It’s Tessie,” Mr. Summers said, and his voice was hushed. “Show us her paper, Bill. “

Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd.

“All right, folks. ” Mr. Summers said. “Let’s finish quickly. “

Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. “Come on,” she said. “Hurry up. “

Mrs. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said, gasping for breath. “I can’t run at all. You’ll have to go ahead and I’ll catch up with you. “

The children had stones already. And someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone. ” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

Shirley Jackson, The Lottery

Shirtless daddy dancing around on Santa Monica screams “you wanna come home with us?” 

I hesitated and he yelled “we have coke!!!” 🤔😒🙄😕

Bleh. I guess I look the type, huh.

Good looking enough guy but the wheels that were turning in my head were more like “I want to see Paula Abdul.”

Hey, little boy with the ba ba ba ba ba balloon! 

His partner cringed and was sufficiently embarrassed for all three of us.

Either that or he was like “hell no honey don’t put that scrub in your mouth, you’re cut off.”

Hey, mister police officer- UH OH! 

*giggle*

Dear WeHo: Cocaine is one of the worst drugs known to man, strictly in terms of dollars per minute of enjoyment. 😡

I stopped into my old home group to pour myself a coffee and leave without putting a dollar in the basket.

I dodged a fake “oh, it’s good to see you” or two and got the most rancid look from the greeter as I drove off.

😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

Olin Park, Christmas 2001

They have a huge Christmas display you can see from John Nolen Drive.

The electronics are pretty crude: Anything that blinks or alternates is plugged into a big metal box with a large relay you can hear clicking back and forth.

For example: A railroad crossing sign with a little arm that goes up and down, is actually two arms. One in the raised position and one in the lowered position.

They alternate back and forth between which one is lit up, and to you, it looks like the arm is going up and down.

We stacked a couple of triads of reindeer up, with the one on the bottom constantly lit.

Then we took the two on top and plugged them into these devices so that they’d alternate back and forth between which one was lit.

From the highway it looked like a reindeer thrusting in and out of the one on the bottom.

After that, we hopped the fence for Edgewood College and walked up to the nativity scene.

I don’t know what we intended to do — scope out the electronics like we did at the park I guess and go from there, right?

As we got halfway up the driveway, the twenty foot high back drop started creaking and groaning and it fell forward, crashing down on the entire nativity scene.

I looked at him.

He looked at me.

I said “I think God is trying to tell us something.”

He goes, “Nah. It saw us coming and it surrendered.”

We called it a night.

I wouldn’t say that he was a religious fellow to put it mildly.

There was an unrelated nativity scene stunt where Baby Jesus was replaced with a Heavenly Ham from the Heavenly Ham Company.

And then there was that time some billboard up in Door County said: “Jesus is the answer, what is your question?” and the fucker spray painted “Who raped my son?” on the bottom.

I did snicker at some point in one of my interviews, only to be challenged with “Do you think this is funny?”

Apologies, but yeah, I do think that at least a couple of the things he did were quite funny.

1. You are not just the body that you see. You are a Soul. You are divine light in physical form. A unique aspect of source creator.

2. You have an agenda. A soul contract to fulfill. You need to establish a connection with your higher self to reach an awareness of that mission.

3. Reality is far different from what we’ve been told. It is multi-dimensional. It has no real solidity. It is essentially a holographic template in which you can create/manifest using your thoughts. The external is a reflection of the internal. 

4. The very sub-stratum of all matter is an intelligent energy or consciousness. God is not a man with a beard sitting on a throne, he is the totality of everything that exists. It is essentially a gigantic universal mind.

5. You are not alone in this. Each and every one of you are surrounded and protected by higher-dimensional beings (spirit guides/angels). However, as they will not violate your free-will, you actually have to ask and give permission for them to assist you. They will provide you with an abundance of signs and synchronicities which will reassure you of their presence and help to guide you along your path. Note – Because of the universal law of vibrational attraction, they cannot prevent any outcomes that you yourself are vibrationally attracting.See section on law of attraction.

6. For the most part, volunteers are more advanced souls who have voluntarily enlisted to assist the planet during a critical evolutionary phase. You volunteered because you had a sort of “galactic expertise” and have probably been in similar circumstances before. Because of a “force-field” around the etheric regions of the planet you had to undergo what is known as a “spiritual fall” in order to incarnate here. This means that you willingly set yourself back in your spiritual evolution from a higher state to a lower state. As such, your goal is to now re-evolve spiritually so that you can effectively serve divine will and then ascend back into the higher dimensions.

7. You have the ability to radiate refined “light-love” energy. This energy has a positive restorative effect on all matter(humans, animals, plants etc). It raises the frequency vibration of the planet and helps heal the delicate energy grid-lines. (ley-lines). Spiritual attainment will enable you to optimize the output of your love-light energy. Although, you will need to energetically neutralize your negative output.

8. The elite of this planet are in service to dark spiritual lords, who are opposed to the will of source creator. They are not interested in spiritual evolution and wish to maintain a tight grip on their pseudo-power. Their strategy, in an energetic sense, is to counter the oncoming positive energy by the deliberate dispersal of negative energy which has a deleterious impact upon the energy system of the planet and keeps it in a lower vibrational status. They also intend to neutralize the positive energy of the volunteers by embedding them with negative energy. This is accomplished by causing you to feel and express negative emotions (fear, anger, hatred etc). 

9. The law of attraction – One of the fundamental laws of the universe that dictates the nature of your reality is the law of vibrational attraction. Everything in this universe at its base structure is energy including your thoughts. This energy has a quality in that it attracts to itself energy of a like nature. Positive (higher vibrational) energy attracts more positive energy and negative (lower vibrational) energy attracts more negative energy and so on. So basically, if you put out energy (thoughts) of a negative vibration, that negative quality of energy will be reflected back to you. This is how gang-stalking works at the deeper level. They (the perpetrators) cause you to fall into a fear-based mindset in which you will vibrationally attract negative outcomes into your life. This provides them with what is known as a “vibrational opening” in which they can then invade your reality.

The entire control system is predicated upon keeping humanity in a very limited frame of perception. Your conditioned in such a way that you immediately reject anything that falls outside of the accepted norm. And through this mechanism your kept in ignorance of anything that could endanger the status-quo. So therefore i would recommend you keep an open mind, and realize that the “rabbit hole” goes deeper than you would think.

— Author unknown 

(I think it sounds like Dolores Cannon, possibly “The Three Waves of volunteers” or someone kind of wired the same way as Dolores there- correction/attribution welcome)

Picture, if you will, a couple in a blue Toyota Prius from Wyoming,
shoving Pringles potato chips into their faces
She’s driving and he’s wearing an Argyle sweater,
looking like a millennial waifu with silver dollar sized eyes.
They’re both pointing at every object and building and person on Hollywood Boulevard,
talking excitedly.

I haven’t been that excited since the one time I dropped ecstasy and wandered into the produce section at Jewel Osco.

Marveling at the lucious red apples
Stunned by how bright and beautiful the yellows of the bananas were.
How vivid the tangerines and lemons and loose leaf spinach looked.

Staring at the sprinklers with the wonder of a child
As the PA system began to play “Singing in the Rain”
Singing in the rain,
Singing in the rain!
My rapture unbroken by the cashier asking me to please leave.
Oh my gosh, she was pretty!

They both have that look about them right now
Cruising past the Hollywood Walk of Fame
Mesmerized out of their minds and probably without ecstasy.
But then again, it’s Hollywood Boulevard
And this is within the realm of possibility

He favors the sour cream and onion flavor.
And hers look like they might be barbecue.
I’m so happy for the both of them today.
Like the weeds and the dandelions, love always finds a way.

And then picture, if you will, a guy in a white sedan from California,
Cruising down Peterson Blvd.
Mesmerized out of his mind, and possibly without ecstasy.
But then again I have some history
And this is within the realm of possibility

This time my observer is sitting in the car with me.
I’m blasting Leela James
Singing along, tapping my fingers on the wheel.
My heart yearns for a passenger in the seat
To kick it and banter and then go our separate ways
Ever so much lighter for such an interaction

I realize that a woman next to me is staring at me
And she is smiling.
I’m a little shy realizing that this time I’m the one in the car
With the out of state plates, being observed
I’m a little self-conscious but I keep tapping and I keep singing.

I was so happy for the both of them that day
And this elderly woman is looking at me that way today.
Some people are intuitive and sense that you are looking their way.
From the perspective of another vehicle in the exact same position today.

Her observer is a little like my observer, namaste.
And then we went our separate ways
Ever so much lighter for such an interaction
Like the weeds and the dandelions, life always finds a way.

I’ve always loved rat-related anecdotes.

I love how rats try to free one another from a trap.

I’ve heard something about the rat who would pull a lever to administer drugs over and over and over until it died.

And I went, “well, fuck, that’s kind of bleak.”

I didn’t know the other part of the story about Rat City, where they took the same rats and gave them a space that was 200 times larger than their previous cage.

They were given toys to play with and plenty of treats and food and other rats to socialize and places to nest and raise their young.

Only 5% or so of the rats continued to pull the lever after that.

Given the choice between regular water and drug laced water, most chose the regular water after that.

I was like “how have I never heard this?”

One of my classmates snorted and said “too expensive, no one wants to hear about this or come up with the money for it. It got buried and that’s all anyone ever heard about Rat City.”

I got to thinking the chatroom’s kind of like Rat City: Take a bunch of neurotic and isolated rats sitting at home and yanking on their dope levers and give them others to socialize with.. and a hunt game and some macros to play with, and bam. Some of them stopped yanking on the lever.

Some of them remain behind and continue to try to free the other rats from their traps.

It’s a far cry from addressing other psychosocial needs or getting people out of survival mode though.

I wish we had a version of Rat City that wasn’t wedded with NA kool-aid and abusive fucked up steppers.

Because I don’t think Rat City would have been so successful if you had introduced the aforementioned rat into a cage full of other rats that were bullies.

Update 9/20/2022: I’m going to leave that bullshit as-is but here, two anons dish on the real ”rat city” / “rat utopia” story:

Roses are red, violets are blue
I’ve been diagnosed with zero four two
And all of two ninety through three one nine
Won’t you be my valentine?

Roses are red, violets are blue
I have “B” twenty and “Z” twenty two.
And all of “F” one through “F” ninety nine
Won’t you be my valentine?

A rats nest of tangled wires for electronics long forgotten
I left a banana on my kitchen counter, it is now rotten.
Reminding me of the bananas of my youth
when I played a whore,
in Egypt with a tourniquet and some cotton.

The mail is yellow and faded and spilling out of the box
And I’m kicking myself for not changing the locks
It seems though my sister has pawned my guitar
For a baggie of shards or some sticky black tar.

A Rubbermaid tote full of “video head cleaner”
And floppy rubber dongs I used to jam in my hole
A faded photo of grandma, so long since I’ve seen her
May God rest her soul

About forty feet of chain for the sling
This and that and some other thing.
Is it time? It is time.
It is time to clean up the house for spring.

I regret I even have to say this, but “my sister did not do that” she is aware of the post and thinks it’s funny. The guitar in question was either lost or stolen by the moving company I’d hired but I can’t work with that.

The only one of these artifacts that was actually (really) in my vacant house when I returned to it was the banana on the kitchen counter and whatever mischievous / lascivious thoughts were brought on by that.

Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which have ten talents. For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he hath. Matt. 25:28-29

Why is the one-talented man chosen as an illustration of these talent-burials? It is to show the responsibility of those who have least – That the Lord expects even of the least of his consecrated people to know of and to use the talents that he has in his possession, and that he will not hold guiltless even those who have the smallest ability to serve him and his brethren and his Truth, yet who neglect to use it. Z. 01-59.

I received permission to write about this. 

The story is better than this, but the only person whose whole process I am at liberty to put out there on this page is my own.

******

She came into the room with the name “oxygen waster.”

I shouldn’t have laughed at it.

Because she kind of meant business.

But I did laugh.

I saw other people do the same thing: 

“LOL. OMG I LOVE YOUR NICKNAME.”

She was confused: Why is that so god damned funny to everyone? 

Because we’ve all felt like that before.

She explained that she got it from a band.

Not everyone comes back.

But she came back.

And then she came back again.

It only took a couple of days before the chat robot offered another animal in the hunting game.

Somebody typed !axe

I don’t even know what the bot says anymore. Something like: “Whoop whoop! [your] hatchet swings right and left, [you] have massacred a [$animal]. This juggalo killer has smoked X animals.”

The new arrival has a question: “wait, which one of you is the juggalo?”

The near 40-year-old with a hatchet girl tattoo who wrote the website with the aforementioned juggalo Easter egg.

“Mmfwcl”

“MCL”

And when she said we made her cry and want to live,

I cried too.

Maybe other people leave this place with hope,

But I’m not usually one of them.

One of my favorite gigs was when they built the Vikings new stadium and I was blasting Evidence – Rain or Shine on one of the club levels. IIRC, I was trying to nail down an audio problem or HDMI signal degradation when some kids burst through the door.

I sheepishly turned the audio levels down. Grunts like me weren’t supposed to be seen or heard in some stadiums when the doors were open for spectators, but this was Minnesota after all: They all but tackle hug you at the door up there.

One of the kids grinned and thumbed up and told me to turn it back up. I was happy to oblige:

It’s funny how strength comes in different forms
Some embrace they faith, others weather storms
Others tell themself that the pain moves on
I saw the clouds move in and when it did, they poured
I push away the pain, it’s the sun and the rain 
Rain or shine, I got my umbrella

I just thought it was neat to stand on the 50 yard line with all my clothes on!

I’m in my Sex and Cigarettes phase:

That’s the one where all the men did her dirty and fucked around on her and the IRS is after her ass.

She might be down but she aint out and she’ll turn it ’round.

“I always knew worry was a fraud, because it would go away so quickly with just a laugh.”

12:22 AM <Robin_Y> when you are young they want to peek in your pussy
12:31 AM <misterpickles> When you’re 21, you’re no fun

“He picks us up like a needle on a record and puts us in another groove.”

I heard him.

The guy stared at me and asked me if I understood what he meant.

I said “no.”

They were making fun of him outside:

“I just.. can’t with him. I had to walk out on him.”

I snapped a picture of someone’s mean tweet because I was interested but I was only half listening at first and I missed the first part that she tweeted about.

I read her tweet, thought about it for a minute, went back inside, and said “Hey Rainbow?”

“Yeah?”

“God rides me like a hood rat in a stolen Camaro.”

He laughed.

I left.

And then about ten minutes later it clicked.

I went back to that bitchy meeting and raised my hand:

“God rides me like a hood rat in a stolen Camaro.”

A couple of the mean tweet crowd snickered.

I continued:

“He picked me up like a needle on a record and he put me in another groove. Fuck, that made my night.”

The chair said “mic drop!” and I left again.

One of our facilitators said she wished she had one of supergirl’s abilities:

She put her hand on another participant’s forehead and said something like “Supergirl has the ability to put her hand on your forehead and wipe away a bad memory.”

Then she gave a demonstration.

I just about spit my coffee out:

I use the nick “supergirl” sometimes.

Supergirl DOES have that capability, if she buys a fat sack of special K and puts a bump or two of it on a key for you.

And then there are those of us who don’t need dissociative agents to go all disso on you.

puts his hand on his own forehead and makes the trauma vanish and the bad people not exist anymore

I told you I was supergirl.

I may or may not have been responsible for the memory she wished she could erase.