Ship: Zimbits Rating: PG-13 for a couple swear words
Summary: Bitty’s excited about finally moving into his own apartment. The ridiculously hot neighbor is just a perk.
Author’s Note(@luckiedee): Written for @creatingdoodles, whose prompt included suits. For inspiration, I googled professions where men have to wear suits and well, this happened. Inspiration also taken from a tumblr post I can no longer find that prompted something like “one half of your OTP thinks that the other doesn’t speak English because they only hear them speaking a foreign language.“ Takes place in an AU where Bitty has a blog, not a vlog, and he doesn’t post his picture to it. I hope you enjoy! ♥
”Lardo,” Bitty says dramatically when he finds her at the coffee shop, dropping into a chair on the opposite side of the table.
“Bits,” she replies, barely glancing up from her sketchbook.
He frowns at the mild reaction and, without further preamble, announces: “An international supermodel lives in my building.”
That gets her attention — or, more accurately, her skepticism. She raises one eyebrow, her charcoal going still. “Here?”
“Mmhmmm,” Bitty confirms, sipping his coffee.
“Here,” she repeats. “In Providence.”
“Here.”
There’s an edge of curiosity in her expression now. “Okay, I’ll bite. Who is it?”
“Well,” Bitty hedges. “I’m not entirely sure.”
“Then how do you know that this person is an international supermodel?”
Bitty leans eagerly across the table. “Consider the evidence: first of all, he’s gorgeous —” Lardo rolls her eyes and starts to speak, but Bitty bowls right over her “— second, he was leaving at ass o’clock in the morning, same as me. We took the elevator together. And he was talking on the phone — in French.”
“That doesn’t mean —”
“Wait! I haven’t told you the most important part.” Bitty pauses for effect. “He was wearing a suit.”
Lardo blinks. “So he’s a businessman.”
“You, Larissa Duan,” Bitty says, pointing an accusatory finger at her, “are no fun. I prefer to think that he was going to a sunrise photoshoot. Let a gay boy dream.”
After a critical glance at her work, Lardo casts her charcoal aside entirely and picks up her mug, smudging fingerprints up the side. “Is there a reason you can’t dream if he’s just some corporate shill?”
“Because then I’ll never know what’s under that suit,” Bitty explains mournfully. “At least if he’s a model, he might do an underwear campaign and I’d see the goods. I deserve that much at least.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Lardo says, and they clink mugs.
*
Bitty’s excited about his new apartment for several reasons. He’s never lived on his own, having gone from his parents’ house to Samwell to bunking with Lardo when she’d transferred to RISD and Bitty had decided that Samwell wasn’t for him (largely because his grades slipped so low that he was barely clinging to his scholarship). It’ll save him from being the awkward third wheel when Shitty visits from Boston. He’ll be closer to the catering company where he’d recently graduated from Baking Assistant to Baker.
I get asked about “Anyway” from The Bad Years a lot. I’ll try not to repeat myself here. I went into a lot of depth in this interview if you want to know more obvious stuff.
The character isn’t me – at all. I don’t think I’ve ever been so sardonic in my life (except maybe when I was 10 – another story for another day). But in my twenties, I had several friends who were my age die. The first one was when I was twenty. She got drunk and fell three stories out of a college dorm window. The second and third happened within a few weeks of each other. One died of a terminal illness and the other got hit by a bus crossing the street in a foreign country. The Mad Ones was always connected to grief. But this song isn’t Sam and it isn’t me. “Anyway” was an exploration of anger and guilt and posturing. The Bad Years has always been a tapestry, an ensemble show. As a result, the songs tell the whole story of a character. You have to immediately know who they are. When people ask questions about context for “Anyway”, I have to admit that it doesn’t matter. The song tells you everything you need to know. And there’s no personal context hidden under the surface like in “Not a Love Story.”
I didn’t expect to see you here –
I mean outside, smoking. I’m more of a nicorette girl these days.
I’m joking.
I mean – I did quit.
But who feels like joking now?
I’ll see you your scowl and raise you a furrowed brow.
This first verse is about establishing who you are. You’re a little nervous and uncomfortable. You’re trying to get a laugh. One of the biggest issues we have with performers tackling the song is when they play the end of the song from the beginning.
It’s sad. Of course it’s sad. What’s interesting is when it isn’t. It’s when you’re vamping, trying to stave off the sadness.
The original setting was outside a funeral, or maybe outside a house where people were sitting shiva. Don’t think about that too hard because the circumstances of The Bad Years have changed (now it’s at the house party). Either way, there’s a sense of someone escaping a claustrophobic space, needing air, and finding the last person you wanted to be alone with – a ghost of christmas past. Picture an arrow. The person who died is the center point and you two are at opposite sides.
You were never close but here you both are. This song is not even trying to bridge the gap. This isn’t a relationship song. It’s a confession song. But the listener (and thereby we as the audience, the stand in) are put into the awkward position of a friendship that never quite took.
Then comes the hook:
Anyway. Anyway.
The hook was the inspiration for the song. I had come up with this musical idea to stretch out the word “anyway” as well as the turn from “anyway" as a restart to “any way” as a plea, like, 10 years ago. I’d written this weird Ani DiFranco-esque lyric when I was fooling around with trying to learn how to write music to songs. We held onto it until we had content that felt like the right emotional territory for it. As soon as we hit on wanting to write a song about immediate grief from the perspective of someone who isn’t emotionally open, we took this hook out of the trunk.
Do you remember how we used to read
Rilke, Joyce?
And we barely understood it, But it gave us a voice
Or a language…
I don’t read poetry anymore.
But if I did,
I’d be reading it tonight for sure.
First thing’s first: the other character isn’t named Joyce, ok? The references are Rainer Marie Rilke and James Joyce. If that was really obvious to you, good on you. If not, you’re welcome.
The silence that you get back from the other character gives you latitude. Your mind starts to wander. I think of the other character in this moment – how there are moments where you don’t know where someone who’s talking to you is going, and it’s almost scary. I remember my mom telling me stories about her childhood that felt off limits when I was a teenager – these windows into who she was, how she became who she became. I remember not speaking for fear of her realizing I was there: true monologue with an audience, where the person goes deeper and deeper into their internality but it’s spoken aloud.
This verse starts a bit more external – a memory, wry – something I’ve thought about, how I used to read poetry all the time. I searched the lines for meaning. And now, I almost never pick it up. It’s so therapeutic, but it never occurs to me anymore. I used to do the same thing with songs. Now I rarely go back and trying to analyze them. It’s an act so anchored in your teen years when your taste is forming. By the end of this stanza, you’ve lost your audience – you’re thinking aloud.
Oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.
Then you remember – you’re talking to someone. It’s a little weird. It’s a little embarrassed. You’re not getting that affirmation that you might want.
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh –
It makes you feel awkward, but your brain is going now. You can’t stop it.
I keep thinking about how the timing seems false, How some days seem faster than my fucking pulse.
And others go so slow.
Like this morning
Feels like a month ago.
Oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.
You’re getting lost. The weekend of my third friend’s memorial was back in Pennsylvania and, by some horrible trick of luck, it was booked on the same weekend as our mutual friend’s wedding. I went to the wedding on Saturday night and the memorial on Sunday afternoon, and so did my friend. She was still wearing her wedding hair as we held hands and cried. I felt like that weekend would never end. Every time I think about post-funeral meals at someone’s house, the warmed over lasagna, the hard dry dinner rolls, it feels like time stretches out like dough. But the entire summer I spent with my friend who got married and my friend who we mourned went by in a snap. Does that make any sense? You’re just thinking aloud. You’re just trying to make sense…
Which leads you to a new thought:
I feel like I’m underwater. I feel like I’m underwater. I feel like I’m underwater.
It’s muted underwater. Everything moves at a different speed. If you scream, no one can hear you. If you open your eyes, it’s beautiful, but you can’t breathe. You can’t survive there.
The first time you hit the idea, it should feel so surprising to you, such an attempt to name something that hadn’t previously been named.
And then you brush it off. It’s nothing.
Anyway. Anyway.
Start over. Full reset.
When we were in rehearsals for The Mad Ones, we talked a lot about “Go Tonight” and why the moment existed – much of the song is about replaying a moment that we already replayed. But the first time, we don’t deal with why it mattered. Sam doesn’t name for herself the point of it (that going back over these moments won’t change the moments but that at the center of this ONE moment, she feels something that she needs to hold onto and take with her).
Here, in “Anyway”, you haven’t hit the dark places you need to go. You scratched the surface but you need to start again, try again. It’s the most basic instinct. You return to the scene of the crime. You write your memoir. You experiment with recovered-memory therapy. Now that you know what it feels like to scratch the surface of the feeling, you need to go at it one more time and see where it leads you.
There’s this building you pass On the subway to Queens – It’s on the L or the R or the one that’s green. [the G train. It’s the G.] – It’s covered in tags, [graffiti] Bright hieroglyphics. These fifteen-year-olds – [taggers] They’re so fucking prolific.
I’m commuting,
I’m eating my goddamn apple
And they’re secretly painting their Sistine Chapel. But whatever,
It’s like they know their odds. If you’re gonna die young, you’d better live like gods. Gods. Gods.
You’ve done this, right? You’ve looked at the impossible. You’ve stared at graffiti 20 stories off the ground. You’ve thought the twin thoughts of ‘why would you risk your life to spray paint on a wall that will only get painted over, or worse, torn down?’ (as with the 5 Pointz, though check this out if you want to see who got the last laugh there), and ‘how glorious.’
The fact is that the kids who are graffitiing walls are in danger. They’re crying out. They need someone to pay attention, to know they were here, because without that, the world may never notice. And they know something we, commuter mortals, forget: we’re going to die.
This is a small point but I think it matters. You’re being kind of a dick by saying some of this. You’re romanticizing something that’s not romantic. You’re equating things that aren’t equal. The death of your friend is not endemic. The incarceration and lower life expectancy of the majority of young urban men who are making street art is. But you’re right on one count:
We might die tomorrow. We might get hit by a bus. Make something now. Otherwise, your mourners will read poetry from your elementary school projects at your memorial. I’ve seen it happen. Dare to try to make something impossible / glorious that lives beyond your life.
And me? I’m not doing anything.
I’m not helping or cleaning.
I’m not even crying.
I’m not doing anything.
She’d be so goddamn helpful.
Well, fuck her for dying ’cause I – I’m not writing her elegy.
Not me.
I’m not writing that down.
They would scrawl her name on a city wall but I’m a fucking clown.
I’m making jokes so I don’t drown.
They say write something that scares you. Saying “fuck her” scared me. I worried it would alienate the audience but you say things like that when you’re grieving – especially when you tell yourself you’re not grieving.
I remember a friend of mine telling me how much our friend’s death didn’t bother her because they’d fallen out a year before. Does she even remember saying that? It was the guilt talking. Even if you don’t say it, you think terrible things when someone dies. The inconvenience of their timing, how you saw it coming when you can only see that in retrospect. You are guilty in the fact of your own inertia, be it the commuter eating an apple; the leach on a funeral, smoking a cigarette because you can’t deal. You live inside the sensation that you have never contributed, that you may never contribute. You survived – the one who had nothing to give – and the other person (future astronomer, social justice lawyer, red cross volunteer) died. If roles were reversed, she would be inside the house making other people feel better. She would comfort the grievers. You – right now, yesterday, and tomorrow – you are doing nothing. Talk about self-loathing.
I was never the best friend, the sister, the mother. I was ten feet away and I was shaken. In the months that followed, I kept thinking about their actual best friend, their siblings. I don’t know what that feels like. But even ten feet away, I felt this seismic shift in who I was. What would be like to feel that every day in the grooves of your routine? I thought about that a lot.
I didn’t want to write about grief. I had to write about grief. Because I could. Because after seeing The Mad Ones, after hearing this song, people grab me by the arm and ask me who I know who died. They have tears in their eyes and I know that they lost someone and this feels true to them and that means something.
At the moment when someone dies, you don’t want to talk about it, or feel it, or deal with it. You don’t want to write about it. You want to avoid it because you’re afraid that if you name it, you will be consumed by it.
By naming the great fear that you will drown, you give into the sensation you’ve been fighting. You let it wash over you.
I feel like I’m underwater. I feel like I’m underwater.
I feel like I’m underwater.
I feel like I’m underwater. Like the whole world is underwater.
Like I’m screaming out underwater.
I feel like I’m underwater these days Anyways.
“Anyways” is a perverse attempt at recovery, of pretending none of that happened. You didn’t start to drown; you weren’t gulping for air. You’re fine. You’re making a joke. You’re rhyming, goddammit.
It doesn’t work. It falls so flat.
Anyway.
The final restart. This is real. This is what you should have said, what you couldn’t have said when you started. This is what you mean.
I didn’t expect to see you here. I mean – thanks for coming.
I thought you’d oppose the use of religious rites as numbing.
I mean – it is dumb.
But what if she can hear them pray?
I mean what the fuck do we know?
Who are we to say?
If there was any way.
Any way.
I told you this wouldn’t be personal. I lied. Everything’s personal.
Have you read A Year in Magical Thinking? I recommend it. Joan Didion wrote it after her husband died suddenly. She’s a master memoirist and so when she turned her lens on such a personal subject matter she’s skilled enough to write something beautiful and restrained. She wrote:
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”
Each time I’ve experienced a death, I’ve had a sensation of cognitive dissonance. I know in my brain that the person is dead, but my heart’s slow to respond. Another friend of mine died this summer. He wasn’t my closest friend. I was ten, even 20 feet away. He was incandescent. Everyone had experienced some unforgettable night where he stared into their soul. We’d had several. He flattered me by meeting up several times to work up a project together. It never got off the ground but just the other day, I had the impulse to share a new thought that might break it open before I remembered that I would never be able to tell him.
I don’t believe in a god. I think your body and soul are intertwined. Nothing magic happens when you die. My friends aren’t haunting the ghost lights of America. But at the same time, I have the humility to hope I’m wrong.
When I put them in the queue I thought everyone was going to get annoyed because they’ve seen them a million times, I feel terrible that so many of you guys haven’t!
There is this controversy in book industries about e-books; specifically Amazon who has made it easy for someone to self publish whereas before it would cost someone thousands of dollars and so if you did you were a loser because you obviously couldn’t get an agent or even get an indie publisher to back you. All of a sudden a million books are being self published by losers who are ruining literature because anyone can just print anything and nothing matters anymore. It’s the same thing they said when they invented the printing press and then again when trade paperbacks became a thing.
A whole bunch of people, mostly fanfic writers just repurpose in their work, start publishing these short erotic novels that they haven’t even edited and it was all getting weirder and weirder.
BDSM became mainstream because of EL James publishing her Twilight fanfiction ‘50 shades of gray’ and then suddenly there were a bunch of books that made people uncomfortable about time traveling to fuck dinosaurs. One erotic novel written by Christie Sims and Alara Branwen kind of became the poster child for the demise intellectualism.
A few years later someone calling themselves Chuck Tingle started to publish tiny erotica novels about people having sex with unicorns and Bigfoot that were intentionally weird with long and had highly specific titles. The covers went viral, most people thinking they were memes but then discovered they were real books that were actual short stories written by somebody who knew how to write and was obviously mocking the controversy.
Everyone was complaining and trying to find out who he was and journalists were trying to contact “him” but he refused to be interviewed. The popular rumor started going around that it was actually a father and son that wrote the books together and someone who everyone is probably sure was actually Chuck Tingle was anonymously interviewed and was like, “lol yeah and we usually write them start to finish in one night” which made people madder and was true because he really blew up when a meme about this dress went viral in a day and by the end of the day
Chuck
Tingle had a new erotic novel about fucking the dress.
Adding to the controversy is the fact that if you publish through Amazon people can read your books for free through their “digital library” but when people check out books it’s technically counted as a sale. Out of nowhere some dude named Chuck Tingle was at the top of the bestsellers list with these offensive books and sort of accidentally got nominated for a really prestigious award and everyone lost their shit.
The powers that be were changing the rules so he couldn’t win, which is what also happened to Neil Gaiman when his comic book Sandman got nominated and everyone was outraged that a comic book could be considered literature. Neil Gaiman actually won the award and then they put in a rule that no more comic books could be nominated, but they got lucky with Chuck Tingle and he didn’t win. Except then he was nominated for a second time.
Obviously Chuck Tingle didn’t win again,
but then he kind of doubled down and published books about getting fucked by his nomination and then fucked by the concept of getting fucked over by the industry. Then his book started getting really mostly sociopolitical and shoved his award nomination down everyone’s throats..
They were still just short weird erotica, but instead of being tongue-in-cheek funny they became condescendingly critical.
He has a website with an about me page but he’s become a folklore hero and everyone is 99% sure it’s fake.
As he stands now, the industries are still really upset but the indie scenes are considering them high art.
I am among the latter.
Don’t forget, the whole reason people nominated Chuck Tingle for the Hugo awards in the first place is because a lot of white male authors were really mad that women and racial minorities were winning awards. They nominated him, but of course, he wasn’t going to ruin the mystery by revealing himself, so instead he had someone go to the Hugos in his place… Zoe Quinn, who Gamergate centered around, and who was therefore the poster child of everything this group *hated*.
Chuck Tingle is a goddamn master.
Thank you for addingthat. I was about to be “but it wasn’t an accident he was nominated for a Hugo”
I have no explanation for why they would end up doing this, but it’s probably the fact that Bitty’s viewers keep asking questions anyway, so Bitty just decides (after asking Jack) to do a livestream Q&A with his viewers.
Jack is nervous because he’s so bad at interviews. he doesn’t want to go into robot mode in front of all of Bitty’s viewers.
(there are also a bunch of curious Falcs fans watching this thing but he doesn’t really think about them because they already know how boring he is at interviews)
so it’s just these two sitting on Jack’s couch reading questions off of the livestream chat and Bitty’s instagram. Bitty does his cue little intro and Jack is next to him, nervous, and gives a shy little “Hello” and the live chat has decided that that was Adorable
“how are we going to read all of these, the chat is going to fast”
“we’ll put it on slow mode, baby. and some of them are going to be from my instagram”
and once the questions start, they kind of catch him off guard. not in a bad way. he just wasn’t expecting answering them to be this easy
(but then again, these questions are about Bittle. he loves talking about Bittle)
My family is not very religious most of the time. We pray at Christmas and Easter and Thanksgiving dinners, and my mom’s entire side of the family excluding her parents and siblings is hardcore religious so whenever we do anything with them it’s kind of religious.
But the point is, most of the time we aren’t, but every year at Christmas time, a church in the next town over puts on a Bethlehem and it’s kind of a tradition to go. They go all out. The building is massive, and they’ve got it all decked out. There’s animals and stalls and everyone is in costume and in character. When you get there, they give you some pennies and you can go and barter for cool little trinkets, and there’s other more expensive things you can buy with your own money. And they have the best apple cider. All in all, it’s pretty cool.
But anyway. We go every year, bundled up in hats and scarves and mittens, and have a good time. We’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember, and my mom talks about going when she was a kid.
I’m going to mention again that everyone is massively in character, especially the really super hardcore religious adults. Because this is an important fact.
Every year since I was about thirteen or so, there’s been this one lady who worked at a stall selling ponchos (I have, like, three. They’re really cool). She was probably there before that, but I was thirteen when she started trying to barter for me to marry her son, who was also about thirteen.
“What a pretty little thing. I think you’d make a very good wife for my son. These are your parents? I’ll give you six goats for your daughter’s marriage to my son.”
Her son, meanwhile, is in the “shop” behind her looking absolutely mortified and like he’d rather be anywhere else than there, and I’m pretty sure I probably looked just as embarrassed.
My parents gave her some sort of excuse, like it wasn’t enough goats or they weren’t ready to marry me off yet or something, and we moved on.
The next year we’re back again, and come up near to the same stall.
“Ah! You’re back again! Have you married your daughter off yet? I can up my offer to nine goats and three chickens for your daughter to marry my son.”
Somehow she remembered the exact people she’d tried to buy their daughter off of for an entire year? So my parents are refusing her offers again and me and the son are trading embarrassed looks and we go on our way.
And then it happens again. And again. And again. Each and every one of the last six years this lady has tried to buy me in goats to be her son’s wife.
A couple years ago when we were waiting in line to get inside my mom jokingly said that they should accept this year and see what she’d do and I completely refused because it was mortifying enough as it was.
One year we brought my friend with us and we’re waiting outside and my sister was like “Are you gonna sell Kee this year?” and my dad was like “Maybe if there’s enough goats” and my friend was confused as heck and I was like “This lady tries to buy me to marry her son every year. I told you that” and she’s like “Yeah but I didn’t think this was a thing that actually happened” and she was still skeptical and by the time my parents had finished refusing the lady’s offer, she’s killing herself laughing and then spent the next few months telling me I couldn’t look at guys because I already had a fiancée.
Anyway, it happened again this Christmas and the son has somehow gotten almost ridiculously attractive since last year. The speech this year had something to do with how I was far too old to not have a husband yet, and the son and I just rolled our eyes at each other as his mom tried to barter with my parents for me.
This year’s offer was twenty six goats and nine chickens. My sister looked up how much goats are worth, and was mad our parents didn’t sell me so she could have sold the goats and gotten $2000-$8000 for them. My dad says they’re waiting out on an offer of a camel. My brother thinks they should have it more than once a year so he can get more apple cider.
Now I’m back at uni, and in my first psych class of the semester the guy sitting beside me looked really familiar.
As in his-mom-tries-to-buy-me-with-goats-every-Christmas familiar.
That kind of familiar.
We introduced ourselves before class started and I sat there for a couple minutes readying to make a total fool of myself in case I was wrong before turning to him again.
“This is going to sound really weird if you aren’t who I think you are, but by any chance does your mom try to buy you a wife with goats every Christmas?”
His friend gives me a weird look as he walks past me to sit on the other side of him, but he’s definitely putting the pieces together.
“That’s you? Bethlehem in [city name], right? God, my mom is so mortifying.”
And we both kinda laugh and meanwhile his friend is giving us both weird looks now because apparently he didn’t know that his friend’s mom was trying to buy him a wife using livestock.
So he turns to his friend and is like
“Oh, I forgot to introduce you. Danny, this is my fiancée, Kee.”
And I kinda rolled my eyes and was like
“I’m not actually your fiancée. Your mom hasn’t offered my parents enough goats yet. But apparently my dad will sell me for a camel.”
And he laughed and shook his head like
“I am not telling my mom that. I don’t want to see what she has planned for if your parents ever accept.”
So yeah. His friend was really confused by that point and we explained it to him and it turns out he’s pretty cool and we’re Facebook friends now and hang out in psych classes. Apparently his mom only ever tries to buy me for him and she and my mom had gone to the same church growing up which is why she can always pick us out.
So yeah. That’s the story of how some lady tries to use goats to buy me to be her ridiculously attractive son’s wife every Christmas, and how he’s in my class and we’re friends now.
It was the 23rd of December, 2017, and my sister had convinced her friend to come with us this year.
“And that’s where Kee’s fiancé usually is,” Sam explained as we stood in the line waiting to get inside. Her friend gave her the same sceptical look she’d apparently been giving since Sam had first told her.
“He’s not my fiancé,” I pointed out, trying to rub some feeling back into my hands. The Goat Guy had been texting me updates since that morning. The organizers had discussed it at length, but apparently temperatures of negative eighteen, thirteen inches of snow, and a blizzard warning weren’t quite enough to have Bethlehem cancelled (or for my parents to decide to skip it this year). Hashtag Canada.
The line was long this year, and we’d already been standing out in the cold for the better part of half an hour. My brother was loudly lamenting the fact that we couldn’t get to the hot apple cider until we’d made it inside.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I braved taking off a glove to check it.
“Who do you keep texting?” my mom asked, not-so-subtly trying to peer over my shoulder at my phone.
“Gregory from psychology,” I told her, sending off a text informing him that we were still in line. It wasn’t technically a lie, since, you know, that was his actual name and he was in my psychology classes. It wasn’t my fault that my family only knew him as the Goat Guy.
“Ooo,” Sam teased, elbowing me in the ribs, her bony elbows hurting less than usual through all our layers. “I’m going to tell your fiancé he has competition, and then maybe they’ll offer us something useful. Like a car or a trip to Hawaii or something.”
I snorted again. “One, he’s still not my fiancé. Two, he doesn’t have competition, because I’m not interested in him or in Gregory. And, three, this isn’t a game show. If anything, his mom will just offer maybe a horse or something.”
“Can I have the horse?”
I rolled my eyes, glancing at my phone as another text came in. Hurry up. “Sure, Cole.”
My brother pumped his fist in the air. “Nice.”
It took another ten minutes or so to make it to the front of the line, and my family had placed their bets on the amount of farm animals that would be offered this year. My dad reminded me that he was selling me if they offered a camel, and I rolled my eyes, trying to act as reluctant to get to that part of the night as I usually was. Apparently I didn’t do as good a job as I thought I did, since Mom questioned me.
I shrugged, feeling my phone go off again. “I guess I’ve just decided to go with it.”
Sam rolled her eyes. “She thinks he’s hot,” she told her friend. Which, well, it wasn’t exactly untrue. Objectively the Goat Guy was ridiculously attractive, but that doesn’t mean I want to (or have time to) date him.
We’d reached the entrance by that point, and were given our little pouches of pennies to buy small trinkets and ducked into the (compared to outside, at least) warmth of Bethlehem.
Roman soldiers milled amongst the people, asking for taxes and wanting to see our papers. We didn’t have papers, obviously, but the soldier who checked us took an extra penny as a bribe.
“Wait,” Sam’s friend said, stopping in her tracks. “There’s a petting zoo?”
There was, in fact, a petting zoo. The petting zoo and the apple cider were there to keep us pacified as we waited for the soldiers to allow us entrance into Bethlehem, and Cole and our parents went off to get us something to drink while I followed Sam and her friend to see the animals.
“What is this?” Sam asked, frowning. “Where are all the animals?”
There were significantly less animals than usual. Two whole pens were empty, and I could see a few soldiers and townspeople whispering to each other in a panic.
“Maybe they were too cold,” I suggested, reaching out to pat a pig’s head. It snorted and turned away.
My parents and brother returned with our drinks, and I sighed into the bliss that is Bethlehem hot apple cider, and, by the time we made it to the gates to listen as the soldiers reminded us of laws that I don’t remember, I actually had a bit of feeling back in my fingers and face.
I pulled off a glove, typing up a quick text. We’re in.
The stalls were as neat as they always were. I bought a wooden hammer to add to my collection for a couple pennies. My mom dug out her wallet to buy a carved wooden bowl. Sam and her friend took selfies with a girl from their soccer team who was working in a bakery and she snuck them a free scone. Cole found another apple cider vendor and took three cups for himself.
“Look,” Sam said, grinning wickedly as she wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “There it is.”
And there it was. The Goat Guy’s mom was standing outside her shop, heckling with a couple over the price of a rug.
“That is a poncho,” I agreed, glancing at one hanging on the side of the shop and deciding I was going to buy it after this whole thing was over.
Sam rolled her eyes. “You know that’s not what I mean,” she pointed out, craning her neck. “I don’t see your fiancé, though.”
“That’s because I don’t have one,” I pointed out, stopping to look at the smithery so I didn’t look too eager to get there.
No one bought that I actually wanted to see some guy pound metal with a hammer (there wasn’t an actual fire or anything, so he was really just sitting there hitting it), so they dragged me across the hall, grins on their faces.
The Goat Guy’s mom, who we will henceforth refer to as the Goat Mom for sake of ease, perked up as she saw us heading towards them, finishing up her bartering and holding her arms out in greeting.
“Ah,” she called, grinning at us. “Back again, I see. Surely you must have found a suitable husband for your daughter by now.”
“Nope,” my mom said, giving me a pointed look. “She’s still single.”
(And, yeah, I was, and still am, but she doesn’t have to be so judgy about it)
The Goat Mom gasped, pressing a hand to her chest. “My dear, you’re far too old to be without a husband,” she cried, causing people to stop to watch. I could feel my face heating up, and glanced around wondering where the Goat Guy was at. We had agreed months ago that this was always far more embarrassing for me than it was for him, so why was he taking so long?
“You won’t be young forever,” the Goat Mom was continuing, grabbing my hands and forcing my to look at her. “You’re running out of time.” She glanced past me to my parents, a smug look on her face that said she got just as much enjoyment out of this as my family did. “My son is still in need of a wife. I’ll tell you what, I will give you thirty goats and ten chickens for your daughter. She—”
“Aww, Mom. You started negotiations without me? How are they supposed to know I’d be the perfect husband for Kee if they can’t see how hot I am?”
The Goat Mom froze for a moment, her grip on my hands loosening enough for me to pull away. I followed the shocked gazes of my family and his mom to the Goat Guy.
He was leaning casually against the shop, somehow managing to look good in clothes that were 2000 years out of fashion, a smirk on his face and a half dozen goats and a llama surrounding him.
“That’s Kee’s fiancé,” Sam whispered to her friend, as if there was any doubt about his identity.
His mom blinked out of her shock, narrowing her eyes at him. “Are you drunk?”
The Goat Guy looked offended, raising a hand to his chest. “What? No!”
Cole started cackling. I don’t think he had any more idea what was going on than the rest of them, but fifteen year old boys are weird.
His mom glanced back at us for a moment, and I had to look away to keep the grin off my face, and noticed quite the crowd had gathered.
She took a deep breath as she turned back to her son, pressing her fingers to her temples. “Then why do you have goats?”
I couldn’t keep myself from snorting then, but, thankfully, everyone seemed too distracted to notice.
The Goat Guy rolled his eyes, relaxing back against the shop once more. “I mean, you’ve been failing at bartering me a wife for eight years, Mom,” he pointed out. “I think they just don’t believe we really have as many goats as you say we have. So I brought goats!” He waved the ropes in his hands, and sent me a wink. “And a llama! Girls like llamas.”
“I think that’s actually an alpaca,” my brother helpfully pointed out, and the Goat Guy grinned.
“You’re probably right, my man,” he agreed and turned back to me. “I’m adding this alpaca onto the list of whatever my mom’s already offered. We can ride off on it into the sunset. What do you say?”
“I say it probably wouldn’t hold us.” I was grinning now, too, no longer able to hold it in.
The Goat Guy just shrugged and stayed silent, letting our families stew for a moment.
“Are you sure you aren’t drunk?” his mom finally asked, glancing between us in confusion. “Maybe you’ve been spending a little too much time at the, uh, tavern.” She glanced at the goats and the llama (alpaca?), realization dawning on her face. “Gregory, you had better not be the reason everyone is panicking about the animals going missing from the petting—trading post.”
“Not drunk,” he insisted, ignoring the part about him stealing the animals from the petting zoo as he thrust the leads of the animals into her hands before she had a chance to protest. “I’m just excited to see my future wife.” He crossed the distance between us, my family stepping back, still mostly in shock, and wrapped me up in his arms. “How’s it going, Kee?”
I laughed, hugging him back quickly before pulling away. “Hey, Gregory,” I echoed loudly, my grin growing at the gasp that came from someone in my family. “How’d you find the psych final?”
He groaned, burying his face in my neck. “Ugh, don’t even get me started,” he whined, an arm wrapping back around my shoulders. “I didn’t fail, but that’s about all I can say.”
I hummed in sympathy, watching our families try to piece together what was going on and the crowd that was wondering if this was supposed to be happening. His mom’s mouth was opening to say something as I caught sight of a couple of soldiers pushing through the crowd, and nudged him.
“You!” one yelled, and the Goat Guy’s head snapped of my shoulder, staring at the soldier in shock. “He stole the king’s animals!” One of the others came forward, pulling him away from me.
“You, uh, have the right to remain silent,” he started, fixing his grip on the Goat Guy’s arm. The soldier who grabbed his other arm rolled his eyes.
“He doesn’t have any rights.”
“Oh, right.” The second soldier nodded and turned back to the Goat Guy. “You don’t have the right to remain silent,” he amended.
“Take him to the king,” the first soldier ordered, taking the leads from the Goat Mom. “He should be tried at once.”
The Goat Guy regained his wits and started to struggle against their hold.
“Wait for me, Kee!” he cried as they dragged him back through the parted crowd. “I’ll come back for you!”
By the time he’d disappeared and the crowd had filled in their path, I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe. It’d gone better than either of us could’ve hoped.
I calmed down after a moment, and the Goat Mom was still staring in confusion in the direction her son had disappeared in. I stepped past her to the shop, pulling the poncho I’d noticed earlier off the wall.
“I’d like to buy this, please,” I said, and her eyes snapped back to me. I grinned and handed her the money, and she pocketed it without bartering, and I walked away, the crowd parting for me as I wandered towards the next stall.
My family joined me a few moments later, as I was browsing some blown glass ornaments and ignoring the fact that the shopkeepers were whispering about me.
“What was that?” my mom demanded.
I shrugged. “That was her bartering for me to marry the Goat Guy like every year.”
“Yeah, that was not like every year.” Sam snorted and I could practically hear her rolling her eyes. “Since when do you know the Goat Guy?”
“Since January?” I tried to look confused, but I’m pretty sure I was still grinning. “You knew that.”
“No?”
“Yeah?” I countered. “Gregory from psychology?”
The stared at me for a long moment before any of them spoke. Sam’s friend was the only one who seemed more entertained than confused.
“That was Gregory from psychology?” my mom asked, and I shrugged, grinning wider. “You planned this, didn’t you? That’s why you kept texting him outside?”
I shrugged. “I mean, we didn’t plan him getting arrested,” I admitted. “But, yeah, we planned the rest.”
“How’d he steal the goats and the alpaca?” Cole wondered.
“He knows a guy.”
“Like that’s what’s important here.” Sam rolled her eyes.
“Why?” my dad asked, and I shrugged again.
“Seven years’ worth of revenge.”
“That’s not what’s important either,” Sam interjected, huffing loudly. “Kee’s totally dating the Goat Guy. I called it.”
“We’re not dating.” I rolled my eyes, pushing past them to continue through Bethlehem. There should’ve been another apple cider vendor coming up soon, and I’d lost all the heat from the last one.
My family did not drop it through the rest of Bethlehem, and neither did any of the vendors who, apparently, knew exactly who I was (my toque was kind of distinctive, so I guess I’ll give them that) and let me know how sorry they were to hear that my man had been locked up just for trying to provide for his family.
We also saw the Goat Guy again, who had been locked up with the prisoners in a large cage, guarded by a handful of soldiers.
He grinned as he saw us approaching, calling out for me and sticking his arms through the bars.
“Can I borrow your notes later?” he asked. “I’m in here for nineteen years, so I’ll be missing a bit of class.”
Sam and her friend posed for selfies with him, and then she made me pose for one with him that will definitely be used for blackmail at a later date.
And that was Bethlehem. No one shut up on the entire drive home, or for the rest of Christmas break, for that matter, about the fact that I’d been keeping my knowing the Goat Guy a secret for almost a year—which I hadn’t, as I pointed out multiple times. They all knew about Gregory from psychology, and he was literally in my phone as The Goat Guy. It wasn’t my fault they hadn’t put the pieces together.
My family is convinced the Goat Guy and I are meant to be and still not entirely convinced that we aren’t currently dating, and I’m kind of dreading what that might mean for Bethlehem 2k18. Honestly, I’d rather not have to deal with the fallout of my parents actually giving in and getting me a bartered husband, no matter how hot he might be. But I feel like they’re going to accept one year, especially after what we did this year.
The Goat Guy says his mom isn’t any better, and is already planning for next year but won’t let him know anything. Maybe I can convince my parents that I never have to go back ever again.
Two weeks later, I caught the Goat Guy’s eye from across the psychology lecture hall, waving him over.
“Hey,” I said, grinning at him as he slipped into the seat beside me. I turned to my friends. “Guys, this is Gregory the Goat Guy.”
“Her fiancé,” he added, and I snorted at my friends’ incredulous looks and punched him gently in the shoulder.
“Not my fiancé,” I corrected, and turned back to him. “The llama was impressive, but you know my dad’s expecting a camel.”
“Darn,” he said, laughing. “I could have sworn you said llama. I guess I’ll have to find a camel by next year if we ever want to get engaged.” He paused, raising an eyebrow. “But you know, I did get arrested before your parents had a chance to decline the offer this time. Maybe they were going to say yes to the llama.”
“Wait,” my friend said, leaning around me to give the Goat Guy a once over. “That story was real? The Goat Guy actually exists?”
casual reminder that i wrote an 90-page novel when i was eight about a deranged pensioner who wants to take over the world and return everything to “The Good Old Days”, and which included such choice elements as
a really neurotic vegetarian vampire
alice cooper, for no apparent reason
an evil supermodel called miranda goth
three nine-year-olds climbing mount everest in diving helmets
the entire population of scotland appearing out of literally nowhere to help defeat the antagonists
“you can take our lives but you cannot take our trousers"
a few people have been asking me to post extracts from this so uh
here’s something
in 20 years i’ll be telling people how i first heard of the best novel ever written when it was a 500 notes post on tumblr
casual reminder that this is now, by (un)popular demand, an ebook! so if you’d like to fund my lifelong desire to own an army of trained meerkats and help me pay off my student loans, feel free to drop some shinies my way. or just reblog this post. that works too
it’s only 2.99 and i bought it without a second thought
OP, you are the perfect mixture of Welcome to Night Vale and Lemony Snickett
1. Nobody knows when her birthday is, her brother confirmed she doesn’t have one and if you ask her she will avoid the question.
2. She said she hates the sun and usually stays out of its way all the time.
“[Talking about filming Jurassic World in Hawaii] I have to say, I hate the sun so it wasn’t much fun for me…” (x)
3. She’s super pale.
4. She hasn’t aged in 10 years.
5. And we haven’t seen pictures of baby Katie. We only have this one and I mean, that could have been taken 100 years ago for all we know.
6. She played a vampire once and was pretty convincing.
7. She has those
hypnotizing out of this world eyes.
8. She always wears sunglasses to cover them, even inside.
9. She’s alluring and inhumanly beautiful.
10. She just looks like one…
11. Also, she loves meat, she wears mostly black clothes that cover every surface of her skin, loves cold weather, is highly intelligent, knows a lot about history (’cause she lived it) and loves it, doesn’t have any social media so she won’t be ‘out there’ and when she’s not filming she disappears for long periods of time and she barely leaves her house. I know there are more things that I’m forgetting. I’m just saying…
A sitcom about the modern Greek gods where everyone is wildly miscast
Zeus is played by Michael Cera
😂😂😂😂 Hephaestus is Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
@seerofbirds has cast Danny DeVito as Aphrodite and @qrowxiii has cast Eddie Murphy as Ares, so this is shaping up to be a pretty great TV pitch and if anyone from Hollywood is reading this, could you also consider casting Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson as Hermes and Christopher Walken as Apollo, thanks.
Hera is Oscar Isaac because are you really going to cheat on Oscar Isaac, Michael Cera? Really? You’d do that? You’d look at that man’s face and chase tail somewhere else, Michael Cera, you sack of shit?
I’m dying this is fantastic I NEED THE WHOLE CAST
Hades is Whoopi Goldberg and Persephone is Jeff Goldblum and Demeter is Julie Andrews. Their interplay makes up 70% of the film and is all improvised.
Athena is played by Amy Schumer (thanks anon!) and she defeats her enemies by being incredibly loud and annoying and plagiarising all their tactics and eventually they just give up in irritation. She only has 3 minutes of screen time and no dialogue. Thank fuck.
Heracles is played by Jesse Eisenberg because Michael Cera got to be Zeus. Sometimes they swap roles. No-one notices.
Poseidon is played by Daniel Craig but his only scene is when he reenacts the famous Bond scene with speedos.
Artemis is played by Robert Pattinson and all his lines are just slightly amended from Twilight. Dionysus is played by Helen Mirren. It is perhaps the only apt casting in the film.
To clarify, Hestia is absolutely played by Charles Dance, whose costume includes an apron which gets progressively dirtier throughout the series.
In the sitcom, which precedes the feature film and which focuses on certain myths every episode, Narcissus is played by John Goodman. Echo is played by Billy Crystal.
Other episodes include the story of Eros and Psyche, played respectively by Jane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine, the story of Daedalus and Icarus, played respectively by Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern, and the story of Zeus overthrowing Cronus, in which Michael Cera as Zeus must defeat Cronus, as played by John Cena, in a battle of wits and muscle. Astonishingly, he wins.
this is all very good gud
but who is perseus and medusa? jason , Midas, circe, media, please I NEED TO KNOW
These are very important questions and I will answer them immediately.
Perseus and Medusa are played by Andy Samberg and Glenn Howerton. All their scenes together are just them one upping each other with improvised insults.
Jason and Medea are played by John Boyega and Meryl Streep, and all their scenes are so beautifully acted that they both get nominated for Oscars, despite the fact that one of Jason’s lines is “are you trying to fleece me out of the golden fleece?”, to which Medea replies “me, fleece you? Oh no, me dear.”
Midas is played by Steve Buscemi, obviously. For no discernible reason, everything he touches does not turn to gold, but copper alloy. This is possibly due to budget cuts. Due to their on screen chemistry, he bizarrely has several buddy cop style scenes with Jeff Goldblum’s Persephone.
Circe does not appear. If she did, she would be played by Audrey Hepburn, using that creepy CGI from the Galaxy adverts, but her estate refuse to give their permission.
Important updates:
(Anonymous suggests: Kelsey Asbille Chow playing Achilles, Michelle Obama is Thetis, Danny Trejo as Helen, Terry Crewes as Paris, and Adrien Brody as Hector. olvmpos says: Ganymede is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and regularly benchpresses Michael Cera.)
there’s something endlessly hilarious to me about the phrase “hotly debated” in an academic context. like i just picture a bunch of nerds at podiums & one’s like “of course there was a paleolithic bear cult in Northern Eurasia” and another one just looks him in the eye and says “i’l kill you in real life, kevin”
I heard a story once about two microbiologists at a conference who took it out into the parking lot to have a literal fistfight over taxonomy.
have i told this story yet? idk but it’s good. The Orangutan Story:
my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?
wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.
background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.
so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—
then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”
some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.
so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.
much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.
so my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. then out of the dead silence, the panel moderator stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:
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