My first printed article after hooking up with Superman would be "GUYS I HOOKED UP WITH THE MOST AMAZING GUY HE'S INCREDIBLE" and would just be a rambly little bit of half-arsed story to get the reader started that would have just rapidly devolved into a bulletpointed list of everything I liked about him.
I know this because my real partner really is that amazing and all I want to do is shout into the universe about
how compassionate they are - their entire mindset seems based on considering others
how they will do everything in their power to help others, even people they don't know
how pragmatic they manage to be without sacrificing ANY compassion - their biggest superpower is getting shit done while leaving a trail of happy and helped people in their wake
how they don't take shit from anyone - if your intentions are to take advantage of them, they will give you as much rope as they'd give anyone else but no more. It's up to you whether you climb that rope or hang yourself with it
how cuddly and cute they are
how they don't hide that cuddly cute side just for me. If you interact with them long enough to know their name, you get to see it too and then I get to gush with you about how adorable they are
how intelligent they are - when a subject interests them enough for them to want to have conversations about it, they educate themselves on it so that they CAN have those conversations in some capacity past "I saw a headline that said..."
how forgiving they are - they are the embodiment of Never Assume Malice, even when some dickhead cuts them off on the highway... "I hope the baby is born healthy dude!"
how waking up next to them every morning and going to sleep next to them every night makes every single one of my days start and end with nothing but joy in my soul
how they can make friends with ANYONE
how much they've inspired me to write again
how easy they make it all look, despite me knowing better
their INCREDIBLE taste in music and cartoons
the way they just FIT in my little found family. They have become QPPs with my QPP of almost a decade and when my adult stepson from my previous marriage told me his landlord had decided to turn his place into an airbnb with 3 weeks notice and he had nowhere to go they started digging out the air mattress and reorganizing the storage closet so we could get him and his stuff safe
Actually that should be its own bulletpoint. Someone they'd never met but who was important to me went "I need help, like a LOT" and their instant response was BET
(Don't be surprised if this gets edited and added to it's a first draft)
I hope some of y'all take this as a sign to rest intentionally too.
if you're "resting" but thinking of all the things you have to do, that's not resting, that's rotting. Even if you haven't done anything all day, give yourself some time to rest and truly relax. When you let yourself relax guilt free, you actually regain energy for your responsibilities.
this post has helped me a number of times since I first saw it. I have realized I was rotting instead of resting, and depending on the circumstance, got up to do something, or settled more comfortably to actually rest.
i experienced too many weather phenomenons today. extremely foggy/smoggy in the morning, turned into bright sunny mid day, cooling down with some strong winds, and then lighting storm
"Tattoos are becoming unpopular", "piercings are unpopular again", "keep your hair natural never dye it again, it's the trend now" literally fuck off I know what y'all are doing
We live in the dumbest, lamest cyberpunk dystopia possible.
So LA has been â and continues to â protest against ICE. These protests havenât gotten any smaller or lost any momentum, but social media wasnât reflecting it.
TikTok users, realizing that the platform/other social media are censoring/deleting/shadowbanning these protest videos, decided to find a workaround.
Theyâre calling it the LA Music Festival. Ice detention centers and other protest locations are âstages.â The hottest band is Rage Against the Machine. âHereâs what gear you should be bringing to stay safe at the LA Music Festival.â
And it fucking worked.
TikTok has become a proving ground for a lot of new music, meaning lots of labels and organizations have lucrative deals with TikTok to promote their new artists and music festivals. So they absolutely cannot censor the words âmusic festivalâ or train the algorithm to ignore it, or they risk endangering that very important revenue.
So now protest videos are flooding feeds again, but itâs the LA 24/7 Music Festival. Truly an incredible timeline weâve landed in.
During the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s, radio broadcasts would refer to upcoming marches as "parties" and use other such euphemisms to sneak calls to organize past censors. For example, the Birmingham marches of 1963 were called "a field trip in the park with a luncheon".
This is, frankly, a timeless strategy, just done online.
did a bit of driving through the state of georgia today and wound up driving through a small town that i later discovered was called newborn, which is an odd name but doesnât technically have anything wrong with it, except for the fact that i nearly gave myself whiplash doing a double-take at a building sign advertising NEWBORN TAXIDERMY
theres bikes around the city you can rent but you have to use an app that needs your drivers license. theres buses that drive right to your destination, but if you dont have change you need the app. you can wash your car here if you sign into the app. you can go to the bathroom here you just have to unlock it with the app that needs your location on. you can order at this restaurant if you scan the code and download the app. im losing my freaking mind
I'm going to start calling this crap "hostile web design." It's the internet version of hostile architecture. Designed to keep out people who can't or won't pay, results in less accessibility for disabled users.
HOWEVER! There is a solution.
Go to https://bugmenot.com/ and enter the URL of the site you're trying to access that's demanding a login. In most cases, you'll get a list of usernames and passwords you can use to log in.
The only downside to talking to small children like theyâre normal people and treating them like normal people (as per my mom) is that as they develop into bigger children they are viscerally aware of every single moment in which they are pandered to like stupid little accessories (as per my dad, my teacher, the special ed aide, every adult in my middle school) and you end up getting a lot of phone calls from people reporting your kid for (checks notes) âundermining authorityâ, âdisrupting the classroom environmentâ, âdisobeying elder peersâ, and âunionizing the grade eleven gym class with intent to incite a mutinyâ (as per me) and you end up with a Grown Adult who will absolutely encourage and enable other peopleâs children to fuck the sustem
The only downside to talking to small children like theyâre normal people and treating them like normal people (as per my mom) is that as they develop into bigger children they are viscerally aware of every single moment in which they are pandered to like stupid little accessories (as per my dad, my teacher, the special ed aide, every adult in my middle school) and you end up getting a lot of phone calls from people reporting your kid for (checks notes) âundermining authorityâ, âdisrupting the classroom environmentâ, âdisobeying elder peersâ, and âunionizing the grade eleven gym class with intent to incite a mutinyâ (as per me) and you end up with a Grown Adult who will absolutely encourage and enable other peopleâs children to fuck the sustem
It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.
But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.
To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.
San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.
Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.
Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.
Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.
Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.
When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.
He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.
It was a mistake that would change American history.
Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghostsâskeletal, in pain, and terrified.
She saw "her kids."
She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.
Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.
She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.
So, she made a choice.
She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.
Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.
The most expensive ingredientâthe cannabisâwas donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.
She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.
She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.
"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."
And it did.
Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.
Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."
For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.
She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.
She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."
By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.
In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.
This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.
One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."
They underestimated who they were dealing with.
They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.
When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.
It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.
Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.
She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.
Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.
"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."
The quote ran in newspapers across the country.
The court didn't stand a chance.
Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Maryâs brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.
The charges were dropped.
Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.
She needed to change the law.
August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.
She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Clubâthe first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.
But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.
She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.
She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.
In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.
It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.
She never got rich.
She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.
She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.
Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.
Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.
Most of them have never heard of Mary.
They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.
They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.
They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.
Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."
She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.
She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.
She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.
Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.
It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.
It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.
Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.
Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.
Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana." Weird Everything, FB december 12, 2025
Edited To Add: The wiki entry should be in here vs the history.com link - so here you go.
This blog is for me. @kamorth - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
