The librarian at my grad school had a book cart in her house and would not let her husband put a book anywhere but on that cart once he was finished with it. Power move.
Okay, so story time (and PSA, it’s going to get real and contains passing references to sexual abuse… I’ll put the whole thing behind a spoiler tag):
Tap for spoiler
In May of 2002 I learned that the pastor of my church in Central Florida was unexpectedly resigning. I grew up with the guy, two of his kids were practically brothers to me; Thanksgiving and Christmas always involved a stop at their place, etc. The reason for the resignation was that he’d been caught on a hidden camera in his office in an act of “sexual indiscretion.”
The woman? My mom.
Turns out she was a victim of sexual abuse for nearly a decade, but none of us realized that for awhile (it wasn’t until counseling that my mom would have the language to articulate what had happened to her). Some church folks assumed the pastor was up to something, so a guy hid a camera in the office when he’d been tasked to install a security system on the property. (Of course, for them, this was just an affair and they blamed my mom just as much.)
Anyway, the night I learned about it, me and a group of friends (including the pastor’s son) just bolted for downtown Orlando and wound up on the banks of Lake Eola, which is in the middle of the city. I felt like my entire world was coming down, someone I loved and trusted had betrayed me and my family, the person that had helped shape my own faith, and I wasn’t sure what was next. Even with close friends around, I felt almost cosmically alone.
Then there was some impulse. I believe it was God, your mileage may vary on that, but that impulse directed me to all the lights in the windows of the buildings. And I had the clearest realization that each “light” (as OP puts it) was a person and living a life. Maybe they were working late and wanted to get home. Maybe it was a boss sleeping with his secretary. Maybe it was someone having the best day of their life, or maybe the worst.
Whatever the case, I suddenly realized that I was not alone and that my problems were not as earth-shattering as they felt—at least not in a literal sense. And those lights almost seemed to blend into the stars above and I had a great sense of perspective. My mom and I would get through this.
Anyway, I know this random, but I’ve not seen anyone else talk about something similar before and this conjured a memory I return to often.
It’s the dead eyes. Despite whatever emotion he attempts to convey, the eyes remain dead.
“Forensic evidence.” So, like, bro said “he totes wrote a note” and then someone uses science to say “there was paper over here; must be where the note went!” Is this the kind of Keystone cops bullshit we’re being asked to believe?
Andre de Grande?
Arianna Giant?
Right. The shark is just a shark doing what they believed sharks did in those days (Peter Benchley himself later became an advocate for shark preservation and once said that if he’d known at the time what we know now, he’d never have written Jaws). The mayor is the one who sees truth as an inconvenience in the way of profit and so creates the situation. Even the shark is a victim, being killed because it stands in the way of capitalism.
The novel iirc goes further in revealing that the mayor is in debt to the mob and needs the money from July 4 to pay them off. So there’s two kinds of “sharks” swirling about…
My best friend, in our late teens, once emphatically claimed that Eric Clapton wrote “I Shot The Sheriff” and that Bob Marley effectively stole the song from him. This was before the internet as we know it, so fact-checking took effort. He and I argued about this off and on for weeks. Until I wound up in a used record store and happened upon the Clapton album that had “I Shot The Sheriff”. Right there, plain as day, it stated “written by R. Marley.” So I bought the LP, even though I did not own a record player at the time, just so I could put it in front of his face and show him.
His reaction? “Well, I’ve seen a Cream album where it says he wrote it.” CLAPTON WASN’T WITH CREAM WHEN HE PUT OUT HIS COVER!11!
Similarly, my brother-in-law as a kid was quite assured that Elton John’s hit song was actually “Panty and the Jets” and refused to believe otherwise for years.
Both are pretty right-leaning guys these days and so maybe “confidently wrong” is just something that comes with a certain political persuasion? ChatGPT is just made in its makers’ image.
Holy shit! I’ve an old friend that had a mildly successful Christian band back in the early ‘00s and they opened for DC Talk a few times. He once told me that he smoked pot in a jacuzzi with Michael Tait (the guy referenced in the article) and that he repeatedly put his hand on his thigh under the water, but tried to laugh it off as “messing around.”
I have young kids. They often say things like “if I were president, I would—“ and then say some borderline totalitarian nonsense like “make it illegal to put pickles on burgers” or some other thing that is self-focused and completely misunderstands the nature of the presidency.
Which is all to say that Trump holds the same view of the presidency that a five-year-old does. And he occupies the office. Awesome.
Correct. As a father of four and who moved across an ocean when one of them was six months in utero it has more to do with concerns that changes in air pressure might induce early labor.
Edit: I realize this post reads like I abandoned my family when one of my kids was six months away from being born. I didn’t. But it’s a funny enough mistake that I’m not changing it.
Easy. Thomas is the exact same action figure but painted yellow, with the little tears on the uniform moulded into the figure still visible.
(Me, still bitter that I held this figure in Woolworth’s and passed on it because it was a shitty repaint)
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FrChazzz
joined 6 months ago
Oh hey, my neighbor is in this strip!