Quotes

Are gods really gods if no one believes in them anymore?

Zeus takes walks in the rain and tries to talk up joggers in central park. When they bolt, or only return his advances with polite smiles that look like fence posts too high for even him to jump, he sighs. He tells them he is a god, and his words echo back to him, accompanied by laughter. No one believes him

He picks up his wife, who might be his sister in this time, in a beat up car with a beautiful flame job, Hera is a marriage counselor with peacock feather bags under her eyes, her advice falls on her own deaf ears as her jealous eyes roam over every girl they pass, and she is right to. She knows this. She has always known.

Poseidon’s hands are rough and calloused, he raises cargo too heavy for a man his age, the young ones say. He laughs his fisherman’s laugh, all depths and riptide, because no one should be his age. He reminds himself he is one of the lucky ones, he gets to be around what he loves. He may not have his dominion any more, but salt water and sun still weather his face.

Hades stalks the streets at night, women cross the street to avoid him, and he smiles with his needle-teeth, they are right to. This winter he is without a bride, and he still wants to usher souls into the afterlife, the pistol hangs heavy in his pocket, his tongue glints gold, the coin to pay his Charon, his most loyal employee. He brings knives to gunfights and guns to fistfights, he stands with his arms out like their new God, these fickle humans, he welcomes the bullets. He dares them to kill him. They try.

Ares and Athena spit curses laced with whiskey from across dive bar floors, they are moving human pawns across a chessboard. They were strategists before they were gangsters, but it doesn’t matter now.

Apollo sings in a nightclub, his crooning voice from a forgotten time. He has his sister’s blood under his fingernails, from stitching up wound after wound, Artemis forgets she is not invincible anymore. He sings about the moon and wonders where she is, picking a fight with some would-be rapist, maybe it’s Zeus. It’s probably Zeus. Again.

Dionysus drinks away their shared pain, dealing LSD in dark alleyways, he whispers sweet promises and his followers believe him, he was human once and he can be again, like wine, he knew nothing so sweet could have lasted forever. Icarus sidles up to his side, asking if he’s got anything that can make you feel like you can fly. In this life, he is a junkie, and Daedalus watches with ancient, sad eyes. Icarus is melting and Dionysus is letting him.

Hestia sits by the hearth and waits for her family to come home. And she listens while they all curse their immortality. She shakes her head slow and clicks her tongue, I know, my darlings, I know.

Are gods really gods if no one believes in them anymore?

Does it matter?

Marissa Dakin, 2015  (via roseghoul)

The majority of the Africans that were kidnapped from the continent of Africa were kidnapped by force and by violence through warfare, they were brought out of their villages, brought down to the coast, then put on those slave ships. In fact, no African country, no African nation in West Africa ever was a slave economy. No society in Africa had its principle mode of production as slavery, it did not exist, that was only something that the Europeans invented and created.

Dr. Molefi Kete Asante 

“But Africans sold slaves too” – 500 Years Later – Dr. Molefi Kete Asante explains how slavery among Africans and slavery among Europeans were completely different systems and should not be used as a point to derail discussions of slavery in an attempt to revert the blame on slavery’s proliferation to Africans. 

(via afro-dominicano)

Boom! No tolerance for the intellectual dishonesty and false equalization of “well Africans had slaves too!”

(via gradientlair)

Being a girl was complicated. It was swallowing rusty nails and clawing our way towards something we didn’t even know we really wanted.

When I was thirteen I told Stephanie that drinking orange juice could stop you from fainting because it raises your blood sugar. In sophomore year, she slammed her head, saw stars, and ended up drinking an entire carton in one sitting. She vomited on her kitchen floor, but she couldn’t tell if it was from the concussion or from a pint of orange juice sitting in her stomach. Her doctor told her mother, “All girls try throwing up at some point.”

I remember the first time one of my friends came to me with eyes so red I thought she’d inhaled a desert. She said her mother had died from breast cancer the night before. She said her home was an open grave, a holy space. She said she’d rather be in school than dealing with an absence so loud nobody could speak. I still think about her every time someone says “save the ta-tas” instead of “please god save our mothers haven’t enough of us suffered.”

On certain Saturday nights we’d all get dressed up like we were going somewhere fancy and then sit in and watch Disney movies. We filled ourselves up with popcorn and gossip. When Patty showed up with a black eye again, we all said nothing about it. We were too young to make fists out of fingers, I think.

A girl on the train was reading a book I love. We got to talking. She’s from the Peace Corps, she said, gave me a smile like a thousand volts. She was one of those people who make you feel good about yourself. When she got up to go, she gave me a little wave. I said “Go stop violence,” and she laughed. Hanging off the back of her bag was a little pink can of mace.

We learned to be secret defend-each-other types. We were going to hold the world down until it liked us. There is something bold about being defiant. There is something about having soft petal skin and still showing sharp teeth.

The box was little and teal and had a bow attached to it. Inside was a pair of brass knuckles in the shape of cat ears. “In case,” my father said, “In case.”

I remember my sister, body wrapped in a towel, saying, “It’s not as bad as it looks,” her shinbone a mess of blood where her razor slipped. She said she saw the patch of skin she removed. She wiggled her eyebrows while holding up her pointer finger. “This long,” she said, “And pretty thick.” She had to throw it out rather than let it clog the drain.

He was tall and gawky and if you asked him personal questions, his ears turned red. He asked if I wanted to go out to the pond in the woods. I blushed and told him I couldn’t swim, and he gasped as if he’d been stung. He picked me up so easily, like I weighed nothing. He put me in the trunk of his car. We were laughing.

Much later, a stranger the same size would say, “Hey mama, wanna come home with me?”

I remember I met this one girl passed out on a couch, her dress hiked up around her hips. She was lying in her own vomit. “Let’s keep walking,” someone said, “Don’t get involved.” I was too much empathy in a small body to let her go unprotected. She shivered in the shower we put her in. Her skin was so blue around her eyes, I thought maybe she’d slipped the sky in there. She looked terrified. I asked her how much she drank, she couldn’t say. I asked her how she got here, she bit her lip and shook her head. “My friends… Just left,” she said, “They just left.” Sometimes friends are like that, I guess.

In late nights, I heard Kathrine crying about the things her father had said to her. She once told me that if it was a choice between being born with her learning disabilities and being born without a tongue, she’d choose the latter one. I whispered something of an apology that fell as flat as I felt, we don’t talk about it ever again.

Skeleton hands never stop shaking me awake. Sometimes I think we’re drowning and sometimes I think we are just painted that way. There’s never an excuse not to be dainty. Someone once told me that beauty is pain.

I remember her lips and how they were bright pink, because the words out of them were sick green things. Maggie said she’d swallowed eighty-nine Tylenol two days before. She said they’d filled her with charcoal and had her spit back up the blackness that was swelling like a river inside of her. We were fourteen.

We flirted with people we didn’t know, we used other people’s hands to mess up our hair, we got home late. We towered in heels that hurt to look at. We felt fierce, on fire. We painted our lips blood red and kissed the mirror until we got a perfect mark out of it. We’d spend ages just getting ready. It was the fun part of parties, I guess.

Her spine cracked while she rested her head on my leg. She said, “Let’s never get old, okay?” and I told her that sounded great. Sometimes in the darkness, she’d sound serious about it. I wanted to ask her if she was fighting bigger demons than the ones I can raise, but before I found out, she moved away.

We belonged to a group that was all punchline. Someone says, “teen girls, am I right?” and laughter spreads like ripples through the room.

I remember the first time you find out that they hurt one of your friends, because that’s how you find out you’re not safe either. She looked so whole, and that was the problem. Her mascara wasn’t even running. I watched her tell the story five ten twenty times to officers who shuffled papers and sniffed at every other word and sighed often and looked at their watch even though they were the reason she was talking. They asked her what she was wearing, she gestured to her body: jeans, tee-shirt, hoodie. They asked her if she knew him, she said no. They asked her if she provoked him, she said no. They asked her if she told him to stop, she fell silent. After a while, she’d try to explain the fear that had crept up her throat until she had choked. They sighed. Asked for the story again. She had this look on her face that I still dream about. It looked like someone had sucked her soul out.

Kelly in the ninth grade with her shining face telling me, “One of us is the better person. Everyone always compares us.”

A waiter looking down my shirt and saying, “Just a water for you, huh?”

Ballet class with pin-thin shaking hands and bathrooms that smelt like a bad dream. A teacher who said, “Don’t eat unless you faint, darlings.” You get used to cigarettes in the hands of young girls. You get used to the backstage addictions of “only nine hundred more crunches to go.” You get used to seeing this stuff until one day someone asks you why you know all the calories in a grapenut.

The television saying, “Lose weight, feel great.”
The television saying, “Girls mean nothing.”
The television saying, “If you’re not pretty, you’re not worth discussing.”
The television saying, “If you’re pretty, your personality is awful.”
The television saying, “Spend your money.”

My father telling me: there’s nothing wrong with this system.

please keep the credit on this it belongs to me it’s literally my actual memories please stop deleting my name it removes me from my own story (via inkskinned)

So there’s this lengthy scene in my current manuscript (which just came back for edits) involving a goldfish.

It is awesome. I say this in all modesty. It is the Hero’s Journey with a goldfish. I had a lot of fun writing it.

One of the edits is that there’s too much going on at the end and a couple of threads that don’t resolve and it occurred to me that if I just hacked out the bit with the goldfish, it would fix some of these concerns and cut a few thousand words.

Common writing wisdom has it that I should ruthlessly slice this out, throw it to the winds, kill my darlings. Sure, it’s painful! That’s how you know it’s working! PAIN IS EDITS LEAVING THE MANUSCRIPT!

I offered to slice out the goldfish.

My agent, my editor, AND my beta reader all came back and said “NOT THE GOLDFISH!” It was like I had the goldfish in front of the firing squad and everybody threw themselves over the bowl yelling “Take me instead!”

I guess the goldfish stays.

Huh.

So, y’know, the moral is that sometimes, just occasionally, it’s painful because you shouldn’t be messing with it.

Not Always Killing Your Darlings

(via

fuckyeahursulavernon

)

Tucker Carlson said on Fox that more children die of bathtub drownings than of accidental shootings. They don’t.
 
Steve Doocy said on Fox that NASA scientists faked data to make the case for global warming. They didn’t.
 
Rudy Giuliani said on Fox that President Obama has issued propaganda asking everybody to “hate the police.” He hasn’t.
 
John Stossel said on Fox that there is “no good data” proving secondhand cigarette smoke kills nonsmokers. There is.
 
So maybe you can see why serious people — a category excluding those who rely upon it for news and information — do not take Fox, well … seriously, why they dub it Pox News and Fakes News, to name two of the printable variations. Fox is, after all, the network of death panels, terrorist fist jabs, birtherism, anchor babies, victory mosques, wars on Christmas and Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi. It’s not just that it is the chief global distributor of unfact and untruth but that it distributes unfact and untruth with a bluster, an arrogance, a gonad-grabbing swagger, that implicitly and intentionally dares you to believe fact and truth matter.

We don’t even bother to protest Fox being Fox. Might as well protest a sewer for stinking. (via wilwheaton)

So anyway, I was having this argument with my father about Martin Luther King and how his message was too conservative compared to Malcolm X’s message. My father got really angry at me. It wasn’t that he disliked Malcolm X, but his point was that Malcolm X hadn’t accomplished anything as Dr. King had.

I was kind of sarcastic and asked something like, so what did Martin Luther King accomplish other than giving his “I have a dream speech.”

Before I tell you what my father told me, I want to digress. Because at this point in our amnesiac national existence, my question pretty much reflects the national civic religion view of what Dr. King accomplished. He gave this great speech. Or some people say, “he marched.” I was so angry at Mrs. Clinton during the primaries when she said that Dr. King marched, but it was LBJ who delivered the Civil Rights Act.

At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn’t that he “marched” or gave a great speech.

My father told me with a sort of cold fury, “Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south.”

Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don’t know what my father was talking about.

But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.

He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.

I’m guessing that most of you, especially those having come fresh from seeing The Help, may not understand what this was all about. But living in the south (and in parts of the midwest and in many ghettos of the north) was living under terrorism.

It wasn’t that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn’t sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus.

You really must disabuse yourself of this idea. Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement used to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth’s.

It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.

This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people.

White people also occasionally tried black people, especially black men, for crimes for which they could not conceivably be guilty. With the willing participation of white women, they often accused black men of “assault,” which could be anything from rape to not taking off one’s hat, to “reckless eyeballing.”

This is going to sound awful and perhaps a stain on my late father’s memory, but when I was little, before the civil rights movement, my father taught me many, many humiliating practices in order to prevent the random, terroristic, berserk behavior of white people. The one I remember most is that when walking down the street in New York City side by side, hand in hand with my hero-father, if a white woman approached on the same sidewalk, I was to take off my hat and walk behind my father, because he had been taught in the south that black males for some reason were supposed to walk single file in the presence of any white lady.

This was just one of many humiliating practices we were taught to prevent white people from going berserk.

I remember a huge family reunion one August with my aunts and uncles and cousins gathered around my grandparents’ vast breakfast table laden with food from the farm, and the state troopers drove up to the house with a car full of rifles and shotguns, and everyone went kind of weirdly blank. They put on the masks that black people used back then to not provoke white berserkness. My strong, valiant, self-educated, articulate uncles, whom I adored, became shuffling, Step-N-Fetchits to avoid provoking the white men. Fortunately the troopers were only looking for an escaped convict. Afterward, the women, my aunts, were furious at the humiliating performance of the men, and said so, something that even a child could understand.

This is the climate of fear that Dr. King ended.

If you didn’t get taught such things, let alone experience them, I caution you against invoking the memory of Dr. King as though he belongs exclusively to you and not primarily to African Americans.

The question is, how did Dr. King do this—and of course, he didn’t do it alone.

(Of all the other civil rights leaders who helped Dr. King end this reign of terror, I think the most under appreciated is James Farmer, who founded the Congress of Racial Equality and was a leader of nonviolent resistance, and taught the practices of nonviolent resistance.)

So what did they do?

They told us: Whatever you are most afraid of doing vis-a-vis white people, go do it. Go ahead down to city hall and try to register to vote, even if they say no, even if they take your name down.

Go ahead sit at that lunch counter. Sue the local school board. All things that most black people would have said back then, without exaggeration, were stark raving insane and would get you killed.

If we do it all together, we’ll be okay.

They made black people experience the worst of the worst, collectively, that white people could dish out, and discover that it wasn’t that bad. They taught black people how to take a beating—from the southern cops, from police dogs, from fire department hoses. They actually coached young people how to crouch, cover their heads with their arms and take the beating. They taught people how to go to jail, which terrified most decent people.

And you know what? The worst of the worst, wasn’t that bad.

Once people had been beaten, had dogs sicced on them, had fire hoses sprayed on them, and been thrown in jail, you know what happened?

These magnificent young black people began singing freedom songs in jail.

That, my friends, is what ended the terrorism of the south. Confronting your worst fears, living through it, and breaking out in a deep throated freedom song. The jailers knew they had lost when they beat the crap out of these young Negroes and the jailed, beaten young people began to sing joyously, first in one town then in another. This is what the writer, James Baldwin, captured like no other writer of the era.

Please let this sink in. It wasn’t marches or speeches. It was taking a severe beating, surviving and realizing that our fears were mostly illusory and that we were free.

Daily Kos :: Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did 

Reblogging this so I can come back to it in the spring when I teach the Civil Rights Movement to my 5th graders. 

(via copperoranges)

Reblogging this for all the non-black people who like to quote MLK like he’s theirs.

(via heathenist)

I think I’ve reblogged this before, but I’m doing it again.  Even growing up on the South Side of Chicago, going through a public school in which most of the students were black, and in which Martin Luther King was a  celebrated hero who got his own honors and assemblies every year, even then I was never taught this.

(via pentag0nal)

Politicalprof: a must read.

(via politicalprof)

A must read, indeed.

(via pol102)