a cook, a thief, a wife and a lover

That's it. That's the dream. I'm almost mad that that's the dream.

That's half the dream. The other half is being fairie fucking godmother to everyone on the planet.

See, I had 100k for a hot minute. Doesn't matter why. But for nearly a calendar year, I picked up the tab every chance I got, i lavished people with gifts, I took a friend to Greece, I paid for healthcare for myself and a few other people, for lawyers to help someone get out of an abusive marriage, Christmas presents for a single mom of 3.

It felt incredible. Just to take away the worry and say, "I've got you." Instacart groceries to a grieving friend of a friend across town. Pay the unexpected car repairs. Gift a young artist a yearlong subscription to Procreate.

That's why I'll never understand billionaires. If you could fix it, if money could actually make even one life better, why would you not do it? Even just for the kick? Hell, i don't care if it feeds your ego. Be Tony Stark, be Superman, idgaf. When you'll never be able to spend all that you have, even if you some up every damn day like it was your job, if you could end world hunger six times over for the price of a social media company, why wouldn't you just DO IT?

I don't have a coherent conclusion to this, except that if I ever meet Jeff Bezos, I'll beat him to death with my bare fists.

my favorite conspiracy theory is that they regret what they did to me

“But I didn’t consent to see kink” yes you did by coming to pride,

a place you know and have repeatedly said you know kink is at, a place built by kinky people, the mother of pride Brenda Howard was a queer kinky polyamorous sex positive anti war bisexual Jew and to try and remove its history or sanitise it is is spitting on her grave, you are consenting by choosing to go there

calvin and hobbes is my favorite comic strip ever

I haven’t stopped laughing at this

hmmm… there’s probably an INFINITELY more humane way to do this…

i get that they’re not killing them and they end up fine, but imagine the trauma of you, a mammal, going through a long ass tube, not knowing what’s going to happen to you, and you can’t breathe. 🤷‍♀️

They get misted with water throughout the thing, and it results in fewer injuries than the ‘ladder’ method. Also, it’s a fish. It never knows what’s going to happen to it at any point in time throughout its life.

Also, I, a mammal, have paid 80 bucks to get into a water park to get the opportunity to feel like that fish, and that motherfucker gets in for free every day is fish day at the fish waterpark

well the MOST humane thing would be to not build dams blocking salmon migration routes, nor create a society where there are only resources allocated to solving the problem at all because blocking the salmon endangers the profits of a segment of the food industry. 

Buuuut since we’re past that already, here are a couple of additional thoughts:

1 this IS the more humane alternative, which was invented to lower injury and death rates associated with previous techniques. When a better alternative is revealed it will probably replace this one. But this one is a pretty huge improvement over the other methods, one of which killed off something like 80% of the fish involved. A study of the above fish tube was conducted by Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in 2017 on the Columbia River and showed a much higher success rate. In that study, only one fish died (“due to a human error during the system setup”) and only 3 percent had signs of injury. So. The next best improvement might have to be “remove dam”

2 they are on their way to die. That is where we are helping them get to. That’s the end goal of the salmon’s migration. They on their way to mutate, start rotting alive, have an orgy, and die. That’s where the tube is taking them.

So like, it’s not going to be the weirdest thing they experience this month, is what i’m saying. 

thank you for that, @hug-your-face

thinking about middle aged gay love is like. we have a future and we have time

my mother divorced my father when i was 7. it wasn’t because she was gay, though she did discover this later (another reminder that it’s okay to find out who you are at 40, at 50, etc, and also for who you are to change) but because she had thought he was the great love of her life and he turned out to be a shitty person.

my mother married my ma when i was 11. i think they do have a great love. i think they love each other the way you can when you’re middle aged – having seen the world, being able to see each other’s flaws, knowing themselves. they see each other in full, and they love each other and the world for it. 

they dance on the street to buskers (very embarrassing when you’re twelve; very cute when you look back on it as an adult). i shit you not – they pass me their purses and dance on the sidewalk, laughing. i thought was something that only happened in movies.

my ma makes my mother eggs every morning because my mother can’t cook for shit. my mother presses my ma’s work blazers for her because my ma still can’t figure out how to work the new iron. 

when it was warm, high-school me would wake up on the weekends and wander downstairs to find them sitting in the backyard in the sun, drinking coffee together and splitting the newspaper in a surgical, exact process since they’d worked out who wanted which sections years ago. 

my mother is happier than she’s ever been. my ma, too. there is a future out there for every gay person who’s always known they’re gay, like my ma, and for everyone who figures it out later, like my mother. there’s time. 

they’re growing old together. i cannot express to you how much they are leading happy lives, loving each other, with a huge family surrounding them. i cannot express to you how much they have this beautiful future that they are living and will live. 

i want you to know, if you don’t have any older gays in your life: they’re out there. and they’re living these full, happy lives.

sometimes i look to my moms and i think, i want a life like yours. and looking at them makes me believe i will get it. 

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A tweet on October 29, 2019 from @DebbiBMoon which says:

Time to remember the best voting advice I ever heard: voting isn’t marriage, it’s public transport.

You’re not waiting for “the one” who’s absolutely perfect: you’re getting the bus, and if there isn’t one to your destination, you don’t not travel- you take the one going closest.

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And in the meantime you at least try to get some seating and shelters at the bus stops to make things less shitty now instead of refusing to accept anything but bullet trains.

You fucking work for the slightly better, every minute. Not the perfect. The perfect is not just the enemy of the good; in this case, it murders it.

hair combs in the form of lily leaves in dewdrops. england, 1906

The artist was Ella Naper; the leaves are horn and the dewdrops are moonstones.

HOLY FUCK

watched some video about a shitty kid yesterday and caught myself thinking "my god the kids these days are out of control" and praise the Lord I immediately reflexively scolded myself like "you were exactly this stupid when you were 13, stupider probably, here's a memory of you doing and saying something so completely terrible because you were a kid and kids don't know better" you cannot let up your vigilance even for a moment, you must constantly fight against age related conservatism and never stop internally interrogating your reactions

“And I don’t think anybody should feel bad if they get diagnosed with a mental illness, ’cause it’s just information about you that helps you to know how to take better care of yourself.

“Being bipolar, there’s nothing wrong with it. Being bipolar is like not knowing how to swim. It might be embarrassing to tell people, and it might be hard to take you certain places. But they have arm floaties. And if you just take your arm floaties, you can go wherever the hell you want.

“And I know some of you are like, ‘But Taylor, what if people judge me for taking arm floaties?’ Well, those people don’t care if you live or die, so maybe who cares? Maybe fuck those people a little. I don’t know.”

Taylor Tomlinson, Look At You (2022)

Instead of going "but have you tried-" every time you meet a disabled person, assume competence. Assume that we've already done our research. Assume that we are knowledgeable about our condition(s). Assume that we are doing everything we can to manage our disabilities well.

In the law, there's this idea called the "last clear chance" doctrine.

If you are in an accident, and you had the last clear chance to avoid the accident, then you are, at least in some portion, responsible for the accident.

For instance, if you are driving and a car pulls out in front of you, and you could've slammed on the brake but do not, you're responsible for that, even if the turn the other car made was illegal. Moreover, you might be held partially responsible for the other person's injuries, depending on how things work in your location.

This is even true if you can merely mitigate the damage. If you have a chance to limit the damage -- again, let's say you don't brake and the result is a collision at 40MPH instead of 10MPH -- the additional damage you cause could be considered your fault.

To me, this seems very applicable to voting.

The two parties in the US are going to put a couple of candidates up in the next few months. Both of them might be dangerous. But in the end, everyone who can vote is going to have one last, clear chance to avoid, or at least mitigate, damage.

It sucks that both parties are out there driving like maniacs.

But the fact of the matter is, they've put us in this position. And if you don't put on the brakes -- that is, at least mitigate damage -- you are responsible for the additional damage caused.

In the national elections, a choice not to vote for Biden is a choice not to brake when some jerk pulls into your lane. And if there's an accident and a lot of damage -- to voting rights in general, to reproductive rights, to the health and safety and life of trans and other queer people, to education, to the environment -- then you are responsible for not attempting mitigation.

You have the last clear chance to minimize danger and damage. And while you can yell until you're blue in the face that the Democratic party put you in that position in the first place by not running another candidate, you are still responsible even if you try to abdicate that responsibility.