I was checking out at Walmart, and as I was reaching for my bags I said, “Happy Holidays!” And the cashier leaned in like she was sharing a secret and said “Merry Christmas.” So I smiled politely and said, “Blessed Yule!” And the look that spread across her face, you would have thought I’d literally stolen Christmas from her.
If you’re going to make a point of wishing me a happy whatever-you-celebrate, I’m going to make a point of wishing you a happy whatever-I-celebrate, and if you think that’s wrong you should consider getting “hypocrite” tattooed across your forehead.
It’s that time of year again
A post I made has officially become an “it’s that time of year again” post and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t honored
I cannot emphasize enough how much you need to read thoroughly through the terms of any publication before you send your writing to them. It is mandatory that you know and understand what rights you’re giving away when you’re trying to get published.
Just the other day I was emailed by a relatively new indie journal looking for writers. They made it very clear that they did not pay writers for their work, so I figured I’d probably be passing, but I took a look at their Copyright policy out of curiosity and it was a nightmare. They wanted “non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide license and right to use, display, reproduce, distribute, and publish the Work on the internet and on or in any medium” (that’s copy and pasted btw) and that was the first of 10 sections on their Copyright agreement page. Yikes. That’s exactly the type of publishing nightmare you don’t want to be trapped in.
Most journals will ask for “First North American Rights” or a variation on “First Rights” which operate under the assumption that all right revert back to you and they only have the right to be the first publishers of the work. That is what you need to be looking for because you do want to retain all the rights to your work.
You want all rights to revert back to you upon publication in case you, say, want to publish it again in the future or use it for a bookmark or post it on your blog, or anything else you might want to do with the writing you worked hard on. Any time a publisher wants more than that, be very suspicious. Anyone who wants to own your work forever and be able to do whatever they want with it without your permission is not to be trusted. Anyone who wants all that and wants you to sign away your right to ever be paid for your work is running a scam.
Protect your writing. It’s not just your intellectual property, it’s also your baby. You worked hard on it. You need to do the extra research to protect yourself so that a scammer (or even a well meaning start up) doesn’t
steal you work right from under you nose and make money off of it.
Exclusive publishing rights have to have a set time frame! Do not agree to anything that doesn’t clearly state “up to five years from signature” or something like that.
What if the publisher goes defunct? What if they get bought by another publisher who doesn’t care to promote or publish your work? You still can’t to anything with it, you don’t own it anymore!
do u guys understand how creepy the pledge of allegiance is though like every day when ur a kid everybody just chants how great america is every morning it’s creepy
You do that every morning???
EVERY MORNING.
wait
wait
is this a real thing i thought that was just in the simpsons
no son
Wait, other countries don’t do this.
*whispers* Not even Russia
I remember when my dad had a conversation with me
because I asked him what the Austrian pledge of allegiance was (because he’s from Austria)
and he said “we don’t have a pledge of allegiance”
and I said “why not?”
“honey, think about what training your children to mindlessly pledge to a flag, without really knowing what they’re talking about, sounds like to Austrians”
“oh. hitler.”
“exactly”
RE FUCKING TWEET
as an austrian, that is literally what i think about every time the subject comes up
as a German I second that
and I’ve heard people who insist that the whole pledge of allegiance thing is totally normal and not creepy in the slightest turn around and wonder how we ended up with a blatant fascist for a president without the slightest hint of self-awareness
The dreaming took me and I just woke up.
I only partially recognized the land in which I woke. The world was strange, tilted slightly on its axis. The barn I had stepped into looked like one I knew years ago, but what lay on its shelves and against its walls was nothing like I had known when it was; if not new, younger.
Various jackets marched across long poles between shelves, dishes and candles and books lay in scattered piles covered in dust. And, in one corner where the hardware and boxes of nails lay thrown together, several broken black velvet ring boxes held jewelry that found its way into my pockets.
Several tiny rings, ear pieces, and one tiny bracelet made of moonstone and diamond.
They all disappeared the moment I crossed the barn’s threshold, left standing under a large, spreading, barren tree as the wind whipped by overhead. I heard laughter in it, high and screeching with the howling of the winds. I was carried down in the direction of the house which before my eyes became a large and sprawling stone building. Its halls were complicated and lay in a tangled heap of limbs, as though some stone cephalopod had landed there.
I wandered the halls and in time, forgot how I had come to be there. I found hidden passages and roamed its mostly-empty byways until I came across an artist I recognized. There was rage in my shaking voice as I pointed her out in the sunlight-dappled stone hall. Denied a free-for-all because of the content of some blog or book of mine. Some “moral failing” she decided I’d had instead of anything concrete. As if its existence declared any creation she offered me provided tacit approval, instead of luck-of-the-draw. Annoying, and rage-inducing when I knew her own past was hardly as shiny as she claimed.
She ran, and I pursued.
I saw others hanging her pieces, large canvases covered in tiles to match the patterns of the walls behind. Smudges across the walls that they hid with the monstrosities. As I ran, I followed her through various passages I’d had yet to see. Warm yellow-orange brick, same odd sunlight shafting through the windows, same worn rugs underfoot.
Somehow as she sapped the color from the room in which I cornered her, some circle alcove set against the back wall, I saw another face. As she melted from view, two others came and stood at my shoulders. A bare-chested boy who looked decidedly attractive, and a girl beside him I didn’t recognize. I made some crack about whether or not they were together as we headed down a spiral staircase to the lower floors. An awkward laugh from him, a dagger-glare from her. Together, then, and not public… I hate those couples. Though my motivation was unknown even to me. (To be honest, looking back, I think I wanted to be him more than I desired anything else. Washboard abs don’t happen by accident, after all. And I prefer to have them than to be with those who do.)
When we reached the outdoors I was alone again, and the witchy artist was nowhere to be seen. I flew on quick feet into the wood, following the trail laid out before me. Off into the wood, lightly across the muddied and wilted-looking trail. My feet made no impressions in the dirt as I followed the glowing flowers that dimmed yet further as I passed. The dirt track unspooled before me, twisting through strange and desiccated trees as I passed.
I came upon a new house on a hill, and saw nothing of good. I was mobbed as I tried to climb the stair to the door, by shuffling, blinded, beings who might have been teachers once. I drew cards for luck and against the rising tide of flesh and bone, and threw them… where they struck, blood did not appear… only more of the growing things that surrounded the house. Vines grew through their bodies, leaves and flowers overtook their melting flesh, and kept them from moving any further. As I jumped from the roof of the house’s porch, i landed much more heavily. It would seem I would no longer pass unnoticed.
I found myself returned to the large, sprawling building made of stone. This time, when I had found my way through the passages and out into the open air, I found myself on the back deck. It matched, precisely, one I had experienced as a child. I found my companion there and my cat, and took up the two broom poles that lay against the enclosure next to the very, very deep and grown-over pool. “Escape then, and only two to do it on. Time to (static)” took over and the tinny, pitched ring of it still echoes in my ears. I took up the carved poles and jumped the fence to the bank of earth behind the pool. I did what I could to cut down as much of the marshy long grass as possible and bound it to the blunt ended poles as possible, creating a green broom. Quick and quite words were said over these and the carvings glowed for a moment as, blinded, I came to a few moments later flying down the boundary upon which our original witch had flown.
The boundary looked melted. The meadow and tangled wood I had come from looked twisted and as though it would disappear, like a painting under chemicals or chalk in the rain. To the right, lay the open planes and the grass and flowers that bent with a wind I could neither see nor feel. I saw her, far and away, and strangely, also coming from behind, her eyes like fire. I took off across the same path, low to the ground until the long flowering prairie closed overhead and there was nothing to my world but strange tunnels of woven greens and browns and whites and pinks and purples flying past my eyes.
In time, i found myself on the boundary of the creek, now swollen and raging with the autumn rains. It had flooded its banks, the well-known trails I had followed as a child and, where it spilled out across the fields, there formed a new river. It was this I followed, my cat clinging to the broom pole as I sped across the rippling water as closely as possible. The grasses hid me from view from above, and I saw no human shape following behind. No distant shriek of laughter.
No sound at all save for the wind, and the stream below me, and no sight but the great grey clouds and the barest peak of starlight shining down across the water to turn its edges silver and gold in the dark.
I found myself in another den I knew well from childhood. Another tree with deep and tangled roots, and spreading bare branches stripped by wind and autumn’s chilly embrace. There was frost on the ground when I woke, and the cat was nowhere to be seen. The roots embraced me, the fallen leaves in drifts hiding me from view, as the growing vinery traced with ice held it all tightly to itself.
There I huddled, clutching at the ground, shining things scattered through the loose and crumbling black earth, coins and more precious things sunk into the loam and leaf rot mere inches from the water that raced by just a breadth away from my feet.
Gay people from 1950-2010: we are human just like you, we’re not another species or a subculture, the only difference is that we are attracted to the same gender.
Gay people in 2018: straight people are stinky, WIG!
straight people ARE stinky
wig!
I feel like I need to point out that respectability politics and assimilation is absolutely NOT the only narrative of the LGBT rights movement. This was more true in the 1950s and then again in the late 90s-00s, but much of the work of the LGBT community (particularly the 70s and 80s) has been in dismantling and abstaining from heterosexual/cisgender social structures and celebrating our own community, acknowledging that we don’t WANT to fit into the system that oppresses us – not trying to convince society that “we’re actually just like you!” Assimilation as a goal (for example, the recent emphasis on LGBT people serving in the military) is absolutely indicative of a turn towards conservatism, and shouldn’t be taken as any kind of summation of the movement as a whole.
Also, don’t let anyone tell you that it’s a linear struggle. It erases the LGBT people of earlier generations who were murdered and imprisoned and silenced by fascism, it absolves fascists of full responsibility for their oppression of our community, and it makes us complacent in the idea that things just naturally trend towards getting better. 1920s Berlin during the Weimar Republic had an absolutely poppin, very public and well-known gay scene, but with this linear narrative you’d never know that. Not all of history is “horrible repressed bigots until Sex was invented in 1960” and thinking about it this way really undermines what the Nazis and other fascist movements actually DID, and what they could do now if we’re not aware and educated and ready to fight back.
his cat is the most photogenic creature I have ever seen in my life.
tfw you find a good coat in Vintage that DOESN’T smell like smoke~
It also has a zip-in liner that makes it super toasty AND makes my shoulders look hella broad. It’s probably late 70s/mid 80s but whatever. Real Leather is one of life’s simple joys~ And they last for fucking EVERRRR.
I’m gonna give it a good saddle-soaping this weekend probably, and look for a conditioner for it. Also probably gonna need to replace a zipper at some point, but I can take it in to a specialist for that.
in newport as the nor’easter passes by! we’ll be casting off lines 5am tomorrow and heading through NYCand to cape charles. I don’t know what time we’ll be passing through hell gate, but if you’re in the city and you see the most beautiful boat in the world, that’s us!
we’ve gotten fuel, water, groceries, and are now free to do that most traditional of sailor things, which is spending all your money on shore (and visiting various friends who’ve washed up here, and just generally wandering, sightseeing, etc)
shout out to the seaman’s church institute in newport, which has showers, laundry, big squashy armchairs, lodging, a big nautical library with a fireplace, and a little chapel, all of which it’s offered for 99 years so far to mariners coming into the harbor.
further bulletins to follow – it sounds like we may be stopping in a few different ports so I’ll keep in touch!
made it to annapolis!
the transit from newport was very, very rough – the currents and wind in long island sound working against each other to make what the captain called a washing machine. the captain and I were the only ones of out six-person crew who weren’t nauseous the first day, and I was still seeing double below deck. one day I’ll draw the positions I had to wedge myself into in my bunk to get any kind of stability and sleep. we kept burying the bowsprit in the water, to the extent we had to take the jib cover off or risk losing it. it was cold enough with the wind and water that when you laid hands on the brass helm you skipped chilly entirely and went straight to burning. we all spent a lot of time with those little chemical handwarmers in our pockets, at the back of our necks, tucked into long underwear over our stomachs, at the foot of sleeping bags.
it did calm down eventually, and got a little warmer, and by the end of this leg even the shipmate who’d been lamenting she’d ever run off to sea was enjoying herself again.
and now! we’re here! and annapolis is unseasonably warm, so we did a bit of varnishing and now we’re waiting for another clear window of weather. ideally we can sail from here directly to key west, weather permitting.
hello from key west! where I’ll be living for the next month or so!
after annapolis we stopped in beaufort NC for a day, long enough to eat $2 cheeseburgers in a bar that 4/6 my crew has been thrown out of at some point. then we sailed direct from Beaufort to Stock Island. this leg was absolutely my favorite:
so much warmer. SO much warmer. I could still feel my feet when my watch was over
about 36 hours where we had lighting on every side but clear skies directly above us. a little nerve-wracking but a very pretty lightshow
bio-luminescence so bright that if I saw it in a film I’d think it was bad CGI
literally dozens of dolphins (pictures to follow!)
bio-luminescent dolphins – you could see their outlines and the glowing streaks where they’d been, even when you couldn’t see the dolphins themselves
I saw a meteor!
and a lot of shooting stars but mostly I’m excited about the meteor
my watch partner tended to put on frank sinatra around 3am which, in conjunction with the constant lightning and the warm breeze, was definitely a Vibe
the seas were gentle enough that no one got seasick!
our reefer broke. this isn’t why this leg was my favorite, it’s just a thing that happened and we had to deal with it.
we caught a lot of fish! a couple of big tuna, a king mackerel, and then small tuna that we threw back
a half dozen flying fish landed in our cockpit, and we got to watch the first mate chase them around to throw them back while wailing ‘nooooo you little shakeweight come here’
seriously it’s so much warmer. it’s snowing in my home state. I regret nothing. this is the fourth consecutive year I have fled winter and I don’t miss anything about it except maybe eggnog.
So – we’re here. Transit’s over; now we put ourselves to a few long days of varnishing (even the masts are varnished on this schooner) and then we start doing day sails on saturday!
House Of Crows 