Max.

Just Max, not Mad Max.

[manny-jacinto]

[vote-for-eggman]

[mymentals]

[maxjustmaxnotmadmax]

Wrong Side of the Track Marks - MaxJustMaxNotMadMax

This song is about the process of healing from codependency. I hope it resonates with someone out there.

[zevveli]

I still think that my favorite urban legend/folklore fact is that there are certain areas in New Orleans where you cannot get a taxi late at night not because it isn’t safe, but because taxi companies have had recurring problems of picking up ghosts in those areas who are not aware that they are dead and disappearing from the cab before reaching the destination and therefore stiffing the driver on the fare causing a loss for the company.

[elsajeni]

An occupational hazard of cab driving I had not previously considered

[princessnijireiki]

I love that the nola problem here is not “ghosts in my taxi cab,” but “ghosts are FUCKING BROKE DEAD BASTARDS & I GOT BILLS”

[siderealsandman]

Horror is when ghosts get into cabs and scare drivers Magical realism is when cab companies have to develop policies to prevent ghastly fare-theft

[kc749]

In a book about the tsunami in Japan in 2011, the writer talked about how there was a huge increase in reports of ghostly activity. Apparently in Japan treating ghosts rudely is basically considered the stupidest thing you could possibly do. For months after the tsunami, taxi drivers would pick up a passenger only to have them give an address in one of the devastated areas. The cab driver often looked up halfway to the destination to find their fare had disappeared. Not wanting to be impolite to the person (even if they were dead) they’d drive to the address, open the door to let them out, then drive away.

[theawkwardqueerturtle]

I love seeing different ways cultures deal with supernatural entities

[genderfluid-and-confuzled]

Japanese taxi drivers: We will respect the dead

New Orleans drivers: YOU FUCKERS THIS IS THE FORTH TIME THIS WEEK

[star-anise]

My girlfriend and I talk a lot about our different generations of queerness, because she was doing queer activism in the 1990s and I wasn’t.

And she’s supportive of my writing about queerness but also kind of bitter about how quickly her entire generation’s history has disappeared into a bland “AIDS was bad, gay marriage solved homophobia” narrative, and now we’re having to play catch-up to educate young LGBTQ+ people about queer history and queer theory. It gets pretty raw sometimes.

I mean, a large part of the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.

“Excuse us,” she said bitterly the other day, not at me but to me, “for not laying the groundwork for children we never thought we’d have in a future none of us thought we’d be alive for.”

[freedom-of-fanfic]

“the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.”

[aphilologicalbatman-deactivated]

thank you for giving me a good reason to finish my dissertation and try to make it in the academy

[brs-love]

Wait, idk LGBTQ+ history, but they died of AIDS cause, what, hospitals refused to treat them or…?

[star-anise]

Oh heck yeah.

When an epidemic happens, public health agencies spend millions of dollars trying to understand what happens: Why are people sick or dying? What caused it? Who else is at risk? Government health departments like the Centres for Disease control and private companies both invest hundreds of millions of dollars into preserving public health. This happened in 1977, when military veterans who all attended the same gathering began to get sick with a strange type of pneumonia, with 182 cases and 29 dead, and the CDC traced the illness to a bacterium distributed by the air conditioning system of a hotel they all stayed at, and in 1982, when seven people died of tainted Tylenol, and pharmaceutical companies changed the entire way their products were made and packaged to prevent more deaths.

Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic took six years to be recognized by the CDC (1975-1981) because at first the only people dying were intravenous drug users, which is to say, heroin addicts; when it was recognized, President Reagan’s government pressured the CDC to spend as little time and money on AIDS as possible, because they literally didn’t think gay lives were important. So yes, hospitals refused to treat them and medical staff treated them as disgusting people who deserved to die, but also, there was very little funding for scientists to understand what this disease was, what caused it, where it came from, how it spread, or how to stop it. The LGBTQ+ community had to organize and fight to get hospitals to treat them, to fund scientific research, to be legally allowed to buy the drugs that kept them alive, and to have access to treatment. An effective treatment for AIDS wasn’t found until 1995.

And it’s ongoing; a lot of the difficulty of fighting AIDS in Africa is that it’s seen as “the gay disease” (and thanks to European colonialism, even African societies that used to be okay with us were taught to think LGBTQ+ people are bad).  Even now that we have medications that can treat or prevent AIDS, they’re incredibly expensive and hard to get; in 2015, New York businessman Martin Shkreli acquired the exclusive right to make a drug that treats an AIDS-related disease, and raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill. 

Here’s one history on what it was like to have and fight AIDS, one history on how politicians responded to the epidemic, and if you can get a copy of the documentary How to Survive a Plague, it’s a good introduction, because it’s about how AIDS patients had to fight for their lives. A lot of these histories are imperfect and incomplete, because privilege played a big part in whose lives and deaths were seen as important–Poor people, people of colour, trans people, and drug addicts were less likely to be able to afford or access medical care, and more likely to die without being remembered; histories often tend to focus on straight people who got AIDS through no fault of their own, and then white cis gay men who seem more “respectable” and “relatable”.  

I mean, people who will talk about how homophobia led to neglect of AIDS still find ways not to mention that AIDS isn’t just sexually transmitted; it’s hugely a disease of drug addicts, because sharing needles is a huge way the disease spreads. But because society always thinks, oh, drug addicts are bad and disgusting people and of course criminals, that often gets neatly dropped from the histories, and it’s still hard to get people to agree to things that keep drug addicts alive, like needle exchanges and supervised injection sites. But if you want my rant about how the war on drugs is bullshit used to control poor people and people of colour, and drugs shouldn’t be criminalized, you’ll have to ask for that separately.

[elfwreck]

They died of AIDS because

Hospitals refused to treat them, and when they did get admitted, treated them like dirt so their will-to-live was eroded - refused to let long-term partners visit them, staff acted like they were disgusting nuisances, etc.

Very little funding was put into finding causes or cures - AIDS was considered “god’s punishment” for immoral behavior by a whole lot of people.

Once causes were understood (effective treatments were a long ways off), information about those causes weren’t widely shared - because it was a “sex disease” (it wasn’t) and because a huge number of the victims were gay or needle-drug users, and the people in charge of disease prevention (or in charge of funding) didn’t care if all of those people just died.

Not until it started hitting straight people and superstar celebrities (e.g. Rock Hudson) did it get treated as A Real Problem - and by that time, it had reached terrifying epidemic conditions.

Picture from 1993:

We lost basically a whole generation of the queer community.

[psychoactive-teratogen]

As a current AIDS survivor, this is really important information. I was diagnosed not only HIV positive in 2014, but I had already progressed to an AIDS diagnosis. Knowing how far we’ve come with treatment and what the trials and tribulations of those who came before cannot and must not ever be forgotten. Awareness is the number one goal. I often speak to the microbiology students at my university to explain what it’s like to live with, how the medications work, side effects, how it’s affected my daily life, and just raise general awareness.

Before my diagnosis, I, like many others, was clueless to how far treatment has come. I was still under the belief my diagnosis was a death sentence. Moving forward, even if only one person hears my story, that’s one more person that’s educated and can raise awareness.

I believe it’s time for us as a society to start better education of this disease. The vast majority of the people I’ve spoken to are receptive to the knowledge of my status, and I’ve received lots of support from loved ones, friends, and total strangers. It’s time to beat the stigma.

[smallswingshoes]

This is slightly off-point, but as for the cost, I wanted to mention that some pharmacies have specialties that let them get special coupons/programs and stuff to save money.

A bottle of Truvada (a month supply commonly used for treating this) is at least $3,000 out of pocket and insurance doesn’t usually take a lot off of that. But the pharmacy I work at is an HIV specialty and we always get te price down to less than $10.

If you’re on HIV meds and they’re ludicrously expensive, ask your local pharmacy manager if there are any local HIV specialty pharmacies that they know of. They might be able to help.

[mycroftrh]

I think it’s important to emphasize that, while the diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, it is also true that people dying of AIDS because of homophobia is not history only.

My brother’s first boyfriend was kicked out/disowned by his parents for being queer, got AIDS, couldn’t afford treatment, and died.  He died in 2019, at around 20 years old.

In 2019.

Barely more than a kid.

Of a treatable disease.

Because of homophobia.

Because his parents cared more about not being associated with a queer person than they cared about their son’s literal life.

AIDS is not just history.  Neither is homophobia.

[madgastronomer]

Back to history: When AIDS patients held die-ins, they went to hospitals, lay down in front of them, and literally waited to die.

[specificfuckery]

[carnivalseb]

If you’re young & either queer or queer-adjacent, think about the number of people out of the closet you know your own age & think about how many you know your parents age. They’re not stamping us out of the mould any quicker these days than in the ‘60s, except in lockstep with population growth. I think, growing up, my picture of relative numbers of queer people & straights was unavoidably impacted by the number of empty seats at our table. That might be the case for you too. The number of elders you never got to meet.

Remember this when people talk about how small the LGBTQIA+ population is. That it’s “such a small percentage of the population to be catered too”. Remember this and tell them, “that’s because homophobia killed them”.

[purplepints]

This picture of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus is often included with the “The men facing the camera/in white are the surviving members” but it leaves out something extremely important:

By 1996, all of the men facing the camera in the picture were dead.

Every.

Single.

One.

Eric Luse, the photographer, said this in a more recent article :

By 1996 the obituary list was almost 50 names longer than the entire choral roster. All of the positions plus four dozen more, gone. The obituary list continued to grow, too. The cost and availability of any treatments in the mid-late 90s continued to cause more death.

If you were queer in the 80s and 90s, you knew someone who had it and knew people who died from it. Period. I cannot stress the impact this had on the queer community and those of us who were alive at the time, and I know the scope of it is almost unimaginable to younger people today.

By 1996, there were NO surviving original members of the SFGMC. You need to know that when you see this picture.

Dozens of the men turned away from the camera here in this shot were also dead alongside the men in white. It is vital to recognize that.

There is no hope in this picture, it isn’t a display of a lucky few who avoided death. There is no “Well at least some of them survived” because no, they didn’t, and this time was so fucking bleak and painful it’s astonishing that anything got done. They’d march one week and die the next. Their friends would bury them in the morning and march in the afternoon. This went on for years.

Bigotry and hate and ignorance killed generations of queer people. It speaks to the sheer resilience of the community that from that all but state-sanctioned genocide, we have gained so much ground in the last few decades. Much is owed to the people who refused to stay quiet and who fought even on their deathbeds, so please consider learning about LGBTQ+ history as a way of continuing the fight and showing respect. Many of us coming of age at that time didn’t have that opportunity, and made it a point to learn and get involved as teenagers and young adults because we saw what we were losing.

Sing for two.

[mg-dl]

My fave part of this post is the repeated usage of the word “queer”. In a discussion about the hatred of LGBT people and how they were left to die by the government, it’s always a great idea to call them all a slur. Can you switch it up a bit and use “fag” next time?

[star-anise]

There’s a really obvious reason why we’re using “queer”.

When talking about LGBTQ+ history, often we have to be really careful with the language we use, because how we understand things now is not how the people we’re talking about understood themselves at the time. We end up using phrases like, “People who we would now understand as gay or lesbian” or “experiences which modern transgender people often identify with”.

In this case? It’s because that’s the word they used.

(Many of them also used the words “fag” or “dyke”, but “queer” is more inclusive.)

When I talk about “the leading lights of queerness” I mean Queer Nation. I mean the people who contributed to Queer Theory. I mean people who deliberately chose to use that word. I mean me and my ex-girlfriend. We exist.

During the AIDS crisis especially, homophobia was so bad that a lot of people didn’t want to be known by any word associated with the gay community: Not gay, not homosexual, not queer, not anything. Epidemiologists had to create the category of “men who have sex with men” because there was literally no existing term that didn’t carry the weight of a slur. The purpose of using the word “queer” was for people to say, “Let’s stop running from the things society is calling us; let’s pick up the weapons they’ve hurled at us and start hurling them back. There is no level of socially acceptable we can be that will make them suddenly decide our lives matter. We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”  It meant very specifically embracing and defending their/our marginalized position.

Every word we’ve ever been known by has been a slur. We all have our own histories and flinch reactions. I grew up with “gay” and “lezzo” being used really hatefully around me, as well as “queer” and “dyke” and “fag”, and I have different comfort levels with all those different words.

/shrug emoji You can dislike the word all you like and ask that it not be used for you. But historically and today, a lot of us do use it for ourselves, and we constitute “the queer community” or “queerdom”. Which we don’t think is a bad thing. If you don’t want to join us, fine, but that doesn’t make us stop existing, and any other word you can call us would also be a slur, because our community is predicated on saying, “We are that thing you’re so afraid of. Get used to it.”

[pieandhotdogs]

Some of y’all never went to a church that looks exactly like this and it shows.

[maxjustmaxnotmadmax]

Folk Punk Cover : Crazy - Patsy Cline/Willie Nelson

Went to the Patsy Cline Museum in Nashville this weekend and decided to make this.

[maxjustmaxnotmadmax]

The Patsy Cline Museum in Nashville is way cooler than the Johnny Cash Museum. There. I said it.

[justdave-deactivated20211107]

Phrase watch this.

[shdghjdhdkjghjkndsvhj-deactivat]

[Transcript:

My name is Brandon Boulware and, Chairman, I’ll go as quickly as I can.

I’m a lifelong Missourian, I’m a business lawyer, I’m a Christian, I’m the son of a Methodist minister, I’m a husband, and I’m the father of four kids - two boys, two girls - including a wonderful and beautiful transgender daughter. Today happens to be her birthday. And I chose to be here. She doesn’t know that. She thinks I’m at work.

One thing I often hear when transgender issues are discussed is,

“I don’t get it. I don’t understand.“

And I would expect some of you to have said that and to feel the same way. I didn’t get it either. For years, I didn’t get it. For years, I would not let my daughter wear girl clothes. I did not let her play with girl toys. I forced my daughter to wear boy clothes, and get short haircuts, and play on boys’ sports teams.

Why did I do this? To protect my child. I did not want my daughter or her siblings to get teased. And truth be told, I did it to protect myself as well. I wanted to avoid those inevitable questions as to why my child did not look and act like a boy.

My child was miserable. I cannot overstate that. She was absolutely miserable. Especially at school. No confidence, no friends, no laughter. I can honestly say this - I had a child who did not smile. We did that for years. We did that against the advice of teachers, therapists, and other experts.

I remember the day everything changed for me.

I got home from work, and my daughter and her brother were on the front lawn. And she had sneaked on one of her older sister’s play dresses. And they wanted to go across the street and play with the neighbors’ kids.

It was time for dinner, I said, “Come in.” She asked, can she go across the street. I said no. She asked me if she went inside and put on boy clothes, can she then go across the street and play.

And it was then that it hit me. My daughter was equating being good with being someone else. I was teaching her to deny who she is. As a parent, the one thing we cannot do, the one thing, is silence our child’s spirit. And so on that day, my wife and I stopped silencing our child’s spirit.

The moment we allowed my daughter to be who she is, to grow her hair, to wear the clothes she wanted to wear, she was a different child. And I mean it was immediate. It was a total transformation.

I now have a confident, a smiling, a happy daughter. She plays on girls’ volleyball teams. She has friendships. She’s a kid.

I came here today as a parent to share my story. I need you to understand that this language, if it becomes law, will have real effects on real people.

It will affect my daughter. It will mean that she cannot play on the girls’ volleyball team, or dance squad, or tennis team.

I ask you, please don’t take that away from my daughter or the countless others like her who are out there. Let them have their childhoods, let them be who they are. I ask you to vote against this legislation.

/end transcript.]

[bunjywunjy]

I have been using alligators as the base for dragons in a book I am writing. Please make me regret my decision and tell me some cursed facts about them!

contrary to popular belief, american alligators can survive the occasional deep freeze just fine!

they do so by entering a torpor state that’s basically a short-term hibernation, but first they make a big ol’ hole in the ice and stick their face out of it so they can breathe until the thaw comes.

depending on how long the freeze lasts, this may mean that the hole literally freezes shut around their faces, and abruptly the swamp by your house is now a skating rink with built-in pit trap hazards.

don’t worry about them though, they’re fine! as long as they have access to open air, they’ll wake up when the temperature rises again and go back to lurking around pretending to be logs, though they may bonk around disorientedly for a few days afterwards. 

“the shit was THAT about??? humans better stop fucking with the climate, I swear.”

overall, the alligators probably weathered the Great Blizzard of ‘21 better than the humans did.

[kaijutegu]

There’s a place in Colorado that has alligators outdoors year round- they have thermal pools they use to raise fish, and why not add some alligators to that? Turns out they don’t mind hanging out in the snow, so long as they can go back in the hot tub at the end!

[maxjustmaxnotmadmax]

Alligator appreciation post! How exciting! Alligators can climb trees! They have incredible downward bite force, but they do not have the same strength to open their mouth. This is why you can tape or hold their mouths shut. When males bellow to make mating calls, the water on their backs make a crazy pattern which apparently is super attractive to females. Pretty neat to look at. When their eggs hatch, the mother will carry the babies in her mouth into the water! I could go on for hours. Alligators are fucking cool. They're really favorite animal here on the tennessee river.

[maxjustmaxnotmadmax]

It’s a working title. 

This song will be included in my upcoming album! Follow me on Tumblr and subscribe to my YouTube channel for more updates! 

[ikarus-the-phoenix]

Reblog if you didn’t write My Immortal

We’re going to find the author by process of elimination.

[johnfkennedaddy]

I would like to propose an alternative to sex, drugs, and rock n roll I call it dry humping, nutritional yeast, and folk punk and it’s a lifestyle designed for vegan youth pastors.

[maxjustmaxnotmadmax]

[godlessondheimite]

the best genre of children’s lit is “kid survivalist novellas that make 8-year olds feel like they could also survive being stranded on an island or lost in the wilderness”

[maxjustmaxnotmadmax]

I read My Side of the Mountain when I was in 4th grade and became convinced that I was going to run away and live in a tree in the woods and teach a hawk friend to hunt for me. Honestly, my goals haven’t changed much.

[tiktoksthataregood-ish]

[friendsrequest]

That's very interesting ma'am but still not a sin

[rosalielesbianhale]

Renesmee, chatting to her friends at lunch: Yeah, my mom got married super young, straight out of high school, to a guy who was way too old for her. She got knocked up immediately. They kept the whole pregnancy a secret, she didn’t leave the house the entire time she was showing. My dad’s family didn’t even want to take her to the hospital to have the baby. My grandad, who was a doctor, was going to deliver me but she went into labour prematurely, like, way prematurely and they couldn’t reach him so my dad ended up having to deliver me even though he had no experience. Anyway, she died in childbirth. She was only eighteen.

Bella, from the other side of the cafeteria: