You find a girl crying next to a grave. “What’s wrong?” You ask. She cries harder. “Nobody came to my funeral.”
Night watchman at a cemetary isn’t the kind of job most people want. I’ve always liked it, though. It’s pretty peaceful, most of the time, which is nice. Sometimes I get to chase off teenagers or would-be occultists or obnoxious drunks, which is fun. There’s a lot of entertainment in a good chase, at least for me, and scaring the crap out of them is fun too.
Sometimes it gets sad, though.
It was my first walkthrough of the night when I saw the girl weeping beside the grave. It happens sometimes, and I never chase them. The cemetary is for the dead and the grieving. They’re always welcome here.
I went over to her, careful to keep the grave between us so I wouldn’t scare her. “What’s the matter?” I asked gently. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
She shook her head, still weeping. “No-one came to my funeral,” she sobbed. “No-one at all.”
I checked the stone. She’d been about seventeen. An age of strong emotions and fierce resentments. “I’m sorry,” I told her, and meant it. “That’s… always hard.”
“If they cared about me, they would have come,” she wept. “This means nobody cared at all.”
“Not always,” I told her gently. “Sometimes it means that something else happened. If you like, I can try to find out.”
“Really?” She wiped her eyes. “I’d… I’d appreciate that. I’m Lucy.”
“Stanley.” She couldn’t shake hands, so I gave her a friendly nod. “Come with me, Lucy. I’ve got a laptop in the watchman’s hut.”
She followed me, drifting silently, back to the hut. I brought her in, and made two cups of tea, offering her one. “I’m not solid,” she said, her lip quivering. “I can’t -“
I showed her how to take it, the ghostly echo of the solid cup, and told her I’d learned it from the day attendant over at the columbarium. She’s Korean, and knows a lot about hungry ghosts. She sipped her tea while I opened the laptop and ran the usual searches.
I do this a lot.
Sure enough, there’d been three major car accidents between the area she’d lived in and the cemetary. There’s almost always at least one - there’s this one intersection that no exorcism, ritual purification or cleansing spell has ever worked on - and it usually helps. A lot of spirits want to know why someone they loved didn’t come.
Me entering any museum: man I’m so excited to learn all the things
Also me: GIFT SHOP GIFT SHOP GIFT SHOP
There are two dragons inside of you. One hoards knowledge and the other hoards trinkets. They’re both very excited when you bring them to a museum
風の谷のナウシカ // Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), dir. Hayao Miyazaki
hey, generally speaking i am pro-pirating but there is post going around with a free version of Maus by Art Spiegelman on a google doc and i am genuinely asking you all to not reblog it. Art Spiegelman is still alive. he still makes money off of Maus. and what is being monetized is his generational trauma as the son of a holocaust survivor. please either buy Maus or get it from the library (libraries also benefit the author and when more people request or check out a book it communicates to the library that they need more copies). pirating Maus is very different than pirating a marvel movie or reading a google doc of a book no longer in print. please use critical thinking.
Marshawn Lynch, episode of Murderville is absolutely brilliant.
You know, He roasts, banters and all.
Always game for shit and giggles.
Will Arnett, was about to lose his shit, most of the episode.
I hope He keeps his creative juice on. Coz the man is Bloody Funny
There was a brief but decisive evolutionary bottleneck of canines that begrudgingly allowed homo-chimps to live after sticking them in a corset.
the wolf started running backwards in circles trying to get out of Uncle Urg’s shirt and everyone is laughing so hard that the sleeping children and young mothers and old folk wake and come out of their hide huts and observe First Funny Dog galloping around in the moonlight, and a tradition is born
like were dogs even dogs yet or did someone manage to squeeze a particularly patient tamed wolf into a leather shirt and then howl with laughter as it trotted around the cooking fires dressed like Uncle Urg begging for food scraps
I’d like to know what the first person to put human clothing on a dog was thinking
“Will you flush game for me, Wolf, when I go hunting the wild things beneath the trees?” asked Human.
“I will,” said Wolf, “If only you leave me the bones and scraps of meat from your kills.”
“That is well,” said Human. “And will you use your ears and eyes and nose to guard me while I rest, and warn me when lions prowl too near?”
“I will,” said Wolf, “If only you let me lie in the warmth of your cooking-fires.”
“But of course,” said Human. “And will you do as I command, and follow me wherever I go, and love my children and grandchildren as you would love your own?”
“I will,” said Wolf, “If only you scratch me where my claws cannot reach, and pet me, and heal my injuries when I am wounded.”
“Always,” said Human. “And will you let me dress you up in funny clothes, and dance around, and do little tricks for me to laugh at?”
Wolf hesitated, and eyed Human warily for some time, weighing its choices. “That depends,” it said. “Will you tell me I’m a good boy?”
Human smiled. “The goodest boy,” it said.
Dog wagged its tail, and Wolf was no more.
I’ve reblogged it before, and I’ll say it again: this prose is right up there with Kipling’s Just So Stories. A modern literary masterpiece. I feel compelled to make an illuminated manuscript of it.
peak Lois Lane & Clark Kent dynamic imo is Clark just being absolutely convinced that he is the reacher and Lois is the settler. periodically early in their relationship he’ll get all ‘aw man Lois is so cool & smart and so beautiful… what could she possibly see in a guy like me… :(’ and his friends have to be like ’clark… you are SUPERMAN’
he’s just like ’…oh yeah’
also he’s right, he is the reacher
