Update: It is not, in fact, the Richards, who don’t actually have the surname Richard, that’s just the name of the eldest boy that I hear screamed over the fence all the time. Richard is probably nine, maybe 10 and his younger borthers are twins of seven becuase I happened to run into them on thier birthday. They pointedly refused to tell me thier names, instead giggling ominously after I introduced myself and running away. This is the gang of boys that I’ve had to stop from torturing small animals on more than one occasion, and whose mother is the one that gets crying-drunk on the front porch late at night.
Lovely family.
Around this time last year thier grandmother came to visit and gave them honest-to-goodness home-made black-powder Cherry bombs direct from Texas, which the boys immediately took to the most flammable patch of chaparral in the neighborhood and set off six of them at once, resulting in a small wildfire, seven emergency response units and a helicopter, a Long Stern talk from the fire department and Karen getting in a screaming match with Child Protective Services and a sizeable crater in the middle of the field.
At least according to Olivia the ER nurse and neighborhood gossip. I was out of town at the time and believe about 80% of that becuase I saw the crater where there had not been a crater a week before, and becuase karen threw a shoe at me the one time I asked if she was alright when she was having her weekly drunk-cry on the porch.
But I Digress.
The Airhorn in fact belongs to one of the ladies at the Old Folks Home. Diane is very excited about the upcoming NBA playoffs and was having a bit of a pre-celebration in the park with her family and hadn’t realized the noise would carry. She’s rooting for Golden State becuase that’s where her grandson goes.
We gon need more stories on that crazy ass family
I don’t have more stories about the Richards specifically, but now that I’ve moved out of that Extremely Strange Neighborhood, I feel free to relate some more of the Wierd Shit that went on there. Some anwers to commonly asked questions:
1. It’s been pointed out to me that Golden State is an NBA franchise and not an institution of higher learning. To be fair, Diane is 84 and in an Alzheimer’s unit, and I know fuck all about sportsball. Perhaps her grandson lives in San Francisco. Regardless, we all had a good time and I was sent home with leftover bean dip.
2. I sometimes misspell things becuase I have multiple learning/reading disorders and Public Education in the US is terrible. I’m funny anyway.
3. Last I heard, Richard had gone to live with the other, less pyrotastic set of grandparents, so maybe there is hope for them yet.
(As always, all names have been changed to protect people’s privacy):
The neighborhood consists of a 206 pallette-swapped versions of the same three houses surrounding the largest hospital in the next six counties in any direction, surrounded immediately by three ranches on one side and roughly 100 miles of uninterrupted rocky mountain wildreness on the other. It’s seperated from the main city (If you can call a city with only the bars and Denny’s open after 9PM a city. Which you can’t) by a large mountain ridge and connected via a small canyon highway. Hence, the neighborhood consists primarily of:
Middle-Class Suburban White People ™
People who’d be too poor to afford this neighborhood normally, but are subsidized by the hospital. Olivia the ER nurse, for instance. They’re terrific.
People with Major Medical Conditions and Their familes, who live nearby, also subsidized by The Hospital.
Old Rural People who remember when Durango had only the train track and no paved roads and was mostly populated by cattle and will tell you they were present at the Alamo if you let them keep talking.
Wildlife that was here first and has no intention of moving.
This is a story about the first learning about the last.
Staci-With-An-I-From-Ventura-California introduced herself to me as that while I was walking the dog by the playground, as I tried to keep her preschooler twins (there are SO MANY goddamn twins in the neighborhood. I mean, we’re right next door to an IVF clinic BUT STILL) from jamming thier fingers up Charlie’s nose but fortunately he thinks children are hilarous and decided to lick what I sincerely hoped was jam off thier faces.
“Hi I’m [Gallus]. Hey, kids, be gentle with dogs-”
“Do you live here?” She asks in what I would find out later is her normal interrogative voice, but sounded to my untrained ear like a member of the spanish inquisition had reccived operatic training then took up chain smoking.
please listen to this poor man losing his shit as he reads an article blaming millenials for killing the mayonnaise industry that was written by a babyboomer upset people don’t want to eat her bland salads anymore
In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.
“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustain periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” read the footnote. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”
Another another friendly reminder that the Minnesota Starvation Experiment subjected adult men who were VOLUNTEERS to 1,560 calorie diets and the psychological effects were so profound that one volunteer cut three of his own fingers off and could not remember why.
These men were volunteers who knew exactly what they would be going through and when it would end, and who believed they were doing it for a good and moral reason (the research was used to help rehabilitate victims of starvation and famine at the end of WWII).
And these are the things we are expected to engage in FOREVER to stay at a “healthy” weight.
Reading about the Minnesota Starvation experiment was my wake-up call. It was what kicked me out of my eating disorder. The guy missing three fingers, whatever his name was, he was the last straw for me.
Scared me so fucking bad I stopped restricting my food that day, and never went back to it.
Just bringin’ this back around like I sometimes do.
Wow. This really hit me hard.
EAT
Fun fact– calorie restriction exacerbates symptoms of pretty much *every* mental illness.
Anorexia has ~16% mortality rate, slightly higher than acted upon suicidal ideation. It’s more lethal than actively trying to kill oneself and this is why.
Okay, listen. Children have crazy high calorie requirements compared to their size because they are growing like weeds. Newborns and toddlers are trying to literally MULTIPLY THEIR SIZE. The caloric requirements of a short, sedentary woman are going to be around 1500 or possibly even less, depending on how short you actually are because you’re done growing. I’m sorry, it sucks and I’m bad at it too but let’s be honest here. We’re really really inactive as a society and we’ve got the appetites of endurance predators who evolved with famine. It’s still better for your cardiovascular and skeletal systems to maintain a healthy weight. It’s just difficult as fuck for a lot of us because of our appetites. Also, frankly, food is one of the cheapest luxuries we can afford and the state of most people’s lives is stressful enough that we cling to any pleasure we can. I lost a hundred pounds and regained forty because my life went to shit for a while and food was predictable. It was something that I knew exactly what to expect and so it couldn’t disappoint me.
It still doesn’t make it healthy. Look up the fat activists who managed to get old. There aren’t many. Being underweight kills you quicker, but being very overweight still shortens your lifespan and it makes your last couple decades a slow decline of suffering. It’s not a sin to want try for yourself and it’s not a sin to want your loved ones to do better.
Like when I say ‘white people need to talk to bigots because bigots don’t listen to minorities’ I did not say ‘and it will be easy and fun’.
I know it’s easier to be like ~boo hooo the world is so evil and there’s nothing I can dooo~ but it’s statistically and experientially understood, just by fucking 3rd grade logic, that a bigot will be less amenable towards the subject of their bigotry.
Bigots don’t just ~not like~ minorities- they don’t think we’re human. It’s not about whether they agree with you or not in the moment. Like, pause.
Understand this:
Calls to action for white people to oppose bigotry are calls for white people to position themselves as opposition. THEY ARE NOT CALLS FOR ~SUCCESSFUL DEBATE~
Do not think you are expected nor are you likely to just go around arguing with bigots and they’ll go ‘I agree with you because you’re white!’.
Your job is to be sandpaper.
Every time they open their mouths to make a bigoted joke, or a bigoted remark, or post their shitty bigoted opinion online, you grate against them.
Your job is to make it hard to be a bigot or a fascist. Your job is to ostracize them. Your job is to speak over them the way they love to speak over minorities. Your job is to make it difficult, lonely, annoying, stressful and unwelcome to be a bigot.
When you are white and silent, You are making it easy. You are just letting it happen.
When minorities speak up for themselves, they are in danger, and the bigot just writes off our arguments as the chattering of ‘lessers’.
You, white people, whether you think so or not, are their peers.
Specifically those of you who look and talk like, to an outside observation, your average white american.
Bigots think you all think like them, but are too scared to say it. That, or you’re too much of a coward to stop them.
YOUR JOB IS TO PUSH BACK AND PROVE THEM WRONG.
YOUR JOB IS TO SEPARATE THEM FROM THEIR OWN COMMUNITY AT LARGE.
There are devils among you and if you want to stop being associated with them then fucking prove it. You’re pretty much the only people who can.
to the anon who asked earlier what my Type was, i forgot about these tweets.
This wasn’t my progression, due to Legolas being a Vile Blond and Aragorn looking like my older brother. I started with Faramir as a teen and now it’s all about Boromir.
I’m a little worried I’m going to start finding Denethor hot one day.
You know just how long 2018 has been? You know how long?
Did you even remember there was an Olympic games this year? Because I didn’t. I thought oh, last year. No. There was a winter Olympics in Korea and I forgot about it.
You know how long this year has been? The tide pod thing happened in January of this year
Am I the only one who really wants Holt and Kevin to have a daughter?
And by that I don’t mean I want him and Kevin to adopt.
I mean I want it to be an average day at the precinct when Holt walks out of his office with a young woman. They shake hands, bid goodbye and Jake walks over to ask who she is.
“Who’s that? Someone from city hall?”
And Holt just casually replies. “No that’s my daughter.”
And everyone in the bullpen just stops, stunned. Because he’s never mentioned it before, ever, even in passing.
“You have a daughter?”
“Yes, her name is Claire, she is 24 years of age and studying at Jon Hopkins.”
Everyone turns to look at Amy who’s frantically flipping through six, thick binders, freaking out because she has not even a footnote on Claire’s existence!
Charles: Amy, how do you not know this? Doesn’t the captain have photos of his daughter?
Jake: Yeah, I thought you investigated everyone that’s breathed the same air as the captain in an effort to bond with him.
Amy: I thought she was his notary!
*cut away*
Holt: Here is your certificate confirming you completed volume one of my mentorship program.
Amy: Thank you Captain! So official, it’s even notarized!
Holt: Yes. Here is a photograph of the notary, Claire.
Amy: Oh, I saw her in a photo with you and Kevin, I was wondering what your relationship was. Did she notarize your marriage certificate?
Holt: *looks at watch* Given that it is 30 seconds after official work hours I will permit this single personal question. Yes she did.
*cut back*
Jake: You didn’t think it was weird he had a photo of his notary on his phone? Wait, no. That’s the sort of thing I wouldn’t have questioned either.
