In the law, there's this idea called the "last clear chance" doctrine.

If you are in an accident, and you had the last clear chance to avoid the accident, then you are, at least in some portion, responsible for the accident.

For instance, if you are driving and a car pulls out in front of you, and you could've slammed on the brake but do not, you're responsible for that, even if the turn the other car made was illegal. Moreover, you might be held partially responsible for the other person's injuries, depending on how things work in your location.

This is even true if you can merely mitigate the damage. If you have a chance to limit the damage -- again, let's say you don't brake and the result is a collision at 40MPH instead of 10MPH -- the additional damage you cause could be considered your fault.

To me, this seems very applicable to voting.

The two parties in the US are going to put a couple of candidates up in the next few months. Both of them might be dangerous. But in the end, everyone who can vote is going to have one last, clear chance to avoid, or at least mitigate, damage.

It sucks that both parties are out there driving like maniacs.

But the fact of the matter is, they've put us in this position. And if you don't put on the brakes -- that is, at least mitigate damage -- you are responsible for the additional damage caused.

In the national elections, a choice not to vote for Biden is a choice not to brake when some jerk pulls into your lane. And if there's an accident and a lot of damage -- to voting rights in general, to reproductive rights, to the health and safety and life of trans and other queer people, to education, to the environment -- then you are responsible for not attempting mitigation.

You have the last clear chance to minimize danger and damage. And while you can yell until you're blue in the face that the Democratic party put you in that position in the first place by not running another candidate, you are still responsible even if you try to abdicate that responsibility.

Please note that this fic is going to take the better part of 2024 and probably 2025

(and given my track record might never be done):

Sansa

"Do you like the taste?" asked Littlefinger, watching her closely as she tried the wine. He always watched her closely.

They had stopped at the Inn at the Crossroads; she hadn't wanted to, but she would have had to explain to Littlefinger why. So she had choked down a meal and refused to think about the last time she had come through this way, where the first member of her family had been murdered in the stable while Joffrey had sniveled and lied and shown her, for the first time, who he really was.

"I don't see what all the fuss is about," she answered. "Why do men love it so much?"

Littlefinger shrugged. "It gives some men courage."

"Does it give you courage?"

He smiled, the way he did when she had stung him. He would take his revenge on her somehow, she knew. He was nothing like Joffrey, but there was a smallness to him that reminded her of the king.

The dead king, now.

A flash of armor to her right made her look up; a familiar woman, tall and broad of shoulder in a suit of armor, had approached their table. "Lord Baelish. Lady Sansa. My name is Brienne of Tarth."

I logged in from my lurker's RSS feed purely to say, "aaaaaaaaah!"

GoT fixits are possibly my favorite genre.

things that made me stop wanting to die that require no effort whatsoever

Almost all of these are about variety. Humans need stimulation! We need enrichment! We literally cannot do the same thing every day!

The other day I was feeling miserable, so I hopped on a bus and rode it all the way back to where I’d started, and my brain, which had finally had some proper stimulation via new environments, was suddenly ready to go again!

This is why taking walks/drives and trying new hobbies are good for you! Don’t turn yourself into a sad zoo animal! You need some pumpkins to roll around in your enclosure!

ITS BACK!!!!!

god i fucking love the quote “dont turn yourself into a sad zoo animal” it has really inspired me!

“Public libraries are such important, lovely places!” Yes but do you GO there. Do you STUDY there. Do you meet friends and get coffee there. Do you borrow the FREE, ZERO SUBSCRIPTION, ZERO TRACKING books, audiobooks, ebooks, and films. Have you checked out their events and schemes. Do you sign up for the low cost courses in ASL or knitting or programming or writing your CV that they probably run. Do you know they probably have myriad of schemes to help low income families. Do you hire their low cost rooms if you need them. Have you joined their social groups. Do you use the FREE COMPUTERS. Do you even know what your library is trying to offer you. Listen, the library shouldn’t just exist for you as a nice idea. That’s why more libraries shut every year

If this post persuades even one person to get a free library account and use it, my time on this hellsite will not have been spent in vain

Certified Library Post

Yes! Not to all of those questions (I am very paranoid about in-person things since 2020), but I am using the *shit* out of my Libby account. (Did you know that many libraries, at least in North America) let you borrow books through a convenient app??? That returns things automatically for you????) This pretty much straight up saved my sanity during the first year of COVID. I did hang out at the library more often pre-COVID.

Also, I do my best to share book links either through Goodreads (if it's for an international audience) or through my city's library/local bookstores (if it's for local friends) rather than link to The Bookstore Killers

like my ideal job is honestly i own an extremely shitty bookstore and cafe and you cant order anything from a menu except cold brew coffee (when we run out, we run out) or you can ask me (i am standing behind the counter) for a drink and i will make you a weird espresso concoction based on what i feel like making and it will always cost a flat 5 dollars (i know, coffee should cost less, but here we are. sometimes the drink will be a scoop of vanilla gelato with an espresso shot poured over. sometimes it will be a coffee seltzer. it will probably just be a regular latte most of the time with sprinkles on top), but sometimes i hand you a grilled cheese sandwich or maybe a novella i like instead. we're only open for three hours between 4-7 in the afternoon btw.

you can also trade me a book in like-new or Good condition for a coffee, but only if it's a book i want to read.

its the sort of place where none of the chairs match but we do have like, five million outlets and i wont say anything if you want to stay there for the three hours we're open and only buy one coffee. honestly if you're cool you can stay later than that but only if you listen to me talk about my wizard novel.

i think what we're really missing in society is third places with bizarre proprieters.

It kinda sounds like you want to be Bernard Black, tbh

Listen I'm a little drunk but... yarn crafts are so important. Textile arts are the backbone of society. All of us take our clothing and accessories and upholstery for granted and it's honestly shocking

I used to buy affordable t-shirts and they were comfy and nice, now I buy them in the same price range and they're sandpaper. They don't wick away moisture and the print comes undone after two washes. I buy denim and the crotch falls apart in months. I read about how modern Singer sewing machines are disappointing and then look at the delicate machining and the beautiful finishes on my 1857 machine and wonder if this is progress?!

Reblog if you're desperate for clothing that doesn't feel like sandpaper or if you like machines that go thunk instead of going obsolete in two years

God, I logged in purely to reblog this. I spend a significant chunk of my stupid paycheck from my stupid fake job to help support companies that are still selling good fucking textiles. And things that go thunk.

Honestly? I would look around to see if there is a group looking to host their own version of AO3 and volunteer to help them do the tech setup. Because the code for AO3 is open source and free! You can 100% host your own!

classic scifi novels by men r always like. page 1 here’s a cool scifi idea i had. page 2 i hate women so much it’s unreal

ALT

ALT

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guys if one more person leaves a tag like this on my post im gonna lose my mind. There Are Science Fiction Authors Who Are Not Misogynistic Men

ok i’ve gotten one too many ‘this is why i don’t read sci-fi’ comments so here’s a rec list for the people convinced all science fiction is bad and misogynistic (with something for everyone, hopefully!):

(also, btw, the book links are to the Storygraph, which includes content warnings for each one!)

this list is long enough, but have some more authors (who are not cis men) also worth checking out: rivers solomon, yoon ha lee, charlie jane anders, aliette de bodard, xiran jay zhao, mary robinette kowal, corinne duyvis

and finally, not all older/classic scifi is written by crusty old white guys who hate women!!! some iconic authors i’d particularly recommend looking into are ursula k. le guin, octavia e. butler, samuel r. delany and vonda n. mcintyre 🥰

Omg, thank you!

Murderbot and Ancillary Justice are two all time faves, but there are so many new books on that list! You've enriched my reading list for 2024, thank you!

reblog and put top three stories (series/podcasts/books/movies/etc) youd recommend for everyone

Black Sails, The Good Place, due South

Here's the thing:

Cis people really do feel like the gender they were assigned at birth.

Cis women really do feel like women, and cis men really do feel like men. They experience what we would call gender euphoria related to dressing and expressing themselves as their gender, whether that's in a femme way or a butch way or any other way. They feel joy and connection with their gender, with their sexuality and how it relates to their gender. They wear clothes, participate in activities, and express themselves in ways that affirm their gender identity.

Gender critical radfems and terfs will try to convince you that "no woman feels like a woman". They do this for several reasons. Firstly, it's to try to convince trans men they aren't trans, they're just women with no connection to womanhood because "no woman feels a connection to womanhood". They also do it to try to discredit trans women, by saying "If you feel like a woman, then you're clearly not a woman, because "woman" isn't a feeling, it's biology".

A lot of gender critical terfs and radfems claim they are "dysphoric women", and will try to convince you this is a normal state of womanhood. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say no, that doesn't sound normal at all, actually. Most women do not secretly wish they could be men, or more androgynous, or have a penis. Most women don't define their lives through suffering - they love being women.

If womanhood - or manhood - is making you miserable... you might be trans, or you might be gender nonconforming. See if dressing a different way makes you feel a spark of joy and happiness - seek euphoria!

Gender should be joyous, not drudgery.

I am a cis woman and I absolutely feel happiness and contentment associated with being a woman, but not with being "feminine—" I started to experience what trans people know as "gender euphoria" when I cut my hair short and started presenting more "masculine." shoutout to butch lesbians for being literally my first experience of "oh, *I* want to look/dress/be like that"

Yeah, I'm a trans man and I know the feeling you're talking about - a lot of times, before I started T, I remember going to the hairstylist and asking for a short cut, only to be given a pixie cut that was a similar style to what a lot of lesbians have, and it didn't make me look or feel male at all. and I remember feeling miserable, because I didn't want to look like a woman with short hair, I wanted to look like a man. The first time I experienced euphoria from a hairstyle was when I asked the stylist to spike up my hair like David Tennant and she actually did what I asked, and it actually made me look male.

Yeah, see, if I try to imagine actually being addressed and perceived as a man, all I feel is revulsion and sadness. I just want to be a woman who is just like a guy at the auto parts store

I seem to recall hearing about an exchange in which somebody’s cis dude friend helped lift and carry something heavy, and got to be everybody’s big strong man, and he was feeling all powerful about it, and realized “wait, fuck, is this what trans folks call gender euphoria?”

Cis people absolutely do get gender euphoria. And I’m fuckin happy for them when they do.

Wait wait this is a perfect example for the other side of this.

This is why (well at least one reason men buy into it) conservative men hate the discussion around toxic masculinity. They think we want to take their gender euphoria. The good feeling of being "everybody's strong man." That we want to shame them for being men, in essence that we want to make dysphoric about being men. Right wing talking heads capitalize on this and push this idea to further their agenda and try and pull men to the right.

I think I got that to make sense maybe not but there it be

No, you're absolutely right.

The conservative/patriarchal concept of manhood is, in a lot of ways, wrapped up in what makes men feel gender euphoria. Being strong, protecting others, being promiscuous, being chivalrous, supporting those around them.

Obviously the most femme person on the planet can do all of those things too, but they are associated with manhood and masculinity in Western Patriarchy.

(fun fact though, other cultures have different concepts of masculinity)

So, when I told my husband I thought I might be enby he asked me something I still don't have an answer for:

How do you know whether you're a butch woman (like @headspace-hotel up there) or non-binary? How do you know it's about presentation rather than a rebellion against gender roles? I've been trying to figure it out for ages but I lack a community I can ask about these things.

For the record, he wasn't being an asshole. He was trying to understand better but I lack the experience to be able to answer him.

Sometimes it's just a feeling you know in your heart, and there isn't anything more to it than that.

I think the answer to that question is going to be different for everyone but I think that it being a feeling in your heart is gonna come the closest to being a "for everyone" answer.

For me, knowing I was a feminine trans man and not nonbinary took awhile. It took introspection and a lot of soul-searching and, finally, offhandedly calling myself a "femboy" and then having some random transphobe trying to hurt me by calling me "he" -- and it all…clicked into place. And I just knew.

I felt it in much the same way that like, the clouds part and you see sunshine.

If you think about being nonbinary and it feels "right", then you're probably nonbinary. If you think about being a woman and it feels "right" then you're probably a woman. Likewise for being a man.

It might take time to like, dig through layers of feelings about things and reach the truth (I often felt terrified that I was "actually a boy" but I think that was tied to some internalized transphobia) but introspection gets you there eventually, I think.

IDK.

Every time one of my friends announces new pronouns or otherwise transitions, I check in with myself: hey, uh, how am I doing, gender-wise?

And the answer always comes back: "Yup! Still cis, thank you for asking!"

The closest I've ever come to experiencing dysphoria was a bad haircut that made me look masc, and when someone who didn't know my pronouns referred to me as "they". (It was horrible, do not recommend, but also it was valuable in that I became a lot more proactive in getting other people's pronouns right.)

For a long time I was deeply baffled by why so many otherwise feminist romance novels written by and for women made a point about how the badass/cross-dressing/monstrous etc heroine was still Delicate and Feminine and Pretty compared to the Big Manly Hero. Why write an unusual heroine in the first place if you were going to make her conventional in the end? But afaict such plots are designed to give gender euphoria to (some) feminine women: it's a fantasy of being able to do everything men can do, and possibly feeling unwomanly, but still being a conventionally feminine woman on a fundamental level, especially in the eyes of a partner.

I still don't enjoy such stories, and afaict a lot of women aren't into them either, but I at least understand the point now (though I can't claim to speak for people who do enjoy them, and am plausibly oversimplifying) I feel like there's more fertile ground to be dug into about how gender euphoria/dysphoria affects cis people but am still pondering it.

Also! To anyone trying to figure out their gender: what worked for me was experimenting with each plausible possibility and seeing if it was more or less appealing than where I was at. You don't have to figure out the Real Answer right away, and maybe there isn't one, just give yourself space to try out little changes (mentally or in practice) and see what feels good. Just keep following that Best Feeling direction and see where you end up, and be willing to let the Best Feeling direction shift and surprise you.

I absolutely encourage people who currently consider themselves cis to do this too. Even if you really are cis it'll give you a stronger sense of what that means, in general and for yourself. And if you do turn out not to be cis, you have an exciting journey of self discovery and gender euphoria ahead of you!

a lot of the time gender identity can't be discovered in a vacuum, because gender is a combination of personal feeling and social validation. ask a friend to treat you like a different gender for a day and see if it's fun. ask a partner how they might treat you differently. ask yourself not 'who am i really?' but 'is there a more satisfying life i could live? a different role id enjoy?'

it's really hard to prove a negative! and there's aspects if being a man or a woman that are just kind of a drag even if the rest of it is great. you really do have to give yourself a range of experiences to draw an informed conclusion.

So I'm a femme nonbinary person, and I'm AFAB. I present as way more femme than I did when I thought I was cis, because when I "was" cis 1. As a fat person who is tall and has a very masculine gait, I got made fun of and basically treated like a man in a dress when I tried to do things that were femme and 2. Being told that because I was a girl everybody knew everything about me already, from my favorite color to my favorite school subjects, none of which were actually true, made me fucking spiral every time. I was already locked out of femininity before I ever changed the game

So for a while, I thought the answer was to try to be butch, and it turns out it wasn't. Butches are very attractive, but I hated wearing the clothing, and it felt exactly as stifling as everything else about being female

So I came out as non-binary, and it doesn't fix everything, there will always be problems and always be people who deliberately don't want to understand, but I feel so much fucking better. I derive great joy in having perfectly manicured power claws, but I also feel such a sense of relief when people use the right pronouns. Those are the people who are actually seeing me, not all the people in my past who thought they knew exactly who I was because of a decision that was made when I was born.

The closest I've come to a gender identity has been "agender" tbh. I find both male and female identities kind of reductive when they're applied to me? Like, "queer" or "non-binary" work in a pinch (such as a multiple choice form), but I just feel like he/she come with too many assumptions that (in my opinion, about myself) are terribly abstracted and don't make any sense. If you want to know stuff about me, ask me a question, pronouns don't tell you shit.

And I guess in terms of presentation, I am a Hiker day to day and I am Queer (with optional Slutty) for special occasions (makeup is fun but very fussy)

I'm curious because I'm a PhD history student with a specialty in the golden age of piracy so that encouraged me to watch the show in the first place!

i have been obsessed with Black Sails since the mid-2010s and Firefly since the mid-2000s. Any feelings about pirates begin and end there tbh.

november mood board

I AM GOING TO YELL THIS PSA FOREVER UNTIL I

If you feel like this seasonally, there's a good chance you have SAD AKA seasonal affective disorder. And for some people (myself included!), you can get rid of like, 90% of the October existential ennui!

Specifically:

god I am always thinking about how moist von lipwig fundamentally does not think himself as a real person. he's not a real person, and so none of his actions have consequences. until he is forced to be a real person and deal with the consequences of his actions (adorabelle) like. it's even in the name. lipwig is a fake mustache. he's not real he's just a character. he's always playing a character. what do you mean his actions have real consequences. he's not real. until he is.

I have been angrily walking around my kitchen for the past ten minutes muttering "a fucking lip wig. Goddammit, Terry."

you know i don’t think we often talk about how difficult it actually is to suddenly realize that a belief you thought was good and moral and correct was actually really fucking toxic. how you have to look at something and go ‘oh shit, oh i fucked up. oh this is going to take probably years at minimum to deprogram from my brain because of all the little ways this shit pervaded the rest of my beliefs’

so. to all the people picking up all the pieces of a recently shattered world-view and trying to figure out what is safe to keep and what has to be thrown away and started over

to all the people having to relearn how to even listen to other people

to all the people putting in the work to do better while struggling with the guilt that comes from finding out you were the asshole

i’m proud of y’all.

it’s hard to admit being wrong and even harder to change in the aftermath. just keep doing the best you can and just know that the effort is appreciated. everyone can change. everyone can do better. keep fighting.

“My thesis is that at many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve.” (from Conflict Is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman. highly recommend it if you’re interested in having better dialogues and feeling less defensive in your life)

In the New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, John Seymour - who pretty much defined the principles of “self-sufficiency” as a modern political movement - goes into detail about conflict and community-building. So far from today’s interpretation of self-sufficiency as an American prepper-homesteader isolated from their neighbors - self-sufficient in the sense of “alone” - he envisioned self-sufficient in the sense of “not needing to buy things,” whether that was buying things for pure survival or buying things just to feel good. Seymour felt strongly that a community of close friends, preferably meeting frequently in pubs with wood-burning fires and live music, was a hallmark of being especially practical and self-sufficient; and if you think about it, you’ll see that it makes sense.

After all, if you want to buy absolutely nothing - if you want to create a way to live separate from society - you cannot do it like Thoreau; even Thoreau wasn’t doing it like Thoreau; you have to create an separate society, a self-sufficient community, and live in that.

And interestingly Seymour put his finger on “why communes fail.”

In his experience, which was deep and broad, experiments in self-sufficient communities/communes virtually always failed. And not because the idealistic fools weren’t capable of growing crops, or chopping wood, or whatever. It isn’t even the founders were stupid or ignorant or inexperienced, or because self-sufficiency only attracts dramatic personalities. No, the communities he observed consistently failed because they had no ability to resolve conflict. Every group of people will have to come to a tricky decision, resolve a sticky situation, have an awkward conversation or even just get along with unideal situations. They didn’t fall apart because a sheep fell in a ditch; anyone can get a sheep out of a ditch; they fell apart over the arguments about ideology, ditches, sheep and blame. It was always some issue of conflict or communication that broke these well-meaning, well-intentioned, well-educated people apart.

Step back from that and think: people frequently try to live outside capitalism even in this modern world, people frequently try to live in the most environmentally-friendly way, people frequently try to envision an alternative to a hostile state, even in this world where it is difficult or impossible to do so. For every utopia you might picture, people (being people) will have already made a decent attempt at building and living it, in the hope of showing it or even giving it to you. And those utopias aren’t here at the moment for you to have, because it’s terrifically difficult to make communities out of nothing. And that’s largely because it’s very hard to have communication skills about anything at all, let alone something that gets you mad.

So it’s worth having communication skills. As a matter of self-sufficiency.

If you have ever worked with the public, remember: the public will be part of your politically utopic community.

All the mommy bloggers, all the brosephs, all the every single customer or client or other person you have dealt with who you wanted to fucking strangle, or at least wanted to be allowed one of those amazing moments of Put Down that viral reddit posts are made of, every single frustrating as fuck human: they will be part of your post-capitalist utopia.

They will not wake up, the morning of the revolution, and suddenly become different people. Your choices will be to line them all up against a wall and shoot them . . . .or figure out how to live with them in your community. (And multiple revolutions in the past hundred years have tried that whole "line them up and shoot them" thing, tried it REAL HARD, and it didn't work out great for them either.)

The more de-industrial, de-urbanized, de-impersonal, whatever, your ideal society is? The more it will involve having to work, and work well, and work effectively and without interpersonal violence (physical or social) against people who irritate the fuck out of you.

And no, we never really had any Neat Trick to make that easier in the past. What we most often had was survival pressure so intense that the threat of being ostracized (or having the group turn on you) was enough to force resolutions that nobody was really happy with, or that left an unspoken wound to fester for generations, or to offer up a scapegoat to vent the community's violence on and then pretend to move on, or . . . .

Etc.

If you want a cooperative, non-violent, non-coercive community, and especially if you want that to be the norm, you end up having to learn to work collaboratively and productively with the person who irritates and frustrates and upsets you most in the ENTIRE world. And if you can't picture doing that, then maybe it's time for some self-reflection about how you really want the world to work, and what you're capable of contributing to that.

Reposting this quote from The New Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency just because I find it extremely funny:

“Do not be put off if you find some of the people irritating or bizarre in some way. You have to remember that several of these people are likely to become very good friends as time goes by.”

Do not be put off if you find some of the people irritating or or bizarre in some way. You have to remember that several of these people are likely to become very good friends as time goes by.

the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?

Goddamn. Okay

Did you have a kid in your neighborhood who always hid so good, nobody could find him? We did. After a while we would give up on him and go off, leaving him to rot wherever he was. Sooner or later he would show up, all mad because we didn't keep looking for him. And we would get mad back because he wasn't playing the game the way it was supposed to be played.

There's hiding and there's finding, we'd say. And he'd say it was hide-and-seek, not hide-and-give-UP, and we'd all yell about who made the rules and who cared about who, anyway, and how we wouldn't play with him anymore if he didn't get it straight and who needed him anyhow, and things like that. Hide-and-seek-and-yell. No matter what, though, the next time he would hide too good again. He's probably still hidden somewhere, for all I know.

As I write this, the neighborhood game goes on, and there is a kid under a pile of leaves in the yard just under my window. He has been there a long time now, and everybody else is found and they are about to give up on him over at the base. I considered going out to the base and telling them where he is hiding. And I thought about setting the leaves on fire to drive him out. Finally, I just yelled, "GET FOUND, KID!" out the window. And scared him so bad he probably wet his pants and started crying and ran home to tell his mother. It's real hard to know how to be helpful sometimes.

A man I know found out last year he had terminal cancer. He was a doctor. And knew about dying, and he didn't want to make his family and friends suffer through that with him. So he kept his secret. And died. Everybody said how brave he was to bear his suffering in silence and not tell everybody, and so on and so forth. But privately his family and friends said how angry they were that he didn't need them, didn't trust their strength. And it hurt that he didn't say good-bye.

He hid too well. Getting found would have kept him in the game. Hide-and-seek, grown-up style. Wanting to hide. Needing to be sought. Confused about being found. "I don't want anyone to know." "What will people think?" "I don't want to bother anyone."

Better than hide-and-seek, I like the game called Sardines. In Sardines the person who is It goes and hides, and everybody goes looking for him. When you find him, you get in with him and hide there with him. Pretty soon everybody is hiding together, all stacked in a small space like puppies in a pile. And pretty soon somebody giggles and somebody laughs and everybody gets found.

Medieval theologians even described God in hide-and-seek terms, calling him Deus Absconditus. But me, I think old God is a Sardine player. And will be found the same way everybody gets found in Sardines - by the sound of laughter of those heaped together at the end.

"Olly-olly-oxen-free." The kids out in the street are hollering the cry that says "Come on in, wherever you are. It's a new game." And so say I. To all those who have hid too good. Get found, kid! Olly-olly-oxen-free.

— Robert Fulghum, "All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten"

in a rare moment of "huh i can maybe contribute to this", i was reminded of this exerpt from Tim Kreider's We Learn Nothing, a collection of his essays.

this one was written about a deceased friend of his, Skelly, who was known to spin tales about his life to hide the shameful parts from others. at his funeral, when all the secrets inevitably started to unfold, Kreider writes: