It Is In The Morning

Man I grew up with German storybooks and I forget like half of them but every once and a while I remember and it hits me in the solar plexus every time

Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to play with matches. Her cats warned her that she'd catch fire and burn to death, but she ignored them. Then she caught fire and burned to death. The end

Once upon a time there was a boy who didn't want to eat his supper, and he starved to death. The end

There once was a boy who never cut or cleaned his hair and nails. He was the ugliest kid in the world. The end

One day a boy was sucking his thumb, and his mom said, "I'm heading out to get groceries, don't suck your thumbs or the tailor will break into the house and cut them off." The boy ignored his mother, and then then tailor broke into the house and and cut his thumbs off. His thumbs are still gone because thumbs don't grow back. The end

yeah basically

Elizabethan Peasant 1: Lo, hast thou learned to read?

Elizabethan Peasant 2: Verily, and to compose as well.

Elizabethan Peasant 1: With haste, then, how is the word “i cup” composed?

Elizabethan Child: Father, I have not yet broken fast and am filled with pangs of hunger.

Elizabethan Father: Hail, Filled With Pangs Of Hunger! Mine own name is Wybert.

Elizabethan Scholar 1: Alack, I have in my purse but sixty-nine pence.

Elizabethan Scholar 2: Lusty fellow, knowst thou well what such a sum portends!

Elizabethan Scholar 1: I…I have not sufficient to sup on fowl.

Elizabethan Scholar 1: Mine name is verily Micheal with a ‘b’, and I hast been afraid of insects mine entire life.

Elizabethan Scholar 2: Cease cease cease. Wither is the bee?

Elizabethan Scholar 1: Thither is a bee?

Elizabethan husband: Wife, ho! Bring forth my keys!

Elizabethan wife: [throws a writing slope before him]

Elizabethan husband: My keys, my keys! What, hast thou not ears?

Elizabethan wife: I thought thou said writing slope.

Elizabethan husband: Devil take thee; why would I say writing slope?

Elizabethan daughter: Harken father! Tis the valorous kush!

Elizabethan father: Thou art in the petty market; how valorous mayest it be?

Elizabethan Peasant: Good morrow, my fine fellows! Thou mayest call me Jared, I has’t seen 19 years upon the Good Lord’s green earth, but I am melancholic, for I must admit it was not my privilege to learn to decipher script.

SO I’M GONNA TELL YOU A STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED TO ME TODAY because I think I accidentally made friends with a benevolent trickster god/fey animal/werewolf???

backstory: I have been afraid of dogs since I was in first grade and two of my classmates both independently got hospitalized for dog bite injuries within a week of each other. ever since, I have been attempting to get over this fear. it’s going pretty solid lately. it helps that at my bus stop, there’s a large and fenced in property with a dog that is afraid of humans. he’s a gorgeous german shepherd?? who I have taken a few sneaky photos of and always manages to look angelic.

so this pup is scared of humans and I’m scared of dogs. but for months we see each other every day. and we nudge closer and closer. and one day I’m feeling brave and pick up a stick and hold it out to the fence and this good good doggo gennnntly takes it between his teeth and runs off with it. since then it’s been a game we play every day and this buddy’s tail starts wagging when I come down the street towards the bus stop and frankly it adds life to these brittle old bones of mine.

today however was the reckoning… I was a bit distracted by school stress when I came down the street, and so I take a moment for myself and when I look back up, the puppy is GONE. I look around the yard, seeing if he’s behind a tree, then see him leaving the yard and merrily skipping down the sidewalk, where he suddenly stops. I ask my group chat for advice.

trick question by the time the answer comes I’m already walkin towards him. he’s sitting still, tail wagging. right in front of him on the ground, with no one in sight? a $20 bill. 

I slooowly bend down and pick up the money and a nearby stick. put the money in my pocket. put the stick out to my doggo friend who gently takes it as always. and then awkwardly I kinda “well, thanks for the money! you should get home now, my bus is coming and your person won’t like you being out of the yard.” and just like that. the dog just trots back to the yard happy as a clam and slips in through the gaping wide bars of the fence. meanwhile, three high schoolers on the way to school are staring at me and laughing but like. okay what am I supposed to do, not thank this blessing dog. I actually tell him thanks once again for good measure before the bus comes.

so basically my fear of at least one dog is cured, my curiosity is piqued (coincidence? maybe. smart dog? perhaps. but this is the same city I got cursed in and the same city I wandered into a fey subway sandwich shop in so), and I got 20 bucks. so reblog for money dog? I guess?

Waitwaitwait… can I hear about that fey subway sandwich shop, please?

okay okay so a little under a year ago now I was craving a sandwich. I went to my normal downtown subway, but it turned out it was buy one get one free day so it was crowded. after some thought, I remembered that there was another subway almost exactly across the street. same franchise, different location, very close to the one I go to and yet I’d never been. I decide to go see if it’s as swamped as my normal one.

I walk in and it’s as good as dead. there’s two people in line in front of me, four people behind the counter, and two employees wandering the store. it’s gorgeous. clean as anything. a fireplace with a burning fire (nice as it’s the dead of winter in pennsylvania at this point), and smooth jazz playing softly on the speakers. it’s huge. there are armchairs. the windows have curtains and a lovely view of downtown. it’s immediately the kind of place you could stay forever but I have a bus to catch in like half an hour so I walk up and get in line.

as I do, I see the first two behind the counter employees. one looks dead. one looks angry. the dead one… and I call her this because she literally looks zombified. not normal min wage worker dead but like her brain was removed dead… asks what she can get for me and I place my normal order. it begins to go down the line. it gets to the second person, the angry one, who says with the most INTENSE STARE to Dead Eyed Girl, “if we all had to come in and we don’t get busy, I’m burning down the city.”

Dead Eyed Girl, eyes still dead, says “Except for this store, of course.”

“Of course not, we can’t burn down this store.”

Dead Eyed Girl literally echoes “We can’t burn down this store.”

this is when I start to go from curious to a little freaked out. angry one takes my subs out of the toaster and begins to put veggies on it, then shoves it over to the person at the register who is, according to the logs I looked up to make sure I remember this accurately, remarkable for one reason…  I was paying attention to EVERYTHING and yet I can’t remember what they looked like at all. I pay and I get my sandwiches and my drink cup and go to fill my drink up.

standing near the drink machine at this point are two more terrified looking employees who are talking quietly to themselves. I fill my cup up with sprite and am about to put a lid on it when one says “oh. that machine… doesn’t work.” note: at this point I have the drink already and it looks and smells right. “here, let me go replace that for you. don’t drink that! one second!”

he looks TERRIFIED as he goes to the cooler and pulls out three bottles of sprite and looks TERRIFIED as he holds them out to me asking, terrified, “here, is that enough?”

and so I just “yeah… thank you?” as he takes my cup and gives me the bottles. it’s more sprite than I paid for.

I sit down as far from the counter as I can and begin to eat. my first toasted sandwich? cold. according to my phone I’ve been in here for five minutes only. I didn’t see the customers who were in here when I entered leave. nobody else has come in. I’d planned to get out my laptop and wait here out of the cold for the bus, but even as I eat the sandwich time seems slow so I just devour it and leave. it’s not even been ten minutes since I came in. just take my second (cold) sandwich and my bottles of sprite and book it.

and I ask around about this subway. everyone I know says it’s perfectly normal and they’ve been there several times and it’s fine! and sure enough when I work up the courage to go back in two weeks later, the fireplace is not operational (in fact it’s blocked off), the music is staticky and pop, there’s no armchairs, and it’s not very clean at all. is there a possibility they cleaned it up for the event and redecorated in two weeks? yes. is it more likely that I wandered into the fey realm for a bit? perhaps.

I didn’t drink the sprite I didn’t pay for.

Damn.

Had a thing like that happen with a hobby shop once.

I had thought the place was closed and gutted, but saw to my delight that it was open and occupied while driving by one day. Of course, I had to stop in.

This place is immaculate, although something about some of the displays seemed slightly off.

A guy there was making custom dice. I commissioned one from him and he made it on the spot. Damn beautiful thing, and the luckiest die I own (not weighted, just super lucky… for me… and basically cursed for anyone else).

We had a very in-depth conversation about the presentation of fey in various contemporary novels while he made the die. I paid him (plus extra, cause I loved the work he was doing), browsed, bought some MTG cards, and left a couple of dollars in a donation box as I walked out the door (I think it was for supplying dice and other ttrpg stuff to local schools or something and I thought it was a very worthy cause).

One of the employees said something like “pretty decent for a person” to dice guy, and he replied something like, “yeah, I gave him a good one.”

I realized after I got home that the displays for the current set hadn’t had any letters on them that I could recognize, but my ADHD brain had parsed something on them as writing that said “Magic the Gathering” anyway and moved on (and I don’t mean, like, it was Arabic or Chinese or something. I mean nothing, in hindsight, even resembled writing).

The cards practically show up at the top of my deck when I call them, and the die is, again, fabulously lucky, but only for me.

Tried to bring a friend to the shop literally two days later and it was back to being abandoned and gutted. My friend didnt believe that there had really been a store there, although he has since admitted that those cards and that custom d20 are weirdly good for me… and only for me.

Honestly, I’m super glad not to be the only one to have had such a word experience, and glad to have a better explanation for it than “that time i lost my mind and somehow came out of it with physical items that appear to be more or less +1 ebchanted.”

Name of the die is Fafnir, btw. He named it, not me.

It's Sabaton o'clock baybeee!!!

Sabaton by Mqvistmedia

Joakim Broden, Sabaton

every day is a good day to give thanks that the winged hussars arrived

Pär Sundström / Sabaton @ Sentrum Scene, Oslo NO 26.03.2017

I did a thing

Bonus Jocke losing it:

I died a little when I saw this

Actual photo of the only two brain cells I have

just watched a man ice skate a whole routine to cotton eye joe while wearing denim overalls. ladies, i may be in love.

this shit is so cute!!! he looks like he’s having a great time!!

Okay, but I love this because he very much is doing an skating routine that is beautiful and elegant, but also made it look like that was very much the middle of a good ol fashion barn hoedown!

He did the cotton eye joe dance in that routine!

he’s an olympic medalist,,, i am LOSING it.

When you remember the anti-vax movement

I first reblogged this in January, and here my ass is in March 2020 self-quarantined at home.

THIS POST DID NOT AGE WELL

On the contrary, it aged a little TOO well.

any Catholics online ? I got some questions.

Yeah I'm catholic whatsup

how do i reach heaven through violence

Its called a crusade and you need to get the Pope's permission first

One of the funniest things I ever experienced was when I went to go see John Mulaney live, and halfway through a bit about how expensive college in the States is, he looked down at the sleeve of his suit jacket and just. stopped. dead halt, mid sentence.

And after like three seconds, where we’re all trying to figure out the punchline because the story clearly hadn’t ended, and John Mulaney quietly says, “Has there been tinfoil on my buttons the whole goddamn show?”

He’d taken his suit to the drycleaner, and they’d wrapped the buttons on the sleeves and the coat with tinfoil to protect them, and John Mulaney didn’t notice until half-way through his set, and was SO FLABBERGASTED that he never did finish the story about college and instead did five minutes on how stupid it was that his buttons were reflecting the light and he just didn’t notice, and in that moment I understood more about John Mulaney as a person than I ever have.

during one of his portland shows, he noticed this like 7 year old girl in the front row and asked her (and her parents) if she ‘is aware that she is physically here right now’ or if she was just brought along. turns out her favorite john mulaney bit is the “and I’m new in town” bit and that she’s seen all his stuff. He was so shocked and discomforted by the fact a SEVEN YEAR OLD has seen his shows, that he couldn’t get through a bit about donating to charity without interrupting himself at least three times to import good life lessons on this small child, as if that makes up for all the horrible things he’s said that she heard

When I saw him in Ft. Lauderdale, there was a bar in the lobby that people kept leaving to go to. At one point, a guy in the front row just got up and BOOKED IT to get drinks. John Mulaney looked over at a woman who was next to the empty seat and asked, “Are you with him? What’s his name?”

She was, in fact, with him, and she did tell him her date’s name. John Mulaney considered this, looked around, and unplugged his microphone. Leaning in to us, he told us that we were going to trick this guy so fuckin hard. He said, “At some point during the show, I am going to stop and say, ‘Well, you guys know what they say here in Ft. Lauderdale,’ and then you guys are all going to scream back ‘WE LOVE MILKSHAKES!’ He’ll be so confused.”

He then continued on with the show as normal, the drinks guy returned to his seat, and that was that for quite a long time. We thought he had forgotten about it until, at some point during what I believe was his McDonald’s drive-thru bit, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “You guys know what they say here in Ft. Lauderdale…”

Naturally, we erupted with “WE LOVE MILKSHAKES” and John Mulaney SWUNG around to face the drinks guy and said, “I bet you’re real confused now, huh, JASON?!”

ah so john mulaney is a chaotic neutral cryptid

i saw him last night and there was a good ten minute interlude where a woman told him everything she found wrong with his suit, including that his pants were too high waisted to which he replied “that’s where my hips are” and someone in the back shouted “look at that high waisted man he’s got feminine hips!” and he yelled back “that’s my joke! i’m offended!!”

I saw him live at my college. During his show he shouted something, which spooked a service dog in training that someone had brought with them (the dogs are common on campus, cause they are learning how to socialize and be in large crowds without reacting). Seeing the dog had been scared he apologized and asked the dog’s name. Upon hearing the dogs name was “Blanket” he about lost his god damn mind he was so happy. throughout the show he kept checking on Blanket. It was adorable.

This is my favorite version of this thread now

blessed thread, 100/10

So, okay, fun fact. When I was a freshman in high school… let me preface by saying my dad sent me to a private school and, like a bad organ transplant, it didn’t take. I was miserable, the student body hated me, I hated them, it was awful.

Okay, so, freshman year, I’m deep in my “everything sucks and I’m stuck with these assholes” mentality. My English teacher was a notorious hard-ass, let’s call him Mr. Hargrove. He was the guy every student prayed they didn’t get. And, on top of ALL OF THE SHIT I WAS ALREADY DEALING WITH, I had him for English.

One of the laborious assignments he gave us was to keep a daily journal. Daily! Not monthly or weekly. Fucking daily. Handwritten. And we had to turn it in every quarter and he fucking graded us. He graded us on a fucking journal.

All of my classmates wrote shit like what they did that day or whatever. But, I did not. No, sir. I decided to give the ol’ middle finger to the assignment and do my own shit.

So, for my daily journal entries, over the course of an entire year, I wrote a serialized story about a horde of man-eating slugs that invaded a small mining town. It was graphic, it was ridiculous, it was an epic feat of rebellion.

And Mr. Hargrove loved it.

It wasn’t just the journal. Every assignment he gave us, I tried to shit all over it. Every reading assignment, everyone gushed about how good it was, but I always had a negative take. Every writing assignment, people wrote boring prose, but I wrote cheesy limericks or pulp horror stories.

Then, one day, he read one of my essays to the class as an example of good writing. When a fellow student asked who wrote it, he said, “Some pipsqueak.”

And that’s when I had a revelation. He wanted to fight. And since all the other students were trying to kiss his ass, I was his only challenger.

Mr. Hargrove and I went head-to-head on every assignment, every conversation, every fucking thing. And he ate it up. And so did I.

One day, he read us a column from the Washington Post and asked the class what was wrong with it. Everyone chimed in with their dumbass takes, but I was the one who landed on Mr. Hargrove’s complaint: The reporter had BRAZENLY added the suffix “ize” to a verb.

That night I wrote a jokey letter to the reporter calling him out on the offense in which I added “ize” to every single verb. I gave it to Mr. Hargrove, who by then had become a friendly adversary, for a chuckle and he SENT IT TO THE REPORTER.

And, people… The reporter wrote back. And he said I was an exceptional student. Mr. Hargrove and I had a giggle about that because we both knew I was just being an asshole, but he and the reporter acknowledged I had a point.

And that was it. That was the moment. Not THAT EXACT moment, but that year with Mr. Hargrove taught me I had a knack for writing. And that knack was based in saying “fuck you” to authority. (The irony that someone in a position of authority helped me realize that is not lost on me.)

So, I can say without qualification that Mr. Hargrove is the reason I am now a professional writer. Yes, I do it for a living. And most of my stuff takes authorities of one kind or another to task.

Mr. Hargrove showed me my dissent was valid, my rebellion was righteous, and that killer slugs could bring a city to its knees. Someone just needs to write it.