Letters i can paste
Title Gore: For all those terrible titles
2013.08.04 18:39 kittypuppet Title Gore: For all those terrible titles
A collection of shitty titles for your enjoyment
2014.05.01 01:56 J0j2 Found Pieces of Paper
Photographs of found pieces of paper with writing on them, photographs or discarded cutouts. Appreciate the forgotten artifacts of everyday life. Share any paper that you found (on the ground, stuck in some bushes or between cans of soup at the store for example) and you do not know who wrote it. Love letters, doodles, interesting to-do or grocery lists, notes from the past - share your discovery with us!
2015.06.21 03:29 GREETINGS FELLOW HUMANS!
THIS IS A PLACE FOR ALL FELLOW HUMANS TO SHARE THEIR KNOWLEDGE. WE TOTTALLY AREN'T ROBOTS. (OOPS I MADE A HUMAN MISTAKE)
2024.05.19 08:10 EagleMaleficent4602 Just venting.
I obsess about my worst mistakes every day.
I replay all of my painful memories.
I think about all of the old relationships I ruined.
I think about all of the jobs I left and the issues I caused.
I replay the bad things people have said to me.
I'm afraid of the people around me, I always think they don't like me and they're talking behind my back.
I catastrophize all of my social problems.
I drive fast and move too quickly.
My eating disorder is the only form of control I have over my life.
I just hope I can use what I learned from the past to have an honest relationship in the future. To understand someone on a deeper level and to make sure just because I'm on the rollercoaster of emotions, they don't need to be. They can leave me whenever they want. I just don't want to leave them like I've left my older relationships with emotional turmoil because of the way I acted.
I know that underneath these issues we all have lies something truly remarkable and I hope to find it as I get better.
When I've been in the right state of mind, the compliments I've gotten from strangers about certain aspects of my personality have been flattering.
All of the medicines haven't helped like I hope they would, they don't change my personality, my environment or how you see myself.
The reality is that my world is exaggerated. My interpretation of what's going on and all of the emotional pain I run into is a consequence of that. I echo these things that upset me for years. When I get distracted from these things, I'm a much better person.
submitted by EagleMaleficent4602 to BPD [link] [comments]
I replay all of my painful memories.
I think about all of the old relationships I ruined.
I think about all of the jobs I left and the issues I caused.
I replay the bad things people have said to me.
I'm afraid of the people around me, I always think they don't like me and they're talking behind my back.
I catastrophize all of my social problems.
I drive fast and move too quickly.
My eating disorder is the only form of control I have over my life.
I just hope I can use what I learned from the past to have an honest relationship in the future. To understand someone on a deeper level and to make sure just because I'm on the rollercoaster of emotions, they don't need to be. They can leave me whenever they want. I just don't want to leave them like I've left my older relationships with emotional turmoil because of the way I acted.
I know that underneath these issues we all have lies something truly remarkable and I hope to find it as I get better.
When I've been in the right state of mind, the compliments I've gotten from strangers about certain aspects of my personality have been flattering.
All of the medicines haven't helped like I hope they would, they don't change my personality, my environment or how you see myself.
The reality is that my world is exaggerated. My interpretation of what's going on and all of the emotional pain I run into is a consequence of that. I echo these things that upset me for years. When I get distracted from these things, I'm a much better person.
2024.05.19 08:10 nomorelandfills California rescuers clamoring for adoption of AB 2265, Animal Shelter Transparency Act cheerfully agree to remove the bit about mandatory spay/neuter before a dog or cat is released to foster. Also, the law is another gateway for release of dangerous dogs.
 | https://preview.redd.it/8wd5vanfrb1d1.png?width=536&format=png&auto=webp&s=4348ee55b7aa2fd3a7d70737d11ffd1979b19f61 submitted by nomorelandfills to PetRescueExposed [link] [comments] To be honest, I didn't read the dangerous dog part as thoroughly as I should. I think I may be somewhat burnt out on the recklessness and coldness shown by rescuers to others in their willingness to prioritize dangerous or marginal ownerless dogs over beloved pets and over people. The spay/neuter part, that just galls me. It should gall anyone. This crisis, this hellscape of pit bull overpopulation that exists clearly calls for sterilization of any shelter dog in California. Shrugging off that as a lesser priority than rehoming existing dogs blows the whole deal. Any animal rescue plan that removes, downgrades or fails to prioritize spay/neuter for pit bulls is worthless. It's just a smokescreen, a way to play with puppies and posture as saviors without doing anything to improve the situation. Status quo, nothing to see here, #adoptdontshop. https://preview.redd.it/if3jg07kpb1d1.png?width=873&format=png&auto=webp&s=bde9e6f11f3311da914d8c76a66d3907e0118374 SUMMARY: Under existing law, it is the policy of the state that no adoptable animal should be euthanized if it can be adopted into a suitable home, as provided. This bill declares it the policy of the state that no animal be euthanized by a public animal control agency, shelter, or a private entity that contracts with a public animal control agency or shelter for animal care and control services (collectively, “eligible agency”). This bill requires an eligible agency to post, 24 to 72 hours before a scheduled euthanasia of a dog or cat, a daily list of any cat or dog scheduled for euthanasia on its public website or social media page and to post a physical notice on the kennel of a dog or cat scheduled to be euthanized. This bill requires a public animal control agency or shelter that seeks to adopt a policy, practice, or protocol that may conflict with Hayden’s Law to give notice regarding the policy, practice, or protocol, as specified, and requires the city or county to schedule a public hearing regarding the policy, practice, or protocol. https://preview.redd.it/r6ett982nb1d1.png?width=701&format=png&auto=webp&s=5a4b03df0544234fd1c1a32dc1ad2396314d7a75 And the sheer chutzpah of this https://preview.redd.it/6jzq88epob1d1.png?width=588&format=png&auto=webp&s=01830f3ea95e94084d4bd927d96ba33fc7732b24 Rescuers - we will advocate for violent dogs and fund their owners' fights to keep them from being designated dangerous and harass communities into being extremely afraid of even starting a dangerous dog investigation. Also rescuers - our new legislation to require more marketing of unadoptable dogs won't include dangerous dogs! Silly! There's no risk to the public! Although I will say I had no idea that rescuers knew of the existence of the word 'transparency' so good for them. Perhaps this knowledge could be turned inward sometimes? The CityWatch article ANIMAL WATCH - An increasing number of reported vicious and fatal dog attacks across California, as reported by the L.A. Times—and worldwide—are ignored by AB 2265 (2024) authored by Assembly Member Kevin McCarthy and introduced in the CA Assembly—and, instead, it prohibits euthanasia of any dangerous animals, including dogs impounded in shelters for violent behavior. AB 2265, (which has so far been amended twice, the latest change being when it was introduced in the Assembly on 3/18/2024) wants California legislators to assure that NO dog (or other aggressive animal) in a shelter can be euthanized, other than if it is irremediably suffering, regardless of its violent or even deadly behavioral history. However, it is the goal and purpose of shelters to place as many animals as possible directly into homes with families. This bill went far beyond the purpose of the 1998 Hayden bill which had the intent to restrict euthanasia of healthy and adoptable animals. No one with knowledge of the devastating outcome of attacks by currently popular Pit Bulls, XL and XXL Bullys, now banned in the UK, Wales, Scotland and India, along with other aggressive breeds, nor anyone who has been the victim of any vicious dog attack, could plausibly agree that this risk should be encouraged or can be afforded by the State of California or any governmental jurisdiction. So far, it appears other legislators are skeptical of this bill. The only positive change with which some CA animal control agencies and legislators have expressed mutual agreement is the increase in spay/neuter deposits for dogs and cats being raised to $200 to match the much higher rates for surgical sterilization in today’s economy. A CLOSER LOOK AT AB 2265 In the past few weeks we have seen countries such as England, Wales, Scotland and India joining those which ban Pit Bull, XL and XXL Bullys and other dangerous dogs in order to stop the trafficking of dangerous breeds, provide safety for communities and stop the horrific attacks and deaths of innocent children and adults whose lives are ended by other people’s “protection dogs” or “rescued” pets with a known history of violent behavior. AB 2265 – A RISK CALIFORNIA CANNOT TAKE There is value in telling the truth about dog behavior and the greatest is in public and personal safety. What weird whim—other than personal aggrandizement or a strong campaign supporter—would cause Senator McCarthy to encourage ignoring violent past history and risk human and animal lives on a gamble that a dog with a known history of unprovoked aggression will suddenly act differently? If we want canines to continue to be known as man’s (or woman’s) best friends, we need—just as we do with humans—to assure they have earned that trust by not misusing their innate strength and survival skills to harm those who trust and love them. CHANGING THE STATE’S EUTHANASIA GOAL This bill, AB 2265, introduced on February 8, 2024, drastically changes the State’s animal shelter euthanasia goal—from ending euthanasia of adoptable animals to ending euthanasia of any animal. That includes vicious dogs, wild and/or dangerous animals, prohibited animals and regulated animals. This would create chaotic danger for adopters and pet owners and innocent residents/neighbors throughout California, while ALSO negatively and disastrously affecting the insurance and veterinary industries, according to experts. The only exceptions in the bill that allow a dangerous animal to be euthanized are very narrow categories for medical and behavior issues: 1) those that are irremediably suffering, which is defined as those for which “severe, unremitting physical pain” cannot be relieved by any medical means without regard to cost or local availability of that level of care; and 2) Those that have been declared “vicious” under the State’s regulatory scheme, which few agencies use, and which assumes that a hearing was held after an owner contested that declaration. According to Fast Track Democracy, “Existing law prohibits animals that are irremediably suffering from a serious illness or severe injury from being held for owner redemption or adoption. This bill would instead declare it the policy of the state that no animal be euthanized by a public animal control agency or shelter or a private entity that contracts with a public animal control agency or shelter for animal care and control services, except as provided.” “Existing law prohibits a stray dog or cat impounded by a public or private shelter from being euthanized before 6 business days after the stray dog or cat is impounded, not including the day of impoundment, and requires that the stray dog or cat, except those irremediably suffering, be released to a nonprofit animal rescue or adoption organization before the scheduled euthanasia of the stray dog or cat if requested by the organization, as specified.” The analysis summarizes the Bill (see Fast Track Democracy). Existing law prohibits a stray dog or cat impounded by a public or private shelter from being euthanized before 6 business days after the stray dog or cat is impounded, not including the day of impoundment, and requires that the stray dog or cat, except those irremediably suffering, be released to a nonprofit animal rescue or adoption organization before the scheduled euthanasia of the stray dog or cat if requested by the organization, as specified. WARNINGS ABOUT THIS ‘NO KILL’ PLAN FOR DANGEROUS DOGS A California animal-control specialist offered the following thoughts based on his personal and professional experience. (The following is not to be taken as legal advice, but merely as guidance in further considering some issues that appear to not have been considered in pursuing these severe changes to animal sheltering under existing California laws and practices.) “This Bill would absolutely eviscerate Food and Agricultural Code Section 31683, which allows counties and cities to have their own regulatory process for dangerous dogs, and it would force everyone to use the very-flawed State process.” AND he summarized that:
FUNDRAISING – THE POWER OF THE ALMIGHTY DOLLAR There is no better way to reach the wallets of animal lovers than through their heart strings, and sadly millions of dollars are going into pockets of executives in organizations that do not directly care for or protect animals and, of course, nothing speaks louder than donations at the lobbying and legislative level. But, the needs of homeless animals should not be creating slush funds for campaigns nor playing on the emotions of those who are continually confronted by TV commercials and mailers, saying that just a few more dollars will save them all. There are also human lives and safety to be considered and this is a primary responsibility of animal shelters and humane societies. It is important that they are asked what will help them do this thankless and seemingly hopeless job. Pets are too often obtained as a short-term experience with little commitment and then abandoned within or outside these facilities that do not benefit from the money that is raised by large organizations or politicians ostensibly to help them. Instead, these promises set unreachable goals and promote “feel-good” programs that overburden their staffing and emotions, without asking what they need to do this very difficult job from a realistic perspective. THE BEST INDICATOR OF AN ANIMAL’S FUTURE BEHAVIOR IS ITS PAST Not all animals are adoptable, nor should they be placed in homes where they are likely to harm, or be harmed because certain behavior is endemic to the breed. The AKC thrives on the fact that bloodlines of dogs determine or influence their predictable behavior. Why is it this is so clear that it causes millions of people to buy purebreds for certain reasons; yet, animal shelters are expected to take in dogs with documented histories of anti-social behavior and attacks and rehome them with promises they will be “good family members” just to keep them alive? LISTEN BEFORE VOTING, SACRAMENTO Legislators need to listen to experts in animal control—not self-appointed voices for animals—many of whom have never worked in a shelter, before even considering new legislation. They also need to ask their own community, “Do you feel safe from dog attacks? And/or “have you been a victim of an attack or live in fear of neighborhood animals?” They may be surprised at the number of injuries that have been suffered but didn’t make the press and how many victims may have permanent, life-limiting, disabilities for which they were never compensated. Assembly Member McCarthy needs to walk through animal shelters in his district and ask those who work there or have been long-term volunteers, and those who take the responsibility for determining policies and the endless, sad challenges of management, “what will help you help them?” DON’T WAIT FOR AN IRREVERSIBLE TRAGEDY California has been very liberal (or very foolish) in allowing dogs known to have a history of aggression to be removed from shelters for adoption, but lawsuits and tragic, injuries or deaths of innocent victims have imposed limitations as to what can be tolerated philosophically and financially. The safety of the dog itself must also be a consideration. People understandably react violently to dog attacks, using any weapon to inflict sufficient injury to stop the dog and save their own or another’s life. Euthanasia can be the most humane option when it is indicated or determined that the animal poses a consistent threat to humans or animals in general, or poses a recurrent uncontrollable risk to the public’s and its own safety. (Author’s note: If anyone would like to see more of the informal critique of the proposed CA law AB 2265, quoted in part in this article, you can contact me through the editor of CityWatchLA: ([jim@citywatchla.com](mailto:jim@citywatchla.com).) (Phyllis M. Daugherty is a former Los Angeles City employee, an animal activist and a contributor to CityWatch. |
2024.05.19 08:08 Iam-scared-of-myself Venting about people, systems, racism, the world in general. NO HATE TOWARDS ANYONE, THIS IS JUST VENTING FRUSTRATION
*CONTAINS SWEARING*
This is gonna be a hefty and most likely triggering post for specific groups of people out there (meaning people who struggle with anger, people who don't want poltical content/opinions etc), so please stop reading and leave if you figure this is gonna be rough for you. This will (mainly) be about the conflict between Palestine and Israel. (and apparently a long one) No hate towards any specific groups of people, but I do have a lot of *frustration regarding behaviours*.
Before I start, I want you to remember some facts about me as you read;
I am autistic
I am heavily influenced by world peace, hate, racism and other unfair situations
I have incredibly high standards for myself that I strive to not break, including, but not limited to, being kind and respectful *always*, despite being in a bad mood, not liking someone, or disagreeing, especially political disagreements
I have always, and will always, stand against widespread hate, racism and other discrimination towards any specific religions, ethnicities, nationalities, cultures, etc.
I also want you to know that I named this throwaway accordingly.
So let's get this shitshow started then, shall we.
As the details of the conflict stands, it is beyond obvious to me that this is racism and, literally, a Holocaust. Not *the* Holocaust, but *a* Holocaust. Oxford Languages has the term defined as a destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, especially caused by fire or nuclear war . I'd say that's very much accurate. Proof to come.
Regardless, this situation has had me very pressed the last almost 8 months, as I know most other people have been too. Without getting too much into the conflict itself, I want to talk a little about what I've seen from the Jewish community.
This is where I advise anyone who struggles with anger especially to leave and try to keep your day positive. If you have a magical potion to stay stable after this, who am I to stop you...
Alright, onto the dreaded part. And yes, I am stalling.
I have never, and I truly mean *never* had any hateful thoughts or opinions about religions (other than Christianity but that's one for another time), and as we are all aware of, The Holocaust had massive effect on the world some 80 years ago. I have always seen Jews as victims due to this, but in recent times I've realised that a lot of them, too, see themselves as victims. The issue is that they aren't the victims right now. They (Israel) aren't defending themselves, they have nothing to defend themselves against. Israel is currently doing the exact same thing as Germany did to them, to Palestine. Sure, maybe at some point who knows when, Palestine *was* the land of Jews, but since then, multiple religions have been thriving together on that land, including Jews. They were never excluded. From what I've understood, there weren't any wars or conflicts going on within the country that didn't happen elsewhere. The issue began when in the late 1940's zionists brutally murdered families to steal their homes. I'm sure the situation was so much more complex than that, but in a nutshell that is basically it. The fact that everyone today have been so desensitized from the travesties happening around the world is depressing and hope-killing. I truly am well on the way to giving up, and at this point in time I'm so angry all the time due to the Middle East's situation.
So a few weeks ago, probably closing in on months at this point, I randomly got a notification from reddit about someone posting on /Jewish. They didn't say anything explicit, so I pressed the notification and I was met with the worst victimization and ignorance I've ever seen. I truly believed most jews would see this for what it is, and not let some racist maniac spoon-feed them propaganda and hate, but I was brutally and humbly proven wrong. They were mocking proPAL parades, hating on news anchors and civilians alike calling this a genocide, insisting that Israel has no other choice, saying "casualties happens in war", convincing each other that zionism is a good thing, and feeling sorry for themselves when friends and families cut contact because they said they supported Israel and saw this as the only solution. Some might have been genuine problems, idk, but for the most part, that subreddit seems to only be about hating the rest of the world because their great grandparents were killed. I know I sound like a complete asshole, but the world isn't antisemetic anymore - they are actively looking for it and then using that one person telling them to stop feeling so sorry for themselves as proof that everybody in the world wants to throw them back in gas chambers.
I commented on my personal once where I mentioned that judaism and zionism are two separate things and got downvoted to oblivion. Someone replied saying that my comment was very much exactly what they too feel, but I got downvoted *simply because* I referred to them as separate entities. That is another criticism they've recieved lately; the pure idea of zionism is on the complete opposite side from what Judaism stands for. I've seen so many of the members there calling Jews protesting against Israel "self-hating" and traitors.
I've also made so many replies that I never sent because I know for a fact they would do anything in their power to ban me from ever using reddit again, and I wouldn't be surprised if I got doxxed and harrassed IRL from it. I saved them all, though. I found that it was kind of therapeutic to get it out, but it still bugs me that I never found a way to say it to them. I once also made a post about my rage for their behaviour connected to this genocide, but I thankfully stopped myself before I posted it. I'm so enraged by their sheer ignorance and hypocritical behaviour, all the while Gaza is still being eradicated and slaughtered, war crimes happening day in-day out, inhumane atrocities by the IOF being posted and hailed, and they have the audacity to say that they are the victims? That Israel has no other choice but martyring tens of thousands of CHILDREN? Starving the entire Gaza Strip, segregating West Bank, literally teaching their young in school to hate and attack arabs? That last one might not be true as I don't speak Hebrew or Arabic, so anyone could've just made up the translation, but I still feel it's worth mentioning in case it actually *is* real.
My point is that the guts they have to claim to be so moral, yet still be so unfaced from what's happening in Gaza is beside me. Sure, for those living near the Gaza wall, I'm positive that hearing bombs and screams were traumatizing as fuck, but to then leave for work the next day and claim that "shit happens"? It's insane! It's inhumane. They can leave whenever they like, children can play football (soccer) in the streets and not having to worry about shit, hotels and restaurants with 5-star ratings thriving, plants and flowers still blooming, absolutely no threats on a daily basis. The fact that people are still calling this a war, something necessary, is beyond devastating to me. There are millions still siding with zionism, claiming there's nothing wrong with the belief that you have an innate right to some dirt simply because your holy book says that thousands of years ago, your religion lived there, and simply because of that religious fact you are rightfully owed thousands of young lives, the death of an entire country with its own culture, just to feed the irrational religious political system? How in God's name has that ever, *IS* that still okay? If Muslims were the ones saying that shit, they would've been completely destroyed by now, today's generation wouldn't know what the fuck Islam was. They are still being slaughtered though, because they're saying it's *not* okay. How is that not racist again?
My brother and I got into a heated argument a few days ago about this. I am very much *for* Palestine to have human rights and to own their own land - he is very much *against* "ugly blackies" having any rights because they're *not* human. Boi when I tell you I got so angry I started crying. And the worst part about that fight? He claims that Jews aren't any better, however they still deserve to defend themselves against children running on the beach. "But Hamas-" is so over-used and outdated by now, it just proves that he doesn't follow up on statistics and evidence. Even if there only were one-sided news (from Gaza), the fact that the ICJ ruled Israel's actions a genocide and war crimes still proves everything he claims to be "n*****'s propaganda". And the fact that he so underminds my autism and *need* for factual evidence before discussing it also goes to show that he genuinely does not care about anything other than the black "terrorists" being eradicated. I said "So you're not just a racist, you're just plain racist?" he just scoffed and looked at me as if I just said the most nonsensical bullshit gibberish ever, practically saying "I'm not gonna say anything, but it really took you that long to realise?" Either that, or he actually didn't comprehend the words coming out of my mouth, like it was a foreign language or something. Because he genuinely does not have a single reason to be racist.
He can't even blame suicide attacks because 1) not all are carried by muslims, and 2) between 1981-2015 around 45,000 were killed by suicide attacks worldwide, where in 2019 the total death toll was only 1,699 more than amount of attacks; whereas in Gaza, between Oct 7 to present there are about 34,000 confirmed palestinian deaths, and assumed around 42,000 with unconfirmed deaths. If, in 36 years, "muslim terrorism" killed about the same amount as Israel has in almost 8 months, how on earth are Arabs the terrorists?
And I've also seen the argument that 30,000 is nothing compared to the total population in Gaza, as if that makes it okay. I will, again, make example of The Holocaust. When 30,000 Jews were martyred, people were already catching on, and this was without the technology we have today.
How have we been allowing this to happen to Palestinians *with* our technology today? Why haven't people been doing more; striking our jobs, cummute chauffeurs striking, proper permanent boycotts, more coverage from news anchors and private people alike? Even if it is to officially reclaim your love for white supremacy, you're still talking about it. Why are people still not reading up on this? Why does millions still not know that this *didn't* begin on October 7th? And why are there still those who claim that the past doesn't matter today? I have so many questions, and if I do get an answer I will only end up with more questions. How hasn't the world stopped over this? Why are people so okay knowing that there are children being intentionally murdered every single day? How can you go to work and talk about Dave's new tie? Or your 6 year old's birthday party with 15 other 6 year olds? Hasn't it crossed your mind that if the roles were reversed, your precious princess would be the one burried under tons of rubble, dying slowly while simontaniously starving, dehydrating, suffocating and crushing, and *knowing* that absolutely no one cares because you're [skin color] and it's normal for your kids to be horrendously massacred? "Oh but the Taliban-ISIS-Al Qaeda" OKAY so what are you gonna do to help save innocent lives and suffering??? How are you gonna contribute to STOP these organizations that have manipulated and murdered to rule their country and are intentionally making the citicens miserable? Are you even aware that your own govurnment is essentially the same fucking thing, just disguised as a well dressed, polite gentleman? Aren't you sick of all those ads on TV showing brown children with flies in their eyes? Or your mama telling you to think about the starving children in Africa? Because I am.
I am so sick and tired of how inhumane humans have come to be. You don't see animals (and I'm trying my best to not mention how humans *are* animals, guess I failed) intentionally kill another animal simply because they're that animal. They kill prey; polar bears kill seals, seals kill penguins, penguins kill fish, fish kill amoebas, and you can get to that result from absolutely everything. What you don't find as a natural event is a golden, brown mane lion attack and kill an albino lion simply because it's albino. You don't see a school of fish swim away from one with two heads, because "*omg Jared is such a freak with his two heads*." So why the FUCK DID WE START DOING THAT? Where did this hunger for power come from? You *will* see a female lion tell the king that enough is enough, and he *will* accept that. I could go on and on for DAYS if I got the chance, but I don't wanna get too off topic here.
I've started a list of all the universally illegal shit Israel has done, and once I'm satisfied with it, I'll make one comparing Israel to Palestine, and then Arabs/Muslims as a whole. I can guarantee that I will still hear "on-sided sources" still, or "You can't trust Wikipedia!" Have you ever tried to edit or create an article on Wikipedia? I have, and I had to confirm that I had a degree or a current valid work ID to prove that I was elgible to speak on the topic. I tried to make a site for myself... Sure, there are more trustworthy sites, but even in a discussion about wether or not being trans is a mental illness, where I quoted and linked all of the most well known official sources like WHO, I was still slapped with "but this shady ass article from a random Deutch website that explicitly says everything I've said, yet still isn't actually saying the same thing because I misquoted and mixed the words to form my own sentence says that it is" when they literally linked a website called "disabled world". I will say though, I agree with that name. Today's world is so non-funtional for neurotypical, hetero, white MEN, it's no fucking wonder everyone else are classified as disabled or whatever. Also, on that disabled topic, if you've made it this far, please don't say "differently abled". A quote unquote quote (heh geddit? cuz it's rephrased and I don't have the book near me rn to directly quote) from Devon Price's "Unmasking Autism" that I really like: "You wouldn't say "a person with Asianness", you'd say "an Asian person"." We are disabled because today's world isn't made for us, and for the most part isn't even accomodated or accessible to us. We are different, yeah, but literally everyone is. We just got that term because we can't do the same things as you (assuming you're neurotypical) without aid. We are able, just not like you. Of course, if an autistic person tells you they prefer "person with autism", listen to them! But most of us embrace it as a part of us because we can't just get rid of it. Autism is what make me me, I wouldn't be me without my autism, so I *am* autistic, for better or for worse. :)
I find it kinda ironic that I started this as a venting about a lot of Jews' hypocritical behaviour, and now ending up on autism. Yaknow, cuz Dr. Asperger during WW2 experimented and tortured autistic people, and found out that some where more alike him than others, which then coined the term Aspergers for the Autistic Community.
Anywho, I feel better now, so thanks for letting me vent a little (a lot). I want to finish off by restating my intro; I have not, and will not tolerate any hate, racism or discrimination towards any religion, ethnicity, nationality, culture etc. This post is not intended as a rant about how aweful jews are, because they're not. I just wanted to air some frustration over their behaviour regarding I/P genocide. This is also not about *all* Jews, but that's the same discussion as "not all men" so I'll leave it at that.
I will delete this account in a week, so if you have any questions, be fast ig. If you find I've mis-phrased, used irrationally insensitive wording or any other complaints that calls for a repost, I will fix it and post an updated version. My DMs will also be available if that should be of interest, but I will not be responding to hate or personal attacks for my opinions. If the issue is my wording, again, tell me and I'll fix it.
At this point I've written so much that I don't remember if I found anything myself that I figured was worth fixing, and I've proof read it so many times that my eyes are crossing and giving me a headache lol
Gosh I'm scared of posting this. I don't want anyone to read this and think I support what A. H. did in 1940 cuz I cannot begin to describe my hatred for that man
submitted by Iam-scared-of-myself to confessions [link] [comments]
This is gonna be a hefty and most likely triggering post for specific groups of people out there (meaning people who struggle with anger, people who don't want poltical content/opinions etc), so please stop reading and leave if you figure this is gonna be rough for you. This will (mainly) be about the conflict between Palestine and Israel. (and apparently a long one) No hate towards any specific groups of people, but I do have a lot of *frustration regarding behaviours*.
Before I start, I want you to remember some facts about me as you read;
I am autistic
I am heavily influenced by world peace, hate, racism and other unfair situations
I have incredibly high standards for myself that I strive to not break, including, but not limited to, being kind and respectful *always*, despite being in a bad mood, not liking someone, or disagreeing, especially political disagreements
I have always, and will always, stand against widespread hate, racism and other discrimination towards any specific religions, ethnicities, nationalities, cultures, etc.
I also want you to know that I named this throwaway accordingly.
So let's get this shitshow started then, shall we.
As the details of the conflict stands, it is beyond obvious to me that this is racism and, literally, a Holocaust. Not *the* Holocaust, but *a* Holocaust. Oxford Languages has the term defined as a destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, especially caused by fire or nuclear war . I'd say that's very much accurate. Proof to come.
Regardless, this situation has had me very pressed the last almost 8 months, as I know most other people have been too. Without getting too much into the conflict itself, I want to talk a little about what I've seen from the Jewish community.
This is where I advise anyone who struggles with anger especially to leave and try to keep your day positive. If you have a magical potion to stay stable after this, who am I to stop you...
Alright, onto the dreaded part. And yes, I am stalling.
I have never, and I truly mean *never* had any hateful thoughts or opinions about religions (other than Christianity but that's one for another time), and as we are all aware of, The Holocaust had massive effect on the world some 80 years ago. I have always seen Jews as victims due to this, but in recent times I've realised that a lot of them, too, see themselves as victims. The issue is that they aren't the victims right now. They (Israel) aren't defending themselves, they have nothing to defend themselves against. Israel is currently doing the exact same thing as Germany did to them, to Palestine. Sure, maybe at some point who knows when, Palestine *was* the land of Jews, but since then, multiple religions have been thriving together on that land, including Jews. They were never excluded. From what I've understood, there weren't any wars or conflicts going on within the country that didn't happen elsewhere. The issue began when in the late 1940's zionists brutally murdered families to steal their homes. I'm sure the situation was so much more complex than that, but in a nutshell that is basically it. The fact that everyone today have been so desensitized from the travesties happening around the world is depressing and hope-killing. I truly am well on the way to giving up, and at this point in time I'm so angry all the time due to the Middle East's situation.
So a few weeks ago, probably closing in on months at this point, I randomly got a notification from reddit about someone posting on /Jewish. They didn't say anything explicit, so I pressed the notification and I was met with the worst victimization and ignorance I've ever seen. I truly believed most jews would see this for what it is, and not let some racist maniac spoon-feed them propaganda and hate, but I was brutally and humbly proven wrong. They were mocking proPAL parades, hating on news anchors and civilians alike calling this a genocide, insisting that Israel has no other choice, saying "casualties happens in war", convincing each other that zionism is a good thing, and feeling sorry for themselves when friends and families cut contact because they said they supported Israel and saw this as the only solution. Some might have been genuine problems, idk, but for the most part, that subreddit seems to only be about hating the rest of the world because their great grandparents were killed. I know I sound like a complete asshole, but the world isn't antisemetic anymore - they are actively looking for it and then using that one person telling them to stop feeling so sorry for themselves as proof that everybody in the world wants to throw them back in gas chambers.
I commented on my personal once where I mentioned that judaism and zionism are two separate things and got downvoted to oblivion. Someone replied saying that my comment was very much exactly what they too feel, but I got downvoted *simply because* I referred to them as separate entities. That is another criticism they've recieved lately; the pure idea of zionism is on the complete opposite side from what Judaism stands for. I've seen so many of the members there calling Jews protesting against Israel "self-hating" and traitors.
I've also made so many replies that I never sent because I know for a fact they would do anything in their power to ban me from ever using reddit again, and I wouldn't be surprised if I got doxxed and harrassed IRL from it. I saved them all, though. I found that it was kind of therapeutic to get it out, but it still bugs me that I never found a way to say it to them. I once also made a post about my rage for their behaviour connected to this genocide, but I thankfully stopped myself before I posted it. I'm so enraged by their sheer ignorance and hypocritical behaviour, all the while Gaza is still being eradicated and slaughtered, war crimes happening day in-day out, inhumane atrocities by the IOF being posted and hailed, and they have the audacity to say that they are the victims? That Israel has no other choice but martyring tens of thousands of CHILDREN? Starving the entire Gaza Strip, segregating West Bank, literally teaching their young in school to hate and attack arabs? That last one might not be true as I don't speak Hebrew or Arabic, so anyone could've just made up the translation, but I still feel it's worth mentioning in case it actually *is* real.
My point is that the guts they have to claim to be so moral, yet still be so unfaced from what's happening in Gaza is beside me. Sure, for those living near the Gaza wall, I'm positive that hearing bombs and screams were traumatizing as fuck, but to then leave for work the next day and claim that "shit happens"? It's insane! It's inhumane. They can leave whenever they like, children can play football (soccer) in the streets and not having to worry about shit, hotels and restaurants with 5-star ratings thriving, plants and flowers still blooming, absolutely no threats on a daily basis. The fact that people are still calling this a war, something necessary, is beyond devastating to me. There are millions still siding with zionism, claiming there's nothing wrong with the belief that you have an innate right to some dirt simply because your holy book says that thousands of years ago, your religion lived there, and simply because of that religious fact you are rightfully owed thousands of young lives, the death of an entire country with its own culture, just to feed the irrational religious political system? How in God's name has that ever, *IS* that still okay? If Muslims were the ones saying that shit, they would've been completely destroyed by now, today's generation wouldn't know what the fuck Islam was. They are still being slaughtered though, because they're saying it's *not* okay. How is that not racist again?
My brother and I got into a heated argument a few days ago about this. I am very much *for* Palestine to have human rights and to own their own land - he is very much *against* "ugly blackies" having any rights because they're *not* human. Boi when I tell you I got so angry I started crying. And the worst part about that fight? He claims that Jews aren't any better, however they still deserve to defend themselves against children running on the beach. "But Hamas-" is so over-used and outdated by now, it just proves that he doesn't follow up on statistics and evidence. Even if there only were one-sided news (from Gaza), the fact that the ICJ ruled Israel's actions a genocide and war crimes still proves everything he claims to be "n*****'s propaganda". And the fact that he so underminds my autism and *need* for factual evidence before discussing it also goes to show that he genuinely does not care about anything other than the black "terrorists" being eradicated. I said "So you're not just a racist, you're just plain racist?" he just scoffed and looked at me as if I just said the most nonsensical bullshit gibberish ever, practically saying "I'm not gonna say anything, but it really took you that long to realise?" Either that, or he actually didn't comprehend the words coming out of my mouth, like it was a foreign language or something. Because he genuinely does not have a single reason to be racist.
He can't even blame suicide attacks because 1) not all are carried by muslims, and 2) between 1981-2015 around 45,000 were killed by suicide attacks worldwide, where in 2019 the total death toll was only 1,699 more than amount of attacks; whereas in Gaza, between Oct 7 to present there are about 34,000 confirmed palestinian deaths, and assumed around 42,000 with unconfirmed deaths. If, in 36 years, "muslim terrorism" killed about the same amount as Israel has in almost 8 months, how on earth are Arabs the terrorists?
And I've also seen the argument that 30,000 is nothing compared to the total population in Gaza, as if that makes it okay. I will, again, make example of The Holocaust. When 30,000 Jews were martyred, people were already catching on, and this was without the technology we have today.
How have we been allowing this to happen to Palestinians *with* our technology today? Why haven't people been doing more; striking our jobs, cummute chauffeurs striking, proper permanent boycotts, more coverage from news anchors and private people alike? Even if it is to officially reclaim your love for white supremacy, you're still talking about it. Why are people still not reading up on this? Why does millions still not know that this *didn't* begin on October 7th? And why are there still those who claim that the past doesn't matter today? I have so many questions, and if I do get an answer I will only end up with more questions. How hasn't the world stopped over this? Why are people so okay knowing that there are children being intentionally murdered every single day? How can you go to work and talk about Dave's new tie? Or your 6 year old's birthday party with 15 other 6 year olds? Hasn't it crossed your mind that if the roles were reversed, your precious princess would be the one burried under tons of rubble, dying slowly while simontaniously starving, dehydrating, suffocating and crushing, and *knowing* that absolutely no one cares because you're [skin color] and it's normal for your kids to be horrendously massacred? "Oh but the Taliban-ISIS-Al Qaeda" OKAY so what are you gonna do to help save innocent lives and suffering??? How are you gonna contribute to STOP these organizations that have manipulated and murdered to rule their country and are intentionally making the citicens miserable? Are you even aware that your own govurnment is essentially the same fucking thing, just disguised as a well dressed, polite gentleman? Aren't you sick of all those ads on TV showing brown children with flies in their eyes? Or your mama telling you to think about the starving children in Africa? Because I am.
I am so sick and tired of how inhumane humans have come to be. You don't see animals (and I'm trying my best to not mention how humans *are* animals, guess I failed) intentionally kill another animal simply because they're that animal. They kill prey; polar bears kill seals, seals kill penguins, penguins kill fish, fish kill amoebas, and you can get to that result from absolutely everything. What you don't find as a natural event is a golden, brown mane lion attack and kill an albino lion simply because it's albino. You don't see a school of fish swim away from one with two heads, because "*omg Jared is such a freak with his two heads*." So why the FUCK DID WE START DOING THAT? Where did this hunger for power come from? You *will* see a female lion tell the king that enough is enough, and he *will* accept that. I could go on and on for DAYS if I got the chance, but I don't wanna get too off topic here.
I've started a list of all the universally illegal shit Israel has done, and once I'm satisfied with it, I'll make one comparing Israel to Palestine, and then Arabs/Muslims as a whole. I can guarantee that I will still hear "on-sided sources" still, or "You can't trust Wikipedia!" Have you ever tried to edit or create an article on Wikipedia? I have, and I had to confirm that I had a degree or a current valid work ID to prove that I was elgible to speak on the topic. I tried to make a site for myself... Sure, there are more trustworthy sites, but even in a discussion about wether or not being trans is a mental illness, where I quoted and linked all of the most well known official sources like WHO, I was still slapped with "but this shady ass article from a random Deutch website that explicitly says everything I've said, yet still isn't actually saying the same thing because I misquoted and mixed the words to form my own sentence says that it is" when they literally linked a website called "disabled world". I will say though, I agree with that name. Today's world is so non-funtional for neurotypical, hetero, white MEN, it's no fucking wonder everyone else are classified as disabled or whatever. Also, on that disabled topic, if you've made it this far, please don't say "differently abled". A quote unquote quote (heh geddit? cuz it's rephrased and I don't have the book near me rn to directly quote) from Devon Price's "Unmasking Autism" that I really like: "You wouldn't say "a person with Asianness", you'd say "an Asian person"." We are disabled because today's world isn't made for us, and for the most part isn't even accomodated or accessible to us. We are different, yeah, but literally everyone is. We just got that term because we can't do the same things as you (assuming you're neurotypical) without aid. We are able, just not like you. Of course, if an autistic person tells you they prefer "person with autism", listen to them! But most of us embrace it as a part of us because we can't just get rid of it. Autism is what make me me, I wouldn't be me without my autism, so I *am* autistic, for better or for worse. :)
I find it kinda ironic that I started this as a venting about a lot of Jews' hypocritical behaviour, and now ending up on autism. Yaknow, cuz Dr. Asperger during WW2 experimented and tortured autistic people, and found out that some where more alike him than others, which then coined the term Aspergers for the Autistic Community.
Anywho, I feel better now, so thanks for letting me vent a little (a lot). I want to finish off by restating my intro; I have not, and will not tolerate any hate, racism or discrimination towards any religion, ethnicity, nationality, culture etc. This post is not intended as a rant about how aweful jews are, because they're not. I just wanted to air some frustration over their behaviour regarding I/P genocide. This is also not about *all* Jews, but that's the same discussion as "not all men" so I'll leave it at that.
I will delete this account in a week, so if you have any questions, be fast ig. If you find I've mis-phrased, used irrationally insensitive wording or any other complaints that calls for a repost, I will fix it and post an updated version. My DMs will also be available if that should be of interest, but I will not be responding to hate or personal attacks for my opinions. If the issue is my wording, again, tell me and I'll fix it.
At this point I've written so much that I don't remember if I found anything myself that I figured was worth fixing, and I've proof read it so many times that my eyes are crossing and giving me a headache lol
Gosh I'm scared of posting this. I don't want anyone to read this and think I support what A. H. did in 1940 cuz I cannot begin to describe my hatred for that man
2024.05.19 08:07 elite5472 [Feedback] Progression is fantastic, endgame is frustratingly unbalanced.
I'm wrapping up the season after being obsessed with this game for the past week. It's been great, the most fun I've had since season 2 for sure, and I look forward to see what comes next!
I have used necro since the start, never played anything else, and I must say I loved most of the changes, but I'll get into that later. First, a summary of how far I got.
What I've done:
D4 from levels 1-100 and all the way to nightmare 70ish and early Pit is fantastic. But the end game suffers from the exact same problem it always has: D4 becomes a bullet hell game and not an ARPG at some point, and they need to do something about it.
submitted by elite5472 to diablo4 [link] [comments]
I have used necro since the start, never played anything else, and I must say I loved most of the changes, but I'll get into that later. First, a summary of how far I got.
What I've done:
- Battle pass
- Season all the way to the last objective
- Level 100
- Tier 81 pit cleared
- Masterwork rank 8 on all my gear
- My build was a corpse explosion shadow mage build focused on exploiting the new skeleton abilities to deal shadow damage. It was a lot of fun! Not the standard minion build but instead a shadow build using minions to proc corpses and shadowblight.
- Gearing was the most fun I've had in any ARPG I've played. Just the right amount of RNG, fun surprises, and things to look forward to. I think D4 strikes the perfect balance for casual play and it just feels great. The codex fixed all of my problems with stash space and having to spend so much time reading every item. By end game, you look at what's marked with a star and sell/scrap the rest, and that's perfect.
- Skeletons play and feel great, but golem is massively overtuned. Early in the endgame I slapped a golem onto my build to add a little extra damage, and let me tell you I had to optimize the **** out of my build to be able to deal a similar amount of damage without it. I think warriors need a buff (they mostly just hold the line) and golems need to be knocked down by a lot.
- I LOVE the synergies between skeleton mages and bone/shadow builds, easily my favorite part of the season. Shadowbolt mages are super fun when they proc xfal and shadowblight and all of my abilities. With max attack speed and +50% double shot proc it's insane how fast they shoot.
- I had many issues scaling damage lategame. If you're not running golem or playing a maxroll meta build, I don't think most players will be able to keep up past pit tier 80. You simply run out of damage. By this point I could easily clear uber duriel though so I think it's a decent stopping point for most people.
- Masterworking is too annoying at the moment. I had to spam tier 60 despite being able to do 70 relatively well because in order to downgrade meterials you have to pay an insane amount of gold. This meant either getting a pittance of materials, or paying 1.5 million per run to turn the T3 matierial into a T2.
- Late game D4 still doesn't feel great. Too many things can immediately kill you, too many effects continue after enemies are long dead. I lost count how many times I've died AFTER clearing a pack. For the record, my necromancer has well over 30k HP and both fortifies and regens health when consuming and generating corpses, my build can literally facetank uber lilith (besides the things you HAVE to dodge). None of that matters, just about anything that elites place on the ground can and will kill you almost immediately, and those effects linger well after the elite dies.
- Of all the bosses they could have picked for the pit, they seemingly chose the most annoying ones they have. The rogue in particular is practically impossible at high tiers when Lilith starts showing up to help late in the fight. Imagine doing uber lilith while also having to dodge a bunch of traps, oh, and you can only damage the boss half the time!
D4 from levels 1-100 and all the way to nightmare 70ish and early Pit is fantastic. But the end game suffers from the exact same problem it always has: D4 becomes a bullet hell game and not an ARPG at some point, and they need to do something about it.
2024.05.19 08:07 storybox Sensory issues
Hi, so I have ADHD, generalized anxiety disorder, and major depressive disorder (If this info Is helpful).
Recently, like within the past half a year or so, I have noticed that I’ve become more and more sensitive to loud noises. The sound of the vacuum running is probably the worst. I just vacuumed my house and had to stop because I was so overwhelmed and it was making me feel physically scared. I was actually on the edge of a panic attack. This has been happening every time now.
I also feel super overwhelmed when in public places with a large amount of people and things going on. I went to a craft convention and I had to take multiple breaks because I couldn’t handle all the things going on. It makes me feel like my eyes are darting all over the place and I can’t concentrate on anything. Then that makes me feel really disassociated.
Are sensory issues related to ADHD?? Does anyone have any suggestions of how to deal with it when I feel overwhelmed?
submitted by storybox to mentalhealth [link] [comments]
Recently, like within the past half a year or so, I have noticed that I’ve become more and more sensitive to loud noises. The sound of the vacuum running is probably the worst. I just vacuumed my house and had to stop because I was so overwhelmed and it was making me feel physically scared. I was actually on the edge of a panic attack. This has been happening every time now.
I also feel super overwhelmed when in public places with a large amount of people and things going on. I went to a craft convention and I had to take multiple breaks because I couldn’t handle all the things going on. It makes me feel like my eyes are darting all over the place and I can’t concentrate on anything. Then that makes me feel really disassociated.
Are sensory issues related to ADHD?? Does anyone have any suggestions of how to deal with it when I feel overwhelmed?
2024.05.19 08:07 SilverNight290 Elderly cat care preparation questions
 | My cat, Lily, will be eleven years old in September! I want to make sure I give her the best care I can so she can be as comfortable as possible as she’s getting older. submitted by SilverNight290 to catcare [link] [comments] She isn’t very active at all. I’m scheduling a vet appointment so she can get really checked out, but she has some mobility issues already. She was hit by a car as a young kitten, maybe around 2 months, so she had some facial reconstruction done and what looks like shoulder injuries from the way she walks. I’m going to see what medications I can get for her, as she has a constant runny nose and sneezes a lot. I personally suspect there’s something structurally wrong in her sinuses or nasal cavity, as she’s been on medication for this before, but the problem comes back in 3-4 weeks. I’m not a vet though, so that’s just my shot in the dark. For food, I’ve switched her to the Tikicat elder wet food. She was previously eating FancyFeast(I felt horrible but it was affordable), but this past week I found live maggots in her fresh food, so no more of that garbage! She has 6 teeth left that I can see and seems to have an easier time eating the wet food than dry. What kind of supplements have you guys had good experiences with? I’d be looking for joint health and immune support. I’m not sure if this is something to ask a vet about instead. Is there anything else you guys would recommend I get for her? Maybe a ramp to get up on the bed so she doesn’t have to jump, even though she doesn’t seem to have problems with it? She’s been my rock and shield through some very rough years and I need to make sure I do this right. She’s so important to me. |
2024.05.19 08:07 Elanderan 28M Looking to make a good friend online
I have trouble making friends in real life like most of us. I have social anxiety but it's improved a lot over the past couple years. I'm really lonely wanting someone to talk to. We can talk about anything. We can get to know each other, share emberassing or anxiety inducing things that have happened, talk about our lives, or whatever. I like getting to know people, even if we don't relate much I like learning new things and discovering new interests. I'm pretty attentive to my friends. If I'm at work I won't be able to reply as often but I'll try
I'm into some anime, sci-fi, gaming, and other stuff. I work at a retail store. I live in Indiana in the US. Message if interested
submitted by Elanderan to socialanxiety [link] [comments]
I'm into some anime, sci-fi, gaming, and other stuff. I work at a retail store. I live in Indiana in the US. Message if interested
2024.05.19 08:07 TheOldWestern May 2024 Fan creation prompts
Something I’ll experiment with is posting prompt lists I have in storage for you writers, artists, whatever out there. Most of the ones I have are from ancient LiveJournal communities but this one is special in that it’s from an ancient FE site. Internet Archive link is at the top (though be warned, it’s in Japanese and on iOS the text is garbled.)
In summary, these are 100 FE-themed prompts that I’m posting here for your usage (Google translated, so there may be some awkwardness):
submitted by TheOldWestern to FEHHusbandos [link] [comments]
In summary, these are 100 FE-themed prompts that I’m posting here for your usage (Google translated, so there may be some awkwardness):
- Load
- Prepare to attack
- Heroine
- Loyal Knight
- Close call!
- Hero
- Knight and Princess
- Attack!
- Join
- Class change
- Arena
- Treasure found
- Fluttering
- Dancing in the sky
- Across the desert
- Wound
- Brother and sister
- Healing
- Dragon's blood
- Rage
- Warrior
- Time to rest
- It has to be you
- Wind
- Frozen land
- Triangle attack!
- Heavy
- Beautiful long-haired swordsman
- Valkyrie
- Rival
- Take aim
- Go at your own pace
- Rescue
- Revenge
- Bonds
- The Captive Princess
- Goodbye
- Sleep
- Mage
- Friendship
- Noble and Commoner
- Risking My Life
- Not Yet!
- I Can Be of Help
- Grassland
- Unstoppable
- Persuasion
- Princess
- Prayer
- Light and Darkness
- Dragoon
- Domination
- Fated Showdown (Part 2)
- Wait
- A Break
- Loved One
- Money
- Big Brother
- Tension
- Look-alike
- ...I'm Bored
- Unrequited Love
- Cleric
- Guard
- Beard
- I'm sorry
- Special training
- Ancient magic
- Smile
- Sword dance
- That cute girl
- Partner
- Sweat
- Help me
- Night
- Friends
- ...!!
- Tears
- Fatal blow
- Prince
- Legendary weapon
- Thank you
- Blood
- Stand by me
- Strategy meeting
- Confession
- Past
- Hurry! Hurry!
- Heart pounding
- Rain
- Alone
- Happiness
- Great duo
- Handsome
- Banquet
- Back
- Eve of the final battle
- Final battle
- The Message of Peace
- Wedding Ceremony
2024.05.19 08:06 Mantis_Shrimp47 The monster in the sand dunes turned my brother into a bird
"You gotta know that there's an art to it, Ezra," Hitch said, cutting another piece of duct tape.
The sleeves of his weather-beaten coat were shoved all the way up his arms, to stop the fabric from falling over his knuckles while he was working, and goosebumps lined his skin. He was strapping a rubber chicken to the back of his truck, over the lens of the shattered backup camera, with the legs pointing down so that they hung a couple inches above the ground. There were dents in the hood from the crash last week, and scratches along the door from scraping into a curb. The chicken, hopefully, would keep him from breaking anything else.
"You can't go cheap," Hitch said. "The cheap rubber chickens only make noise when pressure lets go. That's no good. As soon as I back up into something, I want this chicken to be screaming like it’s in the depths of hell."
“Sure thing,” I said in a monotone, leaning against the side of the truck.
There were scrambled electronic parts piled in the back of the truck, the innards of a radio, a broken computer, tangled wires, a couple loose pairs of earbuds. He found the parts in alleyways or bummed them off his friends for a couple bucks or stole them from the vacation homes that were left empty for most of the year. Then he sold them for a profit at the scrapyard. Hitch had bounced between minimum-wage jobs for a while after high school, spending a couple months as a bagger at the grocery store or as a seasonal worker at the farm two hours down the highway. He'd never stuck with it. At the very least, the scrapyard got him enough money to eat and occasionally spend a night in a motel when he got tired of sleeping in his car.
Hitch pressed the last piece of tape in place and grinned up at me. "I've got something for you, duck."
The nickname came from when I’d broken my leg as a child and waddled around in a cast until it was healed. I hated it with a burning passion, and I glared at Hitch with the ease of twenty-one years of practice. He had a duck tattoo at the base of his thumb that he’d gotten in a back-alley shop as a teenager. He said that he’d gotten it to remind him of me, and the fact that I hated the nickname was just a bonus. It was shaky-lined, with an uneven face, but he loved it anyway.
The handle stuck when Hitch tried to open the door, a consequence of the rust collecting in the crevices of the car and running down the sides like blood from a cut. The car groaned when the door finally popped open, a metal against metal screech that had me flinching away. Hitch dug through the cluttered fast food containers in the passenger-side footwell, eventually coming up with a crinkly paper bag. He waved away the flies buzzing around the opening of the bag and held it out to me.
The last time Hitch had brought me food, I’d gotten food poisoning because he’d left it out in the midday sun for two days. The donut was squished slightly, and the icing was stuck to the bag. I still ate it, grimacing at the harsh citrus flavor. Taking Hitch’s food was an instinct engraved from the days when Dad had given us a can of kidney beans for dinner and Hitch had drank the juice, leaving the beans for me.
I rarely went hungry anymore, three mostly square meals a day and granola in my pockets just in case, but habits didn’t die easy.
These days, Hitch only brought me food when he wanted my help, like when he saw a place he wanted to hit but was worried about doing it alone.
I got in the car, like I always did.
We drove past the cluster of seafood-themed restaurants with chipped paint decks, the beachfront park where there were always shifty-eyed men sitting under the slide, the single room library where all the books had been water damaged in the flood last year. The change was quick as we drove across Main Street, heading closer to the beach. The roads were freshly paved, the concrete a smooth black except where the sun had already started to pick away at it. The three-story homes lining the sides of the street were crouched on elegant stilts, with space underneath for a car or three. Most of the garages were empty, with the lights off and curtains drawn in the house. Come summer, the streets would be swarming with tourists and vacationers, but until then, most of the buildings nearest to the beach were unoccupied.
Hitch stopped as the sun started to go down at a house that was leaning precariously out towards the beach, tilted ever so slightly, the edge of its foundation buried in the shifting sand of the beach. It certainly looked deserted, with an overgrown yard and blue paint peeling off the door in sheets.
Hitch took his hammer out of the backseat, hoisting it over his shoulder. It was two feet of solid metal with rags wrapped around the head to muffle the sound of the hits. Hitch squared up, bending his knees and holding the hammer like a baseball bat. Before he could swing, though, the door creaked open on its own, the hinges squeaking. The house beyond was dark enough that I could only make out general shapes, glimpsing the curve of a sofa to the left, what was maybe the shimmer of a chandelier on the other side.
Hitch lowered his hammer, looking vaguely disappointed that he didn’t get to use it. “That’s…weird as hell.”
“Maybe the deadbolt broke, maybe they forgot to lock it, it doesn’t matter,” I hissed, checking our surroundings for other people again. “Just hurry up and get inside before someone calls the cops.”
Hitch flicked the lightswitch on the wall, and the lights flickered on. They were dim, buzzing audibly and blinking off occasionally. The walls were plastered with contrasting swatches of wallpaper and splattered with random colors. There was neon orange behind the dining table, a galaxy swirl in the kitchen, and on the ceiling there was a repeating floral pattern covered in nametag stickers. Each of the stickers was filled out with The Erlking. Chandeliers hung in every room, three or four for each, and rubber ducks sat on every table. A miniature carousel sat in the corner along with a towering model rocket.
Sand was heaped on every surface, at least a couple inches everywhere. It was piled in the corners and stuck to the walls, and it covered the floor in a thick blanket. Our hesitant steps into the house left footprints clearly outlined in the sand.
Hitch took a cursory look around and headed immediately for the TV mounted on the wall. “Look out the windows and tell me if anyone is coming.”
I shook the sand out of the blinds and pulled them open, then had to brush sand off of the window before I could see anything.
Hitch was quick, practiced at finding and appropriating the things that were worth taking. He came back to me with an armful of electronics and chandeliers, dumping it at my feet before turning to head deeper into the house again.
There was a thump, somewhere upstairs, and then footsteps, slow and deliberate. Hitch froze at the threshold of the room, then ran for the door with me just ahead of him, sand flying out from under our feet.
My hand was almost brushing the doorknob, close enough that I could see the light from the streetlamp outside streaming in through the cracks in the door. My fingers touched the wood and it gave under my touch, becoming malleable and warm. I yelped, stumbling backwards, and the door started to melt. The paint ran down in thick drops, pooling at the bottom of the door, and the wood warped like metal being welded. The soft edges of the door ran into the walls until there was no sign of an exit ever being there.
“Well, well, well,” said a cultured voice with just an edge of snooty elitism. “What do we have here?”
The man was well over eight feet tall, with long black hair covering his eyes. He was wearing a yellow raincoat with holes cut out of the hood to accommodate the deer antlers jutting upwards from his head. There was sand settled on his shoulders and hovering around his head like a halo.
“Who the fuck are you?” Hitch said, inching towards a window.
He smiled, just a little bit, and his teeth shone in the dim light. “I am the Erlking.”
Hitch nodded, and seemed about to respond. I grabbed him by the hand and pulled him towards the window. I could feel sand in the wind roaring against my back as the Erlking growled in anger, the grains scraping harshly against my cheeks.
We were almost to the window when Hitch was ripped away from me, and I came to a startled halt. The sand had formed long grasping arms that pressed Hitch against the floral wallpaper. His wrists were held tight, and as I watched, a sandy hand wrapped around his mouth and forced its way between his teeth. He gagged, and sand trickled out of the corners of his mouth.
The Erlking strolled towards him, not seeming to be in any sort of rush. “You know, I’m not very fond of your yapping.”
He made an idle gesture and the sand wrapped around my ankles, tethering me in place.
“I yap all the time,” Hitch said. “Three-time olympic yapper, that’s me. Best to just let me go now and save yourself some trouble.”
The Erlking tapped a manicured nail against Hitch’s mouth, hard enough to hurt, judging by the way he flinched away. “But why would I ever let you go when I’ve gone to this much trouble to catch you and your sister? It’s so hard, these days, to find people that no one will miss.”
Hitch struggled against the sand, trying to escape and failing. “What do you want with us, then? You just said it, we’re nobody.”
“I’m fae, dear one,” the Erlking said. “I get my power from my followers. And I think that you two will make lovely additions to my flock.”
He flicked Hitch's nose and Hitch gasped. Feathers started to form on his arms, popping out from under his skin in a spray of blood.
Hitch pushed off the wall, using his bound hands as a fulcrum, and his knees crashed into the Erlking’s stomach. The Erlking fell backwards, wheezing, and the sand around my ankles loosened.
Hitch made desperate eye contact with me as feathers shot up his neck and jerked his head towards the window. The message was obvious. Run.
The last thing I saw before crashing out the window and into freedom was Hitch’s body twisting, his arms wrenching into wings and feathers covering every inch of his skin. By the time I landed on the concrete outside, he was a small black bird, held tightly in the Erlking’s hands. The whole building was sinking into the ground, burnished-gold sand piling up over top and streaming from the windows.
Thirty years later, I saw Sam’s Supernatural Consultation and Neutralization written in neat, looping handwriting on a piece of paper taped to the door. The tape was peeling at the corners and the paper was yellowed with age, but there was obviously care put into the sign, in its perfectly centered text and looping floral designs drawn over the edges in gold marker.
I knocked, hesitantly, drawing my woolen coat closer around my shoulders. I’d bought it as a fiftieth birthday gift for myself, and I took comfort in the heavy weight of it over my shoulders.
“Coming!” someone called from within the depths of the office.
There were a couple crashes, and the sound of paper shuffling. Eventually, the door was opened by a young woman with ketchup stains on her shirt and pencils stuck through her hair.
“Hi, I’m Sam, I specialize in supernatural consultation and hunting, how may I help you today?” Sam said, customer-service pep in her voice. She stood in the doorway, solidly blocking entry into the office.
“My name is Ezra, I’m for a consultation. I emailed you but you didn’t respond?” I shifted in place, suddenly feeling awkward.
“Oh! Yeah, I lost the password for the email ages ago. Sorry for the bad welcome, I get lots of people thinking I’m crazy or pulling a prank and harassing me.”
She ushered me into the office, clearing papers off one of the chairs to make room for me to sit down. There was a collection of swords along one wall, all of them polished to perfection, several with deep knicks in the metal which indicated that they’d been used heavily.
“So what can I help you with?” Sam asked again, more sincere this time.
“Thirty years ago, my brother was turned into a bird,” I started. I’d told this story so many times that it barely felt ridiculous to say anymore. I was used to the disbelieving looks, the careful pity. But Sam just nodded along, face open and welcoming.
“I’ve almost given up on finding him, at this point,” I said. “But I saw your ad in the newspaper, and…here I am, I suppose.”
“Here you are,” Sam echoed, smiling. She pulled one of the pencils out of her hair and took a bit of paperwork off of one of her stacks, turning it over so that the blank side sat neatly in front of her. “Tell me everything.”
I told Sam everything, and she wrote it all down, pencil scratching along the paper.
The last part of the story was always the hardest to tell. “I left him there. I ran and I didn’t look back.”
I had been to dozens of detectives and investigators over the years, once the police had dropped Hitch’s case. I’d been to professional offices with smartly-dressed secretaries and met scraggly men in coffee shops. All of them had given me the same look, pity and annoyance all mixed up into a humor-the-crazy-lady soup. Sam, though, just seemed thoughtful.
Sam leaned forward and put a hand over mine, carefully, like she thought that I would pull away. “Sometimes you have to leave people behind.”
I tightened her hold on Sam’s hand and drew it towards me, like I could make Sam listen if only I squeezed tight enough. “But that’s why I’m here. I don’t want to leave him behind.”
“Okay then. I’ll do my best to help you.” Sam agreed, finally. Then she paused, and said softly, “You know…I think I met your brother once. He might have saved my life. He’s certainly why I started in this business.”
“Really? What happened?” I asked.
This is the story that Sam told me, related to the best of my abilities:
It was a new moon, so the only illumination came from the stars gazing idly down and distant porch lights shining across the scraggly brush of the dunes. Sam’s neighbors were decent people who cared about baby turtles, so the lights were a low, unobtrusive red, and the ocean sloshed like blood. Sam walked on the beach almost every night, drawing back the gauzy pink curtains and clambering out her bedroom window. She didn’t often bother to be quiet; her mama worked the late shift and came home exhausted. As long as Sam got home before the sun, her mama would never find out that she paced the shoreline and dreamed of inhaling sand until her lungs became their own beach.
The sky was lightening. The sun would come up soon, and that meant Sam’s time on the beach was over. She needed to get back to her real life, go to her fifth grade class and stop that nonsense, as her mother would say. Her mother loved to say things like that, pushing Sam into her proper place by implication alone.
“She’s a good kid, of course, but she’s a bit…” Her mother would trail off there, usually getting a commiserating expression from whoever she was talking to. Sam always wondered how that sentence would have finished. She’s a bit strange, maybe. She’s a bit intense. She’s a bit abrasive. She’s quiet enough but when Jason tried to steal her pencil in math class, she stabbed him in the hand so hard that the lead tattooed him.
Her mother was better, for the most part. The days of her stocking up the fridge, and leaving a post-it note on the counter, and leaving for days at a time were gone. But Sam still stepped around the place on the kitchen tile where her mother had collapsed and caved her head in, even though the bloodstains had been replaced with new tile.
“Your auntie got an abortion, you know,” her mother had said from her place on the couch, slurring her words. “Pill in the mail and then bam, no more baby.”
She had clapped her hands together to illustrate her point. Her mother jerked forward and grabbed Sam by the wrist, then, staring up at her until Sam met her eyes.
“I love you, you know? But sometimes I wonder…” She settled back onto the couch. “Yeah. I wonder.”
She’d gotten up, then, back to the kitchen. She’d been stumbling, a shambling zombie of a woman. The ground in the entryway of the kitchen was raised, ever so slightly, and her mother went down hard. Her head cracked against the tile, chin first, and she didn’t move.
Sam had been the one to call the ambulance. She had stared at the scattering of loose teeth on the ground while she waited, and considered what her life would be like with a dead mom. Not so bad, she thought, and immediately felt guilty for it.
Her mom was better, now, for the most part. But Sam still stepped around the place on the kitchen floor where she had collapsed. There was still a matchbox hidden under her bed with the gleaming shine of her mother’s lost teeth, two canines and a molar. It was nice, having a piece of her mom to keep. Even if she left again, Sam would still have part of her.
Sam sighed, and turned away from the ocean. As she faced towards the low dunes further up the beach, she saw a sandcastle sitting nestled among them. It was such a strange sight that her eyes skipped over it at first, almost automatically, disregarding it because it was so out of place.
Sam found sandcastles out on the beach sometimes, usually half-collapsed and on the verge of being washed away by the waves, but she had never seen anything like the sandcastle in front of her. It was life-sized, something that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Scottish highlands, with spires shooting up above her head and carefully etched out bricks lining each side. The front wall was dominated by an arched set of double doors, twice her height, with a portcullis nestled at the top, ready to be dropped. All of it was lovingly detailed, down to the rust on the tips of the towers and the wood grain of the door. It was made out of wet, densely-packed sand, held together impossibly. It had not been there two hours ago, when she had come to the beach.
There was a bird sitting on the overhang of the door, small and black.
As soon as she took a step towards the sandcastle, the bird shook out its feathers and swooped down towards Sam, landing at her feet with a little stumble.
“Hey, kid, get out of here,” said the bird.
Sam closed her eyes, very deliberately. When she opened them, the bird was still there. Sam considered herself a very reasonable person, so she immediately drew the most logical conclusion. The bird was, she was almost certain, a demon.
“Trust me, you don’t want to run into Mr. Salty, the queen bitch himself,” the bird said.
“Mr. Salty?” Sam inquired, polite as she knew how to be. She edged to the side, trying to get a good angle to kick the bird like a soccer ball.
The bird did something similar to a wince, all its feathers fluffing up then settling back down. “Ah, don’t call him that. He’d turn you into a toad.”
The bird gestured with its head, towards the looming sand structure. “That’s his castle. He’s in there, probably scuttling along the ceiling or some shit because that’s the sort of weirdo he is.”
Sam nodded, encouraging. She pulled back her foot and lined up her shot, the way she’d seen athletes do on TV. She aimed right for its sharp beak and let loose. The bird saw it coming, its beady eyes widening, and it cawed in distress. It flapped away, avoiding her kick only to fall backward into the sand in a scramble of wings.
“What’s your fucking problem?” it squawked. “I was trying to help you!”
“I don’t need the help of a demon,” Sam yelled, trying to remember the exorcism that her mama had taught her once, because her mama believed in being prepared for anything.
“I’m not a demon,” the bird said indignantly.
It was at about that moment that Sam gave up and just decided to roll with it.
“What are you, then?” Sam asked.
The bird shuffled its clawed feet, looking about as awkward as it could, given that it didn’t really have recognizable facial expressions. “Technically I’m a familiar of the Erlking, prince of the fae, but I prefer to be called Hitch.”
“You can’t blame me for assuming, though,” Sam said. “Ravens do tend to be associated with murder.”
“Hey, excuse you,” Hitch said. “I’m a rook, not a raven. Ravens are way bigger.”
“Sure,” Sam said, not really paying attention. Her eyes had caught on the details of the sandcastle, and she was transfixed by the slow spirals of the sand, the strange beauty of it. She found herself stepping towards the great doors, lifting a hand to knock, and as she did, the sand warped in front of her eyes, heaving itself towards her with bulging slowness. The door creaked open before her, revealing a vast, empty room. Just before she stepped inside, she felt a piercing pain in her foot, and she yelped, leaping backwards.
Hitch pecked her again, really digging his beak in. “Don’t be an idiot.”
Sam glared at him, rubbing her foot. About to retort, she finally really took in the room inside the sandcastle, and her words died in her throat.
There was a body just past the threshold of the door, face down and limbs hanging limp at its sides. Long hair splayed out in a halo around its head.
“Don’t,” Hitch warned, suddenly serious. “Just leave, kid, I mean it. I’ve seen too many people go down this road and you don’t want to be one of them.”
Sam ignored him. She made her way across the beach, slipping with every step. The sand felt deeper, piling up around her feet in silent drifts. She picked up the nearest stick and poked the body with it through the door, ready to leap back if anything went wrong, staying firmly outside of the sandcastle.
This close, Sam could tell that it used to be a woman. Her head wasn’t attached to her body. It hadn’t been a clean amputation, either. Her upper body was bruised, with chunks taken out of it, and the bones in her neck hung mangled, not connected to anything.
“Well, I warned you,” Hitch said, defeated. “I did warn you.”
Sam nudged the head with the end of the stick, nudging it over so that she could see the face. Her mother stared back at her, torn to pieces, breath still wheezing from her lungs. She wasn’t blinking, just gazing forward with glazed eyes. Sweat dripped down from her hairline.
Sam screamed and dropped the stick, tripping over herself in her haste to get away.
Her mother’s eyes were wide and pleading, and she was mouthing desperate words at Sam. Her vocal cords were broken to bits, and the only sound that came out was a strained groan.
The head rolled, inching closer to Sam like a grotesque caterpillar.
Her mother gasped for air, torn lips fluttering. Finally, comprehensible words came out. “Help. Help me, daughter.”
“That’s not your mother,” Hitch said, quiet.
Sam knew that. Her mother was sleeping back at home, and anyways her mom had never asked for her help. She had an aversion to accepting charity, as she put it.
“Okay,” Sam said, shaking all over. “Okay.”
She backed away from the sandcastle, not looking away.
“Failure,” her mother hissed as she stepped away. “I never wanted a daughter like you.”
The sun came up over the horizon. The sandcastle, Hitch, and her mom all disintegrated into sand as the light hit them.
The beach, the next night, was almost exactly how I remembered it. The beams of our flashlights sent light bouncing across the dunes, illuminating the waves, and I imagined faces in the foam of the waves.
“I’ve been back here a hundred times. There’s nothing left,” I said.
Sam took the car key out of her purse and pointed it at the sand, adjusting the sword slung over her shoulder in order to do it. The key had belonged to Hitch; Sam had requested an item of his, and it was the only thing I had left. She rested the key on the sand and drew a circle around it, inscribing symbols around the borders.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Sam shrugged. “Not much, really. I’m…I guess you could say that I’m knocking.”
The key laid inert on the sand for long enough that I was just about to give up and go home, admit to myself that Hitch was dead and that I was a fool to believe that Sam could actually help me. Then a building started to take shape, flickering in and out like it was struggling to get away. With a pop of displaced air, the sandcastle settled into existence.
Sam banged on the entryway. Nothing happened. She did it again, harder, and scowled when the door still didn’t open.
“We demand entrance, under your honor,” Sam yelled. There was a hard rush of wind, and I gripped Sam’s arm to keep my balance, but the doors cracked open reluctantly.
The inside of the sandcastle consisted of one enormous hall, the roof arching up out of sight. Rafters crisscrossed from wall to wall, and a cobbled path led further into the building, but other than that, it was completely empty, except for the birds. There were thousands of them, perched on the rafters or hopping along the ground. They parted in front of Sam and I, and reformed behind us, leaving us in a small pocket of open space. They were all black-feathered, with sharp beaks and beady eyes.
The Erlking sat on a throne at the end of the hall, lounging across it with his feet up on the armrest. He watched them as they came forward, the soft caw of the birds the only sound.
“I am here to bargain for the life of my brother,” I said, with as much dignity as I could muster, before the Erlking could say anything.
The Erlking ignored her, tilting his head to look at Sam. “I remember you. I almost got you, once.”
Sam glared at him but didn’t respond.
“You want your brother,” The Erlking said to me, and he almost sounded amused. “Then go get him.”
As if by some sort of silent signal, every bird in the room took flight at once, and their cawing made me think of screams. I covered my head against the flapping of their wings, and my vision was quickly obscured by the chaotic movement of them. I found myself on my knees, just trying to escape them.
A hand met my shoulder. Sam urged me to my feet, and together we ran for the edge of the room, where the swarm was the thinnest. We pressed ourselves into the corner and the swarm spiraled tighter and tighter at the center of the room. It went on until there seemed to be no differentiation between the birds, all of them fused together into one creature.
When the chaos died down, the birds had become one mass, with wings and eyes and talons sticking out of its flesh, thrashing and chirping. Human body parts stuck out of it, bulging out from the feathers. It was hands, mostly, with a couple knees or staring eyes. The bird amalgamation had no recognizable facial features, but there was one long beak extending from the front of its head. Most of the body parts were concentrated around the beak, and they peeked out from where the beak connected with muscle, or grew from the tongue, nestled between the two crushing halves of the beak.
It turned its beak down and crawled forward, using the hands to balance. The fingers scrambled over the ground. I was afraid of centipedes as a child, and I felt that same crawling dread when it started moving.
“Holy shit,” Sam whispered, which was rather disappointing, because I had been hoping that at least one of us knew what to do.
The creature turned, a lurching movement that crushed some of the hands underneath it, and started heaving itself slowly towards our corner.
“Better hurry up!” the Erlking called from his throne.
It was blocking the exit, by then. The shifting body of it had moved to block us off. It ambled towards us and I tried to sink further into the corner.
As it approached, getting close enough that I could smell the stink of it, I saw a flash of a tattoo on one of the hands. I leaned in, trying to find it again, like looking for dolphins surfacing in the ocean. And again, I caught a glimpse of a duck tattoo, the tattoo that Hitch had gotten on his hand as a teenager.
I ripped away from Sam’s death grip and ran for the monster.
I fell to my knees in front of it, wincing as I impacted the ground, and reached into the nest of hands. I could feel them tearing at my forearms and ripping into me with their sharp nails, but I kept going. I pressed further in, up to my shoulder in a writhing mass of limbs, aiming for the spot where I had last seen that tattoo.
The hands were tugging at me, wrapping around my back and hair. They were pulling together, trying to draw me completely into the mass of them. I was aware of Sam at my side, anchoring me in place and bashing any hand that got too close with her sword or the sparks that leapt from her hands with muttered words. But I didn’t think it would be enough. They were too strong, and there were too many of them.
I was up to my waist in the hands when something grabbed my palm. I felt the way it clung to me, and the calluses on its palm, and I knew that I had found my brother.
I flung herself back. The hands didn’t want to let me go, and they fought the whole way, but slowly, I made progress. I kept hold of Hitch’s hand in mine the whole time, gripping it as hard as I could. I finally broke free, Hitch with me, and Sam was immediately charging the creature, able to use her sword with much greater strength without being worried about injuring Hitch. She swung it forward, and it sliced through the wrist of one of the hands. It fell without a sound, red sand flowing out of it. It deflated until it looked like dirty laundry, just a piece of limp flesh. The creature shrieked, scuttling away enough that the door was finally accessible. The three of us ran for it, Sam and I supporting Hitch between us.
I looked back as I left and found the Erlking staring right at me.
“Interesting,” he murmured, his voice carrying impossibly across the vast space between us.
The sandcastle collapsed behind us, the great walls falling in on themselves. We were out in the morning sun, the sandcastle disappearing as we watched. Hitch was on the ground in front of me, as young as he’d been thirty years ago, when he was captured. He started laughing, feathers puffing out of his mouth. He laughed until he cried and I hugged him in the way that he’d held me when I was young, in the times when my life had been defined by hunger and fear.
Hitch left, afterwards. He scratched at the pinhole scars covering his body, where feathers burst through his skin, and pulled his long sleeves down around his wrists. He didn’t know where he was going but he told me that he needed time
I had spent thirty years worth of time without him. I wanted to grab my brother by the shoulders and beg him to stay. But he flinched when I hugged him goodbye and he refused to go near sand and he stared distrustfully at the birds chirping in the trees. Hitch needed to go away and I loved him too much to stop him.
I sat out on the beach every morning. I felt the sun on my face and I waited for Hitch to come home.
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The sleeves of his weather-beaten coat were shoved all the way up his arms, to stop the fabric from falling over his knuckles while he was working, and goosebumps lined his skin. He was strapping a rubber chicken to the back of his truck, over the lens of the shattered backup camera, with the legs pointing down so that they hung a couple inches above the ground. There were dents in the hood from the crash last week, and scratches along the door from scraping into a curb. The chicken, hopefully, would keep him from breaking anything else.
"You can't go cheap," Hitch said. "The cheap rubber chickens only make noise when pressure lets go. That's no good. As soon as I back up into something, I want this chicken to be screaming like it’s in the depths of hell."
“Sure thing,” I said in a monotone, leaning against the side of the truck.
There were scrambled electronic parts piled in the back of the truck, the innards of a radio, a broken computer, tangled wires, a couple loose pairs of earbuds. He found the parts in alleyways or bummed them off his friends for a couple bucks or stole them from the vacation homes that were left empty for most of the year. Then he sold them for a profit at the scrapyard. Hitch had bounced between minimum-wage jobs for a while after high school, spending a couple months as a bagger at the grocery store or as a seasonal worker at the farm two hours down the highway. He'd never stuck with it. At the very least, the scrapyard got him enough money to eat and occasionally spend a night in a motel when he got tired of sleeping in his car.
Hitch pressed the last piece of tape in place and grinned up at me. "I've got something for you, duck."
The nickname came from when I’d broken my leg as a child and waddled around in a cast until it was healed. I hated it with a burning passion, and I glared at Hitch with the ease of twenty-one years of practice. He had a duck tattoo at the base of his thumb that he’d gotten in a back-alley shop as a teenager. He said that he’d gotten it to remind him of me, and the fact that I hated the nickname was just a bonus. It was shaky-lined, with an uneven face, but he loved it anyway.
The handle stuck when Hitch tried to open the door, a consequence of the rust collecting in the crevices of the car and running down the sides like blood from a cut. The car groaned when the door finally popped open, a metal against metal screech that had me flinching away. Hitch dug through the cluttered fast food containers in the passenger-side footwell, eventually coming up with a crinkly paper bag. He waved away the flies buzzing around the opening of the bag and held it out to me.
The last time Hitch had brought me food, I’d gotten food poisoning because he’d left it out in the midday sun for two days. The donut was squished slightly, and the icing was stuck to the bag. I still ate it, grimacing at the harsh citrus flavor. Taking Hitch’s food was an instinct engraved from the days when Dad had given us a can of kidney beans for dinner and Hitch had drank the juice, leaving the beans for me.
I rarely went hungry anymore, three mostly square meals a day and granola in my pockets just in case, but habits didn’t die easy.
These days, Hitch only brought me food when he wanted my help, like when he saw a place he wanted to hit but was worried about doing it alone.
I got in the car, like I always did.
We drove past the cluster of seafood-themed restaurants with chipped paint decks, the beachfront park where there were always shifty-eyed men sitting under the slide, the single room library where all the books had been water damaged in the flood last year. The change was quick as we drove across Main Street, heading closer to the beach. The roads were freshly paved, the concrete a smooth black except where the sun had already started to pick away at it. The three-story homes lining the sides of the street were crouched on elegant stilts, with space underneath for a car or three. Most of the garages were empty, with the lights off and curtains drawn in the house. Come summer, the streets would be swarming with tourists and vacationers, but until then, most of the buildings nearest to the beach were unoccupied.
Hitch stopped as the sun started to go down at a house that was leaning precariously out towards the beach, tilted ever so slightly, the edge of its foundation buried in the shifting sand of the beach. It certainly looked deserted, with an overgrown yard and blue paint peeling off the door in sheets.
Hitch took his hammer out of the backseat, hoisting it over his shoulder. It was two feet of solid metal with rags wrapped around the head to muffle the sound of the hits. Hitch squared up, bending his knees and holding the hammer like a baseball bat. Before he could swing, though, the door creaked open on its own, the hinges squeaking. The house beyond was dark enough that I could only make out general shapes, glimpsing the curve of a sofa to the left, what was maybe the shimmer of a chandelier on the other side.
Hitch lowered his hammer, looking vaguely disappointed that he didn’t get to use it. “That’s…weird as hell.”
“Maybe the deadbolt broke, maybe they forgot to lock it, it doesn’t matter,” I hissed, checking our surroundings for other people again. “Just hurry up and get inside before someone calls the cops.”
Hitch flicked the lightswitch on the wall, and the lights flickered on. They were dim, buzzing audibly and blinking off occasionally. The walls were plastered with contrasting swatches of wallpaper and splattered with random colors. There was neon orange behind the dining table, a galaxy swirl in the kitchen, and on the ceiling there was a repeating floral pattern covered in nametag stickers. Each of the stickers was filled out with The Erlking. Chandeliers hung in every room, three or four for each, and rubber ducks sat on every table. A miniature carousel sat in the corner along with a towering model rocket.
Sand was heaped on every surface, at least a couple inches everywhere. It was piled in the corners and stuck to the walls, and it covered the floor in a thick blanket. Our hesitant steps into the house left footprints clearly outlined in the sand.
Hitch took a cursory look around and headed immediately for the TV mounted on the wall. “Look out the windows and tell me if anyone is coming.”
I shook the sand out of the blinds and pulled them open, then had to brush sand off of the window before I could see anything.
Hitch was quick, practiced at finding and appropriating the things that were worth taking. He came back to me with an armful of electronics and chandeliers, dumping it at my feet before turning to head deeper into the house again.
There was a thump, somewhere upstairs, and then footsteps, slow and deliberate. Hitch froze at the threshold of the room, then ran for the door with me just ahead of him, sand flying out from under our feet.
My hand was almost brushing the doorknob, close enough that I could see the light from the streetlamp outside streaming in through the cracks in the door. My fingers touched the wood and it gave under my touch, becoming malleable and warm. I yelped, stumbling backwards, and the door started to melt. The paint ran down in thick drops, pooling at the bottom of the door, and the wood warped like metal being welded. The soft edges of the door ran into the walls until there was no sign of an exit ever being there.
“Well, well, well,” said a cultured voice with just an edge of snooty elitism. “What do we have here?”
The man was well over eight feet tall, with long black hair covering his eyes. He was wearing a yellow raincoat with holes cut out of the hood to accommodate the deer antlers jutting upwards from his head. There was sand settled on his shoulders and hovering around his head like a halo.
“Who the fuck are you?” Hitch said, inching towards a window.
He smiled, just a little bit, and his teeth shone in the dim light. “I am the Erlking.”
Hitch nodded, and seemed about to respond. I grabbed him by the hand and pulled him towards the window. I could feel sand in the wind roaring against my back as the Erlking growled in anger, the grains scraping harshly against my cheeks.
We were almost to the window when Hitch was ripped away from me, and I came to a startled halt. The sand had formed long grasping arms that pressed Hitch against the floral wallpaper. His wrists were held tight, and as I watched, a sandy hand wrapped around his mouth and forced its way between his teeth. He gagged, and sand trickled out of the corners of his mouth.
The Erlking strolled towards him, not seeming to be in any sort of rush. “You know, I’m not very fond of your yapping.”
He made an idle gesture and the sand wrapped around my ankles, tethering me in place.
“I yap all the time,” Hitch said. “Three-time olympic yapper, that’s me. Best to just let me go now and save yourself some trouble.”
The Erlking tapped a manicured nail against Hitch’s mouth, hard enough to hurt, judging by the way he flinched away. “But why would I ever let you go when I’ve gone to this much trouble to catch you and your sister? It’s so hard, these days, to find people that no one will miss.”
Hitch struggled against the sand, trying to escape and failing. “What do you want with us, then? You just said it, we’re nobody.”
“I’m fae, dear one,” the Erlking said. “I get my power from my followers. And I think that you two will make lovely additions to my flock.”
He flicked Hitch's nose and Hitch gasped. Feathers started to form on his arms, popping out from under his skin in a spray of blood.
Hitch pushed off the wall, using his bound hands as a fulcrum, and his knees crashed into the Erlking’s stomach. The Erlking fell backwards, wheezing, and the sand around my ankles loosened.
Hitch made desperate eye contact with me as feathers shot up his neck and jerked his head towards the window. The message was obvious. Run.
The last thing I saw before crashing out the window and into freedom was Hitch’s body twisting, his arms wrenching into wings and feathers covering every inch of his skin. By the time I landed on the concrete outside, he was a small black bird, held tightly in the Erlking’s hands. The whole building was sinking into the ground, burnished-gold sand piling up over top and streaming from the windows.
Thirty years later, I saw Sam’s Supernatural Consultation and Neutralization written in neat, looping handwriting on a piece of paper taped to the door. The tape was peeling at the corners and the paper was yellowed with age, but there was obviously care put into the sign, in its perfectly centered text and looping floral designs drawn over the edges in gold marker.
I knocked, hesitantly, drawing my woolen coat closer around my shoulders. I’d bought it as a fiftieth birthday gift for myself, and I took comfort in the heavy weight of it over my shoulders.
“Coming!” someone called from within the depths of the office.
There were a couple crashes, and the sound of paper shuffling. Eventually, the door was opened by a young woman with ketchup stains on her shirt and pencils stuck through her hair.
“Hi, I’m Sam, I specialize in supernatural consultation and hunting, how may I help you today?” Sam said, customer-service pep in her voice. She stood in the doorway, solidly blocking entry into the office.
“My name is Ezra, I’m for a consultation. I emailed you but you didn’t respond?” I shifted in place, suddenly feeling awkward.
“Oh! Yeah, I lost the password for the email ages ago. Sorry for the bad welcome, I get lots of people thinking I’m crazy or pulling a prank and harassing me.”
She ushered me into the office, clearing papers off one of the chairs to make room for me to sit down. There was a collection of swords along one wall, all of them polished to perfection, several with deep knicks in the metal which indicated that they’d been used heavily.
“So what can I help you with?” Sam asked again, more sincere this time.
“Thirty years ago, my brother was turned into a bird,” I started. I’d told this story so many times that it barely felt ridiculous to say anymore. I was used to the disbelieving looks, the careful pity. But Sam just nodded along, face open and welcoming.
“I’ve almost given up on finding him, at this point,” I said. “But I saw your ad in the newspaper, and…here I am, I suppose.”
“Here you are,” Sam echoed, smiling. She pulled one of the pencils out of her hair and took a bit of paperwork off of one of her stacks, turning it over so that the blank side sat neatly in front of her. “Tell me everything.”
I told Sam everything, and she wrote it all down, pencil scratching along the paper.
The last part of the story was always the hardest to tell. “I left him there. I ran and I didn’t look back.”
I had been to dozens of detectives and investigators over the years, once the police had dropped Hitch’s case. I’d been to professional offices with smartly-dressed secretaries and met scraggly men in coffee shops. All of them had given me the same look, pity and annoyance all mixed up into a humor-the-crazy-lady soup. Sam, though, just seemed thoughtful.
Sam leaned forward and put a hand over mine, carefully, like she thought that I would pull away. “Sometimes you have to leave people behind.”
I tightened her hold on Sam’s hand and drew it towards me, like I could make Sam listen if only I squeezed tight enough. “But that’s why I’m here. I don’t want to leave him behind.”
“Okay then. I’ll do my best to help you.” Sam agreed, finally. Then she paused, and said softly, “You know…I think I met your brother once. He might have saved my life. He’s certainly why I started in this business.”
“Really? What happened?” I asked.
This is the story that Sam told me, related to the best of my abilities:
It was a new moon, so the only illumination came from the stars gazing idly down and distant porch lights shining across the scraggly brush of the dunes. Sam’s neighbors were decent people who cared about baby turtles, so the lights were a low, unobtrusive red, and the ocean sloshed like blood. Sam walked on the beach almost every night, drawing back the gauzy pink curtains and clambering out her bedroom window. She didn’t often bother to be quiet; her mama worked the late shift and came home exhausted. As long as Sam got home before the sun, her mama would never find out that she paced the shoreline and dreamed of inhaling sand until her lungs became their own beach.
The sky was lightening. The sun would come up soon, and that meant Sam’s time on the beach was over. She needed to get back to her real life, go to her fifth grade class and stop that nonsense, as her mother would say. Her mother loved to say things like that, pushing Sam into her proper place by implication alone.
“She’s a good kid, of course, but she’s a bit…” Her mother would trail off there, usually getting a commiserating expression from whoever she was talking to. Sam always wondered how that sentence would have finished. She’s a bit strange, maybe. She’s a bit intense. She’s a bit abrasive. She’s quiet enough but when Jason tried to steal her pencil in math class, she stabbed him in the hand so hard that the lead tattooed him.
Her mother was better, for the most part. The days of her stocking up the fridge, and leaving a post-it note on the counter, and leaving for days at a time were gone. But Sam still stepped around the place on the kitchen tile where her mother had collapsed and caved her head in, even though the bloodstains had been replaced with new tile.
“Your auntie got an abortion, you know,” her mother had said from her place on the couch, slurring her words. “Pill in the mail and then bam, no more baby.”
She had clapped her hands together to illustrate her point. Her mother jerked forward and grabbed Sam by the wrist, then, staring up at her until Sam met her eyes.
“I love you, you know? But sometimes I wonder…” She settled back onto the couch. “Yeah. I wonder.”
She’d gotten up, then, back to the kitchen. She’d been stumbling, a shambling zombie of a woman. The ground in the entryway of the kitchen was raised, ever so slightly, and her mother went down hard. Her head cracked against the tile, chin first, and she didn’t move.
Sam had been the one to call the ambulance. She had stared at the scattering of loose teeth on the ground while she waited, and considered what her life would be like with a dead mom. Not so bad, she thought, and immediately felt guilty for it.
Her mom was better, now, for the most part. But Sam still stepped around the place on the kitchen floor where she had collapsed. There was still a matchbox hidden under her bed with the gleaming shine of her mother’s lost teeth, two canines and a molar. It was nice, having a piece of her mom to keep. Even if she left again, Sam would still have part of her.
Sam sighed, and turned away from the ocean. As she faced towards the low dunes further up the beach, she saw a sandcastle sitting nestled among them. It was such a strange sight that her eyes skipped over it at first, almost automatically, disregarding it because it was so out of place.
Sam found sandcastles out on the beach sometimes, usually half-collapsed and on the verge of being washed away by the waves, but she had never seen anything like the sandcastle in front of her. It was life-sized, something that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Scottish highlands, with spires shooting up above her head and carefully etched out bricks lining each side. The front wall was dominated by an arched set of double doors, twice her height, with a portcullis nestled at the top, ready to be dropped. All of it was lovingly detailed, down to the rust on the tips of the towers and the wood grain of the door. It was made out of wet, densely-packed sand, held together impossibly. It had not been there two hours ago, when she had come to the beach.
There was a bird sitting on the overhang of the door, small and black.
As soon as she took a step towards the sandcastle, the bird shook out its feathers and swooped down towards Sam, landing at her feet with a little stumble.
“Hey, kid, get out of here,” said the bird.
Sam closed her eyes, very deliberately. When she opened them, the bird was still there. Sam considered herself a very reasonable person, so she immediately drew the most logical conclusion. The bird was, she was almost certain, a demon.
“Trust me, you don’t want to run into Mr. Salty, the queen bitch himself,” the bird said.
“Mr. Salty?” Sam inquired, polite as she knew how to be. She edged to the side, trying to get a good angle to kick the bird like a soccer ball.
The bird did something similar to a wince, all its feathers fluffing up then settling back down. “Ah, don’t call him that. He’d turn you into a toad.”
The bird gestured with its head, towards the looming sand structure. “That’s his castle. He’s in there, probably scuttling along the ceiling or some shit because that’s the sort of weirdo he is.”
Sam nodded, encouraging. She pulled back her foot and lined up her shot, the way she’d seen athletes do on TV. She aimed right for its sharp beak and let loose. The bird saw it coming, its beady eyes widening, and it cawed in distress. It flapped away, avoiding her kick only to fall backward into the sand in a scramble of wings.
“What’s your fucking problem?” it squawked. “I was trying to help you!”
“I don’t need the help of a demon,” Sam yelled, trying to remember the exorcism that her mama had taught her once, because her mama believed in being prepared for anything.
“I’m not a demon,” the bird said indignantly.
It was at about that moment that Sam gave up and just decided to roll with it.
“What are you, then?” Sam asked.
The bird shuffled its clawed feet, looking about as awkward as it could, given that it didn’t really have recognizable facial expressions. “Technically I’m a familiar of the Erlking, prince of the fae, but I prefer to be called Hitch.”
“You can’t blame me for assuming, though,” Sam said. “Ravens do tend to be associated with murder.”
“Hey, excuse you,” Hitch said. “I’m a rook, not a raven. Ravens are way bigger.”
“Sure,” Sam said, not really paying attention. Her eyes had caught on the details of the sandcastle, and she was transfixed by the slow spirals of the sand, the strange beauty of it. She found herself stepping towards the great doors, lifting a hand to knock, and as she did, the sand warped in front of her eyes, heaving itself towards her with bulging slowness. The door creaked open before her, revealing a vast, empty room. Just before she stepped inside, she felt a piercing pain in her foot, and she yelped, leaping backwards.
Hitch pecked her again, really digging his beak in. “Don’t be an idiot.”
Sam glared at him, rubbing her foot. About to retort, she finally really took in the room inside the sandcastle, and her words died in her throat.
There was a body just past the threshold of the door, face down and limbs hanging limp at its sides. Long hair splayed out in a halo around its head.
“Don’t,” Hitch warned, suddenly serious. “Just leave, kid, I mean it. I’ve seen too many people go down this road and you don’t want to be one of them.”
Sam ignored him. She made her way across the beach, slipping with every step. The sand felt deeper, piling up around her feet in silent drifts. She picked up the nearest stick and poked the body with it through the door, ready to leap back if anything went wrong, staying firmly outside of the sandcastle.
This close, Sam could tell that it used to be a woman. Her head wasn’t attached to her body. It hadn’t been a clean amputation, either. Her upper body was bruised, with chunks taken out of it, and the bones in her neck hung mangled, not connected to anything.
“Well, I warned you,” Hitch said, defeated. “I did warn you.”
Sam nudged the head with the end of the stick, nudging it over so that she could see the face. Her mother stared back at her, torn to pieces, breath still wheezing from her lungs. She wasn’t blinking, just gazing forward with glazed eyes. Sweat dripped down from her hairline.
Sam screamed and dropped the stick, tripping over herself in her haste to get away.
Her mother’s eyes were wide and pleading, and she was mouthing desperate words at Sam. Her vocal cords were broken to bits, and the only sound that came out was a strained groan.
The head rolled, inching closer to Sam like a grotesque caterpillar.
Her mother gasped for air, torn lips fluttering. Finally, comprehensible words came out. “Help. Help me, daughter.”
“That’s not your mother,” Hitch said, quiet.
Sam knew that. Her mother was sleeping back at home, and anyways her mom had never asked for her help. She had an aversion to accepting charity, as she put it.
“Okay,” Sam said, shaking all over. “Okay.”
She backed away from the sandcastle, not looking away.
“Failure,” her mother hissed as she stepped away. “I never wanted a daughter like you.”
The sun came up over the horizon. The sandcastle, Hitch, and her mom all disintegrated into sand as the light hit them.
The beach, the next night, was almost exactly how I remembered it. The beams of our flashlights sent light bouncing across the dunes, illuminating the waves, and I imagined faces in the foam of the waves.
“I’ve been back here a hundred times. There’s nothing left,” I said.
Sam took the car key out of her purse and pointed it at the sand, adjusting the sword slung over her shoulder in order to do it. The key had belonged to Hitch; Sam had requested an item of his, and it was the only thing I had left. She rested the key on the sand and drew a circle around it, inscribing symbols around the borders.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Sam shrugged. “Not much, really. I’m…I guess you could say that I’m knocking.”
The key laid inert on the sand for long enough that I was just about to give up and go home, admit to myself that Hitch was dead and that I was a fool to believe that Sam could actually help me. Then a building started to take shape, flickering in and out like it was struggling to get away. With a pop of displaced air, the sandcastle settled into existence.
Sam banged on the entryway. Nothing happened. She did it again, harder, and scowled when the door still didn’t open.
“We demand entrance, under your honor,” Sam yelled. There was a hard rush of wind, and I gripped Sam’s arm to keep my balance, but the doors cracked open reluctantly.
The inside of the sandcastle consisted of one enormous hall, the roof arching up out of sight. Rafters crisscrossed from wall to wall, and a cobbled path led further into the building, but other than that, it was completely empty, except for the birds. There were thousands of them, perched on the rafters or hopping along the ground. They parted in front of Sam and I, and reformed behind us, leaving us in a small pocket of open space. They were all black-feathered, with sharp beaks and beady eyes.
The Erlking sat on a throne at the end of the hall, lounging across it with his feet up on the armrest. He watched them as they came forward, the soft caw of the birds the only sound.
“I am here to bargain for the life of my brother,” I said, with as much dignity as I could muster, before the Erlking could say anything.
The Erlking ignored her, tilting his head to look at Sam. “I remember you. I almost got you, once.”
Sam glared at him but didn’t respond.
“You want your brother,” The Erlking said to me, and he almost sounded amused. “Then go get him.”
As if by some sort of silent signal, every bird in the room took flight at once, and their cawing made me think of screams. I covered my head against the flapping of their wings, and my vision was quickly obscured by the chaotic movement of them. I found myself on my knees, just trying to escape them.
A hand met my shoulder. Sam urged me to my feet, and together we ran for the edge of the room, where the swarm was the thinnest. We pressed ourselves into the corner and the swarm spiraled tighter and tighter at the center of the room. It went on until there seemed to be no differentiation between the birds, all of them fused together into one creature.
When the chaos died down, the birds had become one mass, with wings and eyes and talons sticking out of its flesh, thrashing and chirping. Human body parts stuck out of it, bulging out from the feathers. It was hands, mostly, with a couple knees or staring eyes. The bird amalgamation had no recognizable facial features, but there was one long beak extending from the front of its head. Most of the body parts were concentrated around the beak, and they peeked out from where the beak connected with muscle, or grew from the tongue, nestled between the two crushing halves of the beak.
It turned its beak down and crawled forward, using the hands to balance. The fingers scrambled over the ground. I was afraid of centipedes as a child, and I felt that same crawling dread when it started moving.
“Holy shit,” Sam whispered, which was rather disappointing, because I had been hoping that at least one of us knew what to do.
The creature turned, a lurching movement that crushed some of the hands underneath it, and started heaving itself slowly towards our corner.
“Better hurry up!” the Erlking called from his throne.
It was blocking the exit, by then. The shifting body of it had moved to block us off. It ambled towards us and I tried to sink further into the corner.
As it approached, getting close enough that I could smell the stink of it, I saw a flash of a tattoo on one of the hands. I leaned in, trying to find it again, like looking for dolphins surfacing in the ocean. And again, I caught a glimpse of a duck tattoo, the tattoo that Hitch had gotten on his hand as a teenager.
I ripped away from Sam’s death grip and ran for the monster.
I fell to my knees in front of it, wincing as I impacted the ground, and reached into the nest of hands. I could feel them tearing at my forearms and ripping into me with their sharp nails, but I kept going. I pressed further in, up to my shoulder in a writhing mass of limbs, aiming for the spot where I had last seen that tattoo.
The hands were tugging at me, wrapping around my back and hair. They were pulling together, trying to draw me completely into the mass of them. I was aware of Sam at my side, anchoring me in place and bashing any hand that got too close with her sword or the sparks that leapt from her hands with muttered words. But I didn’t think it would be enough. They were too strong, and there were too many of them.
I was up to my waist in the hands when something grabbed my palm. I felt the way it clung to me, and the calluses on its palm, and I knew that I had found my brother.
I flung herself back. The hands didn’t want to let me go, and they fought the whole way, but slowly, I made progress. I kept hold of Hitch’s hand in mine the whole time, gripping it as hard as I could. I finally broke free, Hitch with me, and Sam was immediately charging the creature, able to use her sword with much greater strength without being worried about injuring Hitch. She swung it forward, and it sliced through the wrist of one of the hands. It fell without a sound, red sand flowing out of it. It deflated until it looked like dirty laundry, just a piece of limp flesh. The creature shrieked, scuttling away enough that the door was finally accessible. The three of us ran for it, Sam and I supporting Hitch between us.
I looked back as I left and found the Erlking staring right at me.
“Interesting,” he murmured, his voice carrying impossibly across the vast space between us.
The sandcastle collapsed behind us, the great walls falling in on themselves. We were out in the morning sun, the sandcastle disappearing as we watched. Hitch was on the ground in front of me, as young as he’d been thirty years ago, when he was captured. He started laughing, feathers puffing out of his mouth. He laughed until he cried and I hugged him in the way that he’d held me when I was young, in the times when my life had been defined by hunger and fear.
Hitch left, afterwards. He scratched at the pinhole scars covering his body, where feathers burst through his skin, and pulled his long sleeves down around his wrists. He didn’t know where he was going but he told me that he needed time
I had spent thirty years worth of time without him. I wanted to grab my brother by the shoulders and beg him to stay. But he flinched when I hugged him goodbye and he refused to go near sand and he stared distrustfully at the birds chirping in the trees. Hitch needed to go away and I loved him too much to stop him.
I sat out on the beach every morning. I felt the sun on my face and I waited for Hitch to come home.
2024.05.19 08:06 alkeid How long before the end of my eating window should I stop eating?
Hi all,
I've been doing IF for the past two weeks and I have a question regarding when I should stop eating.
Currently my eating window is 12pm-8pm, switched from 11am-7pm because 7 was just too early for me. Sometimes depending on work and if I go to the gym later, I get caught up and have to squeeze in my last meal of the day right before my eating window ends. For example today I squeezed in a gym session at the last minute and finished my last meal at 7:59pm. Does this impact me in a negative way? Should I already be done with eating way before my window is about to close? If so how much time before? Or can I eat up to 7:59 with 59 seconds as long as I don't eat anything after 8pm?
Thank you in advance!
submitted by alkeid to intermittentfasting [link] [comments]
I've been doing IF for the past two weeks and I have a question regarding when I should stop eating.
Currently my eating window is 12pm-8pm, switched from 11am-7pm because 7 was just too early for me. Sometimes depending on work and if I go to the gym later, I get caught up and have to squeeze in my last meal of the day right before my eating window ends. For example today I squeezed in a gym session at the last minute and finished my last meal at 7:59pm. Does this impact me in a negative way? Should I already be done with eating way before my window is about to close? If so how much time before? Or can I eat up to 7:59 with 59 seconds as long as I don't eat anything after 8pm?
Thank you in advance!
2024.05.19 08:06 Southern_Two7833 does anyone else ever take their period blood out by hand?
i know this is quite a strange thing to ask but i’ve tried google and gotten nothing. (Not sure if this is any bit related but i have been through SA most my life so that area has always been somewhere very difficult to touch or get any internal pleasure without sickening anxiety and horrible pressure/pain. i can’t insert anything not even a fingertip and even opening my legs too far makes me gag for some reason.) the past few months it seems my period is quite dry and clots are very frequent.. more dry clots than blood flow ig. anyways, maybe its the dryness (maybe from birth control) but it feels like my period burns my vaginal opening, and like i NEED to get the blood clots out by hand. it takes a while because touching that area, especially the entrance makes me so nervous nauseous, but at the same time i almost enjoy being able to pull the clots out?? going from feeling like im plugged up and in pain to just scoop and pull what i can and then when its all out i feel okay again. the other thing is that when those dark clots are finally out, i see my regular red tint slight blood flow again, until it clots again the next hour or so and then the process starts over again. uugh ick idk. not sure why it happens but yeah… does anyone else experience this or know why this happens?
submitted by Southern_Two7833 to WomensHealth [link] [comments]
2024.05.19 08:05 mcfrrogg housekeeper cleaned a room i didn't want cleaned
today the housekeeper came over to clean the house and i didn't want my bedroom cleaned. i posted a sign on the door clearly stating in all capital letters "DO NOT CLEAN PLEASE". i kept the door cracked however because the cat was under the bed and i was going to be out of the house so i didn't want him to get trapped.
anyway, when i came home i went to my room and saw that my room was cleaned anyway. the door left wide open and the sign still on the door. i'm livid. the instruction couldn't have been clearer. i cant comprehend what was so difficult to understand. are there any housekeepers that can provide any kind of explanation as to why she blatantly and intentionally disregarded my instructions?
submitted by mcfrrogg to housekeeping [link] [comments]
anyway, when i came home i went to my room and saw that my room was cleaned anyway. the door left wide open and the sign still on the door. i'm livid. the instruction couldn't have been clearer. i cant comprehend what was so difficult to understand. are there any housekeepers that can provide any kind of explanation as to why she blatantly and intentionally disregarded my instructions?
2024.05.19 08:05 spicymeatball4 I (21M) am still in love with my ex (21F) after we broke up 18 months ago. Should I try to rekindle it or attempt to move on?
I (21M) met my ex (21F) when we were both 17 in my senior year of high school. We knew each other when we were little kids and then didn’t see each other until we were 17. Right away we had an instant connection. We would get together almost everyday and it was amazing. We both went to different colleges and I ended up failing in college pretty miserably my first semester due to drug and alcohol addiction and other issues. I was able to transfer to the school she was at and things were really good again. Overtime however, my addiction got worse and I could barely ever even communicate. I’d get so drunk and high that days would go by and I’d have no idea what even happened. She tried to help me through it but she liked to drink and smoke weed and could do it in a somewhat healthy way. I’d get mad at her when she’d tell me not to drink or smoke or do whatever drug I wanted to do. Things slowly deteriorated and she ended up telling me that while we apart long distance during our first semester of college that she had sent nude pics to a guy for money. I told her that I had paid for porn. We argued for a while and then had sex and things were never the same. Took a break for a week and I eventually broke up with her over the phone after when she got mad at me not answering it. I went to rehab and am sober now and have been for 16 months. Looking back I realize how much of the problem I was. Don’t get me wrong, she had her faults and made mistakes. But I handed things horribly due to drugs. I actually made amends with her this past December. I said I was sorry in person for all the pain I’d caused and things I’d said. The only really mean thing I’d said was when we broke up. I had T old her that she brought no joy to my life. In reality, I just hated myself back then. I ended up moving across the country after getting sober and just visit my hometown where she lives and goes to college every so often.
She is so beautiful and I still get butterflies in my stomach when I see her. She’s a good person and definitely has flaws but I love her regardless. I think about her almost everyday. I dream about her at least once a week. We’ve been texting recently but just small talk. I’m thinking of seeing if she’d want to get together to hangout when I go home next month. I have a job across the country and I’m not going to quit for her on whim and move back to where she is. I also can’t do long distance because of what happened last time. I also don’t even know if she’d want to get back together. Would it be a bad idea to hangout regardless? What’s the worst that could happen? I’m getting a lot of mixed responses from friends so I thought I’d ask the internet. Anything helps. Thanks.
I’ve only seen her in person once since the breakup and that was this past December. We are now on good terms. Also we dated for a year and a half before we broke up and it’s been a year and a half since then.
It’d be really awkward if she sees this lmao. I don’t even think she uses Reddit but we will see.
submitted by spicymeatball4 to relationship_advice [link] [comments]
She is so beautiful and I still get butterflies in my stomach when I see her. She’s a good person and definitely has flaws but I love her regardless. I think about her almost everyday. I dream about her at least once a week. We’ve been texting recently but just small talk. I’m thinking of seeing if she’d want to get together to hangout when I go home next month. I have a job across the country and I’m not going to quit for her on whim and move back to where she is. I also can’t do long distance because of what happened last time. I also don’t even know if she’d want to get back together. Would it be a bad idea to hangout regardless? What’s the worst that could happen? I’m getting a lot of mixed responses from friends so I thought I’d ask the internet. Anything helps. Thanks.
I’ve only seen her in person once since the breakup and that was this past December. We are now on good terms. Also we dated for a year and a half before we broke up and it’s been a year and a half since then.
It’d be really awkward if she sees this lmao. I don’t even think she uses Reddit but we will see.
2024.05.19 08:04 RiceOk6210 Confused
I just saw my ex tonight for the first time in months & now i don’t know how to feel. For context i am the one that broke up with her & i am the one that told her we shouldn’t talk or be friends anymore months after the breakup. Let me give you guys the back story. She was my first relationship ever & she my was my first time. She was my first everything & i feel like that’s why it’s so hard for me to move on. When we started dating she told me about her past relationship which was over a year before we started talking & she said it was very toxic. She told me about how she was cheated on & how she stayed & all these different things about how bad it was. Hearing these things just made me want to show her what real love was even though she was my first love. As u can predict , our relationship was pretty toxic. She would always try to end things with me & block me & I would always beg for her back & we would always end up making up. A couple of months into the relationship I just started feeling drained honestly but i just loved her so much that I wanted to work through it. Her birthday came around & I threw a party for her at my house and made it super special. The next morning I decided to go through her phone because she would always follow guys back & had random guys on her spam. I found out that everytime we stopped talking or “broke up” for the night, she would text some guys & all these different things. I don’t know if she physically cheated or if texting guys is even considered cheating at all but I was hurt. I confronted her about it & she got mad at me & I ended up begging for her back. We stayed together for a couple of months after that incident but i felt so different. I couldn’t let any of that go so then one day i just decided to break up with her. It was hard for me but I had to for my mental well being. A few weeks after she texted me saying she was pregnant. So we continued talking & We ended up getting an abortion. It was so hard for the both of us & i continued to try to be there for her because I cared for her still obviously. We would still hangout & go out on dates & stuff like that for a few months. One day i found out she was having sex with one of my homies during that whole time & I was honestly so hurt. My whole friend group knew about it & nobody told me anything. The whole time i was being there for her because she was hurt about the abortion, she was having sex with my friend & risking getting pregnant again. I was still friends with that whole group & i was confused as to why they chose her over me. I introduced her to them & i had been friends with them since middle school. It was a tough point in my life because i felt like i lost everything & i was honestly suicidal. I cut things off with her completely & with that whole group. I saw her again a few months after that & she wanted to be friends still but i told her it was just best for the both of us to stop talking. A month after that encounter she shows up to my workplace with a new guy. She’s now been dating him for a couple of months & i don’t understand how she could just move on so fast from everything that happened. I’m still hurt to this day & the thought of being with someone else right now doesn’t sit right with me. Tonight was the first time seeing her in like 5 months & i decided ed to write this post because I honestly have no one to talk to. If u read this whole thing, thank i so much. Typing this made me feel a whole lot better.
submitted by RiceOk6210 to BreakUps [link] [comments]
2024.05.19 08:04 Jillybean-100- Good-Bye 🥺😭😩
 | So I’ve had the pleasure of having this dog Sheva for 13 years. She has been the most loyal and patient and smart dog that I’ve ever had. She’s not a full great Pyrenees, but I had her since she was a little furball this past Monday I had to make the most difficult decision of having her put down. Her hips are just gotten too brittle and I could not allow this wonderful dog to get any worse and lay there in pain,she definitely would not have deserved that. All I can say is, I hope when she left she went to find my son who passed away in December. Those two were tight. submitted by Jillybean-100- to greatpyrenees [link] [comments] |
2024.05.19 08:04 Base_Loose A Visitor in Korea
Vincent Lee, a young man just entering highschool, goes to scout the streets to see which school is best for him while also looking for something that peaks his interest. As he patrols the streets to visit each school, he grows more aware of the amazing things Korea has to offer, but he wants something very specific. Having a past in America's Chinatown, he seeks to uphold a strict martial spirit and a sense of honor in traditional kung fu. He looks at every corner and every sign to see if there's anyone who can help him bring his dreams to life. A life where one becomes a hero just like his idol, Wong Fei Hung. Vincent continues to make his way through while wearing ankle weights in order to emulate a specific technique he's only seen in the movies, the shadowless kick, to be the foundation of his style.
Vincent: so... This is... Man, where am I?
submitted by Base_Loose to OCism_official [link] [comments]
Vincent: so... This is... Man, where am I?
2024.05.19 08:03 Over_due99 Mukha akong tanga.
I a made mistake talking to my ex and made him think na I am still there for him despite him breaking up with me 2months ago.
A part of me wanted him back and would beg for it or ipagsiksikan sarili ko. Then there's also this part of me thinks na I am really stupid if I do. I am self-aware of what I am thinking and what I am trying to do.
We talked sa chat last week and it was brief, after he asked about how am I and situation ng problem ko, which he knows exactly what it is, then I proceeded to tell him "If you need my help on something, you can still ask me" which he just left on read obv. I wish I could just throw away this feeling inside me na sobrang attached sa past kasi kahit self-aware ako, I, most of the time, give in sa nararamdaman ko imbes na yung alam kong tama sa isip ko. I want to see him in person again, so fckng bad, pero I'm battling out which to follow.
submitted by Over_due99 to OffMyChestPH [link] [comments]
A part of me wanted him back and would beg for it or ipagsiksikan sarili ko. Then there's also this part of me thinks na I am really stupid if I do. I am self-aware of what I am thinking and what I am trying to do.
We talked sa chat last week and it was brief, after he asked about how am I and situation ng problem ko, which he knows exactly what it is, then I proceeded to tell him "If you need my help on something, you can still ask me" which he just left on read obv. I wish I could just throw away this feeling inside me na sobrang attached sa past kasi kahit self-aware ako, I, most of the time, give in sa nararamdaman ko imbes na yung alam kong tama sa isip ko. I want to see him in person again, so fckng bad, pero I'm battling out which to follow.
2024.05.19 08:03 hypikachu Tyrion's Paternity: An open question? [Spoilers Extended]
![Tyrion's Paternity: An open question? [Spoilers Extended]](https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/C_Ank7yZVlyY16294VGT7gHQM3FmsLmsOrjJwK7PWpk.jpg "Tyrion's Paternity: An open question? [Spoilers Extended]") | Listen. I know "Tyrion Targaryen" is a divisive topic. I don't think there's any theory that gets more vehement criticism. I understand why it gets the ire it does, and don't even wholly disagree. submitted by hypikachu to asoiaf [link] [comments] Buuuut, if I can play 1. "It hurts the story" I'll admit it. I (kinda) agree with this assessment. A "Tyrion's a secret Targ" reveal threatens to undermine other big elements of the story. One secret orphaned prince is a tragedy, but a dozen is a farce. It also arguably hurts the Tyrion-Tywin relationship. I don't think it'd be ruinous as many of the critics do. But even if it were, that still wouldn't affect whether or not it's canon. This argument really doesn't address "what is or is not," but rather "what should or shouldn't be." But writers do stuff they arguably shouldn't all the time. Fans of Star Wars will gladly tell you that midi-chlorians undermine the Force. But they're still canon, bc George said so. Martin is no more infallible than Lucas. I love these books, and I think GRRM's the bee's knees. But can you tell me with a straight face that "Joffrey sent the catspaw" was perfectly executed storytelling? Whether something's good or not is a subjective matter for the audience. But whether something's canon is wholly at the whims of the author. And it definitely seems like GRRM's whims are pointing towards A+J. 2. "GRRM was setting it up in the early books, but abandoned the idea at some point." Yes, George is a gardener and doesn't necessarily stick to a rigid story plan. He's removed or changed big elements of the story, like the 5 year gap or the Brightflame cloth dragons. It's definitely possible that Tyrion Targaryen might have been a similarly scrapped plan. (Small Tangent: I'm even pretty open to the idea that it was scrapped in the show. It's totally the kind of thing D&D would hate. But you can ask Griff & Stoneheart if show canon = book canon.) The problem is, there's no clear point where GRRM stopped dropping hints that align with A+J. It still seems front and center in ASOS (2000), when Tywin makes his last on-page appearance. He explicitly calls Tyrion's paternity (and the fidelity of his beloved cousinwife) into question twice in that book, down to his last breath. Bookending Tyrion's first speaking appearance (AGOT Jon I). The very first thing Tyrion says about Tywin is "he thinks of me as a bastard." The idea of Tyrion's paternity being in doubt hangs over the Tyrion-Tywin relationship from the first moments to the last. The relevant characters' most recent book appearance was the worldbook in 2014. (The same year GRRM gave his now famous explanation of why abandoning setup makes for bad storytelling.) Even then, GRRM was obliquely pointing to the possibility of A+J=T with relentless determination. Every single mention of Joanna is attached directly to a note about how much Aerys pursued her. Tyrion's birth is one paragraph after the tourney of 272. Where the only notable event was Aerys lusting after Joanna, deepening the rift with Tywin. Which moves us nicely from the meta-textual arguments into the in-universe "evidence." 3. "[Pycelle said] Tywin wouldn't have married Joanna if she'd been with Aerys" Pycelle sure did say that. Pycelle is wrong. That's the point. How can we tell? GRRM's choice of wording in Pycelle's rebuttal. As Pycelle insists in his letters, Tywin Lannister would scarce have taken his cousin to wife if that had been true, “for he was ever a proud man and not one accustomed to feasting upon another man’s leavings.”Pictured: Pycelle's wrongness. The 2014 audience already knows Tywin absolutely would do that. The climax of his conflict with Tyrion was him bedding Shae. "Feasting on another man's leavings" is already a defining part of Tywin's relationship with Tyrion. GRRM wrote Pycelle huffing copium. Conspicuously. The fanboy maester's denial depends on a claim the audience explicitly knows is false. It's just basic dramatic irony: the audience knows something the characters don't. If Pycelle's claims rests on false evidence, what is the author saying about the claim? 4. "If Tywin knew/suspected, why didn't he do anything more than try to resign?" I'll be honest, this one blows my mind. The man sacked King's Landing and killed every Targaryen he could find. Tywin's big defining pre-stories action was brutally overthrowing Aerys' whole family. Sure he didn't do it immediately. But when circumstances permitted, Tywin took extreme vengeance. 5. "Tyrion's dragon dreams aren't Dragon Dreams" Why the hell not? Symbolically heavy. Seemingly prophetic. Showing a destiny of magical conflict, with stakes as intimate as family identity, and as broad as globe-spanning war. Tyrion’s dreams check all the boxes for what makes up a Dragon Dream. (Or should I say, “They meet any cry-Tyrion?”) When Tyrion first mentions dreaming of dragons, he’s telling Jon “I know your secret. You dream the same kind of dreams.” Again, dramatic irony time. Tyrion’s saying it as “I know you secretly feel alienation.” But a reader who knows Jon’s lineage knows the real secret is why Jon’s magic dreams fixate on family alienation. Because they’re Dragon Dreams. The very first thing GRRM tells us about Tyrion’s dragon dreams is that they’re comparable to Jon’s Dragon Dreams. And Tyrion’s have actual dragons in them. Oh, and very non-coincidentally, this scene happens only 20ish pages after Dany has the first confirmed on-page Dragon Dream. Which hits all the same elements. Prophesymbolic vision of a buried dragon identity. Which emerges through the crucible of sibling struggle. GRRM returns focus to Tyrion’s dragon dreams in ADWD. He has two such dreams during his journey east from Illyrio’s manse as part of a plot to marry Dany to a guy with a big fighting force behind him. Eagle eyed observers will note that this is exact same setup Dany herself had in AGOT when her Dragon Dreams started. In both the earliest and latest books in the series, GRRM draws immediate parallels between Tyrion’s dragon dreams and Targaryen Dragon Dreams. Just from an economy of storytelling perspective, it would be weird to have Tyrion’s special important dreams-w/dragons-in-them that just happen to be totally unrelated to Jon & Dany’s Special Important Magic Dragon Dreams™️. Caveat: Schrodinger’s Targaryen Despite all of this, I do not think GRRM’s endgame is as simple as “And then we learn Tyrion is 100% definitely Aerys’ son and not Tywin’s.” My strongest hunch is that the plan is for the story to end without a definitive answer, but a pointedly open question. Compare it to other “unresolved Targaryen/dragonrider ancestry mysteries” like Nettles and Daeron T vs Daemon B. GRRM loves this “the mystery is more valuable than the answer” approach to storytelling. In AGOT and ASOS we’re told “Tywin thinks of Tyrion as not his.” In TWOIAF we see maesters publicly speculating about Aerys & Joanna’s relations. I think the in-universe uncertainty is the plotline here. The speculation already exists in Tyrion’s plot, which will come to a fever pitch when (not if) he saddles Viserion. I don’t think there’ll be any raunchy Bran-vision or tearstained secret letter from Joanna that definitively confirms Tyrion’s parentage one way or the other. Tyrion seizes Casterly Rock and there’s a hubbub about legality. Is he a golden trueborn lion, Tywin’s legal heir? Is he the red of a Targaryen dragon and/or a color-inverted Lannister bastard? Who the hell knows? What does it matter? All the truth Tyrion knows is his mother was a lioness, making him a cat regardless of coat. That, plus he has a dragon, with sharp long claws. The dragon reins are all he needs to reign from This deliberate open-endedness leaves room for a lot of options. I’m very open to chimera theory. Nerd Tangent: In myth, the chimera is literally a fire-breathing lion-serpent hybrid. All Tyrion needs is some goat imagery and he’s got the whole animal. Plus GRRM keeps making the lady of Casterly Rock mother twins at every point in the timeline. Joanna’s were even fraternal. GRRM even wrote an unpublished conversation whereTyrion talks about Maelys the Monstrous (to whom Tyrion repeatedly compares himself) absorbing his twin in-utero, and imagines the same thing happening in his own mother’s womb. George is doing everything a writer setting up a “genetic chimera” twist reveal would do. Separately, I really like the idea of Tywin misinterpreting prophecy and dooming himself to the fate he was trying to avoid. In perfect parallel to Cersei’s experience with Maggy. Tywin gets some kind of cryptic warning about Aerys’ bloodline displacing his own. Just like Cersei’s valonqar, he jumps to a misplaced suspicion of Tyrion, when he should be examining Jaime and/or Cersei. When TWOIAF bundles the tourney of 272, Tyrion’s birth/Joanna’s death in 273, and Tywin’s role in the Targaryen downfall together, it’s entirely possible that the point is the same as AFFC Cersei constantly telling us “valonqar = Tyrion.” A red herring; there to prompt the audience into thinking about the question. But preserving mystery by laying the false answer on thick while the true answer is surreptitiously sprinkled in. Maybe there’s even in-universe discussion about how an AJT reveal makes a farce of RLJ? “Diluting the reveal by flooding the spot with something similar but even more outlandish” was Tyrion’s own in-universe strategy for dealing with the reveal of Cersei’s royal bastards. This could be GRRM going full circle. “Oh, Ned Stark’s other closely guarded secret about royal bastardy just came out? Well, this counterstory from Tyrion about royal bastards has juicy stuff like clowns and sex with a crazy guy and kids w/physical abnormalities. Once this story spreads, no one’ll know what to believe!” It could even go the same direction the show went for Theon’s identity dualism. Tangent: (Theon is kinda directly connected to Tyrion already, having inherited the “burn Winterfell, torn between Starks & birth family” plotline originally meant for Tyrion.) You can be both a furry apex predator on 4 legs and a mythical beast with long wriggly appendages. Lizard & lion at once. GRRM might even be highlighting this Schrodinger-esque superstate of “both one and the other simultaneously” with Tyrion’s ADWD intro. The first time we see the cat-man after he kills Tywin, he’s drunk himself half to death in a box while on his way to Illyrio. It's the moment when he’s most in limbo– after killing the lion Tywin, but before joining sides with Aerys’ dragonspawn – he’s a half-alive half-dead cat in a box. All I'm saying is that I think, for George, the point is the duality. The uncertainty. The multiplicity of options. Tbh, I’m not arguing that “Aerys is the father” = The Answer™️. I’m just arguing that the story is designed to set up the question. From Tyrion’s first lines to Tywin’s last, GRRM insistently raises the notion of Tyrion not being Tywin’s son. The most recently published account of A, J, T, & T deals heavily with the contentious love triangle. I’m not saying you have to like it. I’m just saying you can’t pretend it’s not there. |
2024.05.19 08:03 Cthulhu51 Me and my sister got followed by car for 40 minutes
Me and my sister had something super not fun happen to us just a couple hours ago. I’m still kinda paranoid ngl.
My sister(F27) was driving me(F21) home after hanging out all day and going to the movies. I live out in the country so it’s about a 30 minute drive from the edge of town. We’re having a good time, windows rolled down and singing to some Britney Spears. We notice that the car behind us has been going the same way as us for quite a bit because they have absolutely blinding headlights.
We slow down and move over towards the shoulder so they can pass us. They also slow down and keep behind us. I start feeling nervous when they won’t go around us when we try to get them to pass. We thought about pulling off the road but there wasn’t really anywhere we could.
When we go through intersections, they slow down and copy our turn signal after we put it on and then blow through the light before it turns red. The same thing happens at the multiple four way stops it takes to get to my neighborhood. We have turned our music off at this point because the vibe was killed, we were almost certain we were being followed. The road before we turn off has a pretty high speed limit, so we turn on our turn signal as late as possible before turning. This person had to slam on their brakes so fast to turn that the car behind them had to go around to not crash.
So we get onto our road, which is a really big circle, we make a different turn and go around the circle backwards to how we usually get to my house. They are still behind us and copy our turn. We get about 5 minutes into the circle, about halfway through the neighborhood and my finger was hovering over the call button for my stepdad, who is at the house. The car turns off into a random driveway, but not all the way up to the house at the end. We keep driving and finish the loop at my house once we are absolutely positive we are no longer being followed.
We hung out for an hour or so and then my sister drove back to her house. I get a call when she gets back home, she saw the exact same vehicle with the same bright ass head lights, waiting on the grass off the side of the road kinda near a gas station, facing the direction of the oncoming traffic. They probably saw and heard us as we drove past because we had the windows down at the intersection.
TLDR: Followed for 40 minutes from town to the countryside and lost them. My sister was driving back after hanging out and saw them lurking by the road and watching oncoming traffic.
submitted by Cthulhu51 to TwoXChromosomes [link] [comments]
My sister(F27) was driving me(F21) home after hanging out all day and going to the movies. I live out in the country so it’s about a 30 minute drive from the edge of town. We’re having a good time, windows rolled down and singing to some Britney Spears. We notice that the car behind us has been going the same way as us for quite a bit because they have absolutely blinding headlights.
We slow down and move over towards the shoulder so they can pass us. They also slow down and keep behind us. I start feeling nervous when they won’t go around us when we try to get them to pass. We thought about pulling off the road but there wasn’t really anywhere we could.
When we go through intersections, they slow down and copy our turn signal after we put it on and then blow through the light before it turns red. The same thing happens at the multiple four way stops it takes to get to my neighborhood. We have turned our music off at this point because the vibe was killed, we were almost certain we were being followed. The road before we turn off has a pretty high speed limit, so we turn on our turn signal as late as possible before turning. This person had to slam on their brakes so fast to turn that the car behind them had to go around to not crash.
So we get onto our road, which is a really big circle, we make a different turn and go around the circle backwards to how we usually get to my house. They are still behind us and copy our turn. We get about 5 minutes into the circle, about halfway through the neighborhood and my finger was hovering over the call button for my stepdad, who is at the house. The car turns off into a random driveway, but not all the way up to the house at the end. We keep driving and finish the loop at my house once we are absolutely positive we are no longer being followed.
We hung out for an hour or so and then my sister drove back to her house. I get a call when she gets back home, she saw the exact same vehicle with the same bright ass head lights, waiting on the grass off the side of the road kinda near a gas station, facing the direction of the oncoming traffic. They probably saw and heard us as we drove past because we had the windows down at the intersection.
TLDR: Followed for 40 minutes from town to the countryside and lost them. My sister was driving back after hanging out and saw them lurking by the road and watching oncoming traffic.
2024.05.19 08:02 AncientConstant9488 Stuck in Lucid Nightmares
Hi everyone so i think i may have started to unintentionally ap or something strange is happening at night. I’m someone who is extremely connected and open to everything.. I’ve been all up and down the alley of my mind.
Anyways, i usually have very intense vivid dreams and remember all of my dreams always. I never taught myself how to lucid dream it just started one day after a mushroom trip. almost every night i lucid dream and if not my dreams end by me realizing i’m in a dream and start to become lucid. The past week i have been having TERRIBLE lucid nightmares or i’m starting to ap. I don’t know too much about ap but whatever is going on, it is strange.
They start about 10 minutes into me falling asleep. I know i am asleep, lucid & conscious. they take place in the same exact time and place of where i am, i know i am 100% asleep. Almost as the dream is portraying everything that is going on as if i had my eyes open.
to explain the best i can- let’s say i am in one of my “dreams” and my cat walks across my leg in real life- as i am sleeping i see it happen in real time as i see it in my dream. it starts to get scary when it almost feels like i am in a horrifying “realm” or “layer” of this reality. I start to get terrifying feelings sick to my stomach and i start to see or feel that i’m not supposed to be here AND this is when it gets terrifying. I cannot wake myself up, i try and try as i get more horrified every time i try harder, it feels like i am in sleep paralysis but in a dream of currently reality. sometimes i will think i woke myself up but then i woke up into the first dream sorta like the movie “ inception” dream within a dream. the other night it was happening and i heard my phone ringing in real life, and i was trying to hard to wake up to answer it hoping it could get me out of this realm but i just couldn’t get out. another time my grandmother was trying to wake me up and i saw her in the “dream” everything that she was doing, it was like my eyes were open but they weren’t.. i was sleeping. i knew the same shirt she had on.. i could see her and everything. it was just weird like i can see with my eyes closed or something , anyways i couldn’t move or talk or wake myself up i couldn’t get out of that paralyzed state or dream. Once i know i am awake and no longer in a dream i am in a terrified sleep paralysis for about 10 minutes. i cannot move, i am so scared and i feel like something bad is there with me. I have never experienced this before and it has been every night for the past week.
please let me know what you guys think, i am open to anything or any advice.
submitted by AncientConstant9488 to LucidDreaming [link] [comments]
Anyways, i usually have very intense vivid dreams and remember all of my dreams always. I never taught myself how to lucid dream it just started one day after a mushroom trip. almost every night i lucid dream and if not my dreams end by me realizing i’m in a dream and start to become lucid. The past week i have been having TERRIBLE lucid nightmares or i’m starting to ap. I don’t know too much about ap but whatever is going on, it is strange.
They start about 10 minutes into me falling asleep. I know i am asleep, lucid & conscious. they take place in the same exact time and place of where i am, i know i am 100% asleep. Almost as the dream is portraying everything that is going on as if i had my eyes open.
to explain the best i can- let’s say i am in one of my “dreams” and my cat walks across my leg in real life- as i am sleeping i see it happen in real time as i see it in my dream. it starts to get scary when it almost feels like i am in a horrifying “realm” or “layer” of this reality. I start to get terrifying feelings sick to my stomach and i start to see or feel that i’m not supposed to be here AND this is when it gets terrifying. I cannot wake myself up, i try and try as i get more horrified every time i try harder, it feels like i am in sleep paralysis but in a dream of currently reality. sometimes i will think i woke myself up but then i woke up into the first dream sorta like the movie “ inception” dream within a dream. the other night it was happening and i heard my phone ringing in real life, and i was trying to hard to wake up to answer it hoping it could get me out of this realm but i just couldn’t get out. another time my grandmother was trying to wake me up and i saw her in the “dream” everything that she was doing, it was like my eyes were open but they weren’t.. i was sleeping. i knew the same shirt she had on.. i could see her and everything. it was just weird like i can see with my eyes closed or something , anyways i couldn’t move or talk or wake myself up i couldn’t get out of that paralyzed state or dream. Once i know i am awake and no longer in a dream i am in a terrified sleep paralysis for about 10 minutes. i cannot move, i am so scared and i feel like something bad is there with me. I have never experienced this before and it has been every night for the past week.
please let me know what you guys think, i am open to anything or any advice.
2024.05.19 08:02 Zealousideal-Turn277 Diagnosis&Medication Journey (Ritalin > Vyvanse > Ritalin)
Hey my fellow spicy brain family,
Just sharing a bit of my journey (32M) and I’ll continue to update my post as I travel through this, as for me having resources like reddit to read and be open minded about medication and possibly being able to see what’s a ‘side effect’ or a benefit from meds has been helpful.
02/23 : Diagnosis
Initial dose Ritalin 10mg twice a day AM/PM (I think initially was 5mg for a few days then 10mg)
04/2024 : increase Vyvanse to 50mg
Day 2: I took 10mg x1 every 1-2hrs until I felt something, and voila at dose 4, I felt unbothered by a lot of things that would usually piss me off (bad drivers, my kids doing kid things) so I took a further 2 until 60mg was taken for that day.
Day 3-11: I took 10mg x2 every 3-4hrs, I feel emotive, calm, happy, no anxious feelings at all, executive function is slightly better however the biggest win is I can RELAX which has been a lot of my issues in the past, constantly feeling shit needs to be done, when in actual fact nothing is pressing right now (business stuff) I’m able to parent better and be very patient and calm when my kids (also adhd) have moments, mostly the post school restraint collapse, and be well grounded to help my daughter decompress.
(I cried in the car to work listening to old songs I listened to when I was in high school and not knowing the depth of the lyrics, mostly mourning my childhood being late aged diagnosed)
After all my whole journey to being diagnosed was to give the support to my daughter that I’d been refused to as a child by my parents (even my primary school principal suggested I be evaluated, and I’d say mostly from a caring place).
My conclusions ; it may take a while to get your medication selection / dosage correct, just don’t give up, be careful of ‘chasing the dragon’ but also be as open as possible with your GP/Psych, sometimes we’re taught to please and not be a hindrance by downplaying potential side effects which can slow things down.
Thanks for reading my TEDtalk.
submitted by Zealousideal-Turn277 to ausadhd [link] [comments]
Just sharing a bit of my journey (32M) and I’ll continue to update my post as I travel through this, as for me having resources like reddit to read and be open minded about medication and possibly being able to see what’s a ‘side effect’ or a benefit from meds has been helpful.
02/23 : Diagnosis
Initial dose Ritalin 10mg twice a day AM/PM (I think initially was 5mg for a few days then 10mg)
- I kept asking my GP and others I knew about what I was to notice, however I think I had some kind of ‘expectation’ that made me angry cause I ‘wasn’t getting it’ (or possibly underdosed) I remember the nurse saying when doing my ECG “you’ll know when it’s right” which only further fueled my frustration.
- was getting tension headaches and jitters in afternoon (informed my psych at my next appt) however after doing some studying of my circumstances and situation of late, I have concluded that I was getting these ‘side effects’ as a rebound effect as my doses were too far apart (rollercoaster peak/drop/peak/drop)
- immediately it was ‘go time’ (possibly euphoria) I was so motivated to do literally everything right that moment (after all I am on an amphetamine) I was focused on my business and growing it, back end work, processes etc and quit gaming/porn (as these had a pretty tight hold on me), addressed issues with my parents, and workplace at the time which ended out better for me. (NC with parents, and moved workplace)
- I had no issues with the 30mg as it seemed to be great, but psych upped anyway (I didn’t question because maybe he knew something I didn’t)
04/2024 : increase Vyvanse to 50mg
- Within a week I knew something wasn’t right, heart rate issues/palptations (151bpm, to my error I had a coffee at the same time as my Vyvanse and it didn’t interact well together) I started self titrating and breaking my 50mg and ingesting 30mg after a 4 day medication holiday as I felt so bad when I was on 50mg, but after a week of 30mg I still felt the same, a lot of self doubt, don’t back myself, anxious/worry etc.
- As I’d previously taken 20mg twice a day with issues around my PM dose, I’d concluded my doses were too far apart with what I had learnt,
Day 2: I took 10mg x1 every 1-2hrs until I felt something, and voila at dose 4, I felt unbothered by a lot of things that would usually piss me off (bad drivers, my kids doing kid things) so I took a further 2 until 60mg was taken for that day.
Day 3-11: I took 10mg x2 every 3-4hrs, I feel emotive, calm, happy, no anxious feelings at all, executive function is slightly better however the biggest win is I can RELAX which has been a lot of my issues in the past, constantly feeling shit needs to be done, when in actual fact nothing is pressing right now (business stuff) I’m able to parent better and be very patient and calm when my kids (also adhd) have moments, mostly the post school restraint collapse, and be well grounded to help my daughter decompress.
(I cried in the car to work listening to old songs I listened to when I was in high school and not knowing the depth of the lyrics, mostly mourning my childhood being late aged diagnosed)
After all my whole journey to being diagnosed was to give the support to my daughter that I’d been refused to as a child by my parents (even my primary school principal suggested I be evaluated, and I’d say mostly from a caring place).
My conclusions ; it may take a while to get your medication selection / dosage correct, just don’t give up, be careful of ‘chasing the dragon’ but also be as open as possible with your GP/Psych, sometimes we’re taught to please and not be a hindrance by downplaying potential side effects which can slow things down.
Thanks for reading my TEDtalk.
2024.05.19 08:02 CourseLarge What are most helpful tips you have ever heard that have helped you on your shifting journey
I have shifted(abt a year or more ago), but i haven’t really been successful since. I have been recently felt extremely unconfident with shifting these past few months, but i still have that mentality of “I wanna shift, i wanna shift” anytime I see a show or a movie i’ve made a script for, but as of a few months ago, I’m starting to doubt shifting more than i have ever in my whole 4 year long journey, and it’s making me extremely sad and upset. please, if you can, give me (and others) some tips for this! and tips for actually shifting. thank you guys
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