this is how I got through this. This is what worked for me.’”

Season 11 of Vanderpump Rules starts shooting this summer. Madix is still in the same house as her ex, though she’s looking to move, so we’ll have to wait and see how that plays out. She's dating someone new. She’s not totally sold on the idea of marriage, but you never know. “I still wouldn't want a wedding,” she says. “For me, it's about the marriage. There's something about weddings, and the fanfare, and the bachelorette. I just don't want any of that. And I think that's a big part of it for me.”

She’s looking forward to diving headfirst into her new business venture, the sandwich shop, with her friend and costar. “I feel really, really confident about it,” she says. “It looks amazing inside. The design is pretty much finished. We're working on the menu, and then hiring.” What should I order? The Greek salad sandwich, Madix's favorite.

Before we part, I have to ask her about the circulating theory that Scandoval is fake, that Bravo manufactured the drama for ratings or profit or whatever. She says it’s frustrating, but she kind of understands where people are coming from. “If I was not a fan, like I wasn't really paying attention, I might think that about any given show at any given time.” Would anyone really blow up their life for a television show? Maybe, but not Madix. “If someone says that on my page, they get blocked immediately. If they tag me in a comment that says that, I'll block them immediately. I'm kind of like, ‘Fuck off, this is my real life.’”

Madix sometimes fantasizes about leaving Los Angeles and disappearing into the French countryside and working at a shop or something romantic like that. I ask her if she realistically thinks she could do that, not logistically—anyone can buy a ticket to France—but could she really leave the spotlight behind? Wouldn’t she miss the fame she’s cultivated? “I think I love change,” she says. “I picked up and moved to New York with no friends and no job. I moved from New York to LA with no friends, no job, no money. If I picked up from LA and I moved…it’s like being a new version of myself."

Sent from my iPhone

#PumpRules #bravo #vanderpump rules #TomSandoval #Apology #vanderpumprules #TeamAriana #RaquelLeviss #drama #pumprules #Scandoval #bravotv #VanderpumpRules #Rachel and Tom are both not seeing heaven for doing Ariana so wrong. #The punkassness #The bitchassery #The cowardice #the unfaithfulness #The caucasity #The cuntery #the fuckery #The dustbucketery #The crustiness #the gumption #the nerve #the karma they deserved.

[dailyaudiobiblechronological]

12/11/2022 DAB Chronological Transcription

Romans 14-16

Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible Chronological. I'm China. Today is the 11th day of December. Welcome. So great to be back here with you today. Today we are starting the third week of Advent. This is the week of joy. And man, I'll just let that speak for itself. Maybe you are in need of some joy or maybe you are feeling it. It has been like very dreary in Tennessee, just very rainy. And there's a purpose for that for sure. A couple of days ago it was like flooding everywhere. Like huge, huge amounts of flooding. And I was like, I miss the sun. So I found myself really praying for the joy of the Lord to truly sustain me and to come quickly. The joy of the Lord is our strength and there's so much that we could apply that to and things that we can carry with us the meaning for it. And they're all great. They all have purpose. And so just understanding that the joy of the Lord is our strength and so may joy be with you, may peace be with you, may hope be with you. As we are in this third week of Advent together today we are in the book of Romans, chapters 14 through 16. And since it is a new week, we switch up the translation and we are in the English Standard version for this week.

Commentary:

I love that somehow, and by somehow I mean obviously through Jesus, the scripture that really stood out to me totally affirms what we talked about before we read in the Scriptures. And also just kind of another like stamping of this week being the week of Advent, the week that we celebrate joy. This is actually one of my favorite scripture verses. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. So we're in the week of joy. Last week was the week of peace and the week before that was the week of hope. And I feel like this is a great scripture verse to really meditate on and to really pray over ourselves and over others. I really love the scripture verse because when Ben and I were dating (my husband) long story short, we were tag teaming, dog sitting for a friend. So on the days where he was working nine to five and I worked like in the mornings and so he would go over in like the real early mornings. I'd go over in the afternoon and I was writing him like scripture and just little sweet notes in this person's house just to do something sweet. And this was one of the scriptures that I wrote and I feel like he still has this sticky note, but I just really love the scripture one because I was asking Lord, like, what do you want me to pray over him. Like, what would you want to say to him? And heard the scripture verse. And so it definitely has a deep meaning for me, but also when you really think about it, like, may the God of hope. Okay, so first he's a God of hope. There is hope found in him. May he fill us with all joy, all joy and peace in believing so that by the power of the Holy Spirit, we may abound in hope. I mean, how powerful is that? So if you are needing some joy, here it is. If you're needing some hope, know that it is in God that we find our hope, that the God of hope fills us with joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit, we may abound in hope. Man, that just feels so affirming and that feels like no matter what kind of day you've had, this right here can turn it around. So I'm really thankful for this letter today that is reminding us of who the Lord, who Jesus is and what he gives and what's available to us.

Prayer:

And so I thank You, God, that Your Word aligns with exactly where we're at, in Advent, and this, of course, it is from you. And so I thank you for the past three weeks now that we've had of getting to celebrate Your Son and the coming of his birth and his arrival. And so I just pray over us, Lord, that we would have a great anticipation for Your Son in our own lives, God, that as we are maybe awaiting a promise to be fulfilled, or we're waiting on something, we're waiting for an answer, we're waiting for you to move. I pray that just as in you're waiting for a baby to come and you don't really know what you're waiting for, or how it's going to happen, or what really to do, but just to wait and trust that baby will come. I thank you that we can trust that you will come and you already have. And I thank you for Your Word that settles us, instills us and allows us to wrestle and allows us to feel squirmy and it's okay to feel squirmy and have those questions and have permission to maybe not wait super patiently, but then seek you out and come back into alignment with you and Your Word. And I just thank you that you understand our hearts and our minds and you are not displeased with our humanness. And so I pray over us, God, that we would be a people who are steady in the Word and steady in you, and it's in Your name we pray. Amen.

Announcements:

Dailyaudiobible.com is our website. That's the place of connection where you can see what's happening here in the community, so be sure to check that out. You can also call in your prayer request at 800-583-2164. And also if you listen to the app and you want to send in your prayer request through there, you can also do so. And those get played at the end of every day's podcast. Or they get sent in here, and then they get played at the end of every day's podcast. That is all for today. I'm China. I love you, and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer Line:

Hello. My name is Echo Hope. Today I would like to ask that you would please pray with me. Papa, please help us understand what our non negotiable boundaries should be according to your Word and your living will, according to your desires. For our ultimate good, may we please utilize all of our friends to live in union with you. If any of our friends do not come in contact with the Christ in us, may we please make room in our heart to open up and allow Jesus to reach out and love those friends which need their love granted up and held together tightly in Your loving embrace. Father, thank you for delivering us from mental health issues. Thank you for delivering us from cancer, diseases, turmoil, and destruction. Father, please allow us not to be envious of sinners, for we know that they may have nice things, but those things which they have, we don't have, because you know that if we did have them, that we would bring our life to ruin and that we would no longer be stable and secure in Your loving grace. Father, we love you, and we love the Holy Spirit. Thank you for taking place in our mind, which is the first fruits of the mind of Christ. We ask that the Holy Spirit would continue to nurture and grow love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control that we may live and express the integrity and the virtuous, the virtuous attributes of Christ. Thank you, Father, for your love. We love you, Jesus.

Hey, DABC family, this is Alaska Mom, and I'm just calling to see if I can get some prayers for my husband to get the neurology consult that he needs. We've been working on it for several weeks now and just seemed to be at a standstill trying to get the consult. He was in the hospital for eight days due to a fall, and he seems to have something possibly with his brain, and we're actually down in Oregon right now, and so we're trying to get something done while we're down here traveling, but we only have another week and a half down here in Portland. So anyway, just prayers that we can get the consult and something can be determined whether he has something that is treatable. Anyway, I love you all, and I pray for you all. I was just listening to DAB and just people calling in for others for prayers. I guess that got me to call in. Anyway, have a great day and love you all. Bye.

Good morning, DABC. This is Tony calling in from Suffolk. Today is Wednesday, December 7. I wanted to pray for I think Susan said it was her dad, I'm sorry, I think she said dad from Florida in reference to him having stage four cancer and he fell and broke his leg. Heavenly Father, I lift up the young gentleman to you, Lord God. Lord, I want to say I love you Lord God, we thank you Lord God for being the almighty God that you are. I want to thank you Lord God for his tumor markers to be at two. I want to thank you Lord God for showing that the chemotherapy is working, Heavenly Father, but I'm asking Lord God, he's had a little small setback, but Lord God is nothing too hard that you can't intervene on God and fix. He had to follow Heavenly Father. And I'm asking right now for divine healing, Lord God while he's going through the process, Lord God. And I know Lord God, that you are able Lord, because Lord God, you can do all things but fail. And as I stated, his chemotherapy is working, Father, and I'm asking Lord, you just keep his hands, Lord God, your healing hands upon him. Heavenly Father, thank you for the doctors, Lord God, that plays a part in his healing process along with the support from his loved ones and his family. And I just want to thank you Lord God for all that you have done, all the things that you are planning on doing, Father, in his life, and allow him to have that testimony that he can share with others and also others that may be going through. And Lord, I just give you all the honor and all the praise in the mighty name of Jesus, amen. And as always, DABC, I love you guys and continue being courage and know that you have it, because God have you. Have a wonderful day.

Today is December 7 and my name is Jeanette and I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I have recorded this another time, but I sent it to the DAB and not the Chronological, so I'm going to try this again. So I just finished listening to the Thanksgiving episode and truly moved by all those who've called. It is brought to light an issue that I've struggled with for some time. And according to scripture, he that covers sins shall not prosper, but whoever confesses their sin and forsakes them shall have mercy. And then also in James that we are to confess our sins to each other and pray for each other so that we can live whole healed lives. There is truly no doubt that I do love the Lord and live a quiet, peaceful life. However, I do not seek the Lord like I should. I do work two jobs, but any free time that I have is not used wisely or productively. And in the past, even just reading the word of God for myself, it's a struggle because I don't fully understand it. So when the DAB came along, I was excited because I really wanted to read through the Bible, but I did shy away from actually having a quiet time and truly seeking the Lord. I know that God loves me and that he has a plan and purpose for me, but I just don't feel a connection. So I would ask that you would pray for me, that I can establish a true quiet time and learn to be still and allow him to direct and guide me. Pray that I can understand my worth and value and that he would start moving me in the direction that he has for my life and not just for what I want. Thank you all. God bless you and your families richly. Bye.

[mozart-the-meerkitten]

I'll be honest, I'm not the best at asks. So what's something you want to be asked about? Or what's a topic that you want/love to ramble about but rarely get the opportunity to?

It has taken me two days to come up with an answer to this because I mean, there’s lots of stuff I’d love to talk about but I don’t want to annoy anyone with by posting and I couldn’t come up with anything good. But now I have it! I’ve been wanting to talk about this anyway, and I do love to ramble about it.

It is

The book of Revelation.

That’s right. The last, most easily misunderstood, and my favorite, book of the Bible. I studied it in college and have been re-studying it recently, because I see a lot of misinformation floating around about it and the end times in general and darn it I want to help people understand! Revelation’s not just a big scary book where God ends the world and judges mankind- I mean, those things happen, but they’re not the POINT. The point is that God wins! God literally told us that he wins and that Satan will be defeated! And that should give us HOPE! Revelation is supposed to cause hope, not fear and despair! It is also a call to arms for Christians to fight in spiritual battles and do our best to save people’s souls because there WILL be a judgement.

However, Revelation is often taken out of the context of the whole Bible, and also history, and therefore people see it as confusing and bizarre. People misunderstand that it was written both for us now and for John’s listeners in our past, so the book has multiple meanings! And also, the entire book of Revelation doesn’t deal with just the great big final judgement, it deals with judgements of peoples, countries and cultures who disobey God and invoke his wrath up until the final judgement. Those are what I like to call “mini-judgements” or, “partial judgements”, if you like. The Seal and Trumpet judgements are partial (the “4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse” would more accurately be called “the 4 Horsemen of the mini-Apocalypses”). The Bowl judgements, however, are all-encompassing, and thus part of the final judgement. Thus, Revelation meant something for John’s readers in the past, means something to us in the present, and will mean something different to the people in the future! Because this stuff happens over and over again throughout history.

Also 95% of the book is imagery that represents what something IS like instead of what it LOOKS like, which also seems to confuse people a lot. It’s written in the same way Daniel 7-8 is, which is a genre known as “apocalyptic literature”. Which is why its so wildly different from most of the Bible. People in John’s time knew this and would have understood it, but again, we tend to take Revelation out of context and thus make it harder to understand.

OKAY, well, as you can see I truly do love to talk about Revelation, so if anybody has questions about it please feel free to ask them! I do not have all the answers but I did study this book in a college class for a whole semester and have a lot of good books about it. And I love explaining and helping people understand things!

(And whether or not anybody asks me questions I will probably talk about it again because I love it.)

#revelation #thanks for the ask! #the Bible #Christianity #the end times #the end of the world #exegesis #this has been my favorite book of the Bible since I was NINE #and let me tell you #when I took that class in college it felt like I unlocked a secret of the universe #nobody had ever explained revelation like that to me before #suddenly it all made sense! #I want to do that for somebody else #and I want people to understand Revelation #and study it like the other books of the Bible are studied- with an open mind and without fear #firefletch

[random2908]

Ok, it's time for my crack Locked Tomb interpretation that I've promised... the two people I've been reading these books with. I will say first, the theory isn't itself a crack theory--in its general form I actually stand by it as a serious prediction. But some of the textual evidence I'm going to use is way out there, so don’t take this too seriously--I certainly don’t. Spoilers for Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth behind the cut. Sorry it’s long.

Ok, first, the theory, simply put: I think Alecto/AL is a Resurrection Beast. Personally, I found this "insight" fairly uncontroversial the moment the thought occurred to me, but one of my two friends who've been reading these books with me disagrees on the basic evidence; the other friend has embraced it wholeheartedly, though. So, ymmv, I guess.

The basic evidence starts with: well, what the hell else could she be? She's not human. The older Lyctors call her a monster. There is a missing Resurrection Beast: nine were born, five were killed, three are loose, and the narrative actually calls attention to this numeric discrepancy while glossing others (e.g. the number of Lyctors, which does eventually get explained). John presumably can't just kill Resurrection Beasts himself, or he would have (maybe?? who the hell even knows what his abilities or grand plan are at this point). There aren't really other monsters that have been presented other than revenants (of which Resurrection Beasts are the biggest) and heralds (which are spiritually part of Resurrection Beasts), and the third book of a trilogy isn't really the time to introduce them. (This, by the way, is also my argument that it wasn't aliens who destroyed the solar system in the first place--even though everyone else seems to have come to that interpretation (where by “everyone” I mean my two friends who have read this book). Being Doylist, it's kind of a cheap, lazy argument on my part, but whatever, I still stand by that as a prediction: no aliens.) And Alecto must be something much more powerful than a human because John is so much more powerful than a Lyctor. Finally, the stoma opens for John, and it only opens for Resurrection Beasts--it opens for him because he holds part of Alecto's soul and she is a Resurrection Beast.

The potential counter-evidence is the older Lyctors are confident they know her origins (but that doesn't necessarily make her not a Resurrection Beast), and the [other] Resurrection Beasts are drawn to her as much as to John according to Mercy (although in that case why haven't they attacked the Tomb? and also, again, that doesn't preclude her being a Resurrection Beast--we don't know their relationships with each other, and anyway, their attraction to her might have something to do with the Lyctorification process).

Ok, all that's fair enough. Let's delve into the crack interpretations now. I'm going to start with an irrelevant introduction, though, to explain my frame of mind when I came up with this. In the Appendices of Gideon the Ninth, Muir mentions that Isaac is named as foreshadowing for Gideon's sacrificial death, as in the Christian interpretation of the Bible, the Biblical Isaac foreshadows Jesus. My copy of the e-book did not have the Appendices, but my best friend's did, and she shared screens with me. It's slightly embarrassing that my best friend and I, reading this together, did not even guess from this, not even as a joke, that Gideon's father might be God. I mean, it's not... generally embarrassing--no one reading this should be embarrassed for themselves--it's only embarrassing if you know the two of us, know how good my best friend is at this sort of thing (she guessed the entire murder mystery in GtN a little more than halfway through, including that Dulcinea was dead and had been replaced by a Lyctor in disguise who had philosophical problems with God and was rebelling), and know what sorts of in-jokes and ridiculous speculation we tend to bandy around with each other--know just how often we, respectively and together, joke that some character or other is Jesus. And here it was right on the page, we read it out loud to each other and discussed it, and we didn't even see it. We were both completely taken in by the Gideon Episode One red[-haired] herring (as was, to be fair, Gideon himself). This speculation that I'm about to present came right on the heels of the two of us debriefing over this, because I was primed to read way the hell in too much into Biblical references.

The key line is something my best friend caught, not me. She wasn't even done with the book yet, but the line was bothering her (I'd completely glossed and then forgotten it--never let it be said that my bad grades in English Lit were undeserved). Page 327 (and I'm so glad to have an ebook so I can do word searches), Teacher is talking to Harrow in the dream bubble...........

To their silence, [Teacher] added: “I believe we are now being punished for what they did. Even the devil bent for God to put a leash around her neck … and the disciples were scared! I cannot blame them! I was terrified! But when the work was done—when I was finished, and so were they, and the new Lyctors found out the price—they bade him kill the saltwater creature before she could do them harm … Oh, but it is a tragedy, to be put in a box and laid to wait for the rest of time.

"Saltwater creature" stuck with my best friend. She had no idea what it meant, other than that nearly every mention of saltwater (or salt water, two words, the text is inconsistent) in Harrow the Ninth is alluding to Alecto in some capacity (we confirmed this by searching--again, I love ebooks for this kind of thing). But I was like... wait, I might know! This is my favorite Bible lore!

Muir is working from the King James Bible (based on the quotation at the end of Gideon the Ninth) which is impenetrable and also is a translation of the Latin Vulgate, which is mostly a translation of the Septuagint, which doesn’t even have an extant Hebrew version, so ugh all around. But for this purpose it’s close enough, so I guess that's what I'll use for my English version. Here is how the KJV starts:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Ok, that word there, "the deep." What it says in the Masoretic text (the Hebrew Bible used by both Jews and Protestants) is "tehom," which is not quite a hapax legomenon, but neither is it a word that shows up very often, and importantly it only shows up in very few contexts that reference each other. It is certainly not the usual Hebrew word for sea, and importantly, in the Hebrew there is no "the"; it actually says "darkness was on the face of Tehom" like it's a proper name [capitalization mine for illustration, since Hebrew doesn’t capitalize]. Notice also how on the second day basically the only thing God accomplishes is cutting this thing, this "Deep" made of water, in half, sending one half up into the sky. This is a quick retelling of the defeat of Tiamat (linguistically cognate with Tehom) in the Enuma Elish. Tiamat, the Goddess of the Saltwater Deeps, Mother of Monsters and Dragons, is justifiably angry with the other gods and sets out to kill them; Marduk, the aspiring new head of the Pantheon, cuts her in half. Half of her he leaves on Earth to create the oceans (or just the Earth itself? been a while since I read it), and half of her he throws up into the air and it becomes the sky.

There is a lot of old Jewish writing, some of it predating Christianity, that just starts to touch on this, without daring to delve too deep (...as it were) and pull on the pan-Middle Eastern polytheistic roots of Judaism. (They had enough problems with people still worshiping Asherah, who in southern Canaanite tradition was the sea-and-mother goddess who was the wife of Yahweh the storm god, and who gets mentioned in the Bible a whole lot, without also bringing Tiamat into it.) The Gnostics really latched on, though. They said that this "deep" obviously in the text there predates God's creation, and used that as the foundation of quite a lot of their theological argument: that God (who they call the Demiurge) didn't create the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing) but rather that there was a being even more powerful that came before. And they named this more powerful, older being Bythos (among other things), which means "depth" in Greek. They changed the gender, but they brought Tehom the saltwater goddess back as the most primordial and powerful of all beings.

Bringing this back to Harrow the Ninth... Insofar as it's Biblical allegory (which isn't much--less than Narnia and even Narnia doesn't strictly adhere to Biblical narrative), I think we should take the Resurrection committed by John to be the Biblical Creation not the Biblical Resurrection. First of all, John becomes God by performing the Resurrection, which is a much better parallel to Genesis than to Isaiah or Revelations or whatever. Second of all, after the Biblical Resurrection, everyone who gets to be resurrected is supposed to live in eternal peace in Eden. In contrast, in Genesis, after the creation, people start out in Eden but are quickly expelled and then bad things happen. This matches the story much better, where the expulsion from Eden is due to Lyctorhood--the Resurrection Beasts come for the Lyctors and they have to leave Eden; in this respect, I guess John is really the snake as much as he's God, lol. (Worth noting that in some parts of Christian tradition--although I can't remember about Catholicism specifically--the snake is supposed to be Satan. This also ties back to Gnosticism where the Demiurge is malevolent; John, insofar as he did not actually create the universe on his own, is a much better match for a demiurge than a true god.)

So, anyway, taking John's act of Resurrecting all those people as the initial Creation rather than the Resurrection (the fact that Augustine doesn't remember his pre-Resurrection self, is effectively a new person, also points to this being effectively an initial Creation), the Resurrection Beasts actually come before Creation. They come from the dying of the planets. They predate John becoming God. Furthermore, Alecto is a “saltwater creature,” and she keeps her body after she's Lyctorified, meaning she's split in some way between John and her old body; she is Tehom. Back to the Gnostic idea, Tehom is a more-powerful being who predates God, and the only creatures predating God in Harrow are the Resurrection Beasts who must be comparable to him in power to create such fear: Alecto, then, must be a Resurection Beast.

The problem with this theory is it's a little Jewish and it's very Gnostic but it isn't Catholic. In the Gideon and Harrow, Muir draws references in her language from practically everywhere. But as far as I can tell she only draws allusions and allegory from two mythologies: Greco-Roman and Roman Catholic. And although Jews and Gnostics are drawing on a lot of the same source text, the  understanding is different, and the expansive side stories are different. Although, then again, who am I to say that Muir isn't also drawing on Gnosticism and this isn't our big clue; I've half convinced myself as I wrote this, with the whole John-as-Demiurge thing. It's a fun theory, anyway, and so I thought I'd share it.

(I'm aware that I've completely ignored any connection to Greek mythology, despite her name being Alecto.)

#locked tomb trilogy #locked tomb spoilers #harrow the ninth #harrow the ninth spoilers #harrow spoilers #hopefully that covers the important tags people might be blocking #I learned while writing this that I don't know how to spell 'resurrection' #I tend to put too many letters in #it seems like whenever I make theories about books it's always some weird religious thing #this write-up is SO much more Gnostic than what told my best friend over the phone a few weeks ago #(now that I've done more reading on it) #I knew there was bound to be at least one homestuck reference in these books but I did NOT expect it to be dream bubbles

[wordsbysra]

page turner

*** hey! this is a project i did at college this semester! the prompt was to present on something that gave our lives meaning, so i wrote a letter to my dad. plus i’ve been itching to post, but i’ve been too busy to write something new... thanks for letting me be both corny and vulnerable :) sra ***

When given this project, I was torn on what gives my life meaning. There’s plenty of things that fill me up with joy. Music has always been healing to me, but you can hardly classify dubstep and techno as therapeutic. I really like Trader Joe’s but eating your weight in cookie butter has its consequences. Makeup has always been an amazing way to express myself, but I understand it’s hard for people to believe I can do some sharp ass winged eyeliner, considering I look like I’ve been forgetting to wash my hair for the last four years. Even amongst all these things that make my life sweeter, nothing compares to my family. My dad, in particular. My dad taught me the value of education. He spent weeks on my elementary school science fair projects, tutored half of my high school statistics class over Skype, and even made me a list of 100 books to read before I graduate college. I just started #38 “Ham on Rye” by Charles Bukowski last night, but we’ve got a long way to go. He introduced me to literature, one of my greatest passions. Obsessed with crafting lavish stories that will keep you perched so far on the edge of your seat that you’ll forget to breathe, my dad is the brightest mind I’ve ever known. His consistent encouragement helped me overcome the anxieties and doubt that clouded my potential. Not only did I want to share with the class how my dad brought purpose into my life, but I wanted him to hear it too. Or read it… I wrote this sappy letter, but when I need them most, words fail.

Hey Dad,

           It’s strange to think that I’m over halfway done with my collegiate experience, when it feels like just yesterday, you were still helping me with my times tables. For the first time in a long time, I am excited about learning. I am engaged in my classes (after 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep), I look forward to doing homework, and I feel like I might actually have a shot at doing something great when I’m out of here. For months, I panicked about what I was going to study. The devil on my shoulder told me English was a waste of a degree (it’s not). The devil on my other shoulder told me I wasn’t creative or bold or funny enough to ever tell a good story. But you, my middle-aged angel, encouraged me to follow my instincts and tell my story. I’ll never forget when you told me, “It’s the only story you get, so make it a page turner.”

           It started in my bedroom when I was maybe four years old. I couldn’t seem to sleep with my closet door wide open and you found yourself sitting at the edge of my bed while I spoke incoherently about the monster that was watching me from behind my shirts and dresses. This was when the joy of story-telling was brought into my life, as you configured a story about the monster. You told me that the monster was scared, just like me, and every time I couldn’t sleep, neither could he. In hindsight, this was probably the biggest parenting cop-out ever, but it cured my nightmares. However, you still found yourself at the foot of my bed nearly every night after since I wanted to know more about the closet monster. What was his name? How old was he? Did he have a little brother like I did? You had me immersed in a world that didn’t truly exist, something that only a true storyteller could do. I was an intuitive little girl, so I knew your stories couldn’t possibly be real, but sooner or later, your stories became ours.

           The first true book I ever read cover to cover was “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”. I sat in the cramped backseat with Alex as our overstuffed car inched forward in traffic towards the annual family reunion in quaint Idaho. I don’t know why we always had to reunite with Mom’s redneck survivalist side of the family, but you have very little say in family matters when you’re six years old. Between heaving fistfuls of Cheez-Its and those waxy fruit snacks that Mom always tried to pass off as real Gushers, I sat with a book gripped in my hands, its pages overflowing in my tiny lap. Every few minutes or so, a timid, “Dad, what does this word mean?” would escape from the backseat and be met with a simple definition, an example sentence, and so on and so forth. A grueling nine hour drive later and I had finished my first chapter book; I couldn’t stop gushing about how awesome Hermione was “because she’s smarter and tougher than all the boys”. The constant support I received to keep on reading led me to discover characters that inspired me. I found a sense of identity through intelligent young girls who stood firm in the face of danger. When it was time for us to begin the journey back to home sweet home Nevada, you surprised me with the second book of my new favorite series. I read out loud to the whole car for hours until my eyes got heavy and I fell asleep with another story whirling around my head.

           Unfortunately, the older I became, the less I enjoyed reading. High school started to hinder my imagination and I was eventually diminished into just another statistic for the school district. It became less about telling a story and more about being able to analyze a story and condense my thoughts into a well-written, well-structured essay worth half of my grade. MLA style or bust! Reading books with you definitely wasn’t cool anymore (sorry) and we drifted apart. When I was seventeen, you were admitted into the hospital for a severe complication from one of several surgeries. Even with a bleak chance of survival looming over our heads, you still managed to give me a new story every time we came to visit, be it about a nurse you liked or a dumb commercial you had seen on television. Seeing someone so strong become so vulnerable really broke a part of me, but I ultimately became more appreciative of all the great experiences you had given me. I would run to the library before each visit, frantically searching the shelves for whatever request you had scrawled on a sticky note during my previous visit. Sitting by your side for hours, finishing off the pudding cup stash you were saving for me, each of us with a different book in our hands, pages turning every few moments. Even on your worst days, your sickest days, your weakest days, the powerful stories we read side by side outshined every moment of suffering. It was this point in my life that I realized the power of a really good book, and in an instant, my love for literature was reignited.

           You made me realize that there is so little time to spend focusing on minute details and irrelevant characters. The only plot I should be worrying about is my own, since I am my own story, all by myself. I will always look back fondly on our weekly Saturday dates to the public library, and getting lost at the bookstore amongst the towering walls of bindings and pages, and staying up all night to finish a novel so you’d take me to the movie premiere, but I can’t wait to make the same memories with children of my own one day. Your love of books helped morph me into the most inquisitive version of myself, always eager to pick up something new to read, but always reminiscent of the texts I cherished when I was younger. “The Poisonwood Bible” (which was the first book I had recommended to you) has a quote that often makes me think of you: “I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.” You helped me discover parts of me that I didn’t know were there and encouraged me to be proud of all my cracks and dents. Don’t worry, I’ll make you sound totally awesome in my memoir one day. Thank you for introducing me to the whimsical worlds hidden between dusty pages and 12-point font. You helped excavate the purpose that had been buried inside of me all along. I am eternally grateful to be your daughter and I’m excited to see what crazy stories lie ahead for us. How’s this for a page turner?

P.S. I spent that $50 you gave me over Thanksgiving break at Barnes and Noble. I’ll let you borrow the books I picked up. Please send more money.

#writing #my writing #quotes

[nicholaspopkey]

A letter to Caro

Dear Caro,

Hoping to respond in some adequacy to your beautiful letter (see below), I’d first like to point out the irony of two millennials writing to each other in this ancient yet digitized form of correspondence. While you and I have exchanged postcards in the past, does this fact exempt us from having to put pen to paper to create letters? Does this posting count as a letter, or is "letter" just a label?

Thoughts coming to me now, hardly relevant. As for teaching me the word tenido, I couldn't thank you enough. It made me think of 'he tenido,' which of course means 'I have had.' It was funny to me, because a tenido is something I have never had. My references for the softness and satisfaction of such a settee come from fond memories of blanket forts I made as a kid. The euphoria of collapsing onto your plush daybed in its enveloping coziness! 

Your letter felt like a childhood memory focusing soft to sharp. I could listen for ages to your descriptions of rainy days, their 'heavy sheets' and the 'cold seeping in,' as well as more stories from your past detailing your appreciation for precipitation.

I understand your frustration with a lack of female representation in both required and popular reading. I agree that female authors should be prioritized and celebrated just as much as male authors. Unfortunately, opportunities to become an author continue to abound much greater for men than for women. It was powerful to read you come to the realization that even your own list of favorites would be majority male if stretched out long enough, since the numbers are so far in their favor. The goal you made to try and discover more female authors is commendable and should be pursued. 

As it turns out, Agatha Christie, like Sylvia Plath, had a husband who put her through very difficult circumstances. Her disappearance, motivated by her adulterous husband asking for a divorce, was seen by the public not as a reaction to an unhappy relationship but, rather unfairly, as a publicity stunt. Murder On The Orient Express is now at the top of my list. On the same list of best-selling fiction authors, I stumbled upon Barbara Cartland, another woman I didn't hear about growing up. She was a famous romance novelist who holds the Guinness World Record for most novels published in one year.

My dad stocked the fridge with a Costco-pack of kombucha. It was a really sweet gesture, because he knows I love this bohemian tonic. Normally I'd wonder as to how I could finish them all by the time I go back to L.A., but I'll be here until the 29th, so I know it's enough time. He's enlisted my help moving furniture around the house as he redesigns his study. My dad has a pet rat named Monty, who originally belonged to my sister. She couldn't take him with her from Boise to Santa Barbara, because her roommate didn't want to live with a rat. This roommate is quite another story altogether. As she gears up to move out, their relationship sputters with drama and turmoil. Monty climbs around in a cage in my dad's living room next to the lawyer's bookcase, filled with his rarest anthologies. 

So far I've seen my mom twice. Today at the bookstore we shared a cappuccino, then ended up sitting in her rental car discussing gift ideas, the lighter side of some extended-family dynamics, and plans for ten years from now. We're driving to Tetonia, ID on Saturday to visit her mother, my grandmother. My sister will also be there, although my aunt, who recently had her first successful art show in fifteen years, will be staying in Boise to paint. She said the sales from the show disappeared pretty quickly, so financial burdens must be weighing heavily on her at the moment, although she happens to be working a lot, as well as making art. I’m happy to be home. Looking forward to hearing back from you.

With love, 

Nick

@carolovesapples

______________________________________________________________________

RE:

Dear Nick,

I have set my timer for one hour, and I am beginning by writing you this letter. I’ve brought out all the fluffy blankets in my apartment (I have three, total) and folded them neatly in a tendido on the floor. A tendido, in case you weren’t aware, is a pile of blankets, usually folded in half, which act as a makeshift mattress so you can sleep on the floor comfortably. Quilts, comforters, and sleeping bags can also be used. Air mattresses do not count, as they too closely resemble an actual bed. So here I am, sitting on my tendido in front of my bookcase. It is raining, and I’ve been watching tv all day. I’ve opened my blinds and the windows so I can hear the rainfall outside. It’s lessened now to more of a trickle, but just a second ago it was really “coming down out there”! 

I recently watched the movie Paddington, in which a rare bear from Darkest Peru travels to London and finds a home (much like I intend to do, one day). In preparation for his journey to England, he learned 107 different ways to say, “its raining!”, one of which is “perfect weather for ducks”, which is my personal favorite as ducks are my favorite animal. So, here in Los Angeles, it is perfect weather for ducks, and for that reason I am sitting down on my tendido in front of my bookshelves perusing three books: 

1. On Filmmaking, by Alexander MacKendrick

2. Notes on the Cinematograph, by Robert Bresson, a French director, and

3. How to Win Friends and Influence People, by the one and only Dale Carnegie.

It’s not really about the books, of course. It’s about the rain. When I was little, on rainy days we used to open the garage door and the back of my mom’s minivan, and we would sit in the trunk and watch it come down. My dad would make hot chocolate, and we’d watch the rain, pouring down in gray sheets on our little street. Rainy days have always been my favorite days. They’re the best days for reading, when the cold seeps into the house and you curl up with a book and fluffy socks and a bag of hot Cheetos. They’re also great for writing, because as anyone who has ever listened to Florence + the Machine knows, water is one of the most poetic concepts there is. And then there’s photography, of course. The lighting on rainy, gloomy days has always been my favorites. In fact, every time I’ve traveled to a new place I’ve loved, it’s been raining. New York, Boston, Park City, Minnesota, London. I feel at home in the rain. It’s a familiar comfort. Maybe it was the novelty of a rainy day in Southern California, but they have never ceased to feel special to me. Additionally, rain means I can wear my rain boots and step in puddles, and my yellow raincoat, and I can feel as close to Paddington Bear as I ever will. If you take away anything from this letter, it should definitely be that Paddington Bear is my new hero. 

I’ve an announcement. It is this: in between ending the previous paragraph and starting this one, that I took a quick break because it occurred to me that I still hadn’t read your post on “The Mind’s Free Market” and now having done so I am feeling: very proud, and impressed, and quite frankly, rather envious. But mostly proud and impressed, those are the important emotions. The envy is a thing I feel often when I encounter good writing. It is a good sort of envy, one that pushes me to be better. The thought process goes like this: I’ll read something that resonates (or hear it), and my mind will be blown that the author could so perfectly capture the thought or feeling that their writing evoked in me. Perhaps I am putting the cart in front of the horse here: I am reacting to what is written and marveling at how the author created that reaction in me, when in reality, I will react however I will react and then attribute it to them. They couldn’t have known I would think one way or another about it, but the important part is that any good writing will pull from you some sort of emotional reaction. 

Side note: Yesterday I was hanging out with a friend who didn’t know who Sylvia Plath was, and that made me simultaneously sad for both him and the American education system. To expand: why is it that the majority of writers we study in middle school and high school are mainly men, if not all? I am trying to think about it and I cannot remember a single female writer we read before I went to college. I know why it is, of course, as the accomplishments of men have always been much lauded over the accomplishments of women in any field, but it is still incredibly frustrating. 

As I finished typing, Maya Angelou’s name came to mind, but so far no others. I remember reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald and of course Shakespeare, and Albert Camus’s L’Étranger. We did read Agatha Christie in seventh grade and she remains one of my favorite authors to date (I am looking at five different novels of hers on my shelves as I type this). But we focused so much more on the male authors that no one remembers the few women we did study. I’ve mentioned Agatha Christie’s name on several occasions to various different people and nine times out of ten, no one knew who she was, which is absolutely ridiculous, especially because she is the world’s best selling author, tied only by William Shakespeare. AND as if we needed any more evidence of the women’s accomplishments being downplayed over mens, in any online list regarding the world’s best selling author you will find Shakespeare’s name listed above Christie’s even though they are both estimated to have sold from 2-4 billion books, Christie having written 85 before her death to Shakespeare’s 42. Additionally, “Agatha Christie” comes before “William Shakespeare” alphabetically, and unless someone can show me evidence that Shakespeare has sold more that Christie I see this as a great affront and a deliberate attempt to downplay women’s accomplishments in favor of a man’s. 

Update: I have looked and found that on Christie’s website it IS stated that she is outsold by only the Bible and Shakespeare, so the point is valid, but I spent a full ten minutes on my rant about their rankings so I’m leaving it in with this correction. I still would like to see empirical proof however, that Shakespeare has definitively sold more than Christie. If you subtract the number of people who bought Shakespeare solely as a class requirement, I’m sure her number would overshadow his, but I am biased. Anyways, the few people who did remember who Agatha Christie was only did so because of the remake of the film adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express that came out last year, but lets face it, it never stood a chance because the original starred Lauren Bacall and Ingrid Bergman and Albert Finney, and the remake stars Johnny Depp, who hits women. 

In closing, we should incorporate more female authors and writers into our curriculum. I’d heard of Virginia Woolf in when I was in school, but we never read her in class. We spent a week or two on Emily Dickinson. We were never read the Brontë sisters, nor Jane Austen. And they’re the more well known authors. 

Anyways, when I read Plath or García Lorca or any of my other favorite poets and authors I always feel a yearning to be able to articulate my thoughts and emotions the way they do. I will conclude this letter with a list of some of my favorite authors writers, and lyricists, in no particular order. 

Agatha Christie

Florence Welch

Sylvia Plath

Maggie Stiefvater

Mary Oliver

Albert Camus

Robert Frost

Kurt Vonnegut

Alex Turner

I have many more but I’ve arrived at an almost even number of men and women and sadly I know that if I continue there will be more men than women on my list and that makes me sad. One of my goals will be to discover more female authors in my reading. Many of my favorite female authors are young adult novelists and honestly I think they’re amazing. 

In conclusion, please read a novel by Agatha Christie. I recommend Murder on the Orient Express, Mysterious Affair at Styles, or They Do It With Mirrors, although really, you can’t go wrong with any of her titles. Additionally, please watch Paddington, it is an amazing heart warming movie. 

With love,

Caro 

@nicholaspopkey​

#agatha christie #rainydays #paddingtonbear #florence welch #los angeles #personal #sylvia plath #correspondence #letter writing #letter #letters #writing #friend #friendship #connection #booklr #blog #blog post #home #pen pal #rain #albert camus #writeblr #writers on tumblr #writers community #letter to a friend #writer #books #blogger #spilled ink

[radioleary-blog]

Hef Tragedy Jam

Hugh Hefner died yesterday. When the news was announced, over fifty women said they were dismayed. No, wait...over fifty women said they were “Miss May”. Fifty more were Miss June, and, well, you get the picture. If you were lucky you got their pictures.

Few of you reading this are old enough to remember that Playboy magazine was about the only place you could see a naked woman, and I say that because there are probably few of you reading this, period. But hey, my column gets more readers than the average suicide note, statistically speaking. Although I’m trying to increase my readership, and the average suicide note is more of a stand-alone project. I bet if George Lucas ever wrote a suicide note, he’d follow it up with three prequel notes. Each successively worse than the last. People would be like, “Why did he have to ruin that original suicide note, which I loved, with those awful prequel-suicide notes? I don’t care why he got depressed, but clearly only a manic depressive could make such a desperate cry for help as introducing Jar-Jar Binks. If I ruined a billion dollar franchise by coming up with an offensive racist caricature like Jar-Jar Binks, I’d probably consider putting a lightsaber in my mouth too.”

I grew up with Playboy magazine, and my early knowledge of female physiology was less from a volume of Grey’s anatomy or sketches by DaVinci, and more from volumes of Playboy magazine. It was like a reference guide, one that you would hold up with one hand. In fact, the first time I had a girlfriend who got naked, I wondered where her staples were. Of course, today, I’m the one who should have his stomach stapled, but that’s another story. Ah, sweet irony!

I’m sure Hugh Hefner went to Heaven, but whatever gleaming Mansion in the sky awaits us, no matter how glorious, for Hugh Hefner it’s going to be a pretty big step down from the Playboy Mansion. It may actually be Seventh Heaven, but Hef has been living on Cloud Nine since 1956. But, hey, he’s already wearing a robe. You know when you see depictions of Heaven, everybody is always wearing white robes? That’s because they were wearing those white robes in the hospital when they died. And they make you wear those awful robes that don’t close in the back because that’s where your wings will come out when you get to Heaven. It’s all part of God’s plan. I bet you’ll still have that plastic wristband on too, St. Peter just scans it at the gate to let you in. <beep> “Cardiac arrest. You’re good. Check in at the registration desk. Have a valid photo ID ready.”

Hugh Hefner was such a consummate pussyhound, I wouldn’t be surprised if he made a deathbed conversion to radical Islam, just to get the 72 virgins in Heaven. God would be like - I mean “Allah” would be like, “Pretty tricky Hef, pretty tricky. But...technically it counts. You old horndog!” Of course, you know what Hugh Hefner calls 72 virgins? A slow Tuesday.

The Playboy Mansion was famous for its out-of-control parties, and the mansion had a natural cave-like grotto on the grounds where everyone would go to snort coke and have sex. I guess Hef was a lot like Bruce Wayne, a millionaire with a mansion and a cave. And didn’t they call Bruce Wayne a millionaire playboy? Hef was a Playboy millionaire. But the difference is, Hef would rather do coke and fuck super-models whereas Batman would rather do-good and fight super-villains. Plus, Batman slides down the Bat-pole, and crazy hot chicks slide down the Hef-pole. In other words, Hef was sane, and Batman was, well, not so much. Batman is basically a billionaire who just wants to hurt people and not get sued for it and pretend he’s a hero. Kind of like Trump.

The grotto cave on the grounds of the Playboy Mansion had a huge, heated Jacuzzi pool, where movie stars, rock and roll gods, and celebrity athletes were eagerly humped by groupies, star-fuckers, and aspiring playmates. Unprotected 1970’s sex was messier than Michael J. Fox eating an ice cream cone, so the pool was probably 60% water, 2% spilled cocaine, and 38% James Caan’s jizz. The lifeguard got syphilis just from giving mouth to mouth resuscitation. At least that was her story. But that was about the same time Grand Funk Railroad was in town, so who can say? I do think ‘grotto’ must be the Italian word for ‘gross’.

I hear some of the more politically correct crowd, or as they’re more commonly known, nitwits, complaining that Playboy exploited women. And I guess it was exploitation, in the same sense that Vogue magazine is exploiting the mostly-naked teenage anorexic girls slash super-models in their magazine. And I say slash because that’s what these girls often try to do to their wrists. Unlike Vogue magazine models, at least the Playboy women didn’t have eating disorders. They’re a lot less likely to stick their fingers down their throats. I’m not saying they’re any less likely to have something down their throats, but not their fingers.

Exploiting women. As if Hugh Hefner was hanging around the Newark bus station looking for a girl down on her luck and fresh off the turnip truck from Topeka. That sounds more like the plot of a 1930’s movie than the way his business empire was run. I think what Hef did was have his photography editors, both men and women, spend endless hours going through duffel bags of mail sent in by thousands of women from all around the country who wanted to pose for Playboy. The staff would narrow it down to probably a few dozen, and then get Hef’s opinion on who was not only the most beautiful, but who had the look that would be right to feature in the magazine. That’s exactly what the editors and publishers do at Elle, and Vogue, and every other magazine that holds up a particular brand of beauty as an ideal.

And I don’t know any women who haven’t worn out the related links on their favorite porn sites jilling off to whatever their particular porn flavor might be, so who exactly are these people that still have a problem with Playboy? Because without Hefner’s decades of battles against governmental and religious censorship, there would be no porn sites. Hef made it possible to look at porn sites without pretending you go there for the articles. Without Playboy, people would still be saying, “Did you read that insightful article on the humanitarian crisis in Darfur? And that recently-found short story by J.D, Salinger?” “Why, yes. I particularly liked the profile of Jazz trumpeters from the post-bop era. And I did notice some delightful porn as well, between the articles, of course.”

The reason Hef could get away with putting in naked chicks is his magazine is because Playboy was a serious, respected literary magazine. The greatest writers of the day were in Playboy:

Ray Bradbury wrote original content for Playboy, and serialized Fahrenheit 451, which was coincidentally the exact temperature of how hot the playmates were.

The Beat writer Jack Kerouac wrote for Playboy, and that cat was cool as hell. Beat, Jack, that is exactly what Playboy readers do.

Ian Fleming published short stories in Playboy, and the James Bond novel “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” was published first in Playboy. We all know James Bond got enormous amounts of pussy. But compared to what Hef was getting, James Bond looks like a bible salesman with erectile disfunction. Or a guy who works in a comic book store. Think about that for a minute; the world’s sexiest pussyhound spy still gets less women than the guy who published the magazine his story is in. And Bond is fictional!

Roald Dahl wrote for them, too. The author of “Willie Wonka” writing for people who wonka their willies, sounds apropo.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote for them all the time, and that dude was cooler than Ice Nine. There’s a reference for ya!

Joseph Heller published a lost chapter of “Catch-22” in Playboy. I think the title Catch-22 might be the number of social diseases you’d get if you had sex in the grotto.

Margaret Atwood, author of “The Handmaid’s Tale” started writing for Playboy in 1991. I would imagine one of her stories was called “The Handmaid’s Tail”.

Hunter S. Thompson. Gabriel García Márquez, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Truman Capote, they all wrote for Playboy. This magazine was the real deal, kids, it was smarter and cooler than absolutely anything you know today. You see, all of these stories were longer than 140 characters. Or even 280.

I actually learned quite a bit about culture from Playboy, between rounds, if you know what I mean. By middle school I could discuss the literary feud between Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer in English class and sound like a friggin’ genius, I just couldn’t tell the teacher where I learned it. “Where did I learn that? Oh, you know. Around. Literary journals, and the like. At that building that has all the books. Yes, exactly, the library! That’s the one! I frequent that establishment, I‘ll have you know.” What was I gonna say? My father’s sock drawer?

The Playboy Interview was legendary, they were deep, involved discussions, frank and uncensored. Here are some of the people they interviewed: Salvador Dali, Patty Hearst, Groucho Marx, Ansel Adams, Stanley Kubrick, The Beatles, Albert Schweitzer, Buckminster Fuller, Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, Abbie Hoffman, Tennessee Williams, Erica Jong, Allen Ginsberg, and Bertrand Russell. Then there are the so famous they’re known by just one name:  Fellini, Castro, Brando, Nehru, Sartre, Bowie, Nabokov, Hoffa, Carson, Antonioni, Mastroianni, Gleason, and Sinatra. And Playboy was woke, they interviewed Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Alex Haley, Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali,  Eldridge Cleaver, Dick Gregory, and Huey Newton. Holy shit, right?  Who do you see interviewed today? Kardashians? Ryan Gosling? Taylor Swift, but interrupted by Kanye West? This time we live in today has less culture than a petri dish.

Hef lived so long that most people today have no real idea how influential he was, what an important cultural icon he was, and that he somehow talked Marilyn Monroe into posing naked on the cover of the very first issue of his magazine way the hell back in 1956. That’s a dude with the Kavorka, big-time. And nobody was naked back in 1956. Not in this country. In 1956, people showered wearing a suit and tie, and apart from time shampooing, a smart fedora. They say people were more cultured back then because they went to art museums, bullshit, I think they only went to art museums to see the nudes in the oil paintings. You would too, and you know it, don’t even try to deny it. You’d say you were admiring the Titian, but you were really just admiring the Tit.

Nearly every issue, Playboy featured a very prominent celebrity with a well-established career and respected in her field who actually wanted people to see how beautiful she was without any clothes. Starting with Marilyn Monroe. And she was smoking hot, too, an icon in her absolute prime. Future historians will be more grateful for that photo shoot than they are for the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts. Where do you go from there, Playboy? Well, how about Farrah Fawcett, the biggest sex-symbol of the entire 1970’s! The list of gorgeous, talented, famous, successful women that wanted to pose for Playboy might be hard for you to imagine, as you live in an age where women pose in magazines like Maxim with their clothes on! And men today pay to see that? Wtf? Man, I can see women with their clothes on just about anywhere I go. I can see that in line at the deli counter, I don’t need to pay for it.

Here are just a few, a very few, of the already-famous women who chose to pose with no clothes:

Daryl Hannah. Olivia Munn. Kim Basinger. Charlize Theron. Drew Barrymore. Denise Richards (she had kids with Charlie Sheen, so posing for Playboy was comparatively a relatively sound decision). Shannen Doherty. Belinda Carlisle. Jayne Mansfield. Mariel Hemingway. Margaux Hemingway. Nastassja Kinski. Sharon Stone. Rosanna Arquette. Vanna White. Elle MacPherson. Brigitte Bardot. Uma Thurman. Kate Moss. The list is almost endless. I almost said bottomless, but being Playboy, “bottomless”  goes without saying.

Sure, the last decade and a half weren’t great for Hef, but who stays cool past the age of 75? Only Bob Dylan and Picasso. Hef couldn’t let it all go, and at the end it was pretty sad. It was like Sunset Boulevard with viagra. But I’ll miss the Hef of fifty years ago, that man was at the forefront of political movements, cultural progress, gay rights, equal rights, reproductive rights, and the right to take your goddamn clothes off if you feel like it.

This may be the first funeral where you should bring condoms. In lieu of flowers, please give blowjobs. So long, Hef. Thanks for the mammaries.

[scnsitiuc-blog]

— 8 PEOPLE I’D LIKE TO KNOW BETTER !

TAGGED BY: @redheadarcher​ TAGGING: @horsetm​ / @starkunlimited​ / @notintime​ / @wolfsplit​ / @soulstcne​ + anybody else that wants to do it !

ONE ( ALIAS / NAME ): Cloudie TWO ( BIRTHDAY ):   March 6th THREE ( ZODIAC SIGN ):  pisces, year of the ox FOUR ( HEIGHT ):   161.9cm FIVE ( HOBBIES ):  being a meme, sing lipsyncing intensely because america is a boring country that doesn’t even have karaokes, drumming, writing / translating, watching netflix, working out SIX ( FAVOURITE COLOUR(S) ): any color basically ? i don’t have specific favorites SEVEN ( FAVOURITE BOOKS ): the bible because i’m a pious child of jesus christ i dunno, i haven’t been reading a ton of books these days. i used to back in the age of YA novels, the hunger games, divergent, all that jazz EIGHT ( LAST SONG LISTENED TO ): journey to the past - liz callaway ( listen this song has been stuck in my head ever since i bootlegged watched online anastasia the musical ) NINE ( LAST FILM WATCHED ): spiderman : into the spiderverse ( at the movie theatre ) newsies : the broadway musical ( netflix ) ( oh yes i am that musical theatre kid ) TEN ( INSPIRATION FOR MUSE ): basically netflix. like i recently got into netflix after i came to america because back in korea, i used domestic streaming programs. being the huge marvel geek that i am i have already watched all of the marvel shows & am currently watching the dc shows. also because every american student i’ve met at school has referenced the office / parks & recreation at least once around me, i’ve been watching parks & rec  while taking notes  to become / sound more american LOL ( i tried to watch the office, but it didn’t really click with me ) my goal this year is to sound like the most american out of the exchange students by the time my year-abroad in america ends LOL. i’m a huge game of thrones fan too, i’ve watched up to season six, i’m saving season seven up when the new season comes out so i’ll have more stuff to watch ¿¿ wait i don’t think that sentence made sense ?? oh and disney i love disney i literally learned english while watching the disney channel / cartoon network / nickleodeon during the three years i lived in america during elementary school. fun fact i still remember the we’re all in this together choreo of high school musical ELEVEN ( MEANING BEHIND YOUR URL ): i just think charlie, in one word can be summed up as sensitive. that’s why she’s so quiet and private - deep down she knows how sensitive she is and thus, closes herself off so that she wouldn’t get hurt poor bby

#{ 💬 | 어떡하지 고장 났나 봐 } = out of character

[thatswhenyourefrom]

Sunday’s Best - “Poised to Break” & The “Californian”

I wanted to give insight into the checkpoints of the external forces that make me who I am today. I won’t deny that most of these pieces will mostly stem from my adolescence (and also mostly be music), but I still act as clay in the presences of art around me. The selected pieces (or collections of pieces) may be precise or vast, so expect varying lenses. Most of what I wanted to bring to this conversation were my hidden gems; pieces I hold so true to me and me only. I came to a realization recently that some of my favorite albums and some of my favorite movies do not stick to some of my peers. I don’t expect them too. I also don’t expect to sway any opinions or justify any of my opinions. The expectation is to usher you in to the closest parts of me.

I first heard Sunday’s Best in 2002 on a Canadian tv show called Undergrads before I was in the double-digits. It was a background song (reused again in the end credits), but the chorus stuck in my head. Whether it be hummed, sang, or just spinning around in my head, the song and the sound was stuck (and remains to be to this day). This song has built a house on top of my brain.

In the early 2000’s, the internet was picking up a lot of steam, and even though I was a young little guy, i started to learn my way around it at a young age. Yet still, there was difficulty in finding what I was looking for. I needed to find the artist of this song and the name of the song and download it on Napster or Ares or Kazaa or Limewire (or……). When a certain mood would strike, I would feel almost nostalgic and go on journeys to find a soundtrack list of the songs involved with this show. The hunt for the past is what I craved, and still do. One day I found the Undergrads website, put up by MTV when they used to make websites for each individual show on their rotation. It was a flash site and you could navigate around a little picture and highlight items for more information. One setting to navigate was a bar. In that bar was a jukebox. In that jukebox was the soundtrack list.

I began downloading every song I could. To be entirely honest, I think that these two Sundays Best songs were relatively easy to find, since the rest of the soundtrack was made up by obscure Canadian power pop bands. After listening to the first song I downloaded I knew I had found it; the song was called “Saccharine”.

I mark this song as my touch point for what I would later call emo music. The cul de sac that now exists with the houses of The Promise Ring and Texas is the Reason would most likely not exist is I didn’t hear “Saccharine” when i was nine years old. It fit right in with the other music I liked at the time like Jimmy Eat World who had just brought the light of Bleed American to the world. I get amped in the same way when I hear “Saccharine” as I do “Sweetness” by Jimmy Eat World; youthful, energetic, a little pain, and most of all nostalgia.

[If you would like to split hairs for a minute, I really love the poppy sound of this song and it‘s a much more of a power pop/college rock sound that I was attracted to than something classically emo, but it paved the way, so i digress.]

The hooks still get me. The riffs enliven me. At the very least, you can walk away from this song thinking it it is a catchy bastard. If anyone in the world can take a step back, look in on this song, and for even a second understand that this is the foundation for some person’s entire musical world, you have found me out. I am an open book at that point.

This is one song.

There is another Sunday’s Best song in the soundtrack for Undergrads and it also rang in my head, but to a much lesser extent. “White Picket Fences” is a much more reserved song by comparison to “Saccharine.” Quieter, yet way more dynamic. It grows so much. From what I remember from Undergrads, the audience only hears the last section, a theme that is bigger and hookier than the mood the rest of the song lays.

These two songs remained on my iPod for years.

When I was around the ages of fifteen and sixteen, I decided that i really needed to figure out all of this mumbo jumbo and really hammer down the music that has plagued me for years. What is that sound I am looking for? I want more Sunday’s Best. Can’t just search indie rock. Can’t search punk. Can’t search anything. The keyword “emo” was found and i had suddenly discovered a bible.

I spent a ton of time getting to know a ton of new bands which continue to dominate the music I like today. In this discovery of bands, I also learned much about record labels, including Polyvinyl records. Guess who put out Sunday’s Best’s music.

I decided that I would make the gamble and buy the CD “Poised to Break” by Sunday’s Best from the Polyvinyl store. I call it a gamble, because I have been severely bitten by looking in deeper to a bands output only to find out that the single I love is by far the only thing I could find likeable. This is not the case. This album is ten songs of exactly what I love.

“The Hardest Part” is a strange opener, because it’s kind of big and heavy. The chorus is yelled for Christ sake. It’s easily the angriest sounding song for an otherwise mellow band that I would call energetic at most. Partially uncharacteristic, but still a damn fine song. Track 2, “Bruise Blue” would fit right in with the soundtrack of Undergrads (and parallely my life). It’s calm, full of hooks, emotional. Great. Followed by “Bruise Blue” is “White Picket Fences” and “Saccharine”. At this point, my thought it “well I have all of the best songs out of the way.” “Indian Summer” blows that away with a track that I am so surprised isn’t heralded as an indie rock classic. This song wants be on every mixtape and MTV show until the end of time. “When is Pearl Harbour Day” is an awesome song about nostalgia, including the following line which rings in my head all of the time: “I hate nostalgia, it tries to hard to remember only the easy parts.” Track 7 and 9 are both energetic ones. Track 8, “Looks Like a Mess” is a broody, melodramatic song that I am undeniably in love with. “Winter Owned” rounds out the album and brings it back to the energy of track 1 and employs the same mixed singer chorus. The final track (and bonus track) is called “Congratulations”. Full of hooks, personal experience of naivety and confusion. The secret track is an instrumental song I am sure they used to open sets with. I am glad they included it because it’s loud, slow and cool. To me, each track is unskippable.

The whole album sounds like a soundtrack to a teen drama show that were hugely popular in the late 90’s going into the early 2000’s. Shows like Buffy, Dawson's Creek, 90210, and so many others were drenched in naive and intense emotions, stories of love and personal growth, and youth culture which made them a perfect place for this type of music. I am lucky i got to grow up in the times when I did where I can look up to those people on the screen, then be them, then look back on them with a familiar nostalgia.

Years later I would find that Polyvinyl holds a “Garage Sale” where they sell their surplus records and cd’s for next to nothing. While flipping through the garage sale, I had discovered Sunday’s Best had a second full length. I must have unconsciously ignored this release due to my fear of ruining the sanctity of my entire musical foundation. Do I risk it? What if it sucks and it’s ten boring songs? Or what if they sound like other more popular bands of now? It did come out in 2002 when this type of music was the mainstream. This is more than just a $3 gamble.

I bought it. It’s called “The Californian”. It’s better than the first LP.

Again hitting a ten song track count, “The Californian” is a succinct mood of an album. Much more consistent in tone, the songs are a lot more mellow than the ones on the first LP. This doesn’t mean that it lacks dynamics or moments of intensity. But it does mean there’s less yelling, head banging, and anthemic lyrics. What arises is my own personal therapy. Whether it be because I found a lot of this music (emo) in the autumn seasons, or if my mood just drew my to these sounds during fall, I always return to my classics around this time. Monday was a brisk day and I put in “The Californian” and it immediately hooked a line to the center of my heart. The air reminded me to being a young person and being in high school and college and time passing and old friends and how I used to feel so big, and the songs from “The Californian” were not there to yell at me; they were there to hold me like mother to her child. Therapeutic.

Quick track by track: The album launches into “The Try”. Coming off of the first album, you immediately know this album has more pieces to each song (production wise) creating a huge sound. But it’s not wasted. Every melody is catchy as all hell. “The Try” reigns that in. Track two, the title track, continues this pace. The chorus bops around a bit. “Don’t Let It Fade” is the single. Very quiet. Very somber. The bridge is my favorite part. “The Salt Mines of Santa Monica” has more energy than the last two so it sounds like a bigger “Poised to Break” song. The second singer has great contributions in the pre-chorus. He is really being used in a more calculated way. “If We Had It Made” comes in with massive church bells sound. One of my favorite songs. I love the bells. I don’t entirely know what the song is about, but the chorus moves me. Track 6 is a rocker. Even so, it’s consistent. “Without Meaning” was used in a Gilmore Girls and it’s directed melodrama fits that vibe really well. “Beethoven St.” is pure Sunday’s Best. If you wanted to write a song like them, copy this song. “Brave But Brittle” has a lot of the classic emo riffs. The way the intro falls over itself and then morphs into have arpeggios. Another favorite of mine. The last track is easily my least listened to song, but that’s because I usually reach my destination listing to this album in the care. It’s great though and I kick myself for missing it.

(I could give more in depth track-by-track if requested, but that isn’t necessarily the point of the writing.)

This band and these two lengths are an emblem of my growth. They are a tree that has stood my whole life and I am still sustained by its fruit. The sound that is contained in these albums is contains a definition of who I am and what I love. When you cannot articulate a feeling with direct words, you use art. That’s what artists do. Though I could never imagine conjuring this feeling inside of anyone else with my own art, I am glad I can direct others to this album and this feeling. It it’s hooks can get in and you let yourself get pulled, you can be me.

-luke

#r #by luke

[rinnnyxr]

Things I’ve done in the last week: Studied for more than nine hours in a single day. Eaten fast food more than once. Taken an exam. Slept in until midday. Struggled to get to sleep at night. Watched a film for the first time. Drunk a lot of coffee. Made microwave popcorn. Been on the phone past midnight. Sent over 200 text messages in a day. Discovered a new band. Fallen asleep in the middle of a revision. Watched TV for several hours straight. Been completely and utterly fed up. Thrown something across the room. Hugged more than five people.

Things I’ve done in the last month:

Slept over at a friend’s house. Ended a relationship. Finished a book. Had a massive argument with someone. Cried myself to sleep. Pulled an all-nighter. Gotten a new piercing. Had pretty bad sunburn. Eaten a lot of ice cream. Gone clubbing. Walked around in the rain. Had someone of the opposite sex sleep over. Gone grocery shopping. Visited the zoo. Gone to the doctors. Had tonsilitis/strep throat. Broken my laptop. Smashed a glass. Burnt some food in the oven. Been given flowers. Laid in the grass and stared at the sky. Been to the movies.

Things I’ve done since the beginning of 2020: Had sex. Started taking anti-depressants. Started taking anxiety meds. Dyed my hair. Rearranged my room. Bought over 20 new DVD’s. Met up with an old friend. Had a BBQ. Played in the snow. Cried over exam stress. Gone to somewhere completely new. Made some new friends. Gone to sleep as the sun came up. Downloaded new movies and TV shows. Re-discovered some old favorites.

Things I’d like to do before 2020 ends: Get my driving license. Get another piercing. Dye my hair a completely new color. Got a full-time job. Go and see a show on Broadway. Go to another county. Get therapy for my depression. Get a new double bed. Go somewhere completely new with friends. Go on a road trip. Travel to a theme park. Visit a local safari park. Start keeping fit again. Take up a new hobby.

-

BRITISH

[ ] you drink a lot of tea.

[ ] you know what a brolly is.

[ ] deal or no deal has taken over your life.

[ ] you wanted ben to win the x-factor.

[ ] you use the word “bugger” or the phrase “bloody hell.”

[ ] fish and chips are yummy.

[ ] you can eat a full English breakfast.

[ ] you dislike emos almost as much as you dislike chavs.

[ ] it’s football… not soccer.

total: 3

AUSTRALIAN

[ ] you wear flip flops all year.

[ ] you call flip flops thongs, not flip flops.

[ ] you love a backyard barbie.

[ ] you know a barbie is not a doll.

[ ] you love the beach. [ ] sometimes you swear without realizing. [ ] you’re a sports fanatic.

[ ] you are tanned.

[ ] you’re a bit of a bogan.

[ ] you have an Australian something.

total: 5

ITALIAN

[ ] the sopranos is a great show.

[ ] your last name ends in a vowel. [ ] your grandmother makes her own sauces.

[ ] you know how a real meatball tastes. [ ] you know Italian songs.

[ ] you have dark hair and dark eye color.

[ ] you speak some Italian. [ ] you are under 5’10”. [ ] you know what an Italian horn is.

[ ] Pizza/spaghetti is the best food in the world. [ ] you talk with your hands. total: 4

SPANISH

[ ] you say member instead of remember.

[ ] you speak Spanish or some.

[ ] you like tacos.

[ ] yoU TyPe lIkE ThIs On Da CoMpUtEr.

[ ] you are dark-skinned.

[ ] you know what a puta is. [ ] you talk fast occasionally. [ ] you have had highlights or have dyed your hair. [ ] you know what platanos are. total: 3

RUSSIAN

[ ] you say villain as: vee-lon.

[ ] you get short-tempered. [ ] you know of somebody named Natasha.

[ ] you get cold easily.

[ ] rain is fun for you.

[ ] you get into contests all the time.

[ ] you can easily make do with the cold weather.

total: 2

IRISH

[ ] you think beer is the best.

[ ] you have a bad temper. [ ] your last name starts with a mc, murph, o’, fitz or ends with a ley, on, un, an, in, ry, ly, y.

[ ] you have blue or green eyes.

[ ] you like the color green. [ ] you have been to a st. paddy’s day party.

[ ] you have a family member from Ireland.

[ ] you have red hair.

[ ] you have/had freckles.

[ ] your family get-togethers always include drinking and singing.

total: 2

AFRICAN AMERICAN

[ ] you say nigga/nukka casually

[ ] you have nappy hair.

[ ] you like rap. [ ] you know how to shoot a gun.

[ ] you like chicken. [ ] you like watermelon. [ ] you can dance.

[ ] you can ‘sing’ gospel.

total: 1

ASIAN

[ ] you have slanty/small eyes. [ ] you like rice a lot. [ ] you are good at math.

[ ] you have played the piano.

[ ] you have family from Asia.

[ ] you laugh sometimes covering your mouth. [ ] most people think you’re Chinese. [ ] you call hurricanes typhoons.

[ ] you go to baulko.

total: 4

GERMAN

[ ] you like bread. [ ] you think german chocolate is good. [ ] you speak some german.

[ ] you know what schnitzel is. [ ] you went to preschool. [ ] you’re over 5’2

total: 2

CANADIAN

[ ] you like/play/played hockey.

[ ] you love beer.

[ ] you say eh. [ ] you know what poutine is.

[ ] you speak some french.

[ ] you love Tim Horton's.

[ ] at one point you lived in a farmhouse.

[ ] you watch/watched Degrassi.

total: 2

I am australian (lol no)

-

You have an ex You don’t wear glasses You have blue/gray/green eyes

You’re pretty tall

You can drive a manual transmission car

You know how to change the oil

You know all about cars

You have a serious passion for photography

You’ve known your best friend since middle school You’re close friends with someone since elementary school You prefer Quiznos over Subway

You’re in a relationship You’ve had a rebound before You’ve been in a relationship for five years

You’ve cheated before < on a test

You’ve dated someone who was Asian You’ve dated someone who was Hispanic

You’ve dated someone of your own ethnicity You like to sleep a lot You were born in winter Your birthday is in February

You’re the oldest in your family

You have a younger sister You have a cat You don’t have step-parents You often work the night shifts at your job

You can play the drums

You know a lot about flowers

You’re allergic to shellfish

You like garlic You like a lot of cheese

You get real Christmas trees

You’ve been in a car accident before You’ve snuck people over to your house You’re part Hawaiian

You’re a Pisces

You have no tattoos You have no piercings You have brown hair You have a Steam account You don’t have a Twitter

You’re hardly on any networking sites

You have an XBox360 You don’t like Playstation products very much

You have relatives in Alaska and/or Hawaii

You have a Toshiba laptop

You love German Shepherds You love Welsh Corgis You are Republican

You are Methodist

Your room is rarely ever clean

You’ve drunk dialed someone

A nasty rumor has been spread about you You’re in college One of your parents was at one point enlisted in the military

You are close with your family You like paintballing

You don’t smoke You don’t do drugs

You have a habit of keeping things you borrowed longer than expected

-

gotten lost in London

walked down the street dressed as a fairy with wings

cheated on a test danced fearlessly in front of a crowd witnessed a lunar eclipse

watched fireflies in fascination

seen a shooting star ran across a grassy field with my arms lifted high in the air

ran in the rain splashed through puddles looked at the starry sky out my bedroom window wished on a star been excited about Christmas hung Christmas lights in my room

gone trick-or-treating been to a high school dance

dressed up for a dance curled my hair

dyed my hair traveled across the country

lived in another state for about a year

had regrets learned from my mistakes eaten sushi tried Indian food tried Chinese food tried Mediterranean food tried Thai food tried Greek food tried Mexican food j-walked walked a dog cuddled with an animal made a snow angel counted ceiling tiles out of boredom built a snowman jumped in a pile of leaves been baptized in a lake

gone camping in the fall

done a handstand done a cartwheel opened my eyes in wonder

been awed by something felt at peace in nature celebrated my birthday with cake and presents and a party with friends walked through a haunted house had a part in a play

played on a playground been to sleepaway summer camp and loved it

worshipped with abandon

danced in church

won a contest

been to a county fair entered art projects in the county fair

ridden a roller coaster

gone camping sang songs around a campfire

been to the top of the Sears Tower in Chicago

been to the top of the Seattle Space Needle

been to Mackinac Island

been to Disney World

ridden Space Mountain

ridden Splash Mountain

ate Dippin’ Dots been to an amusement park had my face painted painted someone’s face dressed up as a witch on Halloween

ridden the pirate ship at the fair

been on a hayride been a victim of injustice

read the Bible

won a contest at the library

done Zumba

take dance classes

finger painted drawn a picture of a skeleton taken a college art class written poetry had a pen pal had a sleepover with a group of girls been to a sleepover been to a lock-in

eaten a salad invented my own smoothie recipe

made mac and cheese on the stove babysat knit a scarf

taken selfies gone for a midnight swim swam when it was raining

been to the beach gotten tan won a stuffed animal at an amusement park done an online workout video

seen a car with flames shooting out of it on the side of the road witnessed a house burn down

had a roommate walked at Relay for Life

scrapbooked gone for a walk at night gone for a run at night

ran barefoot

counted sheep counted my blessings

made a list of things I’m thankful for

jumped on a trampoline fell asleep in class given a friend a gift that made her tear up sang in a choir

played with play dough been to a musical been to a cabaret

drank sangria painted pottery

painted something on canvas driven on a five-lane highway

driven across the bridge going to Seattle

had a flat tire

gotten in a car accident

made a collage drank strawberry lemonade watched fireworks drank caramel apple cider

drank chai tea decorated a giant gingerbread cookie decorated the tree for Christmas gone Christmas caroling

passed out valentines opened presents by the Christmas tree volunteered at a homeless shelter

rang the Salvation Army bell

fallen in a swimming pool while fully clothed eaten cheesecake at The Cheesecake Factory been to The Rainforest Cafe

[bisexual-in-every-gender]

survey

[Family]

My brother’s name starts with D. Neither of my grandfathers are alive. I look more like my mother than my father. Both my parents are in a serious relationship. I am the youngest of three children. I am the only girl. My mom’s mom is NOT your typical grandmother. I don’t really like my cousins. I have less than five cousins. I’ve shown up at a family party while under the influence.

[Religion & Politics]

I was raised Christian. But I’m no longer a Christian. I believe in God. But I think the Bible is bullshit. My beliefs aren’t influenced by people around me. My dad is religious. My mom tries to be, but who is she trying to fool? I hate church. I wouldn’t have voted in the last election even if I was old enough. I hate politics more than anything.

[Food]

I honestly never stop eating. Chocolate + peanut butter = orgasmic. I only eat Cains mayonnaise. I’ve never eaten a fruit I didn’t like. I love cooked broccoli but not raw broccoli. I love raw peppers but not cooked peppers. I’ve gone a day or more without eating. I crave chocolate on my period. Pizza Hut has the best pizza around. Cookies & Cream ice cream is one of my favorites.

[Sex, Love & Relationships]

I’ve been told that I was a nine out of ten at giving head. A guy has cheated on his girlfriend with me. I’ve never been cheated on. I had my first kiss when I was fifteen. I lost my virginity in the woods. My best friend lost her virginity a week after me. In the same place I did. I’ve been in the same room as someone having sex. I would rather be on the bottom.

[Music]

I download my music from LimeWire. I love country. I love old school rap. I love alternative. I have All Time Low’s new CD Nothing Personal. And I love it. I love to sing, but I suck horribly at it. I cannot play a musical instrument. I want to learn to play the drums. I used to take piano lessons.

[School]

My GPA is between 2.0 and 3.0. I took Algebra 1 in 8th grade, and again in 9th. I’ve passed a class with a D-. I don’t do my homework at home. I prefer mechanical pencils. I always do projects the night before they’re due. I’m really smart but don’t always apply myself. I text in school. I’ve gotten my phone taken away in school.

[Beauty & Hygiene]

I straighten my hair often. On lazy days, I scrunch my hair to go out. My only make-up necessity is mascara. I like to wing my eyeliner. I’d rather take a shower than a bath. I’d rather use body wash than a bar of soap. I’d rather use a bath scrunchie than a washcloth. My solution for make-up on lazy days: sunglasses. I use the same routine every day in the shower.

[Smoking, Drinking & Drugs]

I smoke cigarettes. I’ve gotten drunk within the past month. I’ve smoked weed when by myself. The first time I got high was on a holiday. Marijuana should be legalized. I have never and would never drink and drive. I hate light beer. My lighter is purple. My favorite cigarettes are Turkish Silver or Camel Crush. I’ve quit smoking but started again.

[Random]

My nails are pink right now. Going to bed at midnight is very early for me. I could never date a guy that didn’t make me laugh. I have a jar of peanut butter in my room right now. I wear sunglasses a lot. Gogurt is really good in the freezer. I’ve been in Hollister, but I don’t own anything from there. Purple is my favorite color. There is no such thing as an ugly color. I need more pens. ______________________________________________________________

I like where I’m at right now. My feet are freezing. I hate feeling awkward. I love driving on country roads. I love driving fast, too. I currently have a cold. I have a crush. No, it’s more than a crush. I always wondered what it’d be like to start over, where no one knew me. I go on Yahoo Answers. I get nostalgic every once in awhile. I really don’t like my father. My mother is one of my best friends though. I don’t mind when people stare at me. No, it’s annoying as fuck. I can’t stand people who are extremely selfish. A Change Of Pace is a good band. I have gotten a new phone within the past month. I want to go to Florida soon. Peach snapple iced tea is theee best. I wrote books when I was younger. I’m really creative, especially when I apply myself. I use Facebook a lot more than I used to. I’m constantly told I’m beautiful, but I still sometimes don’t believe it. One of my friends came out as gay this year. I feel like I’m the only one who doesn’t have someone. I’m way too quiet, and I wish I could change. I need to party. Music and books are my favorite. I love everything about the fall. I always smell really good. My hair looks nice today. I have long fingernails. I’ve kissed a Ryan, Mike, or Justin. I’ve been in love with a Josh, Christian, or Scott. I envy no one. I’m going to an amusement park soon. For a halloween-related thing. I don’t like beer. I don’t like soda. I’ve worn a turtle neck in the past year. I wear them often. Outspoken is something I’m not. I express myself through quotes and lyrics. Photography is beautiful. There’s beauty in everything, you just gotta find it. I ordered a pizza recently. Tonight, actually. I wish I could have a whole new batch of friends. Even though I do love the ones I have now. My nose is stuffy. I like orange juice. And sandwich wraps. I love cozy nights at home. I like playing Hebi. Apples to Apples is fun. I have to start applying for jobs. I really need one. Ahhh life is changing fast. I tend to drive a little bit over the speed limit.

My razor only has two blades. My keyboard is black. I use my friends as arm rests and pillows. My favorite number is odd. My favorite number is a single digit. I love having butterflies in my stomach. The last make up I wore was eyeliner. I’d love to have a winter wedding. I’m really ticklish. I have a facial piercing. I’d only get a tattoo that has significant meaning to me. My boyfriend wife is taller than I am. My school has a shitty football team. I play Pet Society on Facebook. All politicians are the same, in my opinion. I can’t eat sushi with a fork or else it feels awkward. I’ve never been to New Mexico. I’d definitely consider adoption if I couldn’t have my own children. I like plain-colored t-shirts. Horror movies don’t really scare me. I have a decent vocabulary. Lord of the Rings doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t play any sports. I prefer orange juice to apple juice. I like my toast with butter and jelly. I love cream cheese. I have a celebrity crush. I get frequent headaches. I can play a little piano. My boyfriend drives an Asian car. And so do I. I WANT MORE PIERCINGS. My favorite fruit is a type of berry. I miss somebody right now. Some of my friends live far away. I can burp out the alphabet. I love breadsticks. I can count to ten in at least two languages. I’d love to have a pet owl. I prefer dogs to cats. I only wear actual perfume on special occasions. But I wear body spray on a daily basis. I have pictures of my sibling/s on my phone. ______________________________________________________________

What I have…

Purse/bag

Notepad | Altoids | Advil | Wallet | Book | Pencil pouch | Gloves | Earphones | Camera film | Eraser | Pens | Trash | Button | Spare change | Ticket stubs | Tea bag | Plastic spoon

Closet

Cardigans | Sweaters | Jackets | T-shirts | Coats | Tank tops | Button-up shirts | Shoe hanger/caddy | Vans | Hiking shoes/boots | Oxfords | Heels | Shoeboxes with misc. things | Nail polish | Keepsakes | Costume stuff from previous Halloweens | Yarn | Looms for knitting | Backpack for backpacking | School backpacks | Old computer | Photo prints | Video games | Stuff I need to sell | Oil heater

Bedside Drawer

Pills | Coins | Jewelry | Diary | Hairbands | Hair clips | Bobby pins | Comb | Notepads | Chargers | Lighters | Book marks | Light bulbs | Pencils | A pack of playing cards | Pencil lead | An old birthday card | Earphones | Passport | Miscellaneous screws

DVD Shelf

28 Days Later | Amélie | Blade Runner | Catch Me If You Can | A Clockwork Orange | The Darjeeling Limited | District 9 | Doctor Zhivago | Donnie Darko | Ed Wood | Edward Scissorhands | Everything is Illuminated | Fright Night | Full Metal Jacket | The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly | The Harry Potter series | In Bruges | Inception |Jurassic Park | The King’s Speech | Lolita | The Nightmare Before Christmas | Run Fatboy Run | Snatch | Sweeney Todd | The Truman Show | Wall-E | Doctor Who | Pushing Daisies | True Blood

Yard

A sad, sad lawn | My car | Shed | Flower pots | Garden | Barbecue | Chicken pen (with chickens) | Wood shed | Trees | Rose bushes | Dandelions | Daffodils | Tractor | Gravel | Pathways | Bed for my kitty | An old truck | Bushes

iTunes (I’ll say my phone since I don’t have an iPhone)

AC/DC | ADELE | Amy Winehouse | Arcade Fire | Arctic Monkeys | The Beatles | Beck| Beyoncé | Billy Idol | The Black Keys | Canned Heat | Cyndi Lauper | Daft Punk | The Dead Weather | Dropkick Murphys | Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes | Ellie Goulding | Feist | Fiona Apple | Fleetwood Mac | Imagine Dragons | Jack White | Jimi Hendrix | The Kills | Lady Gaga | Lily Allen | Macklemore | Marina & The Diamonds | Mew | Nirvana | Pink Floyd | Portugal. The Man | Queen | Rage Against the Machine | Red Hot Chili Peppers | Rihanna | Sea Wolf | Simon & Garfunkel | St. Vincent | Tears for Fears | Tegan & Sara | Tool | Vampire Weekend | Weezer | The White Stripes | Yeah Yeah Yeahs | ZZ Top

[aarchimedes]

11 Questions

Rules: Always post the rules. Answer 11 random questions posted for you. Create 11 new ones and tag 11 people. Let the person who tagged you know that you answered.

I ‘twas tagged by @iwishicouldtalkgood :)

1. Favorite pair of shoes? Uh, I think my jandals. They’re kinda breaking, but I’ve had them for about 5 months, and they’re really easy to slip on in the morning when I’m on my way to class heh

2. Favorite stuffed animal? Uhm,,,, I have a little Christmas Hedgehog plushie that I keep in my room year-round because I refuse to let him only be a seasonal thing... I also have a little Barb and a little demogorgon mwahahaha

3. Favorite fruit? Pineapples, and then apples and peaches

4. Favorite celebrity? You ask too much, gah... Um, Ben Plattypus

5. Favorite drink? Dr. Pepper (and I’m cutting out caffeine in Feb, yike that’ll be fun)

6. Favorite sibling, if applicable? Well, I only have one unless we are counting my best friends so... My brother

7. Favorite poster/picture/decoration on your wall? Yeesh, um well in my dorm, it’s the lights I have hanging, and in my room it’d be either the cork board that I’ve had since I was nine or the Marvel comic picture hangings (they’re wood and kinda thick, so that’s what I’ll call them)

8. Favorite book of the bible? Ummmmm, I love Ruth and Esther, but there’s a lot of other ones too

9. Favorite class in school? Um, right now it’s this Beginner Guitar Class that I have, but also my Composition class

10. Favorite shirt? Too many. Are we including sweaters or no? I’m gonna say nah, so um, probably either the Star Wars shirt I have that has C-3PO and R2 on it, or a camp t-shirt

11. Favorite relative? My mom (unless we’re talking extended fam bc then it would be my Grandma or my uncle)

Okay!!! Now 11 questions!

1. What is your favorite aesthetic?

2. What is the state of mind that you enjoy being in most (euphoria, sad, ecstatic, etc.)?

3. What is the song that you have been relating to the most recently?

4. Binge-watched recently?

5. Skinny jeans or looser jeans? 

6. Favorite love song?

7. Have you ever watched/listened to a musical? If so, what is one of your favorites?

8. Cole Slaw or Mashed Potatoes?

9. Are you a math, writing, or art type of person?

10. Shrek or the Bee Movie?

11. What is one of your favorite things to experience?

Alrighty, and I now tag @carryontoneverland , @taymoursbooty , @hamlets-last-words , @fillyreports , @dearponty , @more-than-useless , @extract0fllama , @sm-over , @willrolandvevo , @scribblingstoryteller , @hobbitsetal

#alrighty!!!! #blinky's babblings #y'all can do this if you want to #you don't have to though

[dailyaudiobiblechronological]

8/23/2020 DAB Chronological Transcription

Jeremiah 49-50

Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible Chronological, I'm China. Today is the 23rd day of August, welcome. So great to be here with you guys today. As we enter into our new week, we continue on in the book of Jeremiah with chapters forty nine through 50. And since it's a new week, we will be a new translation. This is one of my absolute favorite translations. We will be reading from The Voice. Prayer:

Father I thank you that you're a God who loves, that you're a God who disciplines, that in your discipline, you are loving us. That is a form of love. And I thank you God, that you care for us enough to not let us stray and wander too far gone. And I thank you God, that none of us are outside of your reach. None of us are outside of your capacity, but that you are actually calling us deeper into your arms, deeper into who you are. And I just thank you Lord that that is who you are. I thank you Lord that the God that we serve is a God who brings his people in close. And so Lord we just praise you for who you are. We thank you for all that it is that you have done for us, even the things that feel painful, the things that we don't understand, or the things that we have yet to see.  We thank you God, that you are a God who's actively moving for us on our behalf. And so we thank you Lord that we worship from that standpoint. That you are a God who saves.  You are a kind and loving father. We thank you for who you are, Lord. We love you and praise you. And it's in your name we pray. Amen. Community Prayer Line: 

Hello DABC family. This is Lady of Victory on Wednesday, the 19th of August. Trusting in Him, let's pray. God we thank you. We glorify you. We magnify your name because you alone are God, you alone sit high and look low. You alone, God is to be exalted and to be glorified and to be magnified and to be lifted up. And so God, we come before you on behalf of our brother trusting in him. We lift him up before you. First of all, God, we thank you, on behalf of Trusting in Him on what you have done. God, we're gonna be like the one leper who came back and said thank you. We're gonna be the one who is grateful for the small victories. So, God, we thank you on behalf of our brother Trusting in Him that his wife has even even got so many small victories in what she's done: come home, going to therapy, writing a letter, looking for some type of restoration. God, we thank you for all of that, because when he called in before, none of that was going on. So we thank you for what has happened. We're not glorifying what the enemy is doing, God, but we're glorifying in what you are doing because you are God. You are Lord. And so we thank you on behalf of Trusting in Him. God in Philippians, one six says you who have begun a good work, we can be confident in him who had begun a good work, can perform it and complete it until the day of Jesus Christ. So we got our eyes are fixed on you. I don't care what therapy is saying. I don't care the geographical separation. I don't care about any of that. Our eyes are on you because none of that is too big for you. So God let Trusting in Him do exactly that, trust in you. Hey DABC family, this is Trusting in Him. First, I want to thank everybody for calling in and praying for me and for all those that are praying and not calling in as well. Your prayers are felt and very much appreciated. I need you guys to pray for me and my kids and my wife as well. Again, I found out today that even though she has said that she's not talking to this family, or this husband or wife, specifically the husband that she was involved in an affair with, I found out today that she has been talking to him pretty much every day, multiple times a day and lying to me about it. So I feel like if I just continue down this path that I'm on, I'm just enabling her to be able to do this. So I think I have to...I'm at a point where I have to call the ball and just confront her about maybe not about that, but just say that maybe this isn't, this isn't gonna work. I can't be involved in trying to support you and enable you and help you if you're continuing to have these conversations with this other person. So I think she's trying to have her cake and eat it, too. And I just feel like I'm being taken advantage of. And it may not be intentional. She may actually be that mentally messed up, but I have to protect my kids and I have to protect myself. And still try and do the best by her I can, so I just need your prayers family for guidance, for wisdom, for discernment, and not to act out of emotion or anger, but just out of truth and love. Thanks, family. Love you guys. Bye.

[watusichris]

A Dylan a Day Annex: Narrow is the Way

“…[W]e don’t care about the atom bomb, any of that, because we know this world is going to be destroyed, if not by the word, and Christ will set up his kingdom in Jerusalem for a thousand years. When the lion lies down with the lamb, you know the lion will eat straw on that day. Also, if a man doesn’t live to be a hundred years old, he will be called accursed, that’s interesting, isn’t it? But we don’t mind, we know that’s coming. And if any man have not the spirit of Christ in him, he is a slave to bondage. You know bondage? I know you all know bondage.”

So who said that? Pat Robertson? Joel Osteen?

Mike Pence, maybe? Roy Moore?

No, it was Bob Dylan, born-again vessel of his Lord Jesus Christ, speaking on the stage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on Nov. 19, 1979, at a show (a benefit for the Christian relief organization World Vision) that I attended and reviewed. The date was among the first of what may be called Dylan’s “gospel years” tour, which ran on stages around the world through November 1981.

Dylan raved on in a similar fashion through many of the ensuing shows he played in 1979-80; he dialed things down considerably during his 1981 gigs, at which he performed some of his earlier non-Christian material.

However, you’d never know it from the contents of Trouble No More, the new eight-CD/one DVD package devoted to Dylan’s evangelical years, just issued by Sony Legacy as the 13th installment of its “Bootleg Series” comprising previously unreleased material from his catalog.

I’ll have more to say about that particular piece of archival legerdemain in a moment. First, some historical background, in case you need it.

Dylan turned to Jesus in early 1979, after a tumultuous period that saw his divorce from wife Sara and the release of his poorly received album Street-Legal and his calamitous four-hour feature film Renaldo & Clara. He had experienced something like a religious epiphany after someone threw a small cross on stage during a Nov. 17,1978, show in San Diego. He soon began attending services and Bible study classes at the Vineyard Fellowship, an evangelical church based in Reseda, in the San Fernando Valley.

In early ’79, he wrote a brace of Christian-themed songs; his first thought was to give them to his backup singer (and future second wife) Carolyn Dennis, but in the end he decided to record them himself.

Those songs ultimately appeared on the albums Slow Train Coming (1979) and Saved (1980); nearly all that material was drawn on during his 1979-80 tours. Some further Christian-themed numbers were released on the 1981 album Shot of Love, though by that time Dylan had begun to inch away from sermonizing and (probably at the insistence of concert promoters) had started to perform his earlier, secular material on stage again.

Trouble No More leans heavily on concert recordings from this period. Of the 102 tracks on the set, 74 are drawn from live shows; two of the eight discs are drawn from Dylan’s April 1980 shows in Toronto, and two are devoted to a June 27, 1981, gig at Earls Court in London. Another 18 songs recorded in San Diego on Nov. 28, 1979 (nine days after the date I attended in Santa Monica) are included on a two-CD bonus set offered to Dylan fans who purchased the boxed set through his official web site.

Additionally, the DVD, a one-hour film directed by Jennifer LeBeau, contains 10 songs filmed by Ron Kantor at Toronto’s Massey Hall on April 20, 1980 (and long bootlegged in a full-length alternate cut comprising 16 Dylan performances, numbers by his backup singers, and onstage patter).

I will freely admit that my anticipation for Trouble No More, which surveys the most divisive years of Dylan’s career, was not nearly as high as it was for the previous two “Bootleg Series” sets, which were comprehensive reconsiderations of the “basement tapes” with the Hawks of 1967-68 and the classic first electric sessions of 1965-66. (Both those packages deservedly won Grammy Awards as best historical album.)

I have never had any patience or affection for Dylan’s gospel recordings, save for a few tracks on Shot of Love, which was issued when Dylan already had one foot out the church door. I won’t dwell on these records. I put down my thoughts about the albums of this period in a series of 2013 Tumblr posts; you can scroll down on this page to find them, or, if you like, you can read them in my 2016 collection Together Through Life, which follows Dylan from his first album through “the Sinatra years.”

I continue to consider Dylan’s religious material an accumulation of tics: The songs are dogmatic, didactic, pedantic, schematic, simplistic. Though the official rubric for Trouble No More is “You Will Believe!,” the copious live material therein has done nothing to alter my original opinion.

The inclusion of such songs as “Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell For Anybody,” “Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One,” “Trouble in Mind,” and “Stand By Faith,” none of which appeared on the original LPs, supplies only further evidence of Dylan’s airless and accusatory approach. Over the course of the eight discs, the multiple concert versions of the 19 songs on Slow Train and Saved instill a cumulative affect of Jesus fatigue.

I will confess that the box led me to reconsider my original aversion to Dylan’s band of this period. At the Santa Monica Civic show I attended, I was so thoroughly pissed off by the throngs of vocal, adoring Christians in the heavily papered house (and the acolytes waving their placards, Bibles, and religious tracts at the venue door) that I closed my ears to what was coming off the stage, and I condemned Dylan’s players as “hacks.”

My humblest apologies. The recorded evidence suggests that guitarist Fred Tackett, keyboardists Spooner Oldham and Terry Young, bassist Tim Drummond, and drummer Jim Keltner, backed by a phalanx of black female vocalists, stirred up a soulful noise on stage. They were easily one of Dylan’s finest touring units. Dylan responded to the group with some of the best singing of his entire career – his voice on the ’79 and ’80 performances is full, rich, and flexible. It must be added, however, that by 1981 the band, now augmented by additional guitarist Steve Ripley, had grown strident and hammering.

The general excellence of the playing aside, the performances were made in the service of a system of beliefs that was at its core heartless, intolerant, devoid of actual Christian love, and frankly loony at almost every turn. On many nights Dylan telegraphed his ideas -- about the imminent battle of Armageddon and Jesus’ coming return to triumph over Satan and save believers from damnation -- in convoluted, proselytizing on-stage raps.

Here we arrive at the central rub of the present collection.

It has never been a secret that Reverend Bob went off like a missile with serious trajectory problems during his concert tours of the era. In 1990, Dylanologist Clinton Heylin assembled some of Dylan’s more wacked-out soliloquys into a small, long out-of-print book for Hanuman Press, Saved! The Gospel Speeches. That tome has since been superseded by the comprehensive transcripts of Dylan’s sermonettes compiled on the Scandinavian web site About Bob (bjorner.com/bob.htm) as part of its running record of his ’79-’81 concerts.

To her credit, Trouble No More annotator Amanda Petrusich, possibly my least favorite contemporary music critic, takes the trouble to quote some of Dylan’s less coherent “sanctified jeremiads.” But her piece – like another in the box by celebrity atheist and Dylan fanboy Penn Jillette – collapses in apology, somewhat shockingly ascribing “inadvertent” humanity to Dylan’s songs.

Save for a mild boilerplate spoken introduction to “Solid Rock,” you will otherwise hunt in vain for any evidence that Bob Dylan was saying some really crazy shit on stage during his evangelical era. His sermonizing voice has been neatly expunged from the box’s highly selective version of history. You won’t hear him excoriating the city of San Francisco (where he debuted his evangelical music during a run of 14 shows at the Fox Warfield in November 1979) as some new Sodom of homosexuality, impugning the Muslim faith as “a funny thing,” or zinging rock contemporaries such as Bruce Springsteen and Pete Townshend as heathens.

Certainly you won’t find his condemnation of country musicians, which may be considered an implied indictment his early musical hero Hank Williams, the libertine author of “Help Me Understand” (heard in a live version on Trouble No More) and “I Saw the Light”: “I know a lot of country and western…sing ah, sing ah, what is it? ‘You can put your shoes under my bed anytime.’ And then they turn around and sing, ‘Oh Lord, just a closer walk with thee.’ Well, I can’t do that, That’s right, you cannot serve two masters. You gotta hate one and love the other. You can’t drink out of two cups.”

The apparent objective of the boxed set’s editorial maneuver is to represent Dylan’s brand of Christianity in a benign, benevolent light, by removing the music from the larger and highly problematic context of his apocalyptic beliefs. Nowhere is this strategy of decontextualization more obvious than in LeBeau’s film.

Anyone who has ever seen an uncut version of the 1980 Massey Hall show will almost certainly recall a nearly 10-minute Dylan spiel in which he surmised that Russia’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan was a prefiguring of the final conflict between Christ and Satan at Armageddon. It is slightly demented, and you will not hear it here. (You can find it on YouTube, though.)

The movie’s Toronto concert material, sans stage patter, is bracketed by scenes from a 1980 L.A. rehearsal; the documentary climaxes with a pretty but incongruous (and secular) duet between Dylan and his backup singer and then-paramour Clydie King on the 1968 Dion hit “Abraham, Martin and John (possibly as a hat-tip to Dion’s own born-again status).

The Toronto performances are intercut with newly filmed “sermons” written by Luc Sante and delivered, in what looks to be the gloomiest church in the world, by actor Michael Shannon.

Absent Dylan’s actual presence in his onstage pulpit, Shannon – who here resembles Richard Kiel’s menacing Jaws of the Bond films, minus the metal teeth – has been cast as a surrogate Bob-as-preacher. But the sermons themselves are nonsense, and have nothing whatsoever to do with the fiery furnace of Dylan’s religious universe.

Instead we get little homily-laden stories, folksily delivered by Shannon, of the sort you might hear at a Presbyterian service – maybe one in the early 20th century, when one bought two-by-fours from a sawmill (an anachronism that comes courtesy of Sante), and not at Home Depot. The messages: Love the poor; pity the alcoholic; beware of that greasy fast food. We hear not a word about the End Times in Pastor Shannon’s addresses to his unseen flock.

Since no scripture is actually cited in the sermons offered in the Trouble No More film, let me suggest a text for today. Matthew 7:13-14:  “Enter ye in at the strait gate; for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”

This passage, from Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount, is cited in both Williams’ “I Saw the Light” and in Dylan’s “When He Returns,” the last track on Slow Train Coming. Dylan would return to it, cryptically, in “Narrow Way,” a song from Tempest, his last album of original material, released in 2012.

During the three years he spent making Christian music, Dylan pursued the path of “the straight and narrow.” Yet he evidently found that road to be so narrow as to be confining, both spiritually and artistically, perhaps even a dead end. He released no new music in 1982, and by the time he re-emerged in 1983, he had begun to explore the tenets of the Jewish orthodox movement Chabad; in 1991, he famously appeared on the group’s telethon, performing “Hava Nagila” with Harry Dean Stanton and son-in-law Peter Himmelman.

As early as 1984, in a Rolling Stone interview with Kurt Loder (collected in the new revised edition of Jonathan Cott’s Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews), Dylan denied had had ever been born again at all.

The producers of Trouble No More have taken a similarly narrow lane into the music of Dylan’s Christian period. In an attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of the music Dylan made at that time, which was rejected outright by many of his fans, the most troublesome doctrinal aspects of his work have been excised. Great effort has been taken to extinguish the fire and cool the brimstone of his evangelical message.

This strikes me as dishonest work, and I am not likely to return to it.

[kittaekat]

To the man who Molested me,

I’d be lying if I said that I don’t struggle around this time every year. When the leaves change and fall away from their branches, I think about you, and the night my mom made me swear on a bible in our living room.

I remember crying when she said that if I lied with my hand on that book, something bad would happen to someone I loved.

To her.

To my father.

To my brother.

So I told the truth.

It was the only night I was encouraged to do so when it came to what you did to me.

I had to swear on a bible, be driven to your house, and tell your parents what you had done.

“You told me I could!”

I didn’t. I was scared and you had weaponized the word “love” and suddenly this game of doctor you had taught me to play from a very young age was no longer a game.

Suddenly you loved me like a girlfriend.

Suddenly we weren’t cousins raised like brother and sister only a year apart.

Suddenly my only fear was that you were going to kiss me, and to a nine year old girl, it felt like that would ruin my life.

“You told me I could!”

I didn’t. I just didn’t have the knowledge to know what other terrible things a person could do after the simple instruction of;

“Please don’t kiss me!” Is whisper-shouted into a dark bedroom after playing Spyro on a PlayStation system.

I didn’t know it could hurt

I didn’t know you’d make me bleed

I didn’t know that you’d been subconsciously grooming me our entire lives, for this moment.

I didn’t know that a kiss means nothing.

I have spent a lifetime feeling so fucking stupid over what I didn’t know.

Silenced by the duck tape of our family keeping my mouth shut for your sake.

Suffocated by the success you had in every endeavor you embarked on.

Lost in the shame of feeling trapped by what I defined as broken.

This past year, you served time in jail. Not prison, just jail.

Not for what you did to me, but for a DUI. You served a month out of an eleven month sentence.

Even in the worst moments of your life, you’ve somehow succeeded.

Despite throwing several years of Law School away.

Despite tarnishing your record for any job you’ll apply for.

Despite having to check your Blood Alcohol Level everytime you start your fucking car.

You are loved.

And I

Am still

So angry.

I always struggle with this time of year. Although it is my favorite season, you are the recurring nightmare that keeps me up at night.

When anyone attempts physical contact. You are the tightening in my shoulders, and the stiffness in my movements.

When I start to open up, and share my life with others. You are silencer with your hand around my neck.

When I fall in love, and try to give myself away to someone who loves me too. You are the one who demonized emotion.

You are the one who took too much.

You are the one who made me feel foolish to give.

You are the one who broke me.

This year, more then ever you are prevalent on my mind. I think it’s because the only man I’ve ever loved is getting married next month.

He’s just like you. In that sick and disgusting fucking way where you both say what you have to, to get what you want.

He said “I love you, like I love seven others.”

I didn’t believe him.

I let him touch me.

I let myself feel things.

I let us be the only two people to exist in those quiet moments.

I let us get so close, but when he said:

“I love you.” With his hand fumbling at the button of my pants. I stopped him.

And he’s never loved me again.

He’s had many since me.

He’s living with his fiancée, who hates me more then I hate myself.

He’s built his own computer and left every trace of who he once was behind.

And I lost the friend I had in him.

And I still love him, despite how hard I’ve tried to let go.

And I’m still broken.

And I’m still so God damn angry.

What you’ve done, does not define me.

I will not give you the satisfaction of thinking that you have had a hand in sculpting me.

What you’ve actually done, has defined my fears.

What you’ve actually done, has created monster far scarier then anything Hollywood could make up.

What you’ve actually done, has split our family apart and made me realize that they do not provide the kind of love I want.

What you’ve actually done, has made me incredibly vengeful.

It’s a slow process.

I admit that I have faltered.

In this confessional, I’m faltering now.

But what better revenge is there from a broken girl healing?

What better revenge is there from feeling raw emotion fully?

What better revenge is there from a silenced woman being loud?

What better revenge is there from putting the love I want and deserved into the world?

What better revenge is there from my anger finally pinning toward peace?

What better revenge is there from becoming,

A Woman I’m proud of

and FORMALLY known as your victim.

#may be triggering #triggering content #trigger warning