Travel Diary: I make $195,000 and spent $2149.75 (+49k points) while on a trip to Amsterdam
Section One: Bio
Age: 40
Occupation: Lawyer
Hometown: DC
Number of PTO days and how you accrue them: I earn 6 hours of annual leave every two weeks (19 days total a year), and used 36 hours for this trip
Section Two: Assets + Debt
Not super comfortable with a very detailed financial picture, but my NW is ~$750k. No SO.
Section Three: Income
Main Job Monthly Take Home: After all deductions and contributions to savings, my monthly take home is ~$6200
Section Four: Travel Expenses/Diary
Trip planning - My (40F) best friend from college (39F) and I decide to go to Amsterdam on a birthday trip. We both turn 40 in 2024, and we decide to go in May because it's in between our birthdays and because it'll be tulip season in Amsterdam! Neither of us have been. We also haven't travelled together before, despite being friends for 20(!) years, so we are a little apprehensive, although we have spent a lot of time together over the past few years. We decide on a 6 day trip. For purposes of this diary I'm going to list my half of the expenses for things we split. Costs are in US dollars, despite paying using Euros. As a side note, I also am a little over one year post-Gastric Bypass, which has a limited effect on my diet (I try to eat low carb, but you'll see that I mostly fail at this on this trip!).
Pre-trip expenses: $1193.15 total
Flight: $255 + 49k points (from Capital One)
Lodging: $1425.91 (split) - $713
Rijksmuseum: $40.28
Anne Frank House: $24.95
Keukenhof Gardens plus bus ticket: $36.20
Red Light District Tour: $50.52
Day trip to windmills tour: $43.20
Snacks: $30ish
Day 1 (Total $21.17)
Our flight is at 5:30pm, so we planned to be at the airport by 3:30pm, which actually turned out to be 4pm. Uber ($21.17). After checking bags (included in flight price) and getting through security we made it to our gate right as boarding was about to start. No time for food or drinks.
On the plane I eat a snack of roasted chickpeas before dinner, which was chicken cacciatore with mashed potatoes, bread, cheesecake, cheese, and a salad. And two glasses of wine. I save the cheesecake and cheese for later.
My friend and I watch a movie (Poor Things) and then try to sleep. I am reading A Fault In Our Stars, because Amsterdam. I try unsuccessfully to sleep for awhile and then go back to reading. At some point i eat the cheese and cheesecake. Breakfast is a cheese roll, which i eat a couple bites of (OMG does all of Amsterdam have this much cheese?? - spoiler alert… yes it does!). I wish I had slept more.
Day 2 - Even though it feels like a continuation of day one. (Total $207.02)
7am - We land at 7 and then grab the bags and go through customs. Easy peasy. We are exhausted so we grab coffee at the airport before figuring out public transit ($5.10). I take out 60 euro for cash in case we need it ($65). We buy a train ticket to the central station ($6.33) and when we get there we buy a four day unlimited public transit pass ($28.44) so that we don’t have to worry about it later.
We get to the hotel at around 9am. They tell us it will cost $50 to check in early, which we opt not to do. Instead we go get breakfast and coffee at a cafe nearby ($21.20). The hotel tells us that our prepaid amount did not include city taxes, which is another $183 (my half $91.88).
11:30am - Back at the room we decide to rest for 90 minutes. Enough to catch up on sleep but not to waste the day and get more jet-lagged. After a rest we decide to walk around and get a feel for the neighborhood and do some shopping. We find a bookstore, and I buy a copy of my favorite book from high school, Tess of the D’Ubervilles with a beautiful cover and gold edges ($21.46). We also buy fries with truffle, mayo, and Parmesan at a fry shop ($3.32) (that’s all they have and they are delicious!). We also stop a grocery store and pick up a few things including yogurt, cheese, salami, apples, and an energy drink ($13.19). We have some early days planned and nothing seems to open early. It’s very cold and rainy and semi unpleasant.
6pm - We drop stuff off, bundle up, and head off to dinner and a tour of the red light district. We try to find a place that serves Snert, a Dutch pea soup, but strike out. We end up at an Asian place instead. I get chicken satay and a beer and my friend gets Indonesian soup and wine ($16.10). Our red light tour is great, but we are exhausted after and head straight home to bed. 22k steps total
Day 3 (Total $87.24)
7:30am - We have an early day planned, and have to be on a bus near the central station by 8am. I eat a yogurt and energy drink (from grocery store) for breakfast and we take public transit (covered on unlimited card) to the station. We find the right bus and head off!
First stop is the windmills, which are beautiful! I am happy we get there early because we basically have the place to ourselves. My friend gets a coffee and we both use the restroom ($1.08!). Then we head to Edam and do a walking tour there. Next stop is a clog/cheese place, which feels very touristy but they do feed us lots of cheese. I buy a cheese slicer as a souvenir ($10.81). Next stop is another small town where we have lunch at a cafe. We basically pick one at random. My friend gets fried fish and I get a ham and cheese panini and a beer ($17.30). Final stop is an artificial island town called Maarken. We do another walking tour.
2:30pm - we arrive back in Amsterdam and get let off north of the water. I grab a coffee ($3.76). We go up to the Adam lookout and take a ride on the swing off the side of the building ($25.95 for swing plus ticket to lookout). We also grab a drink and sit on a pillow watching the city from very high up, which is lovely ($6.63). On the way out I buy a reusable water bottle at the gift shop ($4.87).
After the lookout we take the tram over to a brewery at a windmill that was recommended to us by several people (including here on Reddit!). Cost was covered by the transit pass. We buy bitterballen and a small bottle of Genever (local whiskey) (paid by my friend) and a flight of beer ($16.84). We are a bit tipsy but enjoying the lovely weather.
6:30 - On the way back toward the hotel the weather turns and it starts raining so we dip into a pub for dinner. I have a burger ($16.12). We are there at 8pm, which is momentous because it’s a day of remembrance and the whole bar is silent for two minutes. It was very interesting to be there during this time.
We are exhausted by this point and go home to bed. 19k steps total for the day.
Day 4 (Total $104.33)
7am - Another early day as we have to be on a bus at 7:30 to go to Keukenhof for the tulips! (paid in advance). We wanted to take the first bus out there because we heard the crowds were bad. I eat a yogurt for breakfast and take a 5 hour energy (no cafes open this early!). We try to take public transit to the train station but didn’t realize that the trains do not run that early on a Sunday so we grab an Uber instead ($12.20). We tell the Uber driver we’re trying to catch a bus so he makes sure we find the right place and we pull up just as the bus is loading. Phew!
8:00am - we spend 5 hours in the gardens and take literally hundreds of pictures. We are glad that we get there early as the first few hours are lovely and empty. We get a coffee ($4.60) and lunch later ($25.36). By 1pm it’s getting very crowded so we start heading out. We grab the bus back to the train station.
2:30pm - We decide to go by the Rijksmuseum although not in it because we planning that later. Instead we stop off at the Van Gogh/Rijks gift shop that’s nearby. I get a couple souvenirs, including a foldable bag and a magnet ($20.44). I also get a coffee ($3.64) and my friend gets bubble tea. We sit on the hill on museumplein and people watch. After awhile it starts to get hot (we had dressed for the early morning) so we head back to the hotel to change.
5pm - we decide we are having an evening of drinking. We first grab a drink in the hotel bar because we get free vouchers for each day we choose not to have the room cleaned. Then we have dinner at an udon place, which is delicious. We have tempura, chicken katsu, and dumplings ($15.94). Then because it’s cinco de mayo we decide to have margaritas at the Mexican place near the hotel ($15.15)! Not Dutch but it’s fun. We head down the street to another bar and have a Genever cocktail called an Amsterdam mule ($9.91). I am happy with our choice of hotel because there are so many places in our neighborhood. On the way home we pass a fresh stroopwaffle place and must get in line for one ($5.92).
By then we are exhausted and head to bed. 21k steps total for the day.
Day 5 (Total $80.44)
8am - We have a slightly less early day but have tickets to the Anne Frank house at 9:15. (paid in advance). I eat some yogurt and cheese in the room before we leave. It’s walkable so we decide to head out early and grab coffee on the way. ($3.19). The house is sombering but I’m glad we did it.
11am - After the Anne Frank house we walk to the nearby cheese museum. We sample lots of cheese. I buy one cheese to take home ($15.18). We want to walk to a used bookstore, but decide to have lunch at a cafe on the way. We pick one at random. We split chicken tenders and a goat cheese and apple sandwich and I have a beer. ($15.14). The sandwich is one of the best things we have eaten. We spend about an hour in the bookstore and my friend buys one book.
3pm - We realize we are by the monkey bar (one of the oldest bars in Amsterdam that they told us about on our red light district tour). We stop in for a drink. Ok two drinks. ($12.50). We take the metro back towards the hotel and stop in at a tile store in our neighborhood so I can buy a magnet. I buy magnets from all my trips, but I like non-touristy handmade ones if I can find them, Van Gogh magnet from yesterday aside. I buy one with a windmill on it. ($14). We also stop at the grocery store for more yogurt ($3.05) and for Dutch apple pie at the cafe across the street from the hotel ($4). We get back to the hotel and have another free drink and then rest before dinner.
8pm - We go out to a Dutch restaurant for dinner. I am not super hungry from pie so I just get the snert (pea soup). My friend gets sauerkraut and potatoes. Sorry, but I thought it was pretty bland food in general. ($13.38).
We head home. It’s a lighter day, only 14k steps today.
Day 6 (Total $194.47)
8am - Today is our last full day in Amsterdam. We have planned to spend the day at the Rijksmuseum. We want to get there right when it opens for crowd reasons. We had bought “friend of the museum” passes ahead of time so that we can skip the line. I have a yogurt for breakfast and we walk to a cafe near the museum for coffee and breakfast for my friend ($3.78). The man at the cafe is very nice and we love sitting outside in the sunshine. It’s going to be a warm day!
We spend about 5 hours at the museum. We rush to see the Van goghs and the main gallery where the Rembrandts are, including The Night Watch, which is probably one of the most famous paintings in there. We had downloaded the app so we shared a pair of earbuds and listened to audio notes about many of the works (they have a number you can enter in). We take a break outside for coffee ($7.29 - i pay) and skip the line again. Totally worth it for the more expensive ticket. Around 2 we are hungry and have seen almost everything. We stop in the gift shop and I buy a ring and earring set. ($64.76). I forget to use my 10% discount for being a friend. :( I wanted a necklace too but didn’t like the ones they had there so I’ll try to find a matching piece at home.
2pm - My friend has been trying to get herring for the whole trip so we make it a point to do that. The first place is a bust so we find a little stand that sells it a 15 min walk away. We are determined, so we head there. I don’t eat fish so I get a shawarma on the way, which is terrible (cash). I throw half away. After lunch we get ice cream. I get coffee ice cream, and it makes up for the bad shawarma ($6). We also stop at the peanut butter store, which is allegedly the first in the world, and I pick up 3 small jars for my mom for Mother’s Day ($8.11). We also stop at a thrift store and i buy a dress ($21.59). At some point this day (I think), we also stop at another bookstore, and I buy a few things including a card, a couple gifts, and a book ($39.71).
6pm - After resting a bit, we get two more free drinks at the hotel and then head out to dinner. We pick another Asian place. I get an aperol spritz at dinner and we share appetizers (satay, spring rolls, and bitterballen). We also get coconut ice cream with mango sauce for dessert. All yum! ($33.03).
We get one final drink at a local bar near the hotel ($10.20) and I’m again grateful for our choice of neighborhood. Today has been all walking because our 4-day metro pass ran out yesterday. Total steps 13k.
Day 7 (Total $36.93)
8am - this our last day. The plane was supposed to leave at 1:30pm, but we get a message that it’s delayed an hour. We decide to have a leisurely breakfast. We pick a place that’s at a hotel near our hotel. I get an egg sandwich and my friend gets French toast. We both get coffee. ($15.27)
We decide to leave for the airport around 11. We walk to the central station about 20 min away, and I buy wooden tulips for my mom on the way (cash). We buy train tickets (cash) and get right on a train. We are proud of ourselves for our navigation on this trip.
12pm - we get to the airport and through security. We head to a lounge but there’s a line. We are 40th in line based on our QR code place. We decide not to wait and sit down for lunch at a random bar. I get a sausage and a beer ($20.66). We walk around some and get another message that our flight is delayed more, to 4pm. It’s finally our turn to get into the lounge at 2:30 (2 1/2 hour wait) so we go. I grab some water and a whiskey and coke but we just ate so we are not hungry. Around 3 we head to the gate. Unfortunately when we get there our flight is delayed more and will board at 4. They give us airport vouchers so we buy a book, beer, and some stroopwaffles ($1 after vouchers). We finally board and head off around 5.
On the flight we are served dinner. They have run out of chicken by the time they get to me, but eventually find one and bring it to me later. I have a wine too. I read, watch a movie, and try to sleep a little. We have a whole row of four to ourselves so we can spread out. Dinner is a French bread pizza.
8pm - We land around 7pm (love time zone math!), grab our bags, and get a taxi to my car ($27.09). I drop off my friend and get home at 8:30. I am exhausted but cuddle my cats for about an hour before going to bed. 15k steps today
After trip expenses - $225 cat sitting
Total expenses: $2149.75 (+49k points)
Flight: $255 + 49k points
Lodging: $804.88
Food/drinks: $531.38
Travel: $101.56
Activities: $221.10
Souvenirs/gifts: $ 231.93
Final parting thoughts - I think just over $2k for an almost-week long trip to Europe is a pretty comfortable number for me. I am glad I could use points for most of the flight. We definitely didn't try to cheap out on anything. We spent a lot of money drinking (neither of us drink this much usually). I hope this was helpful to anyone, and I look forward to reactions/comments!

Edit: If you are going to comment on the length of this post, please don't. This is not a simple snark but rather an actual critical think piece about feminism and Taylor Swift.

Introduction

Pertaining to Taylor Swift, "Female Rage" has deviated from its intended meaning after Swift debuted a new performance of The Tortured Poets Department during the Eras Tour. Now, according to Swift's use of the phrase, female rage is interpreted as public backlash against Swift's dating choices rather than as a response to the broader injustices against women and women's rights. This post examines Taylor Swift's flawed feminism, philanthropy, branding, and the controversial trademark petition for the phrase "Female Rage: The Musical". Swift's background as an entertainer, indeterminate politics, and alignment with capitalism over feminism pervades her legacy, again threatening her public tolerance as not just an individual but as a brand.

Once Upon a Female Rage...

If you were cognizant in the early 2010's, you've heard countless jabs at Taylor Swift in the media. Magazines, radio, or online. Music critics did not take her seriously as a songwriter; parents put a woman on an unrealistic pedestal as the ideal role model for their children; she dated too much and used men as lyrical fodder. No matter the story, it inevitably spread, conjoined with everyone's respective opinions, and you'd be left to wonder, "Why does everyone hate this girl so much?"
Taylor's target demographic has always been young or adolescent girls, more so when Swift herself was one. She made music that spoke to the awkward misfit, cultivating a para-social relationship with fans on MySpace, then later twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, where Taylor posted relatable vlogs showcasing the life of a homegrown American girl. Taylor had a delayed public "growing up" and, compared to her female pop contemporaries, Swift never "gratuitously sexualized her image and seems pathologically averse to controversy" (and, apparently, never even had a sip of alcohol until she turned 21). She was more than happy to spin this narrative to allude to an inherent moral superiority above other women in the industry (Better Than Revenge, heard of it?), engaging in the very slut-shaming that she herself endured (the Madonna and Whore archetypes). The victim complex arose with the need to prove Taylor as a different type of pop girl. Based upon her holy and clean image, Swift had been dubbed "a feminist's nightmare", and that "[To Swift] other girls are obstacles; undeserving enemies who steal Taylor’s soulmates with their bewitching good looks and sexual availability." Feminism and Tennessee-Christian country values don't exactly mix, it seems.
Years later, Swift befriended Lena Dunham and thus experienced white feminism osmosis, where Dunham taught Swift that real feminists defend rapists, makes insensitive jokes about rape and abortion, and prioritize all-white casts. Swift then declared herself a feminist in 2014, saying,

"Becoming friends with Lena – without her preaching to me, but just seeing why she believes what she believes, why she says what she says, why she stands for what she stands for – has made me realize that I’ve been taking a feminist stance without actually saying so."

I suppose the male-centric songwriting subject that permeates Swift's discography contained covert feminism and that we just didn't see that. Perhaps, the "Bad Blood" song and music video were written only in jest and not about poor Katy Perry, for Swift, as a feminist, would "never make it a girl fight" or tear other women down (though all Katy did was date your terrible ex-boyfriend and allegedly steal three backup dancers from your tour). In 2013, Swift said, in response to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's joke towards her serial dating, "There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women."
There was that time in 2015 Taylor said that Nicki Minaj was "invited to any stage [she is] on" (as if Taylor expects to have access to every stage, award, and platform that Nicki might not otherwise have as a black female artist...yikes!) in response to Nicki's criticism of the white + thin VMA nominations. Later, Nicki responded with confusion, as Swift continued, "It’s unlike you to pit women against each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot..". Of course, this 'beef' was 'squashed' when Nicki performed with Taylor at the VMAs, with Nicki quite literally only having 38 seconds of stage time without Taylor. Maybe all that parading around with a legion of famous white women - similar to the way Taylor might've done with her numerous 1989-era handbags - was in fact a stance against gender inequality, and that this display of "girl power" should be enough to constitute Swift as a feminist icon.
Even while Swift says that Dunham informed her feminist outlook, she dances around the exact contents of those beliefs: "what she believes, what she says, what she stands for" is not exactly insightful towards what beliefs Swift might have inherited. Taylor never broaches women's rights topics such femicide, FGM, forced pregnancy & marriage, sex trafficking, women in slavery, women's financial and political oppression, women's educational rights, women's health, or women's autonomy, so we can assume she only gives a fuck about "girls supporting girls" (whatever that fucking means).
Despite some questionable (and sometimes vindictive) behavior, Taylor as a young woman did not deserve every media lashing that she received. We cannot deny that most headlines and criticisms perpetuated a misogynistic rhetoric which has plagued Swift for a majority of her career. Acknowledging events such as the development of her ED, her sexual assault trial, "Famous" lyric and MV depiction of Taylor, and the explicit Twitter deepfakes, for example, as both disgusting and unfortunate things that happened to a young woman in Hollywood does not negate the fact that Taylor is mostly a performative feminist.

Get Your Fucking Ass Up and Be a Philanthropist, It Seems Like Nobody Wants to Be a Philanthropist These Days

In 2013, Taylor Swift cut the ribbon at the grand opening of the Taylor Swift Education Center at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tennessee. The donation amount - $4 million - was the largest individual artist gift ever donated to the Country Music Hall of Fame, which is, of course, mentioned on Swift's website. The two-story facility features three classrooms, an instrument room, and an interactive children's exhibit gallery. Swift also performed at "All for the Hall" charity shows and has donated numerous artifacts from her career (such as notable guitars, tour costumes, etc) to the museum.
This was over 11 years ago, and it is still the only notable philanthropic contribution Taylor Swift has made.
For a woman of her net worth and stature, and a woman who recognizes the difficulties for women in film and music, you would think that Taylor Swift might establish a scholarship program for women to study the arts or something. Perhaps Swift might even consider becoming a member of organizations that support female artists, or one that supports LGBTQ+ causes (since she is now proudly an ally), yet she remains superficial with her graces. Broader philanthropy, such as donating relief aid to Palestinian women or women impacted by violence and discrimination will probably never receive any financial support from Miss Swift because then she'd be using her money towards philanthropies involving anyone but white entertainers.
She even says herself in Miss Americana, "My entire moral code as a kid and now is a need to be thought of as 'good'." Well, she's certainly thought of as good, though her actions say otherwise. She's more than happy to do a vaguely altruistic song and dance for a clip-worthy interview quote and mass appeasement, then fuck off to one of her mansions on a 20 minute private jet flight, rather than actually contribute to anything pertaining to the causes she has endorsed. Yet, far too many people continue to give a woman such as her their money, time, and energy, and she hoards these resources to herself.

I Like Some of the Taylor's Songs, But What the Fuck Does She Know About Feminism?

Swift continued with her self-proclaimed feminist campaign, positioning herself as a political activist and LGBTQ+ ally in the Miss Americana documentary. The primary focus of the documentary consists of the sexual assault trial, Andrea Swift's cancer diagnosis, Taylor's ED and body dysmorphia, media scrutiny, and, largely, finally speaking up about her politics publicly, mostly her opposition to the 2018 Tennessee Republican senate candidate, Marsha Blackburn, and Blackburn's beliefs. Swift says, following a scene discussing her experience during the trial,

"I just couldn't really stop thinking about it. And I just thought to myself, next time there is any opportunity to change anything, you had better know what you stand for and what you want to say."

We must ask ourselves, though: when has Swift ever spoken up to change anything? Okay, pulling her entire catalogue from Spotify because they didn't pay their artists enough and similarly pulling her catalogue from Apple Music are changes that she leveraged due to her revenue potential and power, but they are not pertinent to the average woman's rights. Moreover, these are issues that directly impacted Taylor's income, which was enough reason for her to protest in the first place. Swift has sold the most units for a female artist in first week sales, is the first female artist with 100k monthly Spotify listeners, is the first female artist to win the Album of the Year Grammy 4 times, and is the first female artist to do X, Y, and Z, all while being inoffensive and family-friendly to boot. The actual Taylor Swift seems unwilling to compromise the brand of Taylor Swift by contributing in meaningful ways to feminist causes, especially if it is for women outside of America and Hollywood.
The reason political anthems such as "The Man" and "Only the Young" of the Lover era feel disingenuous and corporate is because, well, it is. Taylor has taken every opportunity to advance her career or public image at the expense of other women. What is truly genuine to Taylor's outlook on other women is vying for male attention, taking down female competition, and vocalizing feminist injustices only if they directly impact her and her money. Some will argue that it's satisfactory for a woman with such a huge platform to even TALK about feminism, but that just isn't enough. It's even less impressive when you candidly look at the scope of her feminist lens: "If I was the man, then I'd be THE MAN", or "I really resent the ‘Be careful, buddy, she’s going to write a song about you’ angle, because it trivialises what I do", and, of course, "We all got crowns". Feminism, but only when it happens to me. It gets worse when you look at Taylor's track record of copying other famous women and removing other female artists as potential threats to her pop prowess.
It's good for PR to align yourself with certain blanket feminist and political beliefs, therefore good for branding, therefore good for ticketing and merchandise sales, therefore good for business. And Taylor Swift is a business.
She's not a feminist. Taylor Swift is a capitalist.

I Can't Pay Those Sweatshop Workers a Livable Wage or Benefits! How Else Would I Make My Billions?

Recently, Taylor's team filed to trademark the phrase "Female Rage: The Musical" after Taylor said during Paris N1 of the Eras Tour,

"So you were the first ones to see The Tortured Poets at the Eras Tour...or as I like to call it, 'Female Rage: The Musical'."

This trademark petition was filed last week on Saturday, and news comes about just as numerous unofficial fan-made merch designs have cropped up with this phrase plastered on Fruit of the Loom basics. I'm of the opinion Swift's team motioned for a trademark so that they can send out cease & desists to all those that make knockoff merch, which disrupts potential sales for Bravado, UMG's choice merchandising company; however, since it was filed earlier, perhaps Swift has bigger plans with the bizarre use of the gendered phrase. One Swiftie referred to the phrase "female rage" as "a funny Eras Tour joke". Could it be a possible fourth version of the Eras Tour Movie? Whatever the reason, the motion to capitalize off of such a concept is disgusting, but not unsurprising, for a woman that profits on her vain feminism.
Swift, through her company, TAS Rights Managements, has also trademarked over 200 phrases, including "1989", where she owns the property rights to this calendar year on keychains, phone cases, sunglasses, stationary, bags, beverage ware, clothing, entertainment services, your subconscious, and, of course, Christmas ornaments.
The vapid consumerism in Swiftie culture is, frankly, disgusting. Bravado's sustainability statement is non-existent, the quality control is abysmal, and the materials they use are horrible. The materials, such as acrylic and polyester, are made from petrochemicals. This means they are non-renewable, shed microplastics, and are quite toxic in production. The manufacturing process to make all of those lazy-rushed Eras Tour logo graphic tees is a huge blow to environmental well-being. Apparently, though, Swifties don't give a fuck. They sell out products in seconds and either have to face the manufactured scarcity or buy from a scalper that resells for 200% of the already ridiculous retail price. This doesn't include the environmental impact of vinyl records, CD, and cassette production, of which Taylor produces many variants that sell unsustainable amounts.
If we're talking about women's rights violations, why is no one acknowledging the women that work in the inhumane sweatshop conditions that have to pump out fugly t-shirts and hats? The millions of plastic microfiber dander they are inhaling, or the toxic dyes that touch their bare skin? Are they being compensated fairly for their skilled labour and are they in safe working environments? Do these women have minimal bargaining power, and do they have authority over their worker's rights? Is Taylor Swift female raging at their injustices? Does Taylor Swift ever feels bad that her wealth was built on the backs of women of color, disadvantaged by the demands of the global economy and garment industry? Do you think she ever says a little white feminist prayer for them before she goes to sleep at night?
What's even crazier is not that Taylor herself doesn't care, it's that Swifties don't care. There CANNOT BE ethical billionaires. You only make a billion dollars if you are exploiting other human beings for capital gain. Based on public perception of the possible "Female Rage: The Musical" trademark, it seems like Swifties are already asking for merch with this phrase. "If Taylor made it, I'd buy it." Oh, cool. So not only do you champion Miss Swift's avarice and billionaire status, but you also are unashamed to admit to your blind consumption of her music and merchandise, no matter where they might originate in production or sincerity. Just as Swift takes and takes and takes, Swifties' consumerism of Taylor Swift cannot be quelled.
The tortured artist's most vulnerable and sincere poetry...available now in 21 different versions!

I Am Tortured Poet, Hear Me Whinge

Look - even if Taylor's intention is to characterize TTPD as more "tortured" and "angry", the main thread of the album is "I was ghosted by my decade-long situationship with a controversial indie boy and my fucking stupid fans wrote a 'Speak Up Now' open letter prompting me to drop him" anger, which is adequately expressed in the lyrics and performances. The extent of Taylor's "female rage" on TTPD is on tracks such as "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?", which contends with relentless media scrutiny; "But Daddy I Love Him", where Swift firmly states she'll date whoever she likes no matter how "Sarahs and Hannahs" may react; and "The Albatross", a track mythologizing her reputation and the consequences of dating her. Of course, these coincide with deep psychological wounds that formed during Swift's early years in the media, and so, from her feminist perspective, these subjects tackle the misogyny and double standards that she faced.
Yet Taylor Swift still has no grounds to be claiming that TTPD best exemplifies female rage and therefore she, in the context of this album, is female rage incarnate. As the daughter of a stock broker and mutual fund marketing executive, Taylor was born into wealth and allowed privileges like trips and subsequent relocation to Nashville all so that she might get a record deal. Her father even invested at least $120,000 into the then-fledgling label, Big Machine Records, which ensured Taylor's place with Borchetta after leaving her dead-end development deal with Sony. The fact that her parents were able to buy her a fucking brand new guitar for Christmas and pay for music lessons says so much about the financial security and safety of her childhood.
Money is privilege and protection, and despite Swift's experiences with misogyny and loser boyfriends, she does not know what female rage is.
Her rage is derived from her frustrations with her obsessive fans pulling the moral superiority card on Taylor in response to her rebound with Matty Healy. That's literally it. She's just pissed that the monster she created is no longer obediant, it's become a feral, sovereign entity that depletes the world of its natural resources and thinks it is more intelligent than it actually is because it's mommy has started to talk to it with big words. Apparently, 'illicit', 'elegy', 'nonchalant', and 'precocious' are considerably big words for the oafish monster, and I find it strange that this level of literacy is present in a group of fans that allegedly have GPAs of 3.5 or higher, but I digress.
Taylor Swift has never been one paycheck away from destitution. Taylor Swift has never experienced racial discrimination. She may have instances of gender discrimination, but she possesses the ideal white, blonde American beauty standard and therefore reaps the benefits of being a conventionally attractive woman. Taylor Swift has sufficient social capital. Taylor Swift is a billionaire woman prolonging her victimhood though she, as a woman, has mostly had control over her image and music (unlike her contemporaries). Taylor Swift is NOT entitled to be championed for her "female rage", nor should she be. Taylor Swift has never even been the struggling artist, for fuck's sake. I don't give a fuck if she's trying to fill the empty lunch tables of her past. Taylor Swift purporting herself, her unpolished album, and her lukewarm feminism as a musical bleeding with female rage is asinine.

Sigh Try and Come For My Job, Poors

Out there in the world right now is a 23-year-old woman, a recent college grad, who works as a barista. She has to wake up and get ready to go into a minimum wage job because she cannot get a job in her field. She doesn't have healthcare benefits or sick time, so she has to go into work no matter how she's feeling. All day long she is berated by vicious customers and creepy men, and, exhausted from being on her feet, she knows she has to go home to her shitty roommate that never does the dishes and her roommate's shitty dog. To comfort herself, she considers getting a treat, but thinks against it when she remembers that matcha lattes cost $15 and they taste like milky dirt. She knows that she needs to buy groceries this week, and so the woman resolves to go home, but notices that her gas tank is low. She goes to put gas in the car, but the pump stops at $27.86 because that's all that she has in her checking account. The woman, bereft and reeling, sinks into the driver's seat. "Well," she thinks, her head in her hands, "at least I don't have Taylor Swift's job. I just couldn't imagine."
Fame is somewhat of a choice. If at any moment Taylor feels that she is misunderstood, misconstrued, or overwhelmed by public opinion, she can LEAVE the public eye - Lord knows she has the retirement fund and residuals to do so. In "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart", the TTPD song about meeting the demands of your career-zenith mega-tour while in the relationship trenches, Taylor ends the song by rambling,

"You know you're good when you can even do it with a broken heart...you know you're good...and I'm good, cause I'm miserable, and no one even knows!...try and come for my job."

Yeah, obviously we wouldn't know, you recently passed the billionaire threshold and are the most famous and in-demand performer in the world right now. Taylor Swift makes an estimated $10 to $13 million dollars A NIGHT on the Eras Tour. Furthermore, the Eras Tour movie grossed $261.6 million globally, (which, as the producer, Taylor takes home 57% of the ticket sales) not counting the streaming revenue from Amazon Prime Video and the estimated $75 million deal that Disney paid to have it on Disney+. We're not even considering the income from cheap plastic popcorn buckets and drink cups plastered with colored squares in her Era-specific likeness.
It's funny. Taylor Swift often said that being famous wasn't hard, that she "isn't complaining". I'm sure it is difficult to always have to present in a good mood, else you'll end up misrepresented in the media, and I'm sure it's invasive to virtually have no privacy or semblance of anonymity. Still, Taylor Swift shows up each night of tour and performs. For a majority of her career, she has penned her sad songs while on the road. Most of "Red", her breakup album, was written in the thick of the Speak Now World tour. Now, some Swifties say they almost "feel bad" for attending the Eras Tour with Swift's revelations in this song, that they have had a 'dimmed experience' upon hearing Taylor's misery whilst performing. Despite the fact that Taylor said that "this was the happiest she's ever been" at Gilette Stadium in May, the lyrics "boohoo, woe is me, smile for the cameras and make the fans happy!!!" are jarring for Eras attendees.
While Taylor Swift was making double-digit millions a night in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and feeling miserable, Ana Clara Benevides Machado passed away due to heat exposure. The concert promoters, Time For Fun, are now the subject of a criminal investigation due to their lack of adequate hydration and safety. Taylor Swift cancelled the Sunday show that was to follow and offered VIP tent tickets to Benevides Marchado's family, which was a kind gesture, but perhaps incongruous to the incident of which they were offered as consolation. Everyone grieves differently, of course, but I'm not sure attending the very show at the very same venue that my daughter or sister passed away in two days prior, where the singer CONTINUED the show despite her death, would be healthy for closure.
There was no female rage at the show as Swift never saw Benevides Machado pass out. There was no female rage towards the disregard for fans as humans while Swift elected to proceed with her Brazil tour dates despite the country being in historic heatwaves (at risk of overheatting herself). If Taylor Swift was so shaken by touring with a broken heart or a fan's passing, she wouldn't have added an additional North American leg of Eras just two months after the Matty breakup. She's brokenhearted but willing to mend the cracks with your money and move onward with her worldwide female rage induced pillaging.
No matter what happens, even if you die at a Taylor Swift concert, Taylor collects a big fat check and flies away. She doesn't know you as anything other than a conversion rate or earning potential despite what her nearly 20-year long parasocial relationship with fans might otherwise indicate. She knows that, while some Swifties are without disposable income, they feel obligated to spend on a "48 Hours Only!" exclusive vinyl variant instead of necessities because they are so entrenched in Taylor Swift's intoxicating celebrity, they'll prioritize materialistic fandom before their needs. This is good enough for her because this means she can expand her real estate portfolio and finance her cat's lavish lifestyles. They're worth an estimated $100 million dollars. Her three cats could pool their net worth and solve world hunger.
While you and I might be denied bereavement leave and barely surviving the current political and economic climate, Taylor Swift has to, instead of gets to, perform for stadiums at full attendance for three nights in a row across the globe. You and I might be replaced by AI at our longtime jobs, but Taylor Swift is threatened with losing more and more money each time you listen to a "Stolen Version" of her songs. If we don't buy every variant of all of her albums, then who is going to pay for the fucking cats?
It is tone deaf to spend as she spends and lives as she lives in this economy, but this is her reality. She was able to donate $100,000 to all of her tour truck drivers, and that's wonderful, but it leads me to wonder about the ethos of the 2020s where one woman can hoard such life-changing amounts of money. Remember in 2014 when she gave a fan $90 ($120 in today's money) to get Chipotle because she had no fucking clue how much it cost? This is a 34-year-old woman who is increasingly out of touch with the reality for working class people and women in general. Normal everyday adults must wake up and go to their thankless jobs, and yet Taylor Swift, despite all her riches, incessantly references the lows of her life and career as a public figure and entertainer to farm sympathy and drive sales. And still, the corporate women have latched onto "I cry a lot, but I am so productive! It's an art!" as their cubicle battle cry.
Do you think that, from up in her private jet, Taylor Swift gazes at the world through her poetic, tortured eyes, and thinks, "All the little people, in their cars, walking, going about their lives...all those girls that don't support girls...do they know that I've made an album about female rage?"

Conclusion/TLDR

Thank you for reading. I would love to hear your critical insights towards this entire ordeal: TTPD, the trademark, the implications of it all.
TLDR: Taylor Swift is a bad feminist and is delusional to think that the TTPD eras set exemplifies female rage at women's injustice.

A very good morning all from dark southern Maryland, before I try and get some sleep.
Ullr has been my Fultrui since I had a sweat lodge vision of him in mid-July 1989.
Here's a poem I wrote several years later to try and explain the experience.

Walk the Smoke - New Year's Day 2001 CE

With friends he sat, in shaman's hut To cleanse his mind, for household rite In dark and heat, to ride the smoke To Seek and See, and Wisdom gain
The smoke did part, in darkling wood His foot to stone, and earthen path Unknown the way, but sure the track Beneath the boughs, and o'er the crag
He bidden came, to huntsman's lodge Unknown the voice, guiding him there He entered in, the skin-clad walls And sat where shown, by fireside
An Old One sat, beyond the flame His brown-grey hair, by leather held His icy eyes, above dark face In wolf skin clad, in deer hide shod
Ashen longbow, beside full sheaf Antlered long knife, wrist-torc of bronze An auroch's horn, a jar of mead And sparks did play, in air between
My brows arose, in questing glance His eyes sought mine, and searching deep Did find the start, of waking mind A nod and grin, I understood
I found myself, amongst my friends In smoky hut, with streaming eyes I looked around, and saw no Sight Alone I Trod, Alone I Saw

I don't trust this.
Maybe that's because since February of 2021 I've seen every fucking PsyOp trick in the book on the stock I like! All aided by heaping mounds of white collar crime, including the regular fraud, counterfeiting of securities, abusing market maker positions, plus the whole gamut from DTCC's blatant international stock fraud to market manipulation by CNBC a la the Citadel logos plastered across monitors and the set. All sanctioned by the US Government, as inaction from SEC, DOJ, FBI, and other various US government agencies makes them all complicit in all the crime of course, as I KNOW they can't play ignorant about the hundreds of tips and comments individual retail investors have submitted!
Part of me wants to assume this is yet another fake run to shake out paper hands. DFV be damned! I respect the guy, but I've been watching for years from the catwalk, and you regular investors made all this happen, not him!
But.
This saga has helped me with some of my monk shit. Discipline. Fortitude. Logic! I''m pretty Zen, in that I largely won't consider selling until we hit the floor website ticker number. Some of the No Cell No Sell people can flay me for that, but I have Supervillain Plans to get rolling to save the species. You know?
It's been a lovely little foil for my own personal goals, and everyone from Jarumba (sp?) relentlessly asking the DTCC questions to Marijuana Mills for running years, they've all inspired me!
So perhaps I can make a bet to fuel the hype even more somehow?
I won't stick a banana in my ass or eat a whole jar of Mayo, but I'm soon enough gonna beat Shakespeare and become The Second Most Prolific Poet of Human History. (Nobody gives a fuck about a Dead Art Form! Hah!) So if I can beat Shakespeare before we hit the floor website number, or if I can't... What should I bet to help build hype towards a real MOASS rather than what I see as another fake paper hand shake run?
Just thinking out loud here, after chilling in the shadows for a while. Any fun bet suggestions?
(Yes I have written poems about MOASS and GME. No I won't link them because I don't wanna get banned for fucking shilling myself!)
Hope everybody is smiling out there today!

PART 3

Max woke in the night to a plinking sound. He had fallen asleep crying over Scat, treat bag and collar on the table in full view. His eyes were blurry and sore, his nose was runny and sore and the nature channel was his distraction. Ruth was letting off a lovely glow and it warmed him to think of Scat so lovingly curled around her, day in and day out. He let out an almost-sob. He didn’t want to give her back. Didn’t want to wake up.
Eventually Max pried one eye open and surveyed the room. TV still on, duvet still over him, the floor wasn’t wet and the ceiling wasn’t leaking, so where was the…
Plink.
Ruth.
Max sighed and rolled over, the duvet making a break for the floor before being dejectedly scooped up again and deposited back across his lap. The small cloud of Scat’s fur wafted off the floorboards and turned Max’s heart. He contemplated going back to the escape of sleep, but finally sat and rubbed his eyes, held his aching head in his hands for a moment and, dropping his hands and lolling his head back, Ruth came into focus. The central glass disc that she had made like a rosette for herself had grown, bloated out. It looked a bit like a tortoise shell, glittery and iridescent and very Ruth, except now, it had…
“Diamonds!” Max yelped, miraculously fully awake.
There, underneath the bulbous disc was a tiny pile of painfully perfect diamonds, so exuberant in colour they seemed almost alive. He could see clean through the pile itself each one was so clear, with a miniature rainbow refracted inside. They were scattered across the table and he realised they were dropping from all over the glass tubes, the largest ones plinking from the central disc.
“Holy cow! What the hell, Ruth! This is amazing! I mean, how did you do that?”
Ruth plinked another diamond from the disc, meanwhile the bobbing gyroscopic mass that had accumulated in the disc decided to bob itself towards Max and answer him with a spiral of flashes and disco lights.
“You really are a crazy, crazy little thing, you know that?” he asked, picking up a diamond and examining it against Ruth’s emitted light show. He threw his t-shirt across the table top and spread the diamonds out on it. There must have been fifteen of them, simply perfect and all different shapes to each other, irregular and yet symmetrical.
Max collapsed into the dining chair next to the table.
Why did they happen today? Why now of all days? It had been nearly a week since he was entrusted with Ruth and she seemed pretty stable up till yesterday. She had grown that diamond factory bulge that reminded him of a tortoise, yes, but now it almost looked like an expensive, old-fashioned sweet dispenser that you get in the bowling alley or in the shopping centres in posh areas. The kind they stuck between the raised beds of fake forest-looking plants in the food court, the kind that were there to tempt the kids after their unfulfilling and unappreciated fast-food dine-outs but used all your pocket money for one jaw-breaker.
Max tried to backtrack. What had he done differently? If he could figure it out, maybe he could persuade Ruth to make more diamonds… his friend would never have to know, he could get Scat a little headstone, and if he could figure out how it worked he could reverse it so there wouldn’t even be any evidence. No, his friend would surely know. Max could save a few diamonds and give them to him and say she just started… have to work out the details later. First things first.
“So, Ruth. Why are you giving me these little nuggets of joy, huh? What did I do to warrant this spectacle?” He talked to Ruth, but she didn’t respond. No movement, just the usual swirling around. Max watched the glass disc closely through his puffy eyes but couldn’t see where the diamonds fell from, nor anything that would suggest a factory line of compressed carbon was in progress. She seemed to be slowing down.
Max pressed his brows together, then slowly lifted the fern up onto the table again. This was the only thing different. The bamboo was outside and Scat was…
A wave of horror flooded over Max. He launched himself out of his chair and sprinted to the window and, ripping back the voile, he saw the bamboo had grown six feet over night. He knew it grew fast from watching that documentary about tropical rainforests but this was a stretch too far. Much too far. That damned thing hadn’t grown in years…
“Ruth,” he said turning to her, “what did you do?”

For the next few hours, Max observed Ruth from across the room. The discovery channel was on in the background, as always. Ruth didn’t seem to do much without it these days but for a hunk of glittery glass and brass Max supposed not much was interesting unless it moved or had nothing whatsoever to do with man-made things. Suited him just fine. Who needs politics anyway?
Apparently, Ruth had taken it upon herself to make the fern shrivel up and increase her diamond production, much to Max’s exuberant happiness and overwhelming horror. He shoved the sofa to the far end of the room and started putting all his household plants in the spaces between the table and himself. The kitchen herbs went first.
He had taken one of the diamonds down to the swanky precious stone and metal specialist at the posh end of town (his name was Horace, apparently,) and had it valued. He took extreme pleasure in watching the man’s face freeze in wonder at the rock placed before him. I’ve never seen such a stone, Horace said. Never seen such a clear, colourful, perfect stone in my life, Horace said. It’s phenomenal, Horace said. Where did you get it, Horace asked. I inherited it, Max lied. It’s worth a fortune, Horace said. Thank you, I’ll have it back now, Max said. He made sure to stop by the garden centre on his way home.

The front room was a sea of plants. Max waded through them, deciding that a walkway to the door would be a vital escape route that shouldn’t be compromised, in case Ruth decided she had been on her vegetarian stint for long enough. Max had toyed with the idea of getting a fish tank or some other living creature to put next to her as a safeguard but he promptly remembered Scat and nearly broke down on the shop floor in front of the display tanks. Besides, the plants were working! There was already a multitude of stacks of plastic pots and trays next to the front door ready for recycling, and all the withered remains of whatever the pots had housed was scattered along the borders amongst the dog daisies and tulips. Ruth was putting out a considerable amount of stonage these days. Max bought an old bank safe online. It was currently sat in the hallway because that’s as far in as the two couriers could lift the thing, and there was no way on god’s green earth that Max was going to let them into the front room and risk them getting curious. The safe was only waist-high and wasn’t too ugly, so the hallway it was.
Max carefully spun the dial clockwise, anti-clockwise, clockwise again, on and on, muttering under his breath as he read from the bit of paper he guiltily kept in his pocket alongside his friend’s contact details. He used his whole bodyweight to wrench open the door and deposit the load of diamonds in a mason jar, nestled it in next to its siblings that were already full and stacked up there. He had set up a system of small tubs under the hotspots for diamonds drops and his favourite whiskey glass under the place where the large diamonds fell. He emptied them regularly, always aware that someone might knock on the door, he might need to pee or Scat might need to go outside (no, poor thing, he was there already). His kitchen was full of boxes of new mason jars and his lounge was full of plants, like some weird meth lab. A thrill of fear swept down Max’s back and up through his throat looking at all those jars, heavy with precious stones. He knew the smallest one alone would make him a disgustingly wealthy man. Horace had confirmed it.
Two days later, and there was no more space in the safe. Nowhere else to put those little rocks. Max decided to give Ruth a break, let her rest while he decided what to do next. He couldn’t have a house full of safes, his friend would already think it was weird that the one in the hallway appeared out of nowhere. Max put a coffee table over it, covered it with a tablecloth and some old bank statements, throwing on a phone charger for authenticity.
He had taken to talking to Ruth while the documentaries were on, she seemed to like that. He had been taking daily trips to the garden centre and leaving with a fully loaded car, right up until they looked at him suspiciously (he was a renowned leave-it-to-the-bugs kind of gardener; after years of failed attempts at keeping his plants alive and fruitless efforts of the garden centre employees to dispense advice he could keep to), so he started frequenting other nurseries as well.
Today, he was going to figure out how Ruth did it. He had to know. In his mind it was the equivalent of finding out how the Egyptians built the pyramids (because it obviously wasn’t aliens,) and the fact that even his friend didn’t know what this thing could do was something altogether more impressive! He may well have created it, but it was Max who had realised Ruth’s full potential, it was Max who had figured out the process, it was Max who had discovered the balance of life and death. Nobody could take that from him. But to really put the boot in, he wanted to know how.
“Come on, Ruthy, tell me how you do it. Let me see you do it, just once.” Max waited for a response. There was none. Then…
Plink.
He had seen! He knew now! Ha!
“Yes! That’s it! That’s the ticket! I knew it, old gal, this is going to be such an epic day! I can’t wait to see their faces, suck on THAT!”
Max jumped, air-punched and whirled around the front room, ecstatic in his discovery. Never again would they look down on him! Never again would they look at him like he was an idiot because he couldn’t get the printer to print on both sides of the paper, they wouldn’t reject him, the girls would think he was funny, he was going to be filthy rich, he could save the world! He, Max, was all powerful.
Oh yes. That’s what I’m talking about.

**** TRIGGER WARNING!!! ****
This poem speaks about PTSD from a career as a paramedic. There is suggested trauma throughout the poem.
I am a very amature writer. And there are some spots in this poem that feel clunky. I would appreciate any feedback to fix that problem. It doesn't have a title yet.
~
Red and white. Red and white. Red and white flash at me throughout the night.
Transporting me to another place and time. Old memories revist me at the most inconvenient time.
Red and white. Red and white. Red and white speeding throughout the night.
To a motorcycle crash, Up by Whiskey Creek pass. A couple on a leisurely ride, Unaware this would be where one of them would die.
Ran off the road by a truck who fled the scene. A coward who didn't stay to hear their deafening screams.
Red and white. Red and white. Red and red and red Runs from his head.
The panic and fear chokes me even now. Gripping my lungs, my spine, my chest. Until I'm a crumpled ball, heaped in a mess. Tears run down because I couldn't do enough. Failing to provide life saving skills that would prove to be the right stuff.
Red and white. Red and white. Red and white and black stain my mind.
Knowing he wasn't the only one I left behind. Trauma and death of every kind, 7 years of torture keeping me confined.
Red and white. Red and white. I can't STAND to see the flashing red and white.
It cripples me with fear, and grief, and pain. Altering my life, I dont think I'll ever be the same.
A diagnosis of PTSD, And an uncertain future lay before me.
Red and white. Red and white. The life of a paramedic racing to the scene.
Who's fate will be next? God, I hope it isn't me.

I am looking for a lady between 25 and 35 years old, for a committed monogamous childfree relationship. My goal is to become a true team, supporting each other, caring for each other, nurturing each other and helping each other grow and realise our goals and dreams as much as possible. I'm hoping to find someone that values a relationship as much as I do and takes it seriously. It's not the only thing my life revolves around, but it's also not just something 'nice to have' for me.
I am 186cm tall, slim/fit built, dark brown hair, brown eyes. Both my arms are tattooed (full sleeve), as are my calves and the areas above my ankles. Regarding pictures see below. I am a runner, training multiple times a week. I'm also vegan. My love languages are physical touch and words of affirmation. While I am mostly securely attached, withdrawing from me triggers anxiety and I have made a horrible experience with an avoidant partner in the past, so that is something I fear I cannot deal with again.
I am also an atheist.
I am a very warm, soft and sensitive person, I think I am humorous, I am self reflecting a lot and I can also be really passionate and romantic. Those are traits that also are really important to me in a woman.
I can be quite social, I am a good talker, but also love to listen to really get to know someone on a deeper level. I can enjoy an evening out with friends just as much as the silence of sitting at the shores of the river and watching the sunset in solitude (although I've been craving to watch it together with a partner for a really long time now). I can be out in a pub, at a rave, a metal show or at a football game and have the time of my life, but I cannot do these things every day; I need recharge time (on the sofa, in the woods for a run, a lazy Sunday staying in bed etc.). This should give you an idea; basically, I am a homebody that thoroughly enjoys going out in moderation.
I won't say too much about hobbies; suffice it to say I am into the dark, the obscure, the macabre, the occult, the mysterious, the erotic. It won't surprise you that I had a gothic phase in my youth, bonus points if you did too!
What I'm looking for
Although similar hobbies and interests are a plus, emotional and intimate compatibility are more important to me. I am a very sensitive and emotional person (I do cry easily and by this point I don't think I'll ever be able to change that, sorry), so if you're too, we will definitely understand each other. I need someone who I can open up to (which I do rather quickly, anyway), be myself, bare my soul to and I need these things from you, too. I've had my share of emotionally unavailable women who were afraid of intimacy so I know I can't deal with that again because of the way how those things affect me. I am always emotionally invested with the woman I pursue and in those cases that was to my detriment. But my ability to feel so deep is also something I wouldn't want to change because as of yet, although it's getting harder, I haven't given up on finding someone.
With those emotional needs come two requirements that I found to be vital over the years: First, being able to be silly and cutesy together and to accept each other's inner child and care for it. I am not talking about having to deal with another person's immaturity or inability to perform basic adult skills, rather with the way sadness, hurt, anxiety and being overwhelmed manifests for me (and maybe for you, too?). I need someone who is able to comfort me, to hold me, to allow me to be weak and needy for a while until I've calmed down, and I'm more than ready to offer the same. Your inner child can come out for a while, no problem (: Also in a positive way: Thankfully, today everyone seems to be understanding of the cuteness overload cats (or any animal baby, really) can cause; I need that with a partner. I also still have plushies as comfort animals and ideally, you do too.
Apparently in every relationship, one person is the stronger one. In the past, I have been with women who obviously were stronger than me, but that doesn't mean they always had to be strong, far from it. I certainly need to be able to feel protected, but it's not like I'm a particularly needy partner, like everyone, I have my ups and downs, but I can pull my weight and have been told by past partners that I am very caring and that they felt safe and understood with me, and providing that for my partner is really important for me as well.
Second, intimate compatibility. I am rather insatiable and love to experiment when it comes to the bedroom, so you should, too, in order that we can explore and enjoy together. I found out how fulfilling living out those fantasies can be after years of never being able to try and in a relationship, this kind of fulfillment for both partners is a must for me. I found the term 'filthy best friends and partners' to be a perfect description.
I'm looking for a balance between healthy independence and being emotionally present. A relationship where we 'get' each other; we're both each other's number one and treat each other like royalty. Where a disagreement leads to more intimacy between us as we understand better, not to resentment. Where we're comfortable baring our souls to each other, becoming a safe haven and secure base for each other. I don't like the modern notion that you 'should never feel too safe in a relationship' because that sounds like running from the mafia (and believe me, I love mafia movies); you should always put in effort, yes, but safety is one of the things I always want to experience and provide in a relationship. We shouldn't fear that a disagreement leads straight to breakup. I know ‘self-sufficiency’ is trending right now, but I feel like as partners, we’re partly responsible for each other and not our own but also each other’s happiness. Being dependant and dependable at the same time is important; making each other’s wellbeing a priority. If you’re not able to healthily depend on someone and their support while you’re having a hard time, look elsewhere. If I have to be afraid you’ll run at the first major problem that surfaces, even if it’s a ‘you’-problem, it’s not going to work. I think that all things can and need to be talked about. If you think ignoring someone for days is a form of communication, please look elsewhere.
I am looking for someone real. We all have our problems, I don't want or need a 'perfect' person. You don't have everything figured out or 'all your shit' together. Be imperfect. Admit when you feel sad and angry, lonely, hopeless or even helpless – it's all relatable. Don't hide it. Be quirky, be dorky, be witchy, opinionated, be yourself. Don't pretend.
I'm looking for someone to share romance with. Not great gestures, but small, meaningful ones. Poems for each other, expressing our feelings; cards with heartfelt messages that we put our perfume/cologne on, and a symbol that means something to us only, the print of your lips with lipstick, the way I sign and seal my letters for you.
Just as important to me is agreeing on living a healthy life, staying in shape both for ourselves and for each other, regularly working out and eating healthy. I am drug and disease-free and expect the same of you. I do drink as I love a good beer or glass of wine, rum or whiskey, but I've never really been drinking much and especially during the past year have further reduced it. One vice I have is that I enjoy a couple of cigars a year, but I can definitely accommodate you in this regard.
Another important point is aligned life goals: I value safety more than adventure. I want to build a home together with my partner, a safespace for the both of us, where we always feel loved and protected, a place that we create together, make it cozy together so we just love to get back home there wherever we might have been, a home we decorate together for Halloween (my favourite holiday) or Christmas or Springtime, as we live in tune with the seasons, enjoying nature on a walk or the rain outside, reading in our cozy home. I value stability and harmony.
Appearance-wise, I am into ladies on the smaller side), so I'm looking for someone petite/slim/skinny/healthy-fit. Likewise, I am not really muscular and don't have visible abs; like I said, I'm a runner, so if you're more into the gym-type, I'm not a good fit.
I’d prefer to move from text to voice calls, videochat and then meeting up, all of that rather sooner than later. Not that there’s a need to rush anything, but I’d rather see earlier if we’re compatible or not; as someone who catches feelings fast I need to protect myself.
Caveats

• I don't like travelling as it stresses me out; I don't mind being somewhere else for a week or two, but the organisation part of it drains my energy very quickly and dealing with stuff that doesn't work out is overwhelming to me. Smaller trips are ok, but I'm not the right person to travel the world with.
  
• I am not the most awake person in the morning (i.e. I identify as nightowl)
  
• I don't want children and had a vasectomy
  
• I need space for my own projects/time to recharge after social interaction.
  
• While I feel like I am in tune with my inner child and working on/with it through therapy, I realise this is something that could be a turn-off for people.
  
• I have been diagnosed with depressive episodes in the past and am taking anti-depressants right now. I realise that I am a work in progress, maybe more so than in times past, but I manage and the fact that I'm putting myself out here is based on me being ready to get to know someone new.
  
• I want to create a home together here, as I'm firmly rooted where I was born; I realise this is a lot to ask, but I have seen many people here being open to moving, so I want to at least try reaching out to them.
  

If you're interested, feel free to message me and include some pictures of yourself and I will reply with my own. Have a nice day (:

Templates on the right
Saw this new meme format in a post from a few hours ago in this sub. Why don't we start using it? It's certainly a breath of fresh air from the old colorless tierlist

i hate getting too drunk, to the point
where i can’t keep my balance
where i lose my temper with women
where i swing at strangers for a bad look
where i wake up in a cell, piecing together the events of last night through a real bitch of a hangover
where i ruin friendships and embarrass girls
i love finding that sweet spot
where you dance to the birds singing
where you write poems
where girls are beautiful but unimportant
where you are invincible
where everything is a blessing
where even your pain feels good and warm and comforting
it’s hard to find it, sometimes it comes after a couple beers or a bottle and a half of wine or a few glasses of cheap whiskey
sometimes i miss it altogether as i drive past to the drunk tank
and it’s fleeting, but it’s beautiful
just like all good things

General
I am looking for a lady between 25 and 35 years old, for a committed monogamous childfree relationship. My goal is to become a true team, supporting each other, caring for each other, nurturing each other and helping each other grow and realise our goals and dreams as much as possible. I'm hoping to find someone that values a relationship as much as I do and takes it seriously. It's not the only thing my life revolves around, but it's also not just something 'nice to have' for me.
Basics
I am 186cm tall, slim/fit built, dark brown hair, brown eyes. Both my arms are tattooed (full sleeve), as are my calves and the areas above my ankles. Regarding pictures see below. I am a runner (ranging from 5k to full marathon), training multiple times a week. I'm also vegan. My love languages are physical touch and words of affirmation. While I am mostly securely attached, withdrawing from me triggers anxiety and I have made a horrible experience with a fearful avoidant partner in the past, so that is something I fear I cannot deal with again.
I am also an atheist.
I am a very warm, soft and sensitive person, I think I am humorous, I am self reflecting a lot and I can also be really passionate and romantic. Those are traits that also are really important to me in a woman.
I can be quite social, I am a good talker, but also love to listen to really get to know someone on a deeper level. I can enjoy an evening out with friends just as much as the silence of sitting at the shores of the river and watching the sunset in solitude (although I've been craving to watch it together with a partner for a really long time now). I can be out in a pub, at a rave, a metal show or in the stadium watching football and have the time of my life, but I cannot do these things every day; I need recharge time (on the sofa, in the woods for a run, a lazy Sunday staying in bed etc.). This should give you an idea; basically, I am a homebody that thoroughly enjoys going out in moderation.
I won't say too much about hobbies; suffice it to say I am into the dark, the obscure, the macabre, the occult, the mysterious, the erotic. It won't surprise you that I had a gothic phase in my youth, bonus points if you did too!
What I'm looking for
Although similar hobbies and interests are a plus (and there have to be at least a couple things we have in common), emotional and intimate compatibility are more important to me. I am a very sensitive and emotional person (I do cry easily and by this point I don't think I'll ever be able to change that, sorry), so if you're too, we will definitely understand each other. I need someone who I can open up to (which I do rather quickly, anyway), be myself, bare my soul to and I need these things from you, too. I've had my share of emotionally unavailable women who were afraid of intimacy so I know I can't deal with that again because of the way how those things affect me. I am always emotionally invested with the woman I pursue and in those cases that was to my detriment. But my ability to feel so deep is also something I wouldn't want to change because as of yet, although it's getting harder, I haven't given up on finding someone.
With those emotional needs come two requirements that I found to be vital over the years: First, being able to be silly and cutesy together and to accept each other's inner child and care for it. I am not talking about having to deal with another person's immaturity or inability to perform basic adult skills, rather with the way sadness, hurt, anxiety and being overwhelmed manifests for me (and maybe for you, too?). I need someone who is able to comfort me, to hold me, to allow me to be weak and needy for a while until I've calmed down, and I'm more than ready to offer the same. Your inner child can come out for a while, no problem (: Also in a positive way: Thankfully, today everyone seems to be understanding of the cuteness overload cats (or any animal baby, really) can cause; I need that with a partner. I also still have plushies as comfort animals (some of which in quite a litteral sense as they make for really amazing pillows) and ideally, you do too.
There is a saying that in every relationship, one person is the stronger one. In the past, I have been with women who obviously were stronger than me, but that doesn't mean they always had to be strong, far from it. I certainly, like I said, need to be able to feel protected, but it's not like I'm a particularly needy partner, like everyone, I have my ups and downs, but I can pull my weight and have been told by past partners that I am very caring and that they felt safe and understood with me, and providing that for my partner is really important for me as well – this just to put the picture I'm (somewhat haphazardly) trying to paint into perspective.
Second, intimate compatibility. I am rather insatiable, curious and love to experiment when it comes to the bedroom, so you should, too, in order that we can explore and enjoy together. I found out how fulfilling living out those fantasies can be after years of never being able to try and in a relationship, this kind of fulfillment for both partners is a must for me. Someone on here has coined the term 'filthy best friends and partners' which I have no shame to be stealing because it's such an apt description.
I'm looking for a balance between healthy independence and being emotionally present. A relationship where we 'get' each other; we're both each other's number one and treat each other like royalty. Where a disagreement leads to more intimacy between us as we understand better, not to resentment. Where we're comfortable baring our souls to each other, becoming a safe haven and secure base for each other. I don't like the modern notion that you 'should never feel too safe in a relationship' because that sounds like running from the mafia (and believe me, I love mafia movies); you should always put in effort, yes, but safety is one of the things I always want to experience and provide in a relationship. We shouldn't fear that a disagreement leads straight to breakup. I know ‘self-sufficiency’ is trending right now, but I feel like as partners, we’re partly responsible for each other and not our own but also each other’s happiness. Being dependant and dependable at the same time is important; making each other’s wellbeing a priority. I love the relationship model outlined in Stan Tatkin’s ‘Wired for Love’ and you should, too. If you’re not able to healthily depend on someone and their support while you’re having a hard time, look elsewhere. I know codependency is the latest thing everyone’s afraid of, but experiencing someone you’ve grown very attached to just bailing because they’re counterdependent and can’t stand working on themselves while simultaneously letting you in is something I’d rather not go through again. If I have to be afraid you’ll run at the first major problem that surfaces, even if it’s a ‘you’-problem, it’s not going to work. I think that all things can and need to be talked about. If you think ignoring someone for days is a form of communication, please look elsewhere. If you think’s it’s okay to lovebomb someone and then leave after a couple of months with the minimum amount of information and no proper conversation because you’re not ready to own up to what’s happening to you emotionally, please look elsewhere.
I am looking for someone real. We all have our problems, I don't want or need a 'perfect' person. You don't have everything figured out or 'all your shit' together. Be imperfect. Admit when you feel sad and angry, lonely, hopeless or even helpless – it's all relatable. Don't hide it. Be quirky, be dorky, be witchy, be opinionated, be yourself. Don't pretend.
I'm looking for someone to share romance with. Not great gestures, but small, meaningful ones. Poems for each other, expressing our feelings; cards with heartfelt messages that we put our perfume/cologne on, and a symbol that means something to us only, the print of your lips with lipstick, the way I sign and seal my letters for you.
Just as important to me is agreeing on living a healthy life, staying in shape both for ourselves and for each other, regularly working out and eating healthy. I am drug and disease-free and expect the same of you. I do drink as I love a good beer or glass of wine, rum or whiskey, but I've never really been drinking much and especially during the past year have further reduced it. One vice I have is that I enjoy a couple of cigars a year, but I can definitely accommodate you in this regard.
Another important point is aligned life goals: many childfree people seem to be adventurous, but that is a trait I don't associate with myself at all. I value safety more than adventure. I want to build a home together with my partner, a safespace for the both of us, where we always feel loved and protected, a place that we create together, make it cozy together so we just love to get back home there wherever we might have been, a home we decorate together for Halloween (my favourite holiday) or Christmas or Springtime, as we live in tune with the seasons, seeing them change around us, enjoying nature on a walk or the rain outside, reading in our cozy home. I value stability and harmony.
Appearance-wise, I am into ladies on the smaller side (albeit not regarding height), so I'm looking for someone petite/slim/skinny/healthy-fit. Likewise, I am not really muscular and don't have visible abs; like I said, I'm a runner, so if you're more into the gym-type, I'm not a good fit.
The natural progression for me would be to move from text to voice calls, videochat and then meeting up, all of that rather sooner than later. Not that there’s a need to rush anything, but having my heart broken because I already developed feelings due to a longer timeframe and then everything unexpectedly turning to shit is not something I want to have to live through again. I’d rather see earlier if we’re compatible or not; as someone who catches feelings fast I need to protect myself, I unfortunately had to learn that.
Caveats/Possible red flags

• I don't like travelling as it stresses me out; I don't mind being somewhere else for a week or two, but the organisation part of it drains my energy very quickly and dealing with stuff that doesn't work out is overwhelming to me. Smaller trips are ok, but I'm not the right person to travel the world with.
  
• I am not the most awake person in the morning (i.e. I identify as nightowl)
  
• I don't want children and had a vasectomy
  
• I need space for my own projects/time to recharge after social interaction.
  
• While I feel like I am in tune with my inner child and working on/with it through therapy, I realise this is something that could be a turn-off for people.
  
• I have been diagnosed with depressive episodes in the past and am taking anti-depressants right now. I realise that I am a work in progress, maybe more so than in times past, but I manage and the fact that I'm putting myself out here is based on me being ready to get to know someone new.
  
• I want to create a home together here, as I'm firmly rooted where I was born; I realise this is a lot to ask, but I have seen many people here being open to moving, so I want to at least try reaching out to them.
  

If you're interested, feel free to message me and include some pictures of yourself and I will reply with my own. Have a nice day (:

General
I am looking for a lady between 28 and 35 years old, for a committed monogamous childfree relationship. My goal is to become a true team, supporting each other, caring for each other, nurturing each other and helping each other grow and realise our goals and dreams as much as possible. I'm hoping to find someone that values a relationship as much as I do and takes it seriously. It's not the only thing my life revolves around, but it's also not just something 'nice to have' for me.
I tried to be as concise as possible while still providing what details I think are crucial to know; I realise this post turned out very long, but I prefer those because I can get as good an idea as possible with detailed descriptions, bar actually talking to the person, and find that very valuable, so if that also applies to you, that would be awesome.
Basics
I am 186cm tall, slim/fit built, dark brown hair, brown eyes. Both my arms are tattooed (full sleeve), as are my calves and the areas above my ankles. Regarding pictures see below. I am a runner (ranging from 5k to full marathon), training multiple times a week. I'm also vegan. My love languages are physical touch and words of affirmation. While I am mostly securely attached, withdrawing from me triggers anxiety and I have made a horrible experience with a fearful avoidant partner in the past, so that is something I fear I cannot deal with again.
I am also an atheist.
I am a very warm, soft and sensitive person, I think I am humorous, I am self reflecting a lot and I can also be really passionate and romantic. Those are traits that also are really important to me in a woman.
I can be quite social, I am a good talker, but also love to listen to really get to know someone on a deeper level. I can enjoy an evening out with friends just as much as the silence of sitting at the shores of the river and watching the sunset in solitude (although I've been craving to watch it together with a partner for a really long time now). I can be out in a pub, at a rave, a metal show or in the stadium watching football and have the time of my life, but I cannot do these things every day; I need recharge time (on the sofa, in the woods for a run, a lazy Sunday staying in bed etc.). This should give you an idea; basically, I am a homebody that thoroughly enjoys going out in moderation.
I won't say too much about hobbies; suffice it to say I am into the dark, the obscure, the macabre, the occult, the mysterious, the erotic. It won't surprise you that I had a gothic phase in my youth, bonus points if you did too!
What I am looking for
Although similar hobbies and interests are a plus (and there have to be at least a couple things we have in common), emotional and sexual compatibility are more important to me. I am a very sensitive and emotional person (I do cry easily and by this point I don't think I'll ever be able to change that, sorry), so if you're too, we will definitely understand each other. I need someone who I can open up to (which I do rather quickly, anyway), be myself, bare my soul to and I need these things from you, too. I've had my share of emotionally unavailable women who were afraid of intimacy so I know I can't deal with that again because of the way how those things affect me. I am always emotionally invested with the woman I pursue and in those cases that was to my detriment. But my ability to feel so deep is also something I wouldn't want to change because as of yet, although it's getting harder, I haven't given up on finding someone.
With those emotional needs come two requirements that I found to be vital over the years: First, being able to be silly and cutesy together and to accept each other's inner child and care for it. I am not talking about having to deal with another person's immaturity or inability to perform basic adult skills, rather with the way sadness, hurt, anxiety and being overwhelmed manifests for me (and maybe for you, too?). I need someone who is able to comfort me, to hold me, to allow me to be weak and needy for a while until I've calmed down, and I'm more than ready to offer the same. Your inner child can come out for a while, no problem (: Also in a positive way: Thankfully, today everyone seems to be understanding of the cuteness overload cats (or any animal baby, really) can cause; I need that with a partner. I also still have plushies as comfort animals (some of which in quite a litteral sense as they make for really amazing pillows) and ideally, you do too.
There is a saying that in every relationship, one person is the stronger one. In the past, I have been with women who obviously were stronger than me, but that doesn't mean they always had to be strong, far from it. I certainly, like I said, need to be able to feel protected, but it's not like I'm a particularly needy partner, like everyone, I have my ups and downs, but I can pull my weight and have been told by past partners that I am very caring and that they felt safe and understood with me, and providing that for my partner is really important for me as well – this just to put the picture I'm (somewhat haphazardly) trying to paint into perspective.
Second, sexual compatibility. I have a high libido and I have kinks, so you should, too, in order that we can explore and enjoy them together. I found out how fulfilling living out those fantasies can be after years of never being able to try and in a relationship, sexual fulfillment for both partners is a must for me. Someone on here has coined the term 'filthy best friends and partners' which I have no shame to be stealing because it's such an apt description.
I'm looking for a balance between healthy independence and being emotionally present. A relationship where we 'get' each other; we're both each other's number one and treat each other like royalty. Where a disagreement leads to more intimacy between us as we understand better, not to resentment. Where we're comfortable baring our souls to each other, becoming a safe haven and secure base for each other. I don't like the modern notion that you 'should never feel too safe in a relationship' because that sounds like running from the mafia (and believe me, I love mafia movies); you should always put in effort, yes, but safety is one of the things I always want to experience and provide in a relationship. We shouldn't fear that a disagreement leads straight to breakup. I know ‘self-sufficiency’ is trending right now, but I feel like as partners, we’re partly responsible for each other and not our own but also each other’s happiness. Being dependant and dependable at the same time is important; making each other’s wellbeing a priority. I love the relationship model outlined in Stan Tatkin’s ‘Wired for Love’ and you should, too. If you’re not able to healthily depend on someone and their support while you’re having a hard time, look elsewhere. I know codependency is the latest thing everyone’s afraid of, but experiencing someone you’ve grown very attached to just bailing because they’re counterdependent and can’t stand working on themselves while simultaneously letting you in is something I’d rather not go through again. If I have to be afraid you’ll run at the first major problem that surfaces, even if it’s a ‘you’-problem, it’s not going to work. I think that all things can and need to be talked about. If you think ignoring someone for days is a form of communication, please look elsewhere. If you think’s it’s okay to lovebomb someone and then leave after a couple of months with the minimum amount of information and no proper conversation because you’re not ready to own up to what’s happening to you emotionally, please look elsewhere.
I am looking for someone real. We all have our problems, I don't want or need a 'perfect' person. You don't have everything figured out or 'all your shit' together. Be imperfect. Admit when you feel sad and angry, lonely, hopeless or even helpless – it's all relatable. Don't hide it. Be quirky, be dorky, be witchy, be opinionated, be yourself. Don't pretend.
I'm looking for someone to share romance with. Not great gestures, but small, meaningful ones. Poems for each other, expressing our feelings; cards with heartfelt messages that we put our perfume/cologne on, and a symbol that means something to us only, the print of your lips with lipstick, the way I sign and seal my letters for you.
Just as important to me is agreeing on living a healthy life, staying in shape both for ourselves and for each other, regularly working out and eating healthy. I am drug and disease-free and expect the same of you. I do drink as I love a good beer or glass of wine, rum or whiskey, but I've never really been drinking much and especially during the past year have further reduced it. One vice I have is that I enjoy a couple of cigars a year, but I can definitely accommodate you in this regard.
Another important point is aligned life goals: many childfree people seem to be adventurous, but that is a trait I don't associate with myself at all. I value safety more than adventure. I want to build a home together with my partner, a safespace for the both of us, where we always feel loved and protected, a place that we create together, make it cozy together so we just love to get back home there wherever we might have been, a home we decorate together for Halloween (my favourite holiday) or Christmas or Springtime, as we live in tune with the seasons, seeing them change around us, enjoying nature on a walk or the rain outside, reading in our cozy home. I value stability and harmony.
Appearance-wise, I am into ladies on the smaller side (albeit not regarding height), so I'm looking for someone petite/slim/skinny/healthy-fit. Likewise, I am not really muscular and don't have visible abs; like I said, I'm a runner, so if you're more into the gym-type, I'm not a good fit.
The natural progression for me would be to move from text to voice calls, videochat and then meeting up, all of that rather sooner than later. Not that there’s a need to rush anything, but having my heart broken because I already developed feelings due to a longer timeframe and then everything unexpectedly turning to shit is not something I want to have to live through again. I’d rather see earlier if we’re compatible or not; as someone who catches feelings fast I need to protect myself, I unfortunately had to learn that
Caveats/Possible red flags

• I don't like travelling as it stresses me out; I don't mind being somewhere else for a week or two, but the organisation part of it drains my energy very quickly and dealing with stuff that doesn't work out is overwhelming to me. Smaller trips are ok, but I'm not the right person to travel the world with.
  
• I am not the most awake person in the morning (i.e. I identify as nightowl)
  
• I need space for my own projects/time to recharge after social interaction.
  
• While I feel like I am in tune with my inner child and working on/with it through therapy, I realise this is something that could be a turn-off for people.
  
• I have been diagnosed with depressive episodes in the past and am taking anti-depressants right now. I realise that I am a work in progress, maybe more so than in times past, but I manage and the fact that I'm putting myself out here is based on me being ready to get to know someone new.
  
• I want to create a home together here, as I'm firmly rooted where I was born; I realise this is a lot to ask, but I have seen many people here being open to moving, so I want to at least try reaching out to them.
  

If you're interested, feel free to message me and include some pictures of yourself and I will reply with my own. Have a nice day (:

10,000 Stolen Days

May 10, 2024 marked exactly 10,000 days since Sophie’s life was taken. 10,000 days which had they not been stolen from her in December 1996, must have seemed to be filled with possibility .1996 had been a banner year, she had achieved so much in the previous 6 months, setting up her production company "Les Champs Blancs", and producing three different productions, with more on the way. But it had been exhausting few months with all this work and travel, and although Christmas is a holiday, it is not always a relaxing one.
Christmas had often been a difficult time for Sophie. She walked out her first husband Pierre Jean at Christmas 1981, so suddenly, she left her infant son behind and had to steal him back with a ruse involving a relative. She broke up with Bruno Carbonnet over Christmas in 1993. leaving him a puzzling note;
“Je suis partie là où tu n'a jamais été, là où tu n'iras jamais".
“I have left there where you have never been, there where you will never go”. This didn’t make much sense to Bruno. He waited alone for two weeks in the apartment hoping she would return, he a had bought a bicycle for Pierre Louis for Christmas. In January he left to teach in Le Harve and when he returned the locks had been changed and all his stuff was on the landing. Sophie was deliberate about change in her life she didn't just let things happen to her. Her agenda year planners reflect this. She was meticulous in recording meetings, calls, contact details and travel plans. She brought 1995, 1996 & 1997 year planners with her. There are notes and reminders stretching into February 1997. She even tore off the little perforated corners as each week passed. It's a poignant reminder of how abruptly her life was cut off in full flow - the week beginning 23/12/1996 still has its corner intact.
Sophie’s style was austere, almost minimalist. Her cottage was painted white inside and out, with a except for the ground floor, which was black slate with a shiny varnish. The only decorations were a few sprigs of holly placed by the housekeeper to welcome her. A traditional Christmas week filled with loud music, tinsel and overconsumption was the diametric opposite of her character.
Worse there is the prospect having to trade pleasantries with tiresome relatives.
That Christmas Daniel had decided for the first time to have a big family Christmas inviting his extended aristocratic family to his chateau in Ambax in the South of France. For Sophie, who even after six years of marriage barely knew Daniel’s relatives, this was an easy choice and a hard no.
She bought her ticket on the morning of her travel planning to spend nearly a week in Ireland including Christmas Day and return on the 26^th. It may be that this was the only return flight she could get at the time. Or it may be, as she told her aunt Madame Opalka “she was going to go to Ireland to spend Christmas there, because the house in Ambax was full of people”. From what Daniel has said, and from what others have said, it may be he tried to persuade her to come to Ambax for Christmas and convinced her. Sometime during the weekend she got an itinerary by fax at the cottage confirming her flight back on the 24^th. But even on Sunday afternoon she told friends she had not made up her mind which flight she would take.
It is difficult to say how well their marriage was going at that time because the reports vary. Daniel said it was "harmonius and peaceful" which was far from accurate. There are several biographies of Daniel Toscan du Plantier, and they paint a vivid picture of a man who though incomparably charming, lived his life his own way without much concern for his family. He married four times and in three cases his wives were already pregnant before they got married. When he married Sophie, his eldest son and daughter were not even told about it, they only found out later in the summer when Sophie turned up at events.
Some witnesses including Daniel said was it was the happiest period, others say she was basically “an official wife” and that “their open marriage was an open secret”. The truth was probably somewhere in between. She had visited Ambax in November and collaborated closely on the documentary Europa 101 with Daniel. Whatever their personal arrangement, Daniel was deeply affected by her death, even though he refused to come to Ireland. His daughter Ariane wrote how she spent months taking care of him, feeding him sedatives and sleeping pills. He was clearly overwhelmed, so Sophie must have been more than an "official wife" to him. Was their marriage "open"? They clearly had a high degree of independence from each and had affairs in the past.
Nevertheless, Sophie may have balked at spending Christmas in Ambax. For one thing, it was far away from Paris, where her friends and family lived. For another, Daniel’s family and entourage knew very little about her. Apart from his second son Carlo, who was friends with her son Pierre Louis and some servants, she would have been on her own. Christmas in Paris would have been tolerable, she could escape and visit her parents and friends whenever she wanted, but in Ambax, she would be cooped up with nowhere else to go.
There is a question of whether Daniel was having an affair at the time. According to a Garda memo, French journalist Caroline Mangez said that Daniel was with a female film producer. However the files are full of unsubstantiated rumours and lies. Even if he wasn’t having an affair Sophie may have suspected he was. If Daniel had invited a mistress, or even a former mistress, or a former wife to Ambax, it would be unbearably awkward for Sophie. Daniel had uncountable affairs, and many of his mistresses knew each other, some remained on good terms.
Daniel may have been faithful at that time, perhaps he was telling the truth when he said their marriage was harmonius, but in any case Sophie had other reasons to skip Christmas. She had wanted to come to Dunmanus for months, but work got in the way. The heating had just been fixed and she needed to pay the plumber and her housekeeper. They preferred cash.
And if Daniel was unhappy that she wasn’t going to be there for Christmas, they were going on holiday together in the New Year to Dakar, Senegal. It would be much easier for Sophie to be with Daniel by himself than his whole family. This trip to Ireland would be a breather for her. She didn’t want to be alone, she asked at least 8 different people to accompany her, including 2 former intimate partners, though there is no evidence that she was having an affair or intended to have an affair.
There is a post-it note with a message in Sophie's hand seemingly inviting someone to spend Christmas: "Je vous laisse le choix : venir ou de refuser histoire que vous passiez un bon noel"
"I leave you the choice: come or refuse just so you have a good Christmas"
Whoever that note was written to, it was to someone she addressed as "vous" so not one of her closest friends or family.

Work

If she had another relationship, it is not obvious from her diary and it was unknown to her friends. What her diary does show though is that she had thrown herself into work.
Apart from her agenda she kept a working notebook, a red hardback book which is filled with a tantalizing mash of different references to famous works of art, music, and contacts details of artists and philosophers. She had recently completed work on three different films. The first work was a documentary on African Art. The next was Europa 101, a documentary written by Daniel showcasing the wealth of European cinema. This was Daniel’s pet project, he loathed US cinema and the dominance of Hollywood. He once likened his wife’s death to a “bad movie”. His life’s work was a “struggle against cheap portrayals of violence, which is what leads to deaths like this” (Irish Independent 12/07/1998). This project involved gathering interviews and footage from dozens of famous directors and actors, including John Malkovich, Ingmar Berman, Pedro Almodovar, Werner Herzog, Nanni Moretti, Jean Luc Godard and many others. It was broadcast on December 8, 1996.
The third was an art house movie called “He sees folds everywhere”, a concept movie exploring the idea of folds and creases in everyday life, in hanging clothes, paper, wrinkles on skin, folds of a human brain. This was a project of the director Guy Girard, and it was the work to complete this that delayed her trip to Ireland. But she had other projects in train in her notebook. She was researching Greek folk music, Rebetiko. She had a project or projects in mind which were somewhat dark in nature.
She was in contact with George Didi-Huberman who had written a book called “The Invention of Hysteria”. This is a photographic history of how Jean Marie Charcot – one of the giants of 19c French science – locked up thousands of women for the imagined maladies of hysteria, lethargy, catalepsie and experimented on them, deliberately photographing them in contrived and frightening poses. It is a very weird and frightening history.
Her next project seems to have been based around human fluids. Her final notes are filled with references to human flesh, death and the four medieval humours of blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile. There are extensive notes to what seems to be a lecture given by linguist Jean Claude Milner on the subject of melancholia. Note that “melancholia” is a synonym for “black bile”, one of the four humours.
She was researching the avant garde Irish/British painter Francis Bacon, who was known for producing uniquely disturbing images. She references “Three Studies for the Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion”. There was a Bacon exhibition in Centre Pompidou in 1996 and Sophie must have attended it. Her notebook contains her jottings from a lecture on Bacon by writer Philippe Sollers which seemed focused on blood.
"Why does painting touch the central nervous system?" "We are carcasses of meat, meat above all" "The canvas bleeds, blood spurts red" "Dostoyevsky had a crisis in front of the 16^th century Hans Holbein’s painting “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb She jotted down a quote from the play Libation Bearers from Aeschylus:
Orestes sees the Furies coming and exclaims "O Lord Apollon look! Now they come in troops, and from their eyes they drip loathsome blood!"
The last entry reads "research the Furies"

Friday

Having failed to convince anyone to join her in Ireland for Christmas, she went alone. She telephoned Josephine on Tuesday 17^th, told her she would be arriving alone on Friday. She called her again on Thursday to ask her to make sure the house would be warm.
She went to the airport on Friday morning, bought a ticket with the return date on the 26^th, carrying with her a rather hefty bag filled with clothes, including some eveningwear. Perhaps she envisaged visiting people at Christmas time. She expected to stay nearly a week. Later, possibly on Sunday she changed her ticket, she called the Aer Lingus ticket desk in Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris and got a return flight for the 24^th. She received the itinerary details by fax, as she had a machine in the cottage.
She was not in a good mood when she arrived. She had some words with the woman at the Avis counter who passed her to her colleague. The photos on CCTV show a woman looking tired and drawn, something which was remarked upon by the Avis rep, who estimated she was in her forties, a little older than her 38 years. But nobody looks their best walking off an aircraft. She had also attended the Unifrance Christmas party the night before. This was a lavish party held in “Les Bains Douche”, a unique Paris nightclub combined with a swimming pool. Apart from the late night, the social effort must have been tiring. There was a rumour that Sophie had a row that night at Les Bains, a row with one of Daniel’s mistresses, but I have never heard that confirmed. But other reports say that those who met her there found her "radiant", "in good form", "playful". "She went arm in arm to see friends," one guest at the party told Paris Match, "but she always came back to the table where Daniel was sitting." (Paris Match 09/01/1997) Daniel was quoted years later by Michael Sheridan - “She spent some hours having an intense, passionate conversation with a film-maker” - Alain Terzian, producer of Les Visiteurs, one of the most successful French comedies of the 1990s.
Strangely though, Daniel’s first statement said she left on Wednesday. So perhaps it didn’t register with him that she was at the Unifrance party with him on Thursday 19^th, or perhaps he had forgotten the party altogether.
Sophie was captured on Cork Airport CCTV at 14:41 pushing a trolley through the arrivals gate. The scheduled arrival time was 13:20, but because of almost an hour’s delay in departure it didn’t touch down until after 2. It would have taken about 15 minutes to pick up baggage from the carousel.
Cork is a small airport and it is quick to get through the arrival hall to the car hire desks, only a matter of a few meters away.
Sophie hired a silver Ford Fiesta and would have been on the road by 14:50.
The quickest route to West Cork would have been via Bandon and Dunmanway but it is more likely she went via Clonakilty and Skibbereen. She stopped in Ballydehob to buy kindling. She may have stopped in Skibbereen to buy petrol. A pump attendant reported seeing a woman matching her description driving a silver Ford buying petrol. He also noted a tall male companion in the passenger seat. The Gardai discounted this sighting because they accounted for the petrol in the car when it was hired and the mileage thereafter. There were also some discrepancies in the vehicle’s appearance and its description in the statement. Also the Ballydehob sighting is more reliable as the woman got a chance to talk to her. It would seem odd to stop in both Skibbereen and Ballydehob, both petrol stations.
But she seems to have stopped again in Schull because she bought bread and cheese in the Courtyard Deli, and this was most likely on Friday. She talked with the proprietor, Denis Quinlan to ask if there would be live music. At this stage it would have been around 4:30pm and after this she went to the cottage. She called her caretaker Josephine at 5:15, so she must have been at home by then. We don’t know if she went out after that point. She may have stayed in. At 10:15 she called her friend Agnès Thomas and spoke to her for half an hour.

Saturday

Sophie’s whereabouts on Saturday morning are unknown. Perhaps she stayed in, perhaps she went out. Finbarr Hellen was working on his land nearby and saw her car outside the house 12 to 1pm. He didn’t see her and thought it was unusual for her not to come out and say hello. He also remarked her car was parked in an unusual place. He did not elaborate more than this.
The next event we know is that she bought some groceries in Brosnans supermarket on the main street in Schull and took £200 out of the ATM.
For the curious, her shopping list is listed below:

Item	Price
Firelighters	0.85
Independent Newspaper	0.85
EP Televised "Chopped" & Her	0.52
Parsley	0.40
Low Fat Yoghurt	1.90
Ballygowan Natural Spring Water	0.85
Napolina Penne	0.75
Rashers	1.26
Courgettes	1.23
Chicory	1.79
Onions	0.09
Fox's Classic Biscuits	0.83
Flat Mushrooms	0.65
Pepper Coated Salami	0.85
Cooked Turkey	1.89
Mushrooms	0.34
Avonmore Leek & Potato Soup	0.99
Monini Olive Oil	3.45
Ballygowan Natural Spring Water	0.85
Avonmore Carrot & Coriander Soup	0.99
Ballygowan Natural Spring Water	0.85
	22.18

This list does suggest she was buying just for herself, but also that she planned to cook moderately elaborate meals with parsley, courgettes and chicory. Together with the cheese, bread and fruit already in the house she had enough food on there to last a few days. This quantity of food suggests she had not decided to travel home on the 24^th at this stage.
The till recorded a time of 2:49pm.
Sometime after this or perhaps before Sophie entered Tara Fashions, the clothes shop run by Marie Farrell. What Marie Farrell saw that day and subsequent days has been subject to revision, retraction and details seemed to be added with each telling. But I think the most reliable report is the first and all the subsequent revisions cannot be trusted. Farrell called the Gardai on the 25^th but they didn’t get around to taking a statement from her until 27^th. Even so we can assume her memory was fresh. Here is her statement, verbatim.,
On Saturday the 21st December 1996 I was working in my shop at Main Street, Schull, Co. Cork. Between 2p.m. and 3p.m. I noticed a weird looking character across the road from my shop. He was approx 5’10” in height, late 30’s, scruffy looking, long black coat, flat black beret, thin build, sallow skin, short hair. He was there for about 10 minutes. On Sunday morning at 7.15a.m. approximately I noticed the same man on the road at Airhill. When I saw him he was walking towards Goleen on the right hand side of the road and I was travelling in the opposite direction. When he saw me he stopped and put up his hand to thumb a lift. I did not see this man before or since. On Saturday the 21.12.1996 at approx 3p.m. there was a woman in my shop. She did not buy anything. I now know that this woman was the deceased woman from Goleen. I recognised her from the photograph on the television.
There is also a record of her questionnaire which may have been taken earlier than this statement.
In reply to question no 8 When/where did you last see him/her alive? She replied "saw her in shop. She bought a "Carrig Donn" aran sweater aran nap coloured, rolled neck late Sat aftemoon. Paid £39.00. Questions No. 9, 10, 11 & 12 were left blank. In reply to question No. 13 "any other help?" Marie Farrell replied "saw a man on Sat afternoon hanging around street. Desc late 30's, 5'10" very short hair wearing black beret. Saw him again Sun morning @ 7.20am walking towards Airhill but thumbed her.
In a later questionnaire, Farrell said the sweater was too big and she didn’t buy it.
What is interesting her is that Farrell does not draw any explicit linkage between the weird character in the long black coat and the woman in the shop. They were just there at approximately the same time. Farrell did say in later statements that the man followed her up Ardnamanagh road, but this was many years later. Her statements that she saw the same man at Kealfadda bridge at 3am on Monday are untrustworthy, but we won't go into this here.
A farmer, Frank Lannin, saw Sophie driving towards Schull from Goleen around 3pm. She saluted him as she passed him in his tractor. The time or the direction of travel must be wrong here.
The final sighting on Saturday she was seen in the Courtyard pub, eating a crab sandwich and left at 3:30pm. Sally Bolger went to feed her horses on Alfie Lyons land at 4:15pm and says she saw Sophie’s car at her house.
Saturday evening is a complete blank. Nobody saw her, she may have called people on the phone but we don’t have precise details. Her husband said she called him twice on Saturday, but we don’t have any confirmation of this.
At some point Sophie changed her ticket home. Her diary has a number listed as “O’Mahony” and the number was the line to the Aer Lingus ticket desk in Charles-de-Gaulle Roissy airport. The new itinerary was faxed to her in her cottage. The reason why she decided to come home early is not known. Her friend Jean Senet said her husband Daniel persuaded her. For his part Daniel said there was no particular plan and he was to pick her up from the airport at Toulouse at 8pm. Another report tells that she came home early to meet her father, so she could help him with his taxes.

Sunday

For Sunday morning we don’t have any reports.
She called to Dunlough at in the early afternoon, perhaps around 1pm. Sophie had walked here several times before. It is a spectacular headland featuring a lake and three crumbling castles. It was cold and dry at the time, good weather for a walk, if bracing. It is necessary to pass the farm to walk the headland and when Sophie did so she met Tomi Ungerer. This was the second time they had met. Sophie had called here in April but it seemed Tomi and his wife were having a row at the time and Tomi had not paid much attention. Daniel said that Sophie feigned a puncture as an excused to call to the farm. In June Sophie had sent Tomi a fax about the death of a mutual colleague, Gilbert Estève. She may have been seeking information or just making contact. Sophie made a habit out of making contacts with important artists and thinkers. It was one of the things that a colleague said of her, she knew all the right people. It is possible that Tomi was one of the people Sophie wanted to meet for a while. Tomi invited her in for a drink after she had finished her walk. She returned an hour later and they had a conversation over two glasses of wine.
Tomi was a renowned visual artist, with a keen eye and a professional interest in culture. Born in Alsace he was marked by World War II and had seen the ravages of the Nazis and the backlash from the French afterwards. He worked for as a cultural ambassador to improve Franco German relations.
The statement that Tomi gave is remarkable in the insight it gives to Sophie’s character her interests and state of mind.
“She was saying how great Ireland was for literature and education compared to France, how France had thousands of books published every year but that there was no good Authors there, how Ireland was vibrant as a centre of literature for a small Country. She discussed her family, moreover her children and their education in France. She indicated that the reason she was here in Ireland was she wanted to be alone for Christmas. I considered this strange but I sometimes like to be alone too. We talked about books and culture and how the language here was more meaningful and truthful compared to the superficial nature of the French.”
“She seemed a very genuine person, a fine person, not pretentious or snobby. I thought she was deep and intelligent, so much so that I made notes of some things she said, “In a language there should be no need of the use of cuteness” “The problem of France is her lack of modesty”. I wrote those saying they might be useful for my work in the futre. I wrote the quotes on a card in which we exchanged addresses before she left. On hindsight now I would go as far as saying she was not beaming, that she had something on her mind. It’s hard when you do not know someone well to say. I offered her a third glass of wine but she did not take any. We gave her some eggs to take with her, half dozen for her supper. We have hens.”
The word “genuine” is telling. Tomi was struck by Irish people, how the highest compliment an Irish person can give about another, is to say that person is “genuine”.
Tomi described her appearance:
“She was wearing some type of black leather expensive looking pants, brown suede hiking boots, a white/cream ribbed polo necked sweater and a beige wool blazer and a navy blue wool jacket with belt and a navy wool cap and red suede gloves, wine/red gloves. She was dressed very well. She had her hair tied back.”
As to her demeanor, this seems to have grown with the telling. The documentaries made much of the legend of the lady of the lake, whose appearance is reputed to be a harbinger of death. This lurid tale does not feature in the early Garda statements. Tomi remarked that “she was not beaming”, that she may have had something on her mind. His wife Yvonne turned up while they were chatting.
“While we were chatting, Sophie told me that while she was up at the castles she felt this great anxiety almost fear. This is not an uncommon feeling for people who visit the castles. She wasn’t in a cheerful mood but she wasn’t really glum either. She talked about her plans for the future and we spoke about meeting up in Paris in the Spring. She seemed happy to be here and she wanted to be here. She said she liked it here but her husband didn’t. She said she would be back at Easter. We made vague arrangements to meet over the next three days. I gave Sophie some eggs and she left here at about 5.45 p.m.” Yvonne’s estimate of the time she left must be an error. It is more likely she left at around 3:45.
After leaving Dunlough Sophie went to Crookhaven to Sullivans pub, a legendary stop. Here she spoke with the proprietor Billy O’Sullivan and his son Dermot, both of whom speak good French and knew Sophie from prior visits. They also knew her friend Alexandra Lewy. One time Alexandra had arranged to buy a cast iron church gate for Sophie’s birthday, Sophie was fond of antiques and bric-a-brac. Dermot had carried this gate up to the cottage. Sophie asked about getting logs for her fire. Dermot recommended she go to a filling station. She said there was only kindling at the filling stations.
It is interesting that so much of Sophie’s alleged stops and conversations were about fire, kindling, logs etc. Despite this, the photos from her house show she had a lot of fuel. There is a stack of logs, several bales of peat briquettes, what looks to be a 40kg bag of coal and one, perhaps two baskets full of kindling. She had enough for days of fires, unless she lit both hearths, which would be unlikely considering the second hearth did not draft properly, and she was arranging to have it fixed. The kindling may have been bought from Camiers Garage when Kitty Kingston reported meeting her on Friday.
She told her friend Alexandra before she left that she was going to sleep in the guest room because it was the warmest room, being directly above the oil range. There was also a brass bedwarmer found next to her bed. All these details point to Sophie being acutely aware of the cold.
A witness heard her discussing the old Coastguard houses with the Sullivans. These are a prominent landmark visible from O’Sullivan’s pub across the water. The witness left before Sophie did at 4:30pm so she must have returned to the cottage no earlier than 5pm.
The witness noted she was wearing “black leather pants and brown suede desert boots and a long chunky jumper”. This matches well with Tomi Ungerer’s account.
Note the "desert boots" seen by this witness and the "suede hiking boots" mentioned by Tomi Ungerer are probably not the hiking boots she was wearing when she died. The hiking boots she was wearing were very worn, the laces had snapped and had been tied halfway down the lace holes. It looks to me she shoved them on without untying/tying the laces. Sophie would not have visited Schull wearing old worn-out shoes. A pair of dark brown suede "desert boots" are visible at the bottom of the stairs in the garda photos. These match better with the shoes seen by the witness.
It’s 25 minutes drive from Crookhaven back to the cottage so if Sophie left at 4:30 she would have been back home before 5pm.
We know she most likely went home, because at 5:32pm she called her friend Agnès Thomas to wish her a happy birthday. Agnès was out so Sophie left a message.
The postman called at 6pm and noted the lights were on. Presumably he was doing a Sunday shift to cope with the Christmas rush. He didn’t see Sophie’s car, but as he only went as far as the lower gate, it is quite possible he missed it.
At 7:30pm she called her housekeeper Josephine but she was out. She tried her again at 9:10pm but again she was out. Josephine returned and called her back at 10pm. Sophie told her she would be leaving on the 24^th, not the 26^th as she originally intended. They arranged to meet the following day at noon.
Sophie’s phone records were not available, as the exchange she was on was a traditional analogue exchange, with no recording facility. Schull was one of the last places in the country to have such an old system. Days later Garda technicians tried to retrieve call details from her cordless phone but its batteries were flat and nothing was found.
At around 10:30pm she called her husband Daniel, who said he couldn’t take her call. He said he was in a meeting with Unifrance associates. As it was nearly midnight in France, this an unusual time to have a work meeting. Daniel called her back “about twelve minutes later”. He said she was sleepy and probably in bed. Given that the cordless phone was found next to her bed, this seems plausible. He also said that she told him about her visit to the Ungerers and had formed a work project with him. He said she told him she returned home at 9:30pm, but he could be wrong about this. The phone calls to her friend and housekeeper strongly suggest she was at home from 5:30pm.
This was the last anyone heard from Sophie until her body was discovered at 10am the following morning.
From this point all we have is are the police photos and the story they tell is ambiguous, there are multiple possible interpretations.
The fire was lit that evening and there was an empty wine glass on the mantlepiece with dregs of wine in it. There was a loaf of bread, a white crusty “basket loaf” which had been sliced and left open. This is odd as there are no crumbs visible on the table and no plate. Would Sophie have gone to bed leaving the bread out? It’s possible. Another possibility is that the bread was sliced in the morning. But if so where is the plate that she used?
Conceivably Sophie may have left these items from another evening, but it is more likely she consumed the wine that evening, possibly with some cheese she had in her pantry, and the bread she had cut. There was a book open on the table, propped open by a jar of honey next to an empty teacup. However as the cordless phone was found by her bedside, it seems likely this was all left from the previous evening.
It seems the most likely Sophie spent her last night reading, went to bed and then took the call from Daniel.
The book propped open was not a Yeat’s anthology. There is a tale repeated by many true crime authors that Sophie was reading a Yeats poem called “A Dream Death”. It contains the lines
I DREAMED that one had died in a strange place Near no accustomed hand,
Ralph Riegel titled his book after this poem. But this is not the poem she was reading, if any. Yes there was a Yeats anthology found on her bed, but not the bed she slept in, it was on the bed in her personal room which she didn’t use that weekend. The anthology is “Quarente-cinq poèmes suivi de La Résurrection”, a collection of later Yeats poems translated by Yves Bonnefoy. It does not contain the poem “A Dream of Death” but it does contain a poem called “Death”, a meditation on how animals die versus men.
Nor dread nor hope attend A dying animal; A man awaits his end Dreading and hoping all;
But the Yeats anthology is not open on the bed, it is closed in the police photos. Unless the Gardai picked it up before photographing the room, then we cannot be sure what poem or poems she read. As regards the book propped open on the kitchen table, it’s prose and it is French. Journalist Lara Marlowe wrote that the book open on the table was a book about lighthouses.
Among the exhibits the Gardai took are three books

1. Le Coeur Battant – “The beating heart” – this is the title of a 1960 French movie.
2. Le Tenes Vert – Unknown – looks like a transcription error by the Gardai, could be “Les Terres Vertes”
3. Le Cine Monde – World Cinema

Other books in the house seem to correspond well with what we know of her character. On the landing there is another book from an Irish writer, Sean O’Casey, “Les Tambours de Dublin” in French.
On the shelf in her box bedroom we can see a book by Virginia Woolf, the title itself is illegible in the photo but Woolf’s distinctive profile photo is visible on the spine. I wonder if the book might be “A Room of one’s Own”. This essay advocated that a woman writer could never accomplish anything unless she had financial independence and her own space to work in. Even if it was some other book by Woolf, this essay would have been known to Sophie. It hints at what the white cottage meant to her. Her tiny box room tucked under the gable and raised single bed was a quasi-monastic cell - a creative space, a room of her own in West Cork.

Hey all. I live in Littleton and am looking for an Irish bar that has live Irish music. I know a few places have an Irish jam band where a bunch of musicians get together and jam every week, which is great but not what I'm looking for here. I am referring to live Irish pub music, where a band/singer plays songs like Whiskey in the Jar, Tim Finnegan's Wake, etc. I'd prefer to find a spot in Denver, but I'd love to hear about places elsewhere too like Boulder, FC, CS. Thanks!

It’s been one thousand one hundred and fourty-four days. The wounds have never healed. The scars will never fade. Do you still take a long time to get ready? Do you still wear that red dress, those cute socks to help you sleep better? I wish you still do. I still remember how much you light up, how gleaming your smiles were during the wee hours, at quarter after three, when you’ve finally accomplished all those polaroids you had to hang up on your wall facing east. Although it may be a fleeting moment, you were as beautiful as the night. Tranquil and serene, you gave Morpheus all your might. 

But this work, the poem that’s coming, is not for you nor the feeling of longing — this will be for those flies who ended on a dead spider’s web, moths with no flames to melt them with embers, and the perfect parcel delivered on the wrong doorsteps. This is for them.
The Night Does Not Belong To God; For it belongs to every picture you left facing down Images of feelings we wished we could drown Sparks of emotions uncreased and never hung
Semicolon pendants on necks weighing tons Robes of adoration seldom adorned Lilies, peonies, carnations you loved in pink Whiskey, neat, chugged down and spit in your sink Dusk has its horns to souls who are yearning Twilight whistles whims of glee to those dreaming But this isn’t a call of hope This is a cry for hearts lead on but abandoned
Messages in bottles, long lost for nautical miles Rolling, pitching, yawing, grounding in unwelcome shores Warmth of sand, pebbles, and shells on your feet How comforting, lips muttered Slapped by the surprise of pulling riptides
Blaming oxytocins, seeking endorphins Where are you going tonight Ringing their phone and wish it’s alright
Close your eyes, lonely child Let out a sigh and pray Memento Dolor

It’s been one thousand one hundred and fourty-four days. The wounds have never healed. The scars will never fade. Do you still take a long time to get ready? Do you still wear that red dress, those cute socks to help you sleep better? I wish you still do. I still remember how much you light up, how gleaming your smiles were during the wee hours, at quarter after three, when you’ve finally accomplished all those polaroids you had to hang up on your wall facing east. Although it may be a fleeting moment, you were as beautiful as the night. Tranquil and serene, you gave Morpheus all your might. 

But this work, the poem that’s coming, is not for you nor the feeling of longing — this will be for those flies who ended on a dead spider’s web, moths with no flames to melt them with embers, and the perfect parcels delivered on the wrong doorsteps. This is for them. The Night Does Not Belong To God; For it belongs to every picture you left facing down Images of feelings we wished we could drown Sparks of emotions uncreased and never hung Semicolon pendants on necks weighing tons
Robes of adoration seldom adorned
Lilies, peonies, carnations you loved in pink Whiskey, neat, chugged down and spit in your sink
Dusk has its horns to souls who are yearning Twilight whistles whims of glee to those dreaming But this isn’t a call of hope This is a cry for hearts lead on but abandoned Messages in bottles, long lost for nautical miles Rolling, pitching, yawing, grounding in unwelcome shores Warmth of sand, pebbles, and shells on your feet How comforting, lips muttered Slapped by the surprise from pulling riptides Blaming oxytocins, seeking endorphins Where are you going tonight Ringing their phone and wish it’s alright
Close your eyes, lonely child
Let out your sighs and pray Memento Dolor

Summary: A young college student is excited to enjoy his first power hour with this roommates to horrifying results.
My Last Power Hour
I haven't thought about this in awhile but it's coming back to me now like it was yesterday. I think they call it “set and setting” or “state dependent memory”. I don't remember exactly I guess I don't have to anymore.
It was two years ago and I was a sophomore in undergrad at a state university in the Midwest. It was the proverbial ivory tower, a land of oz, an urban oasis amid a sea of corn. It was a Friday night some early in Fall Semester either late August or early September. I remember my flooded sinuses and raw eyes vividly as a sign we were downwind of harvesting.
I knew why I wasn't taking my allergy medicine tonight. I sat maniacally mashing my xbox controller beside my HALO brother in arms and roommate Kevin while our second roommate Pete illegally bought tonight's booze from whoever he said he knew could get us some. I wasn't much of a drinker, in fact I only had a couple of beers in my entire life up to that point and all since starting undergrad. I was kind of straight edge kid in high school and I justified drinking now as a breaking point, a landmark of sorts between my cringe high school years and my new maturing college years.
I supported in this endeavor by my high school friend Kevin. Pete on the other hand was a rando from the dorm Kevin and I lived in during freshman year and through the close quarters and mutual interest in HALO and poker, we decided it would be cheaper to split a four bedroom apartment 3 ways rather than two. Kevin and I were childhood friends since peewee soccer. Pete on the other hand, was a bit more, uh, let's say rustic, oh hell, a bit more redneck but seemed to take well to the college life or a form of it. He had kind of become our immoral compass.
Kevin and I were in the midst of losing a round of team death-match online when Pete came bursting through our door hauling a case of beer and a large brown paper bag of clinking bottles and the telltale squeak of foil snack bags. He was a woodland camouflage blur as he stormed purposefully between Kevin and my line of sight to the video game. “Power Hour, bitchesssssssssssss!”
Kevin, with his red side burns jutting around his Chicago Bears baseball hat, reacted to Pete's overt rudeness by rolling his eyes. I shot back the opposite: a bright smile, a burst of boy on Christmas morning enthusiasm and wonder at the prospect of getting really messed up doing a power hour. With that I flew to the kitchen table where Pete stood unpacking goodies.
“Hey, Kevin,” Pete shouted, “Go get your CD player and speakers.” I watched Kevin dutifully obey, duck into his room before hauling out a portable CD player, two brick sized speakers tangling in a mess of their own wiring.
Pete patiently unpacked a thirty case of Coors marked with camouflage and blaze orange. “Jay, count them out, seven a piece. I'll get the shot glasses from my room.”. I blew my nose and counted the chilled cans and placed them within reach across the table. Pete swung out of his bedroom with shot glasses but snapped his fingers and retreated back.
“Hey man, you know, you don't have to do the whole thing.” Kevin said untangling the sound system and a DC adapter.
“What do you mean? Of course I'm going to do it.”
“I'm just saying you're kinda going from zero to sixty pretty damn fast.”
“Oh, right, you're the expert all of the sudden on drinking.”
“Well, I drank in high school and you didn't.”
“They called you chuck 'ems because of your barfing at Jessica Z's birthday party.”
“Right, that's actually sort of my point. I don't do that anymore, I did that because I drank too much without wading into it.”
“I'm sure this is going to be fine.”
“Well, whatever man, I'm just saying don't let Pete bully you into continuing if you're not up for it. I'll support you in that.”
Pete thundered into the room singing something in choir pig latin that I vaguely remember from Monty Python and Holy Grail when they carried out the holy hand grenade. Pressed between his finger tips was a CD jewel case containing a gold re writable disk scribbled with black sharpie “ultimate power hour”.
“So, what exactly are the rules?”
“Silence!” Pete declared as he popped the disk into the CD player. “I'll let the mix do the talking.”
So there we were packed around a circular table in a dingy dimly lit poorly furnished campus apartment with barely painted blotchy drywall ready to kickoff our weekend. The first track crackled to life with fake static and the muffled and occasionally squeaky voice echoing a 1950's educational film reel but with shades of Rod Sterling. “Gentlemen in opposite alphabetical order indicate this quarter's beer master – he is responsible for refilling your beer once per track for the first fifteen tracks. If there are fewer than four of you, simply rotate back to the first or alternate per quarter. Each track is timed for one minute and each player must consume their shot of beer within that one minute period. Each quarter consists of fifteen drinks with a 1 minute pause at the end of the first and third quarters. There will be a five minute half time and shot of liquor.” Pete rummaged displayed an unopened bottle of black labeled whiskey, “A shot at the end is also mandatory. Each person will be permitted 1 five minute time out per game. By the end of the this roughly sixty nine minute game, assuming no timeouts, you gentlemen will be well on your way to a blissful gentlemanly state perfect charming that sweetheart on your wonderful night off. This track will end in five, four, three, two, one.”
“Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin blasted through the speakers like a nuclear bomb as I enthusiastically dropped the first once and half of gold down my throat. I gagged a little as I was not accustom to doing shots much less shots of carbonation. I was left with this inoffensive sweet bready taste that slowly turned slightly more irritating and metallic. The only way to get rid of that taste was probably to drink more and I wouldn't have to wait long.
“What's with this old stuff?” Kevin objected to the first track as he cleared his mouth.
“It's got something for everyone.” Pete declared as he splashed around,
Something for everyone indeed but I do not for the life of me remember all sixty tracks and I'll probably get a few wrong as I relay the course of this experience to you.
A minute elapsed and then the intro to Pulp Fiction had me slamming another pour of beer. Recounting all of this now seems kind of dumb I guess I can skip the next twenty eight minutes and let you know I think “Sweet Escape” by Gwen Steffani wrapped half time. None of us had used their time outs. I was feeling it and was kind of besides myself in a swamp of gilded pleasure. I was jarred back to the table by the lack of music to get lost in.
“How you doing there Jay? You gonna puke?” Pete flicked my shoulder hard. I blinked and focused in. I realized Kevin was down the hall in the bathroom. “We're half way through, man. You're doing it!”
“I'm doing it” I mouthed back as I noticed I was losing my ability to control my vocal features with precision. I tried to take my mind off of it by wishfully thinking about what we would be doing after this, where would we go and with whom.
“We should go down to that event down at the Student Union. Show the straight edge kids what they're missing and then maybe hit up Rocko's Cellar.”
In the moment where my thoughts were heavy I was instinctively reactive against the Student Union. “Maybe just go to the Rocko's.”
“Oh, because you know Sydney is going to be there and you don't want her to see you drunk off your ass.” Kevin chimed in with a surly tone from the hallway.
Yup, Kevin was right, that was the underlying reason. I had an undergrad crush on Sydney Cole, a beautiful sleak blonde woman apparently from Nebraska.
“Well, you know its goddamn sensible to not, you know, go to an undergrad thing like that piss ass drunk off a power hour. I'm good to go to Rocko's though.” I explained.
The silent track started to pick up and the coy sickly sweet vibe of “Tubthumping” filled the air. Peter pushed fresh shot glasses brimming with caramel colored whiskey at us. There wasn't a lot of room in my gut but I was okay with this and as the song started to fade we took the shot and as the liquor burn started to linger I was looking forward to another shot of smooth tasty beer as “Down with the sickness” started to play.
I don't remember the last song on the playlist. I remember Pete flicked my ear and then pointed down at my shot while smiling at me. Everything felt like I was wearing a soaking wet wool jacket and a plastic bag over my head. I took the shot without thinking and about half of the burning yet numbing liquid dribbled out of my mouth. Pete clapped his hands and announced he was leading us out to Rocko's. Kevin shrugged and then shook his head violently before nodding. I garbled something to effect I needed to go to the bathroom then with all the grace of walking through a foot of water with inverted buckets strapped to my feet I waded down the dark hallway occasionally bracing myself against the walls.
I wasn't going to throw up. I knew that about myself. I wasn't going to throw up. At least I thought I knew myself. The alcohol was not playing nice with my allergies. I needed some cool water on my face. I shut my eyes hard and blew out my nose in effort to clear some snot and restore equilibrium. I turned on the faucet and I knocked Kevin's contact holder into the sink. I finally felt something pop back into place in my head and sinuses as a stream of snot left my nostrils into the sink.
“Ah crap!” I let out a garbled yell as dunked both hands into the sink to fish out the contact case from the torrent of my snot. My hands dove in and it didn't feel like water nor like snot. It felt sort of rubbery almost like gelatin. I opened my eyes and found my vision had been impaired and distorted, almost like after you rub your eyes really hard and see the dark blotches but this was narrow tunnel with the blotches around the edges and skewed colors. I couldn't really make out much around the sink. I blinked a few times to try to clear my vision but to no avail and that's when I turned my head down and saw what was in the sink.
I nearly leapt back in fright as I saw my eyes, and the flesh of my nose, and my lips floating on of the water in front of the faucet. They were staring back me from the sink for a panicked count of three before they cartoonishly swirled together like a runny egg flushed down the drain with a slurping noise. I gripped the sink with both hands as I mustered the courage to look at myself in the mirror. It was impossible I told myself. What I saw was impossible. In my limited vision I could make out skin covered indentations over my eye sockets, a flat patch of flesh where my nose had been, and my lips were replaced with a small dark hole barely wide enough to fit a pencil.
I shook and held my breath as my hands confirmed what the blotchy after image of missing eyes saw in the mirror. What was worse is my skin felt gelatinous, sweaty, and infirm, like ice cream warming on the counter. I shuttered and fell back against the wall with a painful thud. I heard Kevin and Pete laugh in the kitchen.
Okay, I told myself I must just be going a little nuts. How could I still see, afterall, if I had no eyes? I tested a hypothesis by smelling some soap and I was discouraged by the fact I couldn't smell the Tropical Waterfall scented liquid. I gulped and knew I at least still had a tongue and I could still hear myself make sounds which could loosely be interpreted as words. Mixed results I thought, maybe I could clear my head by casually leaving this nightmare bathroom and checking with my roommates.
I opened the door and made it half down the hall when Kevin casually headed my way cradling a bag of chips. The mushy look on his face lit up and his mouth erupted with a spray of chip crumbles before he literally fell on his back and did his best backward crawling Sarah Conner spots a Terminator impression. He chokes then starts screaming. Then the horror of it all hit me and the next thing I know I'm back in the bathroom with my back laying against the door. My head quaked as I came to grips with the fact this was real. This was really happening and somehow it was getting worse by second.
“It has no face!” I could hear Kevin screaming at Pete.
“Wasn't Jay in there? Where is he?”
“I don't maybe that thing got him!”
I could hear them right outside the bathroom. Pete started yelling for me but I didn't dare yell back. They turned the door handle but I had it locked and they both started pounding their fists on the door.
“Dude...what are we going to do? Who are we going call? The police, hello, police, there's a faceless monster in our bathroom?” Kevin murmured during a lull in their attempts to break in. “How did it even get in here?”
“I don't know man! Let me think!”
“Maybe it climbed up the side of the building and into the window.”
I could hear them pacing back and forth around the door.
“Get a spoon or fork or something okay, there's a little slot and tab in the door handle that will unlock it.”
“And then what? We don't want that thing in here with us.”
“I'm getting my baseball bat.”
I knew I had to get out and going through the apartment was no longer an option. It was only a second floor apartment and the window overlooked the trash and utility area for the complex. My vision was becoming more and more impaired as I braced myself leaning out the window to see if jumping or climbing down was out of the question. I could just barely make out the outline of an abandoned brown couch near a gutter and cable shaft running down to the ground within my reach out of the window.
I heard them jiggling the flatware into the little hole for the lock release and my drunk ass reasoned this was my only out. I punched out the screen and lifted the window as high as it could go and in a single move thrusted my ass out over the ledge turned and grabbed the metal bits that held the gutter and utility cable to the brick siding. I seemed to be a stable but painful place to grip but I had no choice to swing my footing on it as the bathroom door swung open.
My footing slipped and I dangled down one rung when Pete charged his head out of the window with the bat. In the overhead shine of the nearby street lamp his eyes met my featureless face and he gasped in terror. I slipped again and lost both footings and my hands gave way against the pain of the sharp narrow grip. I must have dropped a good eight or nine feet onto that old ratty, smelly, and wet couch.
I was shocked and I groaned but the soggy cushions and my own intoxication seemed to break my fall rather than me. The moment after I realized I was intact I bolted from my block because the last yelling I heard from Pete and Kevin indicated they intended to chase me down. I wasn't thing but graceful and agile as I swerved with wobbly footfalls across the sidewalk. Glare from the street lamps and passing headlights was almost blinding as eyesight continued to fail. To my dismay my ears started to fell wet inside like they were melting and occasionally my hearing was completely overwhelmed by a loud draining sound.
I veered off of the sidewalk and away from the road and ran through gravel planters to keep bushes between myself and possible onlookers who might also violently confront me. I was winded as sucking air through a tiny hole in my face was more like breathing through a gas mask or wet socks.
Ahead was the first thing I recognized in a bit. It was the five story student union building. Despite the event Sydney was attending, the Union was a quiet, unpopulated and dark place to be on a Friday night. The Union also housed the student clinic.
In my head I pictured the doors as grand white rectangles but all I could see now were dark green blotchy oblong outlines on a black and purple surface. I believed I was coming in the back corner of the building where I may give a security camera operator a fright if he looked closely enough but otherwise I believed no one would be near. I remember myself contemplating heading straight for the clinic or hiding out in one of the empty study rooms and waiting this condition out.
Despite the occasional draining sound in my ears I was able to make out Pete and Kevin's winded voices somewhere behind me. My plans went out the window as I ran scared through the wide halls of the Union with my roommates still in pursuit. My luck was running out as I tried multiple study room doors and found them locked, in fact an entire wing, the wing with the student clinic was closed off by an overhead chain link divider. I was a rat in a maze running out of places to run.
I pushed through the first door I found open and froze. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of people in this room. I realized immediately I had stumbled into the event Sydney was involved in. My hearing had steadily degraded to where everything sounded like I had my head dunked in an aquarium but I could still make out someone talking about the sponsor of the event – Students for a Sober Society.
“Oh my god!” I recognized the voice as Sydney. She blindsided me, “That is such a great costume! I love the spandex work over the head! That is hardcore.”
I garbled something back to her. I tried begging her for help but she kept fawning over my costume.
“I've never would have expected someone to be so committed to the cause of sobriety – you're literally an anti-drinking icon. You drank your face off!”
There was a whirlwind of activity as she turned more and more heads and attention my way. Someone came in with something in their hand. Sydney wrapped her arm around my shoulder while I heard someone's flip phone make a fake shutter snap sound.
I backpedaled out of Sydney's embrace and out of the room. I wasn't going to find the help I needed. I was shattered that I had won, for a moment, my crush's attention but had no way of knowing if she recognized me as anything more than a false mascot for the dangers of drinking. I plunged around to the other side of the Union when Pete and Kevin spotted me from the hall. I fell though the doors leading to the Square – the large grassy area at the heart of the campus.
At this point everything was totally fading out. My ears felt like they had been filled with concrete and whatever after image of having eyes I had was almost gone. I ran my hands across the bushes lining the square and weaved between the paths and the open grass hoping to continue to evade my roommates and anyone else. I had a map of campus in my head and there was only one other place I felt I could hide and be safe for now.
The street lamps on the Square seemed to brighten significantly all of the sudden. I wondered if campus security was now after me or maybe after Pete because the last time I saw his outline he was still wielding a baseball bat. I was running, as loosely defined, on rest of my adrenaline and the booze to Underground Library.
I knew it locked automatically late at night, would be poorly attended if not deserted,, and had plenty of places to hide. I pushed into the door and headed down the stairs, about thirty feet down and then ducked into the bathroom. I locked myself in a stall and sprawled out on the tile floor. I think I started to cry as the last bit of tactile sensation fled my body. If I had lips I suppose I would have kissed my ass goodbye as last outlines of things blurred into the rest of the deep black.
The next thing I knew I was that I was being poked painfully in the back. I instinctively rolled over and felt an immediate wash of stiffness and pain wash over me. I gasped and groaned but despite the pain I felt a rush of euphoria that I could feel and I feel my mouth unzip and make noise again.
“Another damn drunk kid.” Someone said over me. I could hear again! I willed my newly found eyelids open with the same force I'd open rip open a bag of chips. I blinked a few times and an older grizzled face of the janitor came into full color and full focus.
“My face!” I shouted as I curled myself up to bring my felt under me. My head felt heavy and pulsed and quaked with an unspeakable pain. As I lurched to stand, I felt like I had a manhole cover stuck in my stomach. “What happened to my face?”
“Why don't you check the mirror, kid.” The janitor withdrew his mop stick and let me walk out to the sinks. In the mirror I could someone or something had drawn in black marker on my face the phrase “Gone Drinkin'”.
I shambled home rubbing my head and my stomach. I bewildered by the hangover as I tried to retrace my steps. I walked through the door of my apartment and found Pete and Kevin passed out on the floor and couch respectively with beers spilled on the floor and the bat beside Pete. When finally woke up they wondered where I had been but I told them I left to go to Rocko's. They didn't seem to question it. When I asked them about the bat, they looked at each other and replied by saying they were just goofing around. We never spoke of that evening again.
A few days past and I wondered if I had dreamed this all up or maybe I was just incredibly drunk and had imagined some of it. The only proof I had was a blurred phone camera image of my faceless “costume” printed in the weekly student newspaper in an article about the Students for a Sober Society event. The whole response to my appearance only deepened my terror that something so strange and devastating could occur and no one bats an eye. We are instinctively driven to some banal explanation and go our own way in the face, pun intended, of true strangeness, of things truly unexplained, of things that make no sense.
Needless to say I did not drink again and I tried my hardest to put that night out of my head. The only reason I'm typing all this up and putting this out there is that tonight is my graduation night and it was the closest I've come to drinking since that night. Pete, Kevin, and Sydney are at this frat house celebrating our final night on campus and I've taken shelter in their small makeshift computer lab. Before I ended up here I wondered in a daze with a full solo cup in hand through the entire yard, the pool area, and the house as “Frank Sinatra” by Cake blared over me. There are dozens of people without faces here.
By Theo Plesha

Summary: A young college student is excited to enjoy his first power hour with this roommates to horrifying results.
My Last Power Hour
I haven't thought about this in awhile but it's coming back to me now like it was yesterday. I think they call it “set and setting” or “state dependent memory”. I don't remember exactly I guess I don't have to anymore.
It was two years ago and I was a sophomore in undergrad at a state university in the Midwest. It was the proverbial ivory tower, a land of oz, an urban oasis amid a sea of corn. It was a Friday night some early in Fall Semester either late August or early September. I remember my flooded sinuses and raw eyes vividly as a sign we were downwind of harvesting.
I knew why I wasn't taking my allergy medicine tonight. I sat maniacally mashing my xbox controller beside my HALO brother in arms and roommate Kevin while our second roommate Pete illegally bought tonight's booze from whoever he said he knew could get us some. I wasn't much of a drinker, in fact I only had a couple of beers in my entire life up to that point and all since starting undergrad. I was kind of straight edge kid in high school and I justified drinking now as a breaking point, a landmark of sorts between my cringe high school years and my new maturing college years.
I supported in this endeavor by my high school friend Kevin. Pete on the other hand was a rando from the dorm Kevin and I lived in during freshman year and through the close quarters and mutual interest in HALO and poker, we decided it would be cheaper to split a four bedroom apartment 3 ways rather than two. Kevin and I were childhood friends since peewee soccer. Pete on the other hand, was a bit more, uh, let's say rustic, oh hell, a bit more redneck but seemed to take well to the college life or a form of it. He had kind of become our immoral compass.
Kevin and I were in the midst of losing a round of team death-match online when Pete came bursting through our door hauling a case of beer and a large brown paper bag of clinking bottles and the telltale squeak of foil snack bags. He was a woodland camouflage blur as he stormed purposefully between Kevin and my line of sight to the video game. “Power Hour, bitchesssssssssssss!”
Kevin, with his red side burns jutting around his Chicago Bears baseball hat, reacted to Pete's overt rudeness by rolling his eyes. I shot back the opposite: a bright smile, a burst of boy on Christmas morning enthusiasm and wonder at the prospect of getting really messed up doing a power hour. With that I flew to the kitchen table where Pete stood unpacking goodies.
“Hey, Kevin,” Pete shouted, “Go get your CD player and speakers.” I watched Kevin dutifully obey, duck into his room before hauling out a portable CD player, two brick sized speakers tangling in a mess of their own wiring.
Pete patiently unpacked a thirty case of Coors marked with camouflage and blaze orange. “Jay, count them out, seven a piece. I'll get the shot glasses from my room.”. I blew my nose and counted the chilled cans and placed them within reach across the table. Pete swung out of his bedroom with shot glasses but snapped his fingers and retreated back.
“Hey man, you know, you don't have to do the whole thing.” Kevin said untangling the sound system and a DC adapter.
“What do you mean? Of course I'm going to do it.”
“I'm just saying you're kinda going from zero to sixty pretty damn fast.”
“Oh, right, you're the expert all of the sudden on drinking.”
“Well, I drank in high school and you didn't.”
“They called you chuck 'ems because of your barfing at Jessica Z's birthday party.”
“Right, that's actually sort of my point. I don't do that anymore, I did that because I drank too much without wading into it.”
“I'm sure this is going to be fine.”
“Well, whatever man, I'm just saying don't let Pete bully you into continuing if you're not up for it. I'll support you in that.”
Pete thundered into the room singing something in choir pig latin that I vaguely remember from Monty Python and Holy Grail when they carried out the holy hand grenade. Pressed between his finger tips was a CD jewel case containing a gold re writable disk scribbled with black sharpie “ultimate power hour”.
“So, what exactly are the rules?”
“Silence!” Pete declared as he popped the disk into the CD player. “I'll let the mix do the talking.”
So there we were packed around a circular table in a dingy dimly lit poorly furnished campus apartment with barely painted blotchy drywall ready to kickoff our weekend. The first track crackled to life with fake static and the muffled and occasionally squeaky voice echoing a 1950's educational film reel but with shades of Rod Sterling. “Gentlemen in opposite alphabetical order indicate this quarter's beer master – he is responsible for refilling your beer once per track for the first fifteen tracks. If there are fewer than four of you, simply rotate back to the first or alternate per quarter. Each track is timed for one minute and each player must consume their shot of beer within that one minute period. Each quarter consists of fifteen drinks with a 1 minute pause at the end of the first and third quarters. There will be a five minute half time and shot of liquor.” Pete rummaged displayed an unopened bottle of black labeled whiskey, “A shot at the end is also mandatory. Each person will be permitted 1 five minute time out per game. By the end of the this roughly sixty nine minute game, assuming no timeouts, you gentlemen will be well on your way to a blissful gentlemanly state perfect charming that sweetheart on your wonderful night off. This track will end in five, four, three, two, one.”
“Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin blasted through the speakers like a nuclear bomb as I enthusiastically dropped the first once and half of gold down my throat. I gagged a little as I was not accustom to doing shots much less shots of carbonation. I was left with this inoffensive sweet bready taste that slowly turned slightly more irritating and metallic. The only way to get rid of that taste was probably to drink more and I wouldn't have to wait long.
“What's with this old stuff?” Kevin objected to the first track as he cleared his mouth.
“It's got something for everyone.” Pete declared as he splashed around,
Something for everyone indeed but I do not for the life of me remember all sixty tracks and I'll probably get a few wrong as I relay the course of this experience to you.
A minute elapsed and then the intro to Pulp Fiction had me slamming another pour of beer. Recounting all of this now seems kind of dumb I guess I can skip the next twenty eight minutes and let you know I think “Sweet Escape” by Gwen Steffani wrapped half time. None of us had used their time outs. I was feeling it and was kind of besides myself in a swamp of gilded pleasure. I was jarred back to the table by the lack of music to get lost in.
“How you doing there Jay? You gonna puke?” Pete flicked my shoulder hard. I blinked and focused in. I realized Kevin was down the hall in the bathroom. “We're half way through, man. You're doing it!”
“I'm doing it” I mouthed back as I noticed I was losing my ability to control my vocal features with precision. I tried to take my mind off of it by wishfully thinking about what we would be doing after this, where would we go and with whom.
“We should go down to that event down at the Student Union. Show the straight edge kids what they're missing and then maybe hit up Rocko's Cellar.”
In the moment where my thoughts were heavy I was instinctively reactive against the Student Union. “Maybe just go to the Rocko's.”
“Oh, because you know Sydney is going to be there and you don't want her to see you drunk off your ass.” Kevin chimed in with a surly tone from the hallway.
Yup, Kevin was right, that was the underlying reason. I had an undergrad crush on Sydney Cole, a beautiful sleak blonde woman apparently from Nebraska.
“Well, you know its goddamn sensible to not, you know, go to an undergrad thing like that piss ass drunk off a power hour. I'm good to go to Rocko's though.” I explained.
The silent track started to pick up and the coy sickly sweet vibe of “Tubthumping” filled the air. Peter pushed fresh shot glasses brimming with caramel colored whiskey at us. There wasn't a lot of room in my gut but I was okay with this and as the song started to fade we took the shot and as the liquor burn started to linger I was looking forward to another shot of smooth tasty beer as “Down with the sickness” started to play.
I don't remember the last song on the playlist. I remember Pete flicked my ear and then pointed down at my shot while smiling at me. Everything felt like I was wearing a soaking wet wool jacket and a plastic bag over my head. I took the shot without thinking and about half of the burning yet numbing liquid dribbled out of my mouth. Pete clapped his hands and announced he was leading us out to Rocko's. Kevin shrugged and then shook his head violently before nodding. I garbled something to effect I needed to go to the bathroom then with all the grace of walking through a foot of water with inverted buckets strapped to my feet I waded down the dark hallway occasionally bracing myself against the walls.
I wasn't going to throw up. I knew that about myself. I wasn't going to throw up. At least I thought I knew myself. The alcohol was not playing nice with my allergies. I needed some cool water on my face. I shut my eyes hard and blew out my nose in effort to clear some snot and restore equilibrium. I turned on the faucet and I knocked Kevin's contact holder into the sink. I finally felt something pop back into place in my head and sinuses as a stream of snot left my nostrils into the sink.
“Ah crap!” I let out a garbled yell as dunked both hands into the sink to fish out the contact case from the torrent of my snot. My hands dove in and it didn't feel like water nor like snot. It felt sort of rubbery almost like gelatin. I opened my eyes and found my vision had been impaired and distorted, almost like after you rub your eyes really hard and see the dark blotches but this was narrow tunnel with the blotches around the edges and skewed colors. I couldn't really make out much around the sink. I blinked a few times to try to clear my vision but to no avail and that's when I turned my head down and saw what was in the sink.
I nearly leapt back in fright as I saw my eyes, and the flesh of my nose, and my lips floating on of the water in front of the faucet. They were staring back me from the sink for a panicked count of three before they cartoonishly swirled together like a runny egg flushed down the drain with a slurping noise. I gripped the sink with both hands as I mustered the courage to look at myself in the mirror. It was impossible I told myself. What I saw was impossible. In my limited vision I could make out skin covered indentations over my eye sockets, a flat patch of flesh where my nose had been, and my lips were replaced with a small dark hole barely wide enough to fit a pencil.
I shook and held my breath as my hands confirmed what the blotchy after image of missing eyes saw in the mirror. What was worse is my skin felt gelatinous, sweaty, and infirm, like ice cream warming on the counter. I shuttered and fell back against the wall with a painful thud. I heard Kevin and Pete laugh in the kitchen.
Okay, I told myself I must just be going a little nuts. How could I still see, afterall, if I had no eyes? I tested a hypothesis by smelling some soap and I was discouraged by the fact I couldn't smell the Tropical Waterfall scented liquid. I gulped and knew I at least still had a tongue and I could still hear myself make sounds which could loosely be interpreted as words. Mixed results I thought, maybe I could clear my head by casually leaving this nightmare bathroom and checking with my roommates.
I opened the door and made it half down the hall when Kevin casually headed my way cradling a bag of chips. The mushy look on his face lit up and his mouth erupted with a spray of chip crumbles before he literally fell on his back and did his best backward crawling Sarah Conner spots a Terminator impression. He chokes then starts screaming. Then the horror of it all hit me and the next thing I know I'm back in the bathroom with my back laying against the door. My head quaked as I came to grips with the fact this was real. This was really happening and somehow it was getting worse by second.
“It has no face!” I could hear Kevin screaming at Pete.
“Wasn't Jay in there? Where is he?”
“I don't maybe that thing got him!”
I could hear them right outside the bathroom. Pete started yelling for me but I didn't dare yell back. They turned the door handle but I had it locked and they both started pounding their fists on the door.
“Dude...what are we going to do? Who are we going call? The police, hello, police, there's a faceless monster in our bathroom?” Kevin murmured during a lull in their attempts to break in. “How did it even get in here?”
“I don't know man! Let me think!”
“Maybe it climbed up the side of the building and into the window.”
I could hear them pacing back and forth around the door.
“Get a spoon or fork or something okay, there's a little slot and tab in the door handle that will unlock it.”
“And then what? We don't want that thing in here with us.”
“I'm getting my baseball bat.”
I knew I had to get out and going through the apartment was no longer an option. It was only a second floor apartment and the window overlooked the trash and utility area for the complex. My vision was becoming more and more impaired as I braced myself leaning out the window to see if jumping or climbing down was out of the question. I could just barely make out the outline of an abandoned brown couch near a gutter and cable shaft running down to the ground within my reach out of the window.
I heard them jiggling the flatware into the little hole for the lock release and my drunk ass reasoned this was my only out. I punched out the screen and lifted the window as high as it could go and in a single move thrusted my ass out over the ledge turned and grabbed the metal bits that held the gutter and utility cable to the brick siding. I seemed to be a stable but painful place to grip but I had no choice to swing my footing on it as the bathroom door swung open.
My footing slipped and I dangled down one rung when Pete charged his head out of the window with the bat. In the overhead shine of the nearby street lamp his eyes met my featureless face and he gasped in terror. I slipped again and lost both footings and my hands gave way against the pain of the sharp narrow grip. I must have dropped a good eight or nine feet onto that old ratty, smelly, and wet couch.
I was shocked and I groaned but the soggy cushions and my own intoxication seemed to break my fall rather than me. The moment after I realized I was intact I bolted from my block because the last yelling I heard from Pete and Kevin indicated they intended to chase me down. I wasn't thing but graceful and agile as I swerved with wobbly footfalls across the sidewalk. Glare from the street lamps and passing headlights was almost blinding as eyesight continued to fail. To my dismay my ears started to fell wet inside like they were melting and occasionally my hearing was completely overwhelmed by a loud draining sound.
I veered off of the sidewalk and away from the road and ran through gravel planters to keep bushes between myself and possible onlookers who might also violently confront me. I was winded as sucking air through a tiny hole in my face was more like breathing through a gas mask or wet socks.
Ahead was the first thing I recognized in a bit. It was the five story student union building. Despite the event Sydney was attending, the Union was a quiet, unpopulated and dark place to be on a Friday night. The Union also housed the student clinic.
In my head I pictured the doors as grand white rectangles but all I could see now were dark green blotchy oblong outlines on a black and purple surface. I believed I was coming in the back corner of the building where I may give a security camera operator a fright if he looked closely enough but otherwise I believed no one would be near. I remember myself contemplating heading straight for the clinic or hiding out in one of the empty study rooms and waiting this condition out.
Despite the occasional draining sound in my ears I was able to make out Pete and Kevin's winded voices somewhere behind me. My plans went out the window as I ran scared through the wide halls of the Union with my roommates still in pursuit. My luck was running out as I tried multiple study room doors and found them locked, in fact an entire wing, the wing with the student clinic was closed off by an overhead chain link divider. I was a rat in a maze running out of places to run.
I pushed through the first door I found open and froze. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of people in this room. I realized immediately I had stumbled into the event Sydney was involved in. My hearing had steadily degraded to where everything sounded like I had my head dunked in an aquarium but I could still make out someone talking about the sponsor of the event – Students for a Sober Society.
“Oh my god!” I recognized the voice as Sydney. She blindsided me, “That is such a great costume! I love the spandex work over the head! That is hardcore.”
I garbled something back to her. I tried begging her for help but she kept fawning over my costume.
“I've never would have expected someone to be so committed to the cause of sobriety – you're literally an anti-drinking icon. You drank your face off!”
There was a whirlwind of activity as she turned more and more heads and attention my way. Someone came in with something in their hand. Sydney wrapped her arm around my shoulder while I heard someone's flip phone make a fake shutter snap sound.
I backpedaled out of Sydney's embrace and out of the room. I wasn't going to find the help I needed. I was shattered that I had won, for a moment, my crush's attention but had no way of knowing if she recognized me as anything more than a false mascot for the dangers of drinking. I plunged around to the other side of the Union when Pete and Kevin spotted me from the hall. I fell though the doors leading to the Square – the large grassy area at the heart of the campus.
At this point everything was totally fading out. My ears felt like they had been filled with concrete and whatever after image of having eyes I had was almost gone. I ran my hands across the bushes lining the square and weaved between the paths and the open grass hoping to continue to evade my roommates and anyone else. I had a map of campus in my head and there was only one other place I felt I could hide and be safe for now.
The street lamps on the Square seemed to brighten significantly all of the sudden. I wondered if campus security was now after me or maybe after Pete because the last time I saw his outline he was still wielding a baseball bat. I was running, as loosely defined, on rest of my adrenaline and the booze to Underground Library.
I knew it locked automatically late at night, would be poorly attended if not deserted,, and had plenty of places to hide. I pushed into the door and headed down the stairs, about thirty feet down and then ducked into the bathroom. I locked myself in a stall and sprawled out on the tile floor. I think I started to cry as the last bit of tactile sensation fled my body. If I had lips I suppose I would have kissed my ass goodbye as last outlines of things blurred into the rest of the deep black.
The next thing I knew I was that I was being poked painfully in the back. I instinctively rolled over and felt an immediate wash of stiffness and pain wash over me. I gasped and groaned but despite the pain I felt a rush of euphoria that I could feel and I feel my mouth unzip and make noise again.
“Another damn drunk kid.” Someone said over me. I could hear again! I willed my newly found eyelids open with the same force I'd open rip open a bag of chips. I blinked a few times and an older grizzled face of the janitor came into full color and full focus.
“My face!” I shouted as I curled myself up to bring my felt under me. My head felt heavy and pulsed and quaked with an unspeakable pain. As I lurched to stand, I felt like I had a manhole cover stuck in my stomach. “What happened to my face?”
“Why don't you check the mirror, kid.” The janitor withdrew his mop stick and let me walk out to the sinks. In the mirror I could someone or something had drawn in black marker on my face the phrase “Gone Drinkin'”.
I shambled home rubbing my head and my stomach. I bewildered by the hangover as I tried to retrace my steps. I walked through the door of my apartment and found Pete and Kevin passed out on the floor and couch respectively with beers spilled on the floor and the bat beside Pete. When finally woke up they wondered where I had been but I told them I left to go to Rocko's. They didn't seem to question it. When I asked them about the bat, they looked at each other and replied by saying they were just goofing around. We never spoke of that evening again.
A few days past and I wondered if I had dreamed this all up or maybe I was just incredibly drunk and had imagined some of it. The only proof I had was a blurred phone camera image of my faceless “costume” printed in the weekly student newspaper in an article about the Students for a Sober Society event. The whole response to my appearance only deepened my terror that something so strange and devastating could occur and no one bats an eye. We are instinctively driven to some banal explanation and go our own way in the face, pun intended, of true strangeness, of things truly unexplained, of things that make no sense.
Needless to say I did not drink again and I tried my hardest to put that night out of my head. The only reason I'm typing all this up and putting this out there is that tonight is my graduation night and it was the closest I've come to drinking since that night. Pete, Kevin, and Sydney are at this frat house celebrating our final night on campus and I've taken shelter in their small makeshift computer lab. Before I ended up here I wondered in a daze with a full solo cup in hand through the entire yard, the pool area, and the house as “Frank Sinatra” by Cake blared over me. There are dozens of people without faces here.
By Theo Plesha

So, my ferment seems to be going well on day 2, based on SG. I was surprised at the difference in smell from the extract beewine/meads that I’m accustomed to. Reading suggests butyric or lactic infection that is desired for fruity esters.
I would love to know what your thoughts are on the backset I used. I saved some of the spent yeast from a mead ferment, then added a bit of sugar to the hot backset after distilling. I let it cool, combined with the yeast and left it in the refrigerator for a few weeks until I was ready to make this whiskey. I left some headroom and a slightly loose lid because I was afraid of explosive jars. It did carbonate, so the something survived.
Does this seem like a reasonable process to continue with?
I aim to make a rum wash next. Should I use the whiskey backset or start fresh generations of each?
TIA!

By W. W. Jacobs
Published 1902 in Harper’s Monthly, Vol. 105, Iss. 628
Genre: Horror, Mystery
Part I
Without, the night was cold and wet, but in the small parlour of Laburnum villa the blinds were drawn and the fire burned brightly. Father and son were at chess; the former, who possessed ideas about the game involving radical chances, putting his king into such sharp and unnecessary perils that it even provoked comment from the white-haired old lady knitting placidly by the fire.
“Hark at the wind,” said Mr. White, who, having seen a fatal mistake after it was too late, was amiably desirous of preventing his son from seeing it.
“I’m listening,” said the latter grimly surveying the board as he stretched out his hand. “Check.”
“I should hardly think that he’s come tonight, ” said his father, with his hand poised over the board.
“Mate,” replied the son.
“That’s the worst of living so far out,” balled Mr. White with sudden and unlooked-for violence; “Of all the beastly, slushy, out of the way places to live in, this is the worst. Path’s a bog, and the road’s a torrent. I don’t know what people are thinking about. I suppose because only two houses in the road are let, they think it doesn’t matter.”
“Never mind, dear,” said his wife soothingly; “perhaps you’ll win the next one.”
Mr. White looked up sharply, just in time to intercept a knowing glance between mother and son. the words died away on his lips, and he hid a guilty grin in his thin grey beard.
“There he is,” said Herbert White as the gate banged to loudly and heavy footsteps came toward the door.
The old man rose with hospitable haste and opening the door, was heard condoling with the new arrival. The new arrival also condoled with himself, so that Mrs. White said, “Tut, tut!” and coughed gently as her husband entered the room followed by a tall, burly man, beady of eye and rubicund of visage.
“Sergeant-Major Morris, ” he said, introducing him.
The Sergeant-Major took hands and taking the proffered seat by the fire, watched contentedly as his host got out whiskey and tumblers and stood a small copper kettle on the fire.
At the third glass his eyes got brighter, and he began to talk, the little family circle regarding with eager interest this visitor from distant parts, as he squared his broad shoulders in the chair and spoke of wild scenes and doughty deeds; of wars and plagues and strange peoples.
“Twenty-one years of it,” said Mr. White, nodding at his wife and son. “When he went away he was a slip of a youth in the warehouse. Now look at him.”
“He don’t look to have taken much harm.” said Mrs. White politely.
“I’d like to go to India myself,” said the old man, “just to look around a bit, you know.”
“Better where you are,” said the Sergeant-Major, shaking his head. He put down the empty glass and sighning softly, shook it again.
“I should like to see those old temples and fakirs and jugglers,” said the old man. “what was that that you started telling me the other day about a monkey’s paw or something, Morris?”
“Nothing.” said the soldier hastily. “Leastways, nothing worth hearing.”
“Monkey’s paw?” said Mrs. White curiously.
“Well, it’s just a bit of what you might call magic, perhaps.” said the Sergeant-Major off-handedly.
His three listeners leaned forward eagerly. The visitor absent-mindedly put his empty glass to his lips and then set it down again. His host filled it for him again.
“To look at,” said the Sergeant-Major, fumbling in his pocket, “it’s just an ordinary little paw, dried to a mummy.”
He took something out of his pocket and proffered it. Mrs. White drew back with a grimace, but her son, taking it, examined it curiously.
“And what is there special about it?” inquired Mr. White as he took it from his son, and having examined it, placed it upon the table.
“It had a spell put on it by an old Fakir,” said the Sergeant-Major, “a very holy man. He wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow. He put a spell on it so that three separate men could each have three wishes from it.”
His manners were so impressive that his hearers were conscious that their light laughter had jarred somewhat.
“Well, why don’t you have three, sir?” said Herbert White cleverly.
The soldier regarded him the way that middle age is wont to regard presumptuous youth. “I have,” he said quietly, and his blotchy face whitened.
“And did you really have the three wishes granted?” asked Mrs. White.
“I did,” said the sergeant-major, and his glass tapped against his strong teeth.
“And has anybody else wished?” persisted the old lady.
“The first man had his three wishes. Yes,” was the reply, “I don’t know what the first two were, but the third was for death. That’s how I got the paw.”
His tones were so grave that a hush fell upon the group.
“If you’ve had your three wishes it’s no good to you now then Morris,” said the old man at last. “What do you keep it for?”
The soldier shook his head. “Fancy I suppose,” he said slowly. “I did have some idea of selling it, but I don’t think I will. It has caused me enough mischief already. Besides, people won’t buy. They think it’s a fairy tale, some of them; and those who do think anything of it want to try it first and pay me afterward.”
“If you could have another three wishes,” said the old man, eyeing him keenly, “would you have them?”
“I don’t know,” said the other. “I don’t know.”
He took the paw, and dangling it between his forefinger and thumb, suddenly threw it upon the fire. White, with a slight cry, stooped down and snatched it off.
“Better let it burn,” said the soldier solemnly.
“If you don’t want it Morris,” said the other, “give it to me.”
“I won’t.” said his friend doggedly. “I threw it on the fire. If you keep it, don’t blame me for what happens. Pitch it on the fire like a sensible man.”
The other shook his head and examined his possession closely. “How do you do it?” he inquired.
“Hold it up in your right hand, and wish aloud,” said the Sergeant-Major, “But I warn you of the consequences.”
“Sounds like the ‘Arabian Nights’ ”, said Mrs. White, as she rose and began to set the supper. “Don’t you think you might wish for four pairs of hands for me.”
Her husband drew the talisman from his pocket, and all three burst into laughter as the Seargent-Major, with a look of alarm on his face, caught him by the arm.
“If you must wish,” he said gruffly, “Wish for something sensible.”
Mr. White dropped it back in his pocket, and placing chairs, motioned his friend to the table. In the business of supper the talisman was partly forgotten, and afterward the three sat listening in an enthralled fashion to a second installment of the soldier’s adventures in India.
“If the tale about the monkey’s paw is not more truthful than those he has been telling us,” said Herbert, as the door closed behind their guest, just in time to catch the last train, “we shan’t make much out of it.”
“Did you give anything for it, father?” inquired Mrs. White, regarding her husband closely.
“A trifle,” said he, colouring slightly, “He didn’t want it, but I made him take it. And he pressed me again to throw it away.”
“Likely,” said Herbert, with pretended horror. “Why, we’re going to be rich, and famous, and happy. Wish to be an emperor, father, to begin with; then you can’t be henpecked.”
He darted around the table, pursued by the maligned Mrs White armed with an antimacassar.
Mr. White took the paw from his pocket and eyed it dubiously. “I don’t know what to wish for, and that’s a fact,” he said slowly. “It seems to me I’ve got all I want.”
“If you only cleared the house, you’d be quite happy, wouldn’t you!” said Herbert, with his hand on his shoulder. “Well, wish for two hundred pounds, then; that’ll just do it.”
His father, smiling shamefacedly at his own credulity, held up the talisman, as his son, with a solemn face, somewhat marred by a wink at his mother, sat down and struck a few impressive chords.
“I wish for two hundred pounds,” said the old man distinctly.
A fine crash from the piano greeted his words, interrupted by a shuddering cry from the old man. His wife and son ran toward him.
“It moved,” he cried, with a glance of disgust at the object as it lay on the floor. “As I wished, it twisted in my hand like a snake.”
“Well, I don’t see the money,” said his son, as he picked it up and placed it on the table, “and I bet I never shall.”
“It must have been your fancy, father,” said his wife, regarding him anxiously.
He shook his head. “Never mind, though; there’s no harm done, but it gave me a shock all the same.”
They sat down by the fire again while the two men finished their pipes. Outside, the wind was higher than ever, an the old man started nervously at the sound of a door banging upstairs. A silence unusual and depressing settled on all three, which lasted until the old couple rose to retire for the rest of the night.
“I expect you’ll find the cash tied up in a big bag in the middle of your bed,” said Herbert, as he bade them good night, “and something horrible squatting on top of your wardrobe watching you as you pocket your ill-gotten gains.”
He sat alone in the darkness, gazing at the dying fire, and seeing faces in it. The last was so horrible and so simian that he gazed at it in amazement. It got so vivid that, with a little uneasy laugh, he felt on the table for a glass containing a little water to throw over it. His hand grasped the monkey’s paw, and with a little shiver he wiped his hand on his coat and went up to bed.

Frank Miller's Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism (Comics Culture) eBook : Young, Paul
This was the first honest-to-god analysis of a work of fiction I ever bought. Sure we all think about the stories we read but I had never sought out a professional look at it before. The interviews with Miller and others are really an invaluable look into his creative process, IMO.
I really recommend this book for insights not just into Daredevil, but Batman and Punisher, too.
For anyone curious, here are a lot of the parts which really stood out to me - although of course I have my own interests and you might have parts of the book you love which I just passed over. The first comic I ever remember reading and being deeply impressed by was JMS' Supreme Power. To me, the best superhero stories ask "what does it even mean to be a (super)hero?" I think Miller has some invaluable insights on this topic.

Miller's problem with Spider-Man was all the angst. "All my reservations about the character are in how he talks 'cause his visual is still very confident, and very strong - it's just that he never stops whining." Spidey's self-pity, his penchant for martyrdom, and his borderline masochistic self-neglect attracted fans' identification but also made his life more or less a continual nightmare. Even worse, it made his success as a superhero hard for Miller to swallow. Spider-Man's trademark heckling of villains during fights only made his effectiveness less believable:
"I don't believe that Spider-Man would last two weeks [as a crime fighter] the way he's conceived. In order to have power over the criminals, you would have to be that rotten; [criminals] would have to accept him as almost one of them... Daredevil has to reach the point where when he walks into a room. they're terrified of him. because he has to be accepted as a force they'll respect. That isn't done much in comic books; it's around in other kinds of fiction. I'm more comfortable with that; I don't see him as being happy go lucky when he's up against a bunch of guys with guns."
[...]
Miller would probably have incited comparisons to Batman in the fan press simply by transforming Daredevil into a grittier, more deterministic series, but Miller openly stressed the parallel in his Daredevil-era interviews. In 1981, Miller draws an explicit contrast between Daredevil and Batman: "Daredevil . . . operates on a basic motive of love for seeking out justice. . . . [Batman] is punishing those who killed his parents. Batman's focus is on the criminal, Daredevil's is on the victim."27 Critics picked up on Miller's concern with Daredevil's motives, as well as the productive task of measuring them against those of the Batman. Reviewing Miller's work thus far in the Comics Journal in 1982, Ed Via wrote that Miller had made Daredevil "first and foremost a moralist, a person with a strong sense of fairness and . . . compassion, someone whose actions were as directly in line with his convictions as humanly possible."28 Even Daredevil's scuffles with criminals differed from Batman's in that they were performances rather than acts of vengeance:
"I see Matt Murdock as being a grown man and Daredevil as almost being a boy. . . . He believes in everything he's doing and he works very hard at it, but part of him just gets off on jumping around buildings."29 "I'm also trying to develop him as a guy with a terrific sense of humor, who scares criminals and has a great time doing it. Like [Steve Ditko's DC character] the Creeper, he laughs and laughs and laughs, and thinks [to himself], 'Jeez, they're buying it!'"30
Miller's favorite means of exposing his hero's antic side was to send Daredevil to Josie's Bar, a fictional dive where New York's entire population of petty thieves seems to turn up every night. Digging for clues to various cases, DD inevitably sparks fights that trash the place, hurling thugs through the front window while Josie protests (for the umpteenth time) that she just had it repaired. Sometimes he even orders a drink first, but as Miller points out, it's always a glass of milk. The milk (and the milk moustache it leaves behind) comically telegraphs Matt's wholesomeness compared to the hardened types guzzling whiskey and beer all around him, but it also underscores Miller's description of DD as Matt's boyish side, the inner child that "comes alive" while playing superhero.31
Ultimately, however, the contrast Miller once drew between the borderline psychotic Batman and the psychologically healthy Daredevil sounds like an overstatement of the argument, fronted by the Village Voice in 1965 (and echoed in Esquire the following year), that "Marvel Comics are the first comic books to evoke, even metaphorically, the Real World."32 By those lights, "real world" referentiality meant that Marvel heroes dealt openly with persecution, neuroses, and family squabbles and turned out to be their own worst enemies nearly as often as protagonists did in postwar literary fiction.
By contrast, DC didn't raise any schlemiels, with the possible exception of Clark Kent, whose inferiority complex is all an act to keep people from noticing that, but for the eyeglasses and the hunched shoulders, he looks exactly like Superman. DC stories followed the logic of such classical storytelling modes as the epic or the chronicle, where decision making is an exponent of action instead of a process inflected by character subtleties and every action thus taken is world-historical in importance. Its editors exiled strong emotion, anxiety, mortality, and other everyday complexities to the infamous imaginary stories of the fifties and early sixties.
This means of distinguishing Silver Age Marvel heroes from those of DC hits a snag, however, when we stack Batman's origin up against that of Spider-Man or Daredevil. The emotional crux of all three is the Spidey triumvirate of all-too-human gut reactions: guilt, shame, and a desire for revenge. Indeed, the most obvious precedent for Daredevil's origin is the first version of Batman's origin story in DC's Detective Comics #33 (December 1939), in which an anonymous street thug robs and shoots Bruce Wayne's parents before young Bruce's eyes. Batman's origin sets underexamined precedents for many origin stories from Marvel's Silver Age: dead parent, angry child, costume chosen to strike fear into what the Batman of 1939 touts as a "superstitious, cowardly lot" of evildoers, an initial state of helplessness igniting the desire to bulk up and do right. Not unlike the death of Jack Murdock in Daredevil's case, Bruce Wayne's extraordinary childhood loss forges Batman's determination to avenge that loss on all criminals everywhere forever after and to transform himself into a steroidal, bat-eared Sherlock Holmes.
Miller brought the Punisher, then Marvel's most homicidal lead character, into the comparison to develop a pet point about Daredevil's singularity: his duty to the legal system, for better or worse. In 1981, when Richard Howell asked Miller point blank, "Is Daredevil Marvel's Batman?" Miller answered that, no, "the Punisher is Marvel's Batman."33 Miller argued that, unlike the Batman, whose parents' murder catalyzed every major life decision he made from then on, the death of Battlin' Jack did not have as "big an effect on [Matt] as his father's life, and he is his father's son, being a natural born fighter."34 The Punisher, by contrast, shares not only Batman's desire to murdered loved ones but also his will to stop killers and drug dealers in their tracks. He exceeds Batman's mission only in that he executes the bad guys on the spot.
The Punisher, Miller tells Howell, is "Batman without the impurities. The side of Batman that makes him spare the criminals is something that's added on. It's not part of the basic concept of his character. . . . Daredevil's basic concept is very dissimilar. I see Daredevil as someone who operates on a basic motive of love for seeking out justice."35
This was not to say, however, that the Punisher's use of deadly force made him less heroic to Miller than Daredevil or Batman were. The Punisher is a hero, Miller says, but "I don't consider him a role model. The main difference between him and Daredevil is Daredevil's sense of responsibility to the law. The Punisher is an avenger; he's Batman without the lies built in."36
The "lies" Miller mentions refer in part to Batman's vow never to kill; he wields a gun only two or three times in his entire first forty-five years in print, due in each case to editorial inattention. While the no-kill rule probably helped keep Batman out of trouble with parents worried over comics' influence on young children, it exacerbated the tension between his desire for justice and his sense that the legal system is inadequate to the task of collaring mass murderers and rooting out corruption. If Batman's prime motive is to champion justice in the legal sense, to quash anarchy and restore social order, then why does he have such contempt for the police and the legal system except insofar as they can help him achieve his goals?
[...]
The ambivalence about due process expressed here stems in part from Miller's decision to make Daredevil a character whose convictions don't necessarily match his own: "I don't necessarily believe that Daredevil's right about everything he says. The character is built on very strong basic principles, and it would have been a terrible violation of those principles . . . to let Bullseye die. Daredevil has to believe that the law will work in every instance, but I'm allowed to believe differently."17 Miller had much tougher critiques of Daredevil-style liberalism waiting up his sleeve, including the bleeding-heart psychiatrists in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns who claim that Two-Face and the Joker (the Joker, for crying out loud) can be rehabilitated and an unforgettable throwaway joke about liberal hypocrisy in the same book, in which a Central Casting suburbanite tells a reporter that he doesn't believe in Batman's brand of vigilante justice but then snorts that he himself would "never live in the city." But to paint Miller as a legal or social conservative would not be accurate, at least not at this point in his career. Satirically, in fact, Miller plays the entire political field, broiling John Ashcroft and George W. Bush in The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001–2) for exploiting the Twin Towers' destruction to further their own political agenda (and while these men were doing exactly that in the aftermath of 9/11, no less).
The Daredevil run, though, is less a satire of Matt's position, or anyone else's, than it is a Brechtian experiment in which Miller draws sympathy to Murdock's point of view while examining it with a microscope at the same time, pushing harder and harder on the question of whether justice is served if lives are left at risk, while putting just as much pressure on the opposing question of whether preventive justice deserves to be called justice at all.
[...]
Matt's reaction to the death of Elektra is to bully Heather into the submissive role that Elektra couldn't play. Miller attributes to Matt not a single thought balloon to suggest that he is aware of the toll his bullying takes on her, while Miller continually draws the reader's attention to that toll via Matt's glib condescension and Heather's devastated reactions to it. The soundness of Daredevil's judgment is now more questionable than ever. Does his heroism stem from a neurotic urge to control everything around him, and is that neurosis reaching a tipping point? After all, we see him suffer a nearly dissociative breakdown when he convinces himself in #182 that Elektra somehow survived her own murder. The splash page of that issue still chills me with its full-face close-up of Matt in a cold sweat, staring into our eyes, as if pleading with us to believe something we know to be utterly false just because he believes it: "SHE'S ALIVE." By #189, only seven issues later, his demeaning paternalism has driven his new fiancée straight to the bottle.
In spite of the ugliness of Matt's abuse, and the emphasis Miller places on that ugliness, it's difficult for me to decide whether terrorizing Heather this way makes Daredevil less heroic or more heroic in Miller's definition. Miller has often spoken about the archetypical hero as something other than human, as dismissive of what others think they need as Matt is of Heather's feelings. When Miller discusses The Dark Knight Strikes Again!, which he and interviewer Gary Groth agree is nearly a parody of superhero comics, he emphasizes Batman's abstract quality, born of the kind of social isolation that Stick enforces on Matt: If Batman's "motto is striking terror" into the hearts of criminals, then "Batman can only be defined as a terrorist. . . . I don't want you to like this guy." "My feeling about Batman is that he's similar [to James Bond] in that you'd want him to be there when you're being mugged, but you wouldn't want to have dinner with him. The way he cheers Hawkman on as he crushes Luthor's skull . . . For me, [such scenes demonstrate] the idea [of Batman] coming into its own without the bullshit on top of it being a socially acceptable role model and all of that."23
Matt's disregard for Heather's emotional state during the Glenn Enterprises affair further clarifies Miller's sense of the heroic impulse: it is prosociety but deeply antisocial, convinced that Right and Wrong are real and unchanging standards but dangerously solipsistic in its interpretation of how to achieve Right at the expense of Wrong. The true hero, according to Miller, is, compared to "normal" human beings at least, a pathological narcissist. Daredevil, with unwavering faith in his own judgment, performs "necessary" services for a culture whether it asks for them or not, while those who are under his protection see him as unfathomable at best and terrifying at worst. But even if Miller thrills to his own extrication of the "lies" and "bullshit" from the Batman persona a few years later, in Daredevil he employs dramatic irony to relate the high cost, to both individuals and their community, of the uncompromising, take-no-prisoners heroism that Americans think they want. "Dirty Harry . . . is a profoundly, consistently moral force," Miller tells Kim Thompson, but that wouldn't keep him out of jail for "administering the 'Wrath of God' on murderers who society treats as victims.
An authoritative study of Jack Kirby, Charles Hatfield has suggested that Marvel Comics distinguished itself in the 1960s in part by placing new stress on the tension intrinsic to superhero comics between the hero's desire for justice and the extralegal means by which she or he pursues it.25 I would add that Marvel's Silver Age stories place the stress primarily on the plotting opportunities provided by this tension, as in the case of Spider-Man, whose good deeds only draw the ire of a public (understandably) suspicious of ununiformed law enforcement.
Miller further develops the "upstanding vigilante" paradox from a cliché of the genre into a philosophical dialectic that, though sometimes decried as fascistic, cannot be reduced to an unironic plea for authoritarian rule. The superheroic fantasies on display in 300, the Sin City graphic novels, The Dark Knight Strikes Again!, and even the controversial Holy Terror cast a clear eye on the paradox of the specifically American fascination with the superheroic ideal. All pose to the reader the implicit question, Is this really what you want? Considering the consistency of this theme dating back to Daredevil,
I think of the pre-9/11 Frank Miller as less conservative than libertarian, a posthippie refugee of the 1960s who disdains the everyone-is-special relativism of grade-school participation trophies and liberal humanism but shares with the conscientious objector and the bra burner a fervency for personal liberty: "I'm no middle-of-the-roader, but I find that people who tend to follow any party line, of the left or right, tend to all end up saying the same thing, which is 'Do what I tell you.' Quit those habits I don't like, don't use the words I don't like, don't draw the pictures I don't want my children to see. . . . So yeah, I have a very jaundiced view toward most authority."26 In any event, Miller's focus on Daredevil's unflagging moral code, and his attention to how a relentless diet of violence might change that code into an ideological prison, allows him to explore the upstanding vigilante figure from multiple angles—the broadly liberal defense of constitutional protection for criminals and victims alike; the broadly conservative ideal of defending one's own body, family, and property without impediment from the state—without readily disclosing his personal politics.
[...]
Slowly and steadily, Miller was maneuvering out of Code territory into the world of frankly adult themes and pressing harder and harder on the contradictions on which a traditional concept of heroism depends. Miller's The Dark Knight Returns steps even further into that world even as it sets up new "walls" to push against, namely, the postsixties culture of liberal humanism and so-called moral relativism. Miller's Batman has all of Daredevil's desire for justice but lacks any of DD's concern for the civil rights of the alleged perpetrators; indeed, if Daredevil's primary concern is with the victims, as Jim Shooter taught Miller, then Batman's primary concern is with crushing the perps. And he gets called on it throughout The Dark Knight Returns by loads of liberal-sounding talking heads who claim that Two-Face and the Joker were actually turned into supervillains by Batman's example, that even convicted homicidal maniacs deserve a second chance, and so forth.
What Miller has done is to take Daredevil's line of legal thinking regarding the rights of criminal defendants, the same line that made him save Bullseye from being mashed on the subway tracks, and put it in the mouths of comic-relief characters such as the brain surgeons and psychologists who try to make Two-Face a productive member of society again. Miller's Batman, by contrast, is an epic hero who refuses to mistake good for evil or vice versa, and he gets to define on his own what each term means. Miller's Matt Murdock refuses such a metaphysical view of good and evil as all-or-nothing opposites on idealist grounds of a different sort. Matt believes that obscured innocence and hidden guilt have to be brought to light intellectually by finding proof and testing it, while Batman, who was at one time represented as a detective at heart, relies entirely on instinct when Miller has the reins.
To be fair, Miller presents the crudeness of Batman's worldview as a serious problem and has even done so in the midst of a conflict that seemed to many Americans to draw the brightest possible line between the national Us and a foreign Them. DC had already published the first issue of Miller and the colorist Lynn Varley's Dark Knight sequel, Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again!, when al-Qaeda operatives commandeered the planes that destroyed the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, an event that, Miller told Groth, made it impossible to leave Batman's catchphrase about "striking terror into the hearts" of evildoers unannotated. As I've mentioned, Batman's dialogue in The Dark Knight Strikes Again!—even the dialogue written before 9/11—makes the ugliness of his philosophy unmistakable: "Striking terror. Best part of the job."
Groth even points out to Miller that one Batman speech, in which he refers to American capitalists and the federal government as "tyrants" and promises that he and his team will "strike like lightning and . . . melt into the night like ghosts," sounds uncannily like "the point of view of radical Islamists" toward the United States.13 Miller doesn't take such a crack at the obvious bad guys, however. Rather, he immediately pounces on the political reaction to the bad guys and how the George Bushes, Dick Cheneys, and John Ashcrofts of the world use crises like 9/11 for their own purposes. They stand in for the heroes we think we need in tumultuous times but slip the bounds of law at every turn—and Miller attempts to reduce our sympathy for them. This Miller, chastened by the 9/11 attacks but ever the shrewd critic of the media that deliver such disasters to us, digs into the fascistic politics of superhero comics, the news media's role in sensationalizing global politics and inciting fanatical nationalism, and the real-world politics of vigilante justice all at once. He claims comics as a space to explore what "heroism" means—and not necessarily to him but rather to contemporary US culture. If the one who "saves" us from tyranny, even the tyranny of our own leaders, claims he has to act like a terrorist to do it, do we even want to be saved?
At the same time, both Miller's comics and his interviews have long scrutinized the insolubility of the paradox—heroism is necessary to restore order, but it's also authoritarian in its purest form, even fascistic—as a necessary evil. Batman seems the purer Miller "hero" in that Batman's sense of justice is unencumbered by any complicating factors. He metes it out as he sees fit, on the basis of an Old Testament version of righteousness: you take my eye, I'll take yours, score settled. This hero is no model for quotidian life, but as in such classical Hollywood Westerns as John Ford's The Searchers (1956), the frontier will remain forever a chaotic wilderness without him. Only Ford's half-wild hero Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) can save his niece from hostile Comanche in post–Civil War Texas, but his intense race hatred makes him a relic, unfit to cross the threshold into the orderly world of law, family, and home that his very wildness has helped bring to the western frontier.
The civic-minded Daredevil would be welcome in any such home, but for the later Miller especially, that taste for civilization and its rules reads as an "impurity," a liberal-humanist streak within traditional superheroism that Miller once talked about strictly in terms of character type (it's the difference between Batman and his "purer" doppelgänger, the Punisher) but that lately he describes as a moral fault, without any of the irony he mustered up a decade ago. There are signs dating back to 1986's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns that this irony was ambivalent anyway, considering the extent to which Batman adopts the Western hero's ruthless stance when taming the "frontier" of racialized criminals, right down to trading in the Batmobile for a horse.
The progressive reverence with which Miller's comics after Daredevil treat that definition of heroism has everything to do with 9/11 and the scale of twenty-first-century global terrorism as Miller has processed it since The Dark Knight Strikes Again!. Back in 2003, he told Groth, "For at least the foreseeable future, [9/11 is] the whole point of my work. I'm going to play around with doing some propagandizing,"15 but this sentiment did not prevent him from making the US government's reaction to the disaster a target for satire in his second Dark Knight story or lambasting the Bush administration for branding disagreement with its policies as providing solace to terrorists. By contrast, the Fixer, the costumed hero of Miller's frankly propagandistic graphic novel Holy Terror (Legendary Comics, 2011), doesn't care whether he gets thrown out of the house or not; his lot is to make the world safe for civilization, American style, not to inhabit it, and he likes it that way. The Fixer, a behemoth who shares a name with a character that Miller created for his high school newspaper's comics page, kills terrorists like a sledgehammer breaks pavement. There's no second-guessing motives or anything else; as far as the Fixer is concerned, if you're Muslim, you've got a bomb strapped to your midsection, so there's no danger that he will smash the wrong face.
Unsurprisingly, the character originally at the center of Holy Terror was Batman. Finally, Miller had freed the character of its impurities. To do that, he also had to burn off the "impurities" of the fundamentalist foe by painting al-Qaeda as representatives of all Islam and all Muslims and playing on every Arab stereotype he could scratch onto his Bristol board, from big noses to using Evil English to express delight in the torture and murder of "infidels." He has matched such images with political commentaries on National Public Radio, his personal blog, and elsewhere that show none of the critical distance that once made his work as jarring and energizing intellectually as the best Dashiell Hammett novel you've ever read. Our terrorist enemy, Miller has said, is "pernicious, deceptive and merciless and wants nothing less than [our] total destruction." Never mind that the majority of victims of al-Qaida and now ISIS are, in fact, Muslims.16
The hardline right position that Miller takes in Holy Terror differs so dramatically from that expressed in interviews dating back to the early 1980s that one has to wonder if he's been replaced by a Life Model Decoy from Nick Fury's supply closet. But Holy Terror was a critical disaster, prompting fans and critics alike to swear off any future Miller work and even to claim that his comics have rallied around a "sexist, fascist" flagpole since as far back as The Dark Knight Returns and possibly even before. Spencer Ackerman echoes the most scathing reviews when he writes in Wired, "Frank Miller doesn't do things halfway. One of the true comic-book greats, he's created several of the most extraordinary stories ever to grace the art form. So perhaps it's fitting that now he's produced one of the most appalling, offensive and vindictive comics of all time.
[...]
I can't subscribe to such uses of Miller's Batman to evaluate Miller's own character. Critics have been mistaking the positions Miller examines in his comics for his own convictions for decades. Indeed, Miller would agree with every one of Kevin's criticisms of Batman and even offer an aesthetic justification for this portrayal that depends on a dramatic irony that is difficult to locate, precisely because superhero comics have always traded in absolutes; criticism of those absolutes would understandably be less obvious to a dedicated reader of superhero comics, not to mention a nonreader convinced of superheroes' intrinsic lack of sophistication, than to someone interested in exploring or exploding the limits of the Batman mythos. Now, however, it not only looks like Miller has given away his critical distance; he also wants everyone to know it and to decide for themselves whether what he's done is worthless as a result, as comics or as political activism.
Back in 1998, discussing 300 with Christopher Brayshaw in the Comics Journal, Miller acknowledges the historical irony of Greece, the epitome of civil organization and intellectualism in the ancient West, needing a nation-state of cold-blooded warriors to fight its battles. In another context, he tells Brayshaw, he might have invited readers to ponder that irony and consider its paradoxical relationship to the development of democratic ideals.19 He does not do so in this context, however. For Miller, 300 is all about the necessity of saving civilization—Western civilization—from barbarism. The three hundred Spartans did what was necessary; they lost the battle, badly, but without their sacrifice, discipline, and utterly unambiguous worldview, we would apparently still be living in mud huts today.
Even with 300, though, Miller argues that he's playing around just a tiny bit with our tendency to collapse heroes with role models. Miller makes Leonidas admirable but not likable and renders most of the other 299 Spartans as less admirable and even less likable. But maybe, Miller has said not only about the Spartans but about the Punisher, Batman, and Superman, cultures need guys like that, and I do mean guys—the reckless male narcissists who can't or won't make subtle distinctions between good and evil—to do the dirty work of "preserving civilization as we know it." Usually, as in The Dark Knight Returns and The Dark Knight Strikes Again! and to a certain extent the noir riff on Dante's Inferno that is Sin City, Miller lets us sit with that ugly possibility, lets us squirm at our own enjoyment and/or disgust. He forces us to wonder if peace and forward movement are ever possible without the bright lines between good and evil and at the same time makes us ponder whether by drawing those lines, we put our humanity at risk. The generous way to interpret what Miller says here is that, like Hitchcock, he's casting doubt on the very notion of heroism that rules superhero comics, that is, the fantasy that superheroes could do what they do and yet remain "ordinary" people. Miller turned Batman into a living symbol of the fear that criminals should feel when threatened by "good," at least in a Platonist universe, but don't. However, when it's no longer comics, the First Amendment, or aesthetic complexity at stake but national security, take-no-prisoners tactics—in art as well as war—look to Miller like the only way to go.
[...]
In what I want to believe is a triumph of Miller the listener over the absolutist Miller who sneers at the same First Amendment he once sacrificed his industry goodwill to defend, Miller now refuses to comment further on his anti-Occupy rant. Perhaps he thinks it all speaks for itself, or perhaps he has accepted certain tenets of his critics just as he graciously (and legitimately, it seems) accepted the differing opinions of Groth and other interviewers as recently as a decade ago. Either way, he has stopped talking much about politics of any stripe. His blog is now abandoned due to "computer problems," Miller says, glowering during an interview for a Wired profile when Sean Howe suggests he find "a better technician" to fix it. "I will," Miller says, after a long silence.22
Look back on Daredevil's nemeses from the '79–'82 run with Miller's current anti-Islamicism in mind, though, and watch the ambiguities and nuances of his first major achievement get harder to pinpoint. Bullseye is a psychopath, complete with brain damage caused by cancer to guarantee it. Elektra is irredeemable despite her ostensibly clean bill of mental health: "The feeling I've been trying to get across is that she's betrayed something. She was meant to be something better than she is."23 But once you've fallen from grace, that's it. Some people are evil, through and through—think of the "reformed" Harvey Dent/Two-Face in The Dark Knight Returns, whose ruined mind no amount of reconstructive surgery can repair—and they must be punished, locked away for good, dismissed, disposed of. There's no other way to get the cancer out of society. Miller dates the rising scale of violent crime in Daredevil back to his getting mugged and robbed in New York: "The experience filled me with anger, and that translated right into my comics."24 As he got angrier, however, the struggle over right and wrong that plagued Daredevil seemed to get a lot less interesting to him than staking an unwavering claim to right.
Howe shrewdly characterizes Miller's use of secondary characters as a kind of misdirection: "Daredevil's dastardly supporting cast allowed Miller to have it both ways by making Daredevil's barrage of kicks and punches look reasonable in comparison."25 The bleak view on Miller's career would paint it as a slow but momentous roll past such apologies for superheroic vigilantism and into the stark light of the Fixer's gleeful, openly sadistic rampages, a development that Howe connects to Miller's personal victimization by crime prior to plotting Batman: The Dark Knight Returns:
"As Miller's career was taking off, the everyday violence in Manhattan at the time was taking its toll. "New York is no longer fit for human habitation," Miller told one friend. After enduring three robberies in the course of a month, he and [the colorist and his then-girlfriend Lynn] Varley decided to escape to LA. While she went out west to search for a home, he stayed behind to set up more work to get them out of debt. He had a check in his pocket when, once again, someone tried to rob him. "Frank just went berserk on the guy," Varley says. "He didn't hit him or anything, he just went so berserk the guy backed off and ran away. We were on edge."26
Such anger floats to the surface of his work with a bang in 1986, the year I graduated from high school, with not one but two smash-hit stories about characters that didn't belong to him: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Miller's most lauded Daredevil story, Daredevil: Born Again, his 1986 return to the Daredevil series, penciled by David Mazzucchelli.
[...]
It's a hell of a second coming for a character whose series stubbornly still bore a Comics Code seal. I won't fault Miller for the anger of that story today any more than I did when I read Born Again at seventeen; on the contrary, I still believe there's not much point in going through adolescence in the United States without some rebel-themed mass culture to embrace for the sole reason that your parents would hate it. Still, I marvel at how much Miller's perspective on his audience had changed between 1983's "Roulette" and the Born Again story line in 1985–86.
According to Howe's account of Marvel in the eighties, Miller's inspiration for Born Again was losing everything himself. Ramped up on the success of Ronin and eager to get away from the city that fostered at least one person's transformation into a real-life vigilante ("one Bernard Goetz is enough"), Miller moved to Los Angeles, found himself dead broke, and decided to pitch a new Daredevil story that started with Matt Murdock in similar straits.28 No doubt it was satisfying to create a world in which a bloated mob boss—somebody, anybody—could actually be held accountable for downturns of fortune, instead of such mundane external forces as random robberies or astronomically high rent. But Born Again also recommends interpretations of Miller's work as reflective of his worldview, making it more difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt when he says he is investigating the justification of defensive violence rather than sponsoring it.