I know I told this story before but last year I was having complications with a surgery and I just broke down in a public place and I was trying to gather myself, sitting and leaning on a wall when this girl in cowboy boots approached me and sat down and she asked what was wrong and I told her it was medical issues and she said “I understand, I have to have my foot amputated next week” and it shocked me out of crying and I was like “wow that sucks!” And she said “yeah.” And then she just touched my arm so tenderly and told me “I promise you that this problem will have its place, and everything is going to work out.” And the way she said it just made me really believe her. She said. “We’re just gonna have to cowgirl up.” And then she stood up and walked away and I’d call that a genuine encounter with an angel but the truth is there is a lot of goodness right here on earth in humanity and it’s shining and pure.
Okay but “this problem will have its place” is genuinely inspiring
THAT REALLY STRUCK ME because I’ve always hated the tired rhetoric of “this happened for a reason” and this feels like a more genuine, comforting take on that. Not “it happened for a reason,” but “this will find its spot in your life and your future that it fits into in a way that will eventually work out even though it sucks that it happened.” Love that.
Ok so I have a story. I worked Fantasyland (Dumbo) at Magic Kingdom. We had a girl transfer from Pirates of the Caribbean. And she told me the most amazing story.
So Pirates is down (shocking) And this particular boat is stopped at the first big scene, Where Barbosa is on the ship yelling for Jack Sparrow.
Anyway the boat has been stopped for about 15 minutes at this point, and there’s a couple sitting alone in the back. So the guy decides that nothing gets him in a better mood than the smell of water that hasn’t been changed in roughly 50 years, and convinces his girlfriend to blow him.
Now this girl is in the booth, along with the coordinator, watching this go down. Literally. There’s not much they can do to stop it at this point, other than notify security. Then another problem arises. The guy finishes, and the girl makes the motion to spit.
In. The. Fucking. Water.
Now if that load is released into the water, thats an automatic biohazard, and the ride is shut down for weeks. The water is removed, the ride path is scrubbed, along with the ride vehicles, and then new water is brought in. Costing the company thousands of dollara and pissed off tourists. The worst combination on this earth.
Panicking at this predicament, the coordinator grabs the mic in the control booth and says:
“Spitting is for quitters.”
This echoes over the bitching of guests and 50 year old audio of pirates commiting various crimes.
The look on this woman’s face was priceless. She gazes up, as if Walt himself commanded her from the grave, and swallows.
I’m told the ride started 5 minutes later and the couple ran out from the exit queue as fast as they could.
And this is why you dont fuck at Disney. Because cast members will call you out and it will be the highlight of our day.
I will be participating on a guacamole contest tomorrow at work. My objective is not to win, but to make every single one of the judges cry.
I will add every single chili I am able to find at the store, all of them.
All the chilis I could find at the store… i wonder if it will be enough 😛
Ready for the judges!!
So updates after the contest! I didn’t win.
This guacamole had the talent that when you take the first bite of your chip it isnt that spicy, but after a few seconds the feeling starts to spread. The judges bravely took a bite and were all happy and as I walked away from the table they started to gasp when the full force of the 6 different types of chili hit them at once.
People were free to taste it afterwards and every face of first surprise and then pain filled my heart with happiness.
I have never seen so much people enjoy suffering tho, because they finished everything so fast I even got time to make a second batch before the winners were announced.
Overall this was great and I had lots of fun making others suffer 😀
like seriously their brain-to-body size ratio is equal to that of a chimpanzee
They vocalize anger, sadness, or happiness in response to things
they are scary smart at solving puzzles
some crows stay with their mates until one of them dies
they can remember faces
SIDENOTE HERE BECAUSE HOLY SHIT. They did an experiment where these guys wore masks and some of them fucked with crows. Pretty soon the crows recognized the masks = douchebag. But the nice guys with masks they left alone. THEN, OH WE’RE NOT DONE, NO SIR crows that WEREN’T EVEN IN THE EXPERIMENT AND NEVER SAW THE MASK BEFORE knew about mask-dudes and attacked them on sight. THEY PASSED ON THE FUCKING INFORMATION TO THEIR CROW BUDDIES.
They remember places where crows were killed by farmers and change their migration patterns.
A colleague of my dad’s lives next to a lake, and looked out the window one morning to see a duck trapped in the ice. A crow swooped down. “Oh hell,” she thought, expecting carnage, because crows are opportunists. But the crow chipped at the ice with its beak until the duck was free.
Idk of this counts but a few crows saved me from a magpie swooping attack once ,they’re bros who can tell when magpies are being unreasonable and need to chill
I love crows so damn much. When I was fifteen, I hit a pretty serious bout of depression, to the point I was in my room for months. Well, a family of crows made a nest in a tree outside my window. There were two parents and two chicks. One chick was healthy and strong. One was weak, and had a caw like something being strained. It sounded more like a rooster crowing and so my parents jokingly named him ‘Buck’.Well… months passed and Buck’s sibling was taught to fly. His parents focused on the sibling because the sibling was strong. The father stayed behind to try and teach Buck, but I saw him try to fly, fail, and crash to the floor. His father helped him back up into the tree.
Every day, I would watch Buck from my window until one day I opened it and started talking to him. He was small and gangly and he couldn’t caw right. His feathers were all over the place and I felt a kinship. So I made a deal with him. I told him that if he could do it, if he could fly, then I could find the strength to get up. Well… near the end of the season, after talking with him every day, I finally saw him get out of the nest. He went to the edge of his branch, braced himself, and jumped… and just before he hit the ground, he soared back up into the sky. I cheered harder than I ever had before.
That winter, Buck left the area. I was crestfallen. I felt like I’d lost a friend. But I was so damn proud of him.
Cut to the next spring? I’m walking up the driveway one day when suddenly I hear a sound… a broken caw. I look up, and Buck is sitting in a tree above my head. He stared at me and puffed his feathers, then hopped down in front of me and cawed again. I was so damn thrilled, and I told him how proud I was of him. He ruffled his feathers and then soared off into his old tree.
That summer? I heard two broken caws. One from Buck… and one from his chick.
Cut to ten years later? We have a family of crows who all have a very distinct caw and they come here and spend every spring, summer, and fall on our property. Buck still greets me every spring.
that last reply made me wanna cry. that’s so beautiful.
this one morning i kept hearing really loud caws, i remember it was like 5am, LIKE REALLY LOUD AND ANNOYING AND AGGRESSIVE, so loud that i could hear it through a closed window, and i eventually went outside to check it out. there was a crow on my front lawn, it had an injury on its head and couldn’t fly and there were two other crows circling right above it, and they were cawing like mad.
i tried to get close and take a better look and one of them dived super low and tried to attack me. so i went back in the house and chopped some sliced raw meat and tossed it at him from a distance.
a few more times later, very soon after, they could tell i was trying to help, and did not attack me. i was “allowed” to walk up close and pick him up, he couldn’t drink water properly so i had to dip my finger in a bowl and stick it in his mouth.
i did this few times a day and it went on for about a week before he disappeared, i thought he recovered and left, but he came back the next day and lands on me, and i see him around the block quite often, and he would come sit on my shoulder for a few minutes and then fly away again. i feel like i’ve adopted a son.
Best birbs !!
your son is Beautiful and Strong
every time I see this post it has different crow stories and every time I reblog it again because all crow stories are good stories
Like, I wouldn’t want to be on bad terms with a crow, but they are a really smart animal, they aren’t scary You just want to be nice to them because they will know and they will remember, and they will pay you back if you treat them a certain way.
As a side note, I volunteered at a rehab (Hope for Wildlife), where they were rehabbing a crow with a broken wing–who was named Russell Crow. He kept pulling his bandage off so a sleeve was cut off some old clothing and put on him like a little sweater.
!!!!
I don’t think I’ll ever not reblog this. This posts makes me cry and smile at the same time.
Sometimes I think back on the time I spent working as a barista, and it seems SO STRANGE to me that “coffee shop AU” has become synonymous with narratives that are low on conflict, high on wholesome romance. During the year I spent working at a coffee shop:
A coworker of mine took a bunch of psychedelics, walked through some strangers’ plate-glass door, and threatened them with a bowie knife, leading to his arrest and imprisonment (and, needless to say, a late opening for the coffee shop that morning).
Another coworker, an ex-military type with a young wife and a new baby, decided to smoke up for the first time ever with two other mutual coworkers, in the back of one of their trucks; and ended up having a three-way with them which ended his marriage.
I had a nervous breakdown, stopped being able to eat food or hold conversations, and ended up sleeping on my coworker’s couch for three weeks before she finally called my parents to come collect me.
Multiple store managers were fired for embezzlement. (Reminder: this was within the space of a single year.)
Yet another coworker, who was seventeen at the time, started dog-sitting for a couple of regulars in their (I’m guessing) early 50s, and ended up in an ongoing creepy and incidentally illegal ~relationship~ with them both.
Various employees discovered, in the course of cleaning the bathrooms: couples fucking in the bathrooms; junkies passed out in the bathrooms; drunks puking in the bathrooms; both adults and children weeping in the bathrooms; a woman bleeding all over the bathroom from a gash in her throat (??); a dude standing in the middle of the bathroom floor and pissing in the opposite direction from the toilet, so that when the employee opened the unlocked door she got piss all over her (????).
The owner of the bridal shop across the street was exposed as both abusive toward her employees and also cooking the books, which led to my coffee shop taking on a couple of untrained and weirdly conservative bridal shop workers for a few months while the bridal shop was shuttered and sold to new owners. Later the larcenous former bridal shop owner came down with some horrible disease which caused her to lose both her hands.
There was a regular universally referred to as “Sketchy Steve,” who came in at 7am for a three-shot latte with room for Seagrams 7, and dealt drugs to all us baristas. I actually, at one point (I cannot believe I was this stupid), went inside Sketchy Steve’s house, and allowed him to spend like half an hour showing me his collection of découpaged outlet plates and also soliciting me for sex while I uncomfortably yet studiously declined.
Right before I started, the store manager had walked off the job in the middle of a shift, and ¾ of the employees had walked out after him. None of them ever returned.
Like, working on the front lines of food service was the most operatically sordid professional experience I have ever had, and one of the most surreal; and it is hilarious to me that THAT, of all jobs, is the one that has come to stand for soft-focus domestic romance in fandom circles.
This is the Coffee Shop AU we deserve.
Two of my managers got fired for having an affair with each other. There was this guy I never really talked to, so one time I see him and ask how his weekend was. He says “I wanted to drop some acid but I couldn’t find any.” Never saw him again.
I had a friend whose manager used to sit in the backroom doing lines of coke before opening at 7am. It was and I quote ‘the only way to deal with this shit’.
My own manager, who was heavily pregnant at the time, told an asshole customer to take their latte and shove it up their arse, before walking out and promptly going into labor.
We had homeless people sleeping in our dumpsters who used to throw the trash back out at us when we opened the lid.
I have myself uttered the phrase “M’am, I am the manager” after they dumped a cream cake over my head because it wasn’t what they ordered except it was. They even pointed at it first and said “that one”.
I had a customer piss themselves out of defiance when we asked them to leave. Then when the police were called they did it again, like some vengeful piss camel.
I’m telling you friends, I have stood at the precipice of hell, I have stared into the void and plummeted into the depths of humanity and it tips less than 20%.
Found it. The origins of everyone starting to send me the phrase Vengeful Piss Camel instead of Crucifix Nail Nipples for a short time. Amazing. I do not miss catering.
At the first coffee shop where I worked:
every employee who got fired would be banned from the shop for a certain period of time (highly variable based on how much money they owed you) and would get shorted half their last paycheck. I got banned for a week and shorted $42, a dude named Patrick got shorted $3k and banned for life.
Brandon, a regular, performed a citizens arrest on a guy who was threatening him, the guy’s dad and brother showed up and threatened him also so Brandon called my partner, who is nearly seven feet tall and was a bouncer at the time, to come and scare them away. It worked.
there was a love triangle between regulars Derek, Sarah, and Jenny. Sarah and Jenny were sisters. Derek had settled in and decided to date Jenny, but when a bunch of regulars (Sarah, Derek, Punk Rock Mark, Gina, Liz) and I went to a Circle Jerks show together Derek got kicked in the head in the mosh pit. Sarah offered to babysit him and ended up making out with him while he was concussed and Jenny threw up her hands and decided this was too much bullshit for her.
Punk Rock Mark got in a fight with his portable CD player at the coffee shop and the CD player won. He got pissed when it started skipping and threw a cinderblock at it so hard that the cinderblock bounced and hit him in the head and knocked Punk Rock Mark out cold for a minute.
Liz (one of the regulars from the Circle Jerks show) went to Vegas with me and on our way back from the trip she got a phone call from another regular that Sarah (also from the Circle Jerks show) had fucked Liz’s long-term boyfriend Mike in the bathroom of the coffee shop.
The coffee shop was cash only and we never replaced the register tape when it ran out because the shop was 100% only being used to launder the money the owners made selling cocaine out of their club in Hollywood.
One day I opened the shop and the front door (glass) was completely broken out but had been replaced with cardboard stapled on – nothing was missing, the register was fine, and there was a railroad tie studded with broken glass locked on the smoking patio, which you needed a shop key to get to. I spent the first half of that shift alternating between calling the owners, calling the manager, calling the cops, and cleaning up broken safety glass. At some point two of the regulars showed up (Mike-but-not-the-one-who-fucked-Sarah and Drew, who I would eventually marry) with plywood and replaced the door more securely. Nobody at the shop ever charged them for their drinks again. Eventually it came out that the manager had showed up at the shop at around four in the morning, slept on the couch for a while, done a bunch of coke, and broken out the door from the inside with the railroad tie (which we had to divert water because the toilet overflowed in the night twice a week and flooded the shop until we just started turning off the water to it every night)
Everybody was sleeping with Employee Jesse and nobody knew that everybody else was sleeping with him. Employee Jesse was disconcertingly sexy. He got a signed deal with Crown Publishing so one day we sat around helping him edit a book of poetry. He had had an album released by Sony in the late 90s. He would sometimes drink whiskey and get sad and play Desperado on his guitar while smoking on the patio. He was working in town to have spending money while he lived with and cared for his disabled Grandmother. He moved out when his Grandma got better and started living with Blonde Lori (who he was sleeping with). Their apartment building caught fire and a neighbor got stuck outside while her baby was in the apartment so Jesse turned on a garden hose and handed it to her then ran in and grabbed the baby and a chihuahua. The manager gave Jesse a month of free rent because he prevented the fire from spreading. Any time anyone tried to criticize Jesse after that his response was “I saved a baby” and as it turns out that’s really hard to argue with.
Debbie, an employee who lived about 100 yards from the shop, had a party once. When I showed up after closing Brown Lori told me to walk inside and look to the right. Blonde Lori had full-on mounted Mike-who-fucked-Sarah on Debbie’s couch while Sarah sat across the room sobbing to the sound of their sloppy fucking. Liz, his ex, was on the patio cackling.
We had to ban one of the musicians who played regularly on Friday nights, he was a disabled pastor who happened to also be a dwarf and we had to ban him because he kept trying to convince 16 year old regulars that they needed to sleep with him because it was what god wanted. The only reason I mention his disability or dwarfism is because he used these as examples of trials he had overcome and why he was holy and purified by fire and therefore god wanted minors to sleep with him.
In a conversation about exes Brandon (the citizens arrest regular), his boyfriend Phil, and I all discovered we had been dating the same guy at the same time (which was a bit disconcerting as Brandon and Phil were like five years older than me and they had been dating Danny when Danny was 16 and I was 15.) Danny’s girlfriend before all of us was Blonde Lori’s little sister, who happened to also be named Alli. Blonde Lori and Phil had dated before Phil came out.
Look if there is one thing I know about coffee shops and the employees and regulars at the it is that you need at least three dimensions to express all the socially incestuous fucking that happens at them.
Brandon found out that Beth (a regular) had been saying she’d been sleeping with all of the queer girls at the shop (she had only been sleeping with Debbie but they had broken up and Beth said they were still sleeping with each other). Brandon told me and Gina (who was 16 and the pastor had been trying to hook up with her) and Ishmerai (an employee who was actually straight and married) what Beth had been saying; he arranged it so that all of us would be there at the same time then called Beth and had her show up. What followed was a shitfest that is probably one of my most shameful moments, we should have just banned her and been done with it but instead it was like an hour of people hurling accusations while Beth sat in the middle of it and admitted over and over again that she had lied.
Beth ended up moving in with Blonde Lori and Mike-who-fucked-Sarah. Beth went out of town one day and came back to find that Blonde Lori and Mike-who-fucked-Sarah had moved out while she was gone and had taken literally everything they could out of the apartment, down to the ice cube trays in the freezer that Mike-who-fucked-Sarah had dented when he punched it and the roll of toilet paper that was already on the toilet paper dispenser. So when information about an arrest warrant for Mike-who-fucked-Sarah’s DUI hit-and-run came in her mail and when the notification that the check for Mike-who-fucked-Sarah and Blonde Lori’s marriage license had bounced came in her mail she just threw them away because she didn’t have a forwarding address.
Blonde Lori briefly rented a room with Brandon but she brought Mike-who-fucked-Sarah over every night and they had sex about three feet away from Brandon while he was trying to sleep so one day he moved everything of hers out of their room and set it up perfectly in the living room of that apartment. Blonde Lori didn’t even come back to the apartment for three days and when she did she just moved out silently and never spoke to Brandon again.
Turns out, BTW, that Blonde Lori and Mike-who-fucked-Sarah moved to Vegas and Mike-who-fucked-Sarah lied to Blonde Lori about working a construction job for two years while he sat in a casino and gambled away money he’d taken out of her account that came from her student loans.
They’re still married.
When I started working there there were 3 rules for hiring: No one under 21, No regulars, No dating regulars. I got hired as a 19-year-old regular whose boyfriend was a regular.
I got hired because 1) I had a major crush on Debbie and she had a major crush on me and Debbie made hiring recommendations and 2) The manager who would eventually break out the front door with a railroad tie was impressed with the way I had handled a dead body the day before.
We banned a regular for smoking on the patio after we had specifically asked him not to (cops were coming in twice a day at that point) and he climbed over the railing for the patio that night and shit on one of the tables.
The first night I worked there I had to ban a dude named Manny for smoking meth on the patio.
In fact this coffee shop was so well known for drugs that when I told someone where I worked while I was at school 20 miles away from the damned place his response was “Oh, dude, can you get me any speed?”
I want to point out that this is in LA. Maybe if you live in a small town in a sparsely populated state you know about the drugs and drama of a place 20 miles away but for this to happen in LA county was staggering, to this day I have no idea how that reputation spread so far.
Manny’s girlfriend, Sarah-who-didn’t-fuck-Mike, then used the coffee shop as a refuge and would come hang out if he had been hitting her. This frequently led to Manny standing outside of the shop and shouting for her to come out.
Derek (he of the concussion and the sister-based love triangle) joined the airforce and fucked Sarah and Jenny and another girl whose name I can’t remember on the patio the night before he left for bootcamp.
Ishmerai lived like ninety miles away in the desert and needed to have a yard sale because she and Tristan were selling their house because he was being stationed in like, Georgia or some shit. Ish invited Blonde Lori and Brown Lori and Mary and me and Drew and Jesse to drink the rest of the booze in the house and help out with the sale in the morning. So we all make it out there and everybody but me and Drew and Tristan gets shitfaced and then Blonde Lori, Brown Lori, and Mary all realize they’re all sleeping with Jesse and we were in for twelve hours of shouted accusations and a tire fire of a yard sale in the damned desert the next morning.
They didn’t end up moving anyway and Ishmerai started purposefully fucking up the espresso machine when I was about to come on shift so that I would get fired.
Sucked to be her because I got fired for something totally unrelated (not making enough in sales during a downtown event on a night where we ran out of ice cream, milk, large cups, half and half, espresso, canned soda, and bottled water because the manager hadn’t brought stock in for us for more than two weeks. Did I mention that everyone worked every shift alone and we never had two people on shift and sometimes that night I had a line out the door of people I had to keep turning away because you can’t make iced drinks when you’ve run out of ice?)
The owners told us the shop was closing for four days for earthquake renovations (which made some sense – the patio locked but you could get onto it after locking it by leaning on one of the pillars supporting the gate and moving the latch out of the way because the bottom of the pillar was rotted out) and the next morning we found all of the CDs and board games and art and ashtrays that regulars had brought in in the dumpster covered with smashed Torani syrup bottles.
And that’s how we found out that everyone was fired and the shop was closed for good. (I’d been fired and banned for a whole week at that point so I was bitter and this didn’t impact my livelihood or job search because I was already fucked over)
That was my very first ever actual job
I still miss the fuck out of that place. It has been closed since October 2005, when it shut down a bunch of the regulars and employees broke onto the patio using the fucked up pillar and held a wake that ended with at least one person getting arrested for being drunk in public – a bunch of regulars and employees still hang out periodically and on 2/22/22 we’re going to have an anniversary party (the shop’s address was 222, the date has nothing to do with any kind of anniversary but we’re idiots so that doesn’t matter to us)
Anyway I’ve never understood why “coffee shop AU” is a chill, low stakes, low drama thing.
At the second coffee shop where I worked we had stalkers and arrested employees and a whole different flavor of excitement.
Since working at the first place I’ve contended that drama is born in coffee shops. It may migrate to the outside world, but coffee shops are the source.
she cursed my great-grandfather, actually, who had spat on the hands of the ocean and disrespected the beating heart of the earth – for what else are waves but a pulse – who was silly and violent and who tried to rip from the water what was hers by rights. we were wealthy, before that, a family of merchants. my mother says in her youth she recalls white horses, the gleam of candles, early mornings with bread baked fresh by a horde of servants.
he didn’t ask permission to cross her. that’s what my mother tells me while she spoons porridge with no flavor into the wood of my bowl. he had no faith in superstition, rode with boats that were more decoration than strength, the folly of a man who was cruel and vain and proud of his own gold teeth. the sky had been blue, so regardless of what the village witch said, he would sail that day. and when his boat sank; their lives turned blue like the sky that day.
my mother says she thinks the curse on the men of our family, even if they come in when they marry, is that they will forever be violent, too foolish to see the storm on the horizon. she whispers this to me on the eve of my seventh birthday, while father is his own storm, thundering around the house, looking for her. later, when i am cleaning the cut by her cheek, she tells me the curse is on the women to forever be unhappy, to wane until they are shadows, to walk into the deep like a sinking ship.
we don’t burn candles often, they are too expensive. she tells me this in the silk of a dark room. the moon kisses her hair.
in three days, my mother will walk into the ocean, and my father will be my own problem. the curse will pass onto me.
my father does not believe in superstition, no curse to conquer him. when he is gone, and i am heartbroken, i go to the village witch. i ask her to teach me about magic, and other things, and about how the ocean can be coaxed, and how to save my father’s soul.
and my hands rot too, keeping a house by myself with things i barely knew. i learn the art of a good scrubbing, keep my mind full of white horses while i endlessly clean, dream of candles in dark while i make the bread that he will not allow me to eat. he keeps me from the ocean, from visiting the place that took my mom, from following in her footsteps where the water makes women undone.
i am sixteen when i see her in the water of a bowl. she scares me so completely that i drop it, and my father comes in with his hands, and the curse, and i almost forget all about it. it isn’t until after that i realize she is beautiful, and young, which surprises me.
i think about it every evening. her face becomes distorted to me. i can no longer remember the exact shape of it, only the impression of beauty.
i turn seventeen and wait for the high moon. i pin safety to my vest in little witch herbs and runes. i put naked toes on the sand and slip closer, closer, to the avenue of my family’s doom. i find a little private beach, small and surrounded by rocks, hidden from my father in the event he ever thought to come looking. at high tide, it is barely the span of my body. at low, it feels empty.
the witch of the land has given me what i need to call in the witch of the sea, but i do not use it. it feels wrong, somehow, standing here in the wind and the quiet pulse of the world. i put down the incense and sage and i sit just close enough it feels wild, dangerous – but not close enough to get caught up in thrill.
when nothing happens, i go home and i make bread that i will not eat.
for months i do this. i climb down to my beach. i learn to do it when the moon is half, and then when the moon is empty. i learn to do it so well that sometimes i go to sleep in my own bed and wake up by the water. i take to sleeping with warding runes to keep me from being pulled in the rip out to the waiting hands of a hungry sea-witch.
i don’t know when i start talking. more often i sing, because singing in my house is not allowed, and something about the way the rocks echo my voice feels comforting. the older i get, the more i can pretend i hear my mother’s voice, answering me, harmonizing gently. i sing songs about sadness and lullabies about curses. when i have exhausted every song i know, i write new ones about fathers who have never learned how to be kind, about the house i work in but do not love, about mothers who left, and about a sea witch.
i see her sometimes. in a puddle, in the drop of rain, in the strangest places. i never expect it, although i always hope. i am never able to see her for more than the length of a wave, breaking, and each time, it does something new to my heart.
at eighteen i am too much of my father’s burden. he tries to unload me onto other men. the land witch helps me with this. i rub hemlock, burn wolfsbane. we arrange so these men have other women to marry. the news of my curse is bad enough to scare most away. my father is not happy.
after a particularly savage night, i wonder how bad it could be. i could marry some boy from the village who didn’t quite bother me. i suppose they’re not ugly. timothy had always been gentle to me. i think about a life, and how i am cursed to be unhappy. my father would finally be proud of me.
i walk to the beach and i tell the waves about him and how i could convince myself it was love if i just never wanted from him. how i could be okay, if not content, how i could be free, how i already had learned life down on knees.
but i go home and i write a rune of warding. and the years pass and i find reasons each suitor is wanting. and the sea witch i see, sometimes, peeking out at me, staying long each time in the water, looking, watching. i see her in mirrors when my father storms against me. it is bad because he mistakes the cause of my smiling. it is better when she is there the next morning.
and i go to the ocean. when i am too sad to speak, it seems like the ocean is whispering for me. i picture my mother’s voice and tell myself i am happy. i am seven again and we are sewing. i am seven again and the curse has not been given to me. i am seven and she came home after she walked to the sea.
i grow silly, brave, unthinking. i leave behind the herbs and i wade deep. i teach myself the art of swimming. i am bad at it, at first, but something about it feels good to me. like the ocean wants to buoy me. in the day i think of it, guilty. what if there was a rip tide, and the water took me? who would care for my father if i stepped off the beach into a long drop? wasn’t i clever enough to know that the ocean is uncaring?
it is not this that does it. i go out after a rain and i slip on the rocks and suddenly i am in water above my head but without the moon i cannot see the up of it. i kick and i thrash and the water surrounds me. the tide pulls on my body and in the cold i feel my body grow weary. water spills into me. it punches through my body, up my nose and into my lungs and some part of me knows this is what mother felt before she was gone.
i kick ground by accident, reorient, drag myself heaving and spitting into the air. i lie there for a long time, half in and half out of death, enjoying the sensation of breathing and of life.
when i look up, i think i see her, watching me, her brows knit with something like worry. but we make eye contact and my heart leaps and then she is gone and i am left alone with nothing but the dawn breaking.
my father is furious when there is no bread. he finds my hair wet, and the salt of the ocean still smelling on me. and that is it. that day he goes out and pays someone to agree to marry me.
this feels right to me, i think. i’m twenty-one, three times seven, a perfect number for a curse to fully come down on me. i will be wed in three weeks.
the land witch comes to visit me. she looks like she’s sorry for me. she gives me a spell and tells me to put it under my pillow; i’ll dream of love and it will soothe me. instead i dream of the seawitch, and how wonderful she is, and the sight of her, out on the water, worried.
even though it is risky, i go down to the beach. i do not bother with protective spells, i have already seen that the water can kill me. fear alone keeps me from wandering. i sit on the beach and in the sand i draw runes for understanding and i make the small magicks i’ve spent years learning and i close my eyes and i askthe ocean “why do you do this to me.”
i fall asleep. i dream that the sea witch talks to me. i dream she is my age, that she is the great-granddaughter of the first to curse my family. i dream she has spent years watching, learning, finding the truth of me. that she just needs to get the courage to come and speak, that she has fallen in love with my singing, that she knows no curse but the one in her heart that brings her back to a human, to a creature of air and not water, to a mistake in the making.
in the dawn i know it is a dream and no more. i make bread. i pour water out before it can make mirrors. i do not look. i do not like the ache that has filled me, as if i’ve been looking for an answer and the answer only leads to longing.
the man i meet – my husband-to-be – is delighted by the house i keep. he believes a woman should keep in her place, and her place should be clean. he hears from neighbors that sometimes i sneak out to the land witch’s house. laughter barks out of him. not going to allow that behavior, not me. he does not believe in curses. he will pack me up and move me from the ocean to somewhere in the mountains, where i know nobody. and i will, he promises, learn to keep my place, and that place clean.
i tell myself i could love him. he is not ugly. he says i’m pretty enough after whiskey. my father mentions i used to sing. i refuse to perform for these men so instead i make them cookies. they laugh and talk about me, even when i am in the room, as if they cannot even see. they shake hands and talk about how useless a woman is for much else than breeding. it’s very funny. the man meets my eyes and promises he’ll put a baby in me. i look down and pretend the thrill i feel is excitement, not fear brewing in me.
the land witch comes by a week before my wedding. she is smaller these days, aging. her apprentice and i get along wonderfully. the two women stand before me, holding something.
a small box, so tiny and lovely. “break the curse,” the witch whispers, “learn to be happy.”
i smuggle the box, take it everywhere with me. it is days before i have a moment to slip away, to open it by the sea. i take a candle with me, even though my father will notice and be angry.
by the light of fire i read the spell they have left me inside, and then i am so full of gratitude i cannot stop crying.
it must be a full moon, so i must wait. in the meantime, i walk home, and i bake.
i do not see the seawitch, even though i look for her. maybe i have wounded her, getting married. my father asks why i keep smiling. i tell him it is because i am finally with a man. he grunts and says to stop looking so silly.
the man kisses me. i let him. we are married on a night with a full moon, and i poison him and my father in the bread i did not eat. i think of how these men were cursed so they could not see a storm coming. i watch them as they lie there, dying, and then i put all of the things i own into a basket for the land witch. i leave it there with a song i wrote for her, a spell i know will make her happy, will stop the aging of her joints, will give her the kind of relief she gave me.
i go down to the water. i find myself running, even though i am in no hurry. i know the way so well it is like i wake up there, panting. i ask permission first. i lay out the contents of the box, i organize and practice and when the needle and pain comes, i am ready for it. i am used to pain at night. i breathe into it and walk naked into waters that swallowed my mother.
i chew bitter herbs. i swallow fire. i feel myself drown as i change from land witch to sea witch.
when it is done, i open my eyes in the deep of a moonlit ocean. and i see her.
this time she does not flicker. this time when i reach for her, she is there, and she is pushing my hair out of my eyes, and we are kissing with the ocean rejoicing around us, and i am laughing, and i hear her voice as clear as bell inside me.
and we live like this, a whole world between us where white horses are the size of pinky fingers and swim with their thin snouts, where i need no candles because i was raised lightless, where we have no servants but the water takes care of us. i show her the magic of land and she unfolds the magic of water. together we are unstoppable. when i come up to the air to sing little girls a promise that they can survive the madness, she sings with me, and we make a beautiful harmony.
The story of the Distant Goddess is absolute proof that it’s a crime that Ancient Egyptian mythology hasn’t entered the popular conciousness in the same way as Greek stuff.
Short, super paraphrased version: Ra is sick of humanity being rebellious wee bastards, so he sends a goddess as an embodiment of his vengeance, usually Sekhmet in the form of a great fuckoff lion – first to the southern deserts to wipe out the followers of Set. She does so, and then for unspecified reasons, Ra decides maybe humanity is redeemable hey call off the murderlion. But being an embodiment of pure divine retribution, she isn’t really having it.
So Ra sends Thoth out in an effort to soothe the goddess before she arrives in the north and wipes out everything including the gods (she’s just that strong). He’s terrified, but he tries all sorts of cunning and wisdom and trickery and tells her moral tales and all that, but all he can do is delay her.
In the meantime, Ra’s priests of the north are hard at work. They brew thousands of barrels of beer, and mix pots and pots red dye. And when the goddess inevitably arrives, they mix it up and pour it into the reeds of the nile. Believing it to be the spilled blood of her enemies, she drinks it up proudly… And gets EXTREMELY drunk, calming down and transforming into Hathor, goddess of joy and love.
And once a year to celebrate this momentous occasion, Egyptians would get Absolutely Plastered.
I didn’t find details on the exact date, but some cross-googling suggests the festival occured around the start of the Nile flood season, which is in mid-July.
Anyone got a more precise date?
Well, the traditional beginning of the flood season varies from year to year based on the first rise of the star Sirius before sunrise, and also marks the beginning of the ancient Egyptian new year. The Festival of Drunkenness would be held about 20 days after that.
Sirius’ rise – which varies around the world based on longitude, but basing it on Egypt for consistency’s sake – happens on the 24th of July in 2018.
So if you want to get smashed on behalf of an angry cat, the 13th of August is the day to mark down.
Today’s the day fuckers, get smashed on behalf of a cat.
So. Today in class we assigned Macbeth roles to students to read. When I asked the class who wants to be Lady Macbeth, a young man raised his hand. I kind of stared at him like “Lady Macbeth,” and he nodded like “I know what I’m about ma’am.” So then the student who ended up as Macbeth raised his hand and said “HE’S THE ONE, HE’S MY WIFE!” So I said “yeah sure why not,” and the entire class period they were blowing kisses to each other and winking at each other, and every now and then Macbeth would say “I’m the luckiest man on Earth” and Lady Macbeth would put a hand to his chest, and be like “BABE!”.
I just stared at them, knowing that they CLEARLY have never read ‘Macbeth’ before, so… all this lovey dovey… I don’t know if I have the heart to tell them the truth.
Update:
Macbeth is absolutely willing to fucking throw down for Lady Macbeth. Has already threatened a wall, a desk, a few students, a textbook that was neither his nor Lady Macbeth’s, and me
Lady Macbeth is enjoying the attention and has begun to use this new connection to his advantage. I’m starting to suspect he’s read ahead in the play.
Macbeth is going to end up living in detention at this rate.
Macbeth has no idea that he is the tragedy of the story. Claims to be the hero of the play, fails to see the irony in this
Macbeth slowly scooted his desk across the classroom to hold hands with Lady Macbeth. He was not subtle.
Macbeth has proposed on several occasions. Lady Macbeth just laughs and says they’re already married.
Macbeth’s girlfriend is in the class with them and is “totally not jealous or anything just thinks this whole fucking play is a waste of time”
Lady Macbeth should probably be a theatre major at some point, he fucking rocked Act V scene I
Other teachers and staff are emailing me about the “lovely lords”. Lady Macbeth now refuses to answer to anything other than Lady Macbeth and is always very upset when people don’t call him by his proper title.
Procrastination Queen 