given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that
this was submitted as a one sentence horror story, but it feels like it could be an old jewish joke, like the one about the two rabbis proving g-d doesn't exist or the saying 'people plan, g-d laughs'
Even more, it sounds like the beginning -- the set-up -- of the joke. Can’t you hear Carl Reiner opening a bit with this line, or Shalom Aleichem using it to kick off a story?
Well I'm not quite an old Jewish man just yet, but let me give it a shot...
Losing confidence in Himself, G-d became an atheist. He decided to go down to Earth, to walk among humans and see how they found meaning.
He wandered the world until he came to a town, where he happened upon a pastor. "Come to our church this Sunday!" said the pastor. But G-d shook his head. "I don't believe in G-d anymore," he told the pastor sullenly. "And besides, I really shouldn't be working weekends." . . .
He continued wandering, and as night fell, he realized he had no money for a hotel. Walking down the darkening sidewalk, he passed many shivering folk, some young and thin, others old and worn and grizzle-bearded, looking not unlike himself. Just as the rain began to fall, he happened upon a priest. The priest looked him up and down, and said, "You look cold, my son. We're hosting a men's shelter at the church tonight; you can sleep there, and come to Mass tomorrow." This time G-d agreed. He slept well and was warm, and in the morning sat for Mass. They blessed him in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but he felt beside himself and decided to leave.
By this time G-d was quite hungry. He stopped by a deli, but still had no money, so all he could do was watch the fresh steaming bagels be made. On a bench outside the deli, a man was eating a bagel with lox. As he finished eating, G-d noticed there were still some scraps of food on the waxpaper. Unable to help himself, he asked if he could have the scraps, before the man threw it away. "Please sir, I'm so hungry. I'd just like that crumb of bagel there, and that little shred of lox. I think I could make a bisl of fish last quite a while." The man shook his head. "I cannot in good conscience give you my trash," he said, "But come inside, I'll get you your own bagel. I'd offer to get you coffee—but that's trash too."
So the man bought G-d some breakfast and sat with him on the bench. "Thank you so much," said G-d. "How can I ever repay you?" But the man just shrugged and said, "I'm a rabbi. Buying bagels I don't get to eat is part of the job description."
G-d thanked the rabbi again, and ate in silence. "Rabbi, can I ask you a question? I feel I haven't been on this Earth too long, but already I've seen much misery. How do you do it? How do you still believe in G-d?"
The rabbi pondered this. "I believe in joyful things. I believe in kindness, and people choosing to help each other. And isn't that a kind of godliness?" (G-d suspected there was a bit more to godliness than that, but he let it slide.) The rabbi continued: "I've prayed to G-d every day for the last 30 years, and I will every day til I die. And if He answers my prayers, all the better! But tell me, my new friend, what's your name?" G-d hesitated and said, "It's a little hard to pronounce..." The rabbi chuckled and said, "No matter. Say, it won't be anything like Shabbos dinner, but my wife is baking a delightful fig pie today, and I'd like to have you over for dinner to enjoy it." G-d nodded. "I do like figs..."
That evening, G-d sat for dinner with the rabbi, the rabbi's wife, and their four children. The meal was delicious, the rabbi's family was incredibly welcoming. Their conversation was friendly but never prying, and the children laughed and played with each other. Several times, the youngest child tugged on G-d's sleeve for his attention before her father motioned for her to go play with her siblings. G-d began to see what the rabbi had meant about the joyfulness of life.
At the end of the night, G-d stood up to leave, and felt renewed. The rabbi said, "My friend, don't leave us so soon!" And G-d replied, "I will always be with you, for I am the Lord Your G-d." And they understood it to be true.
He had done this sort of thing a few times before and generally knew how it went. As expected, the rabbi and his family fell to their knees, weeping with joy and awe. He did not expect the youngest child to walk right up and tug G-d's sleeve again. He smiled graciously down at her, and she looked up with the wonderful bright eyes of a child who understands nothing but the urge to play. In a high voice, she said, "Knock knock!" G-d couldn't help but laugh. "Who's there?" He replied cheerfully.
Suddenly from across the room, the rabbi swore loudly and rudely. Dismayed, G-d asked, "What troubles you?" He saw the rabbi was trembling, half in rage and half in embarrassment. "I'm sorry Lord! Thank you for this, thank you so much for gracing us with your light, Baruch Atah and so on, it's just..." The rabbi swore again. "Thirty years of daily prayer, Lord, and a KNOCK-KNOCK JOKE is what you'll answer?"
hey captain-acab, this is the highest compliment i can bestow: it would not have surprised me had i found that story in a book of traditional fables in the shul library
Look, someone has to be the first to make up any traditional Jewish story, why not @captain-acab? If we all keep telling it, then in a generation or two it'll be traditional.
We're here, we're queer, we're really fucking tired so we're just gonna go straight to biting instead of feigning polite confusion if you're gonna be a bigot this time, just so you know.
HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY
A mark on your forehead identifies the god you must worship to stay alive, usually by joining its local church or temple. Your mark is unknown, meaning an old, forgotten god sponsored you. To survive, you must either find an old temple to worship at, or do the arduous task of building a new one
Nobody in your small coastal village has ever seen the Godmark that you were born with. It’s a dark russet sequence of criss-crossing lines, with a vertical arrowhead on the left and a circle on the right, just over where your brow meets your temple. Some of the traders who come down from the mountain say it looks like one of the scripts used in the hinterlands, but not a language that any of them recognize.
“If she’s got the temperament for it, she should try her luck inland,” they advise. “No point her starting a temple here if she’d find her people elsewhere, with a little searching.”
At first, your parents are reluctant to send you away. Though you’re well-behaved and diligent in your chores, you’re a sickly child with no God to worship. And besides, you’ve always been the dreamy type–inclined to lose track of time watching the path of rain droplets chasing down the window, or the fronds of an anemone as it sways in a rock pool.
Instead, they send you to the temple of the Storm to learn all you’ll need for your own God. You are happy there, for a time: making up beds and serving food to the castaways who pass through, keeping vigil at the lighthouse, burning incense and praying with the loyal widows and orphans of the drowned.
One such widow, an old, old lady, touches the mark on your forehead. “I recognise those letters. We wrote this way in the town where I grew up, way off past the mountains.”
Your heartbeat quickens. “What does it say!?”
She squints, eyes engulfed by wrinkles and hidden behind smudged glass. “A… Ar… Oh, I can’t remember how to speak it. I left before I learnt my letters properly. There was a war, you know. But I remember,” she says, mistily, “the most beautiful pink and white flowers used to grow, on the borders of the wheat fields…”
You try to ask more questions, but remembering the war distresses her, and so you speak of other things. When she’s drifted off to sleep, you get to your feet, go home and tell your parents: you are leaving in search of your God.
“The first rule of love,” her mother says, voice crackling over the phone, “is to never take more than they can give.”
Finola’s eyes dart to the shoebox under her bed and then back out the dorm window. Her room is on the second floor this year and she can see more of the trees than she can see of the grassy space preceding the dining hall. “I know, Mom.”
“Remember.” Her mother’s voice is sharp and Finola can almost see her heavy, thick brows lowering until shadows cover her eyes. “No clothing. No bags. Never any jewelry.”
Finola wraps her free arm around her waist and closes her eyes. The light breeze rolling through the window smells like eucalyptus and mint. Her mouth waters. “I know, Mom.”
“Those are the big things,” her mother says, “but remember that too many of the small things can amount to a big thing.”
The shoebox under the bed gleams in a stray ray of light. Finola licks her lips. “I know, but—I need something. I have to. I feel like she’ll disappear if I don’t.” The words are inadequate for the sick fear in her stomach each time she loses sight of her. The horrible certainty that something bad will happen if she’s not by her side. She rubs a hand over her mouth.
Her mother’s tongue clicks. “That’s old instincts, Finola. Fight it. You don’t want your father and I to pull you out of school, do you?”
The memory of watching her high school fade out of sight surfaces and, in that moment, she’s sixteen again. She can feel her heart beating too fast, the scream ripping out of her throat, the way the ropes chafed her wrists. She can smell her first love’s perfume, cloying peach, in the air. She can feel their separation like a death in the pit of her stomach, radiating up into her chest, her throat, her head.
You are posted out by the Hollywood sign tonight, sitting under the frame where the W used to be. It got burnt to a crisp during last week’s big superhero fight. A hero died right where you’re sitting. The whole area’s been closed down until Hero Force can coordinate a recovery effort. Usually it’d be done by now but no one’s willing to touch it until the ash has been completely blown away.
It’s a rule that the world must stand still when a hero dies.
“How much?”
The voice comes from behind you. The lights that illuminate the Hollywood sign are down to hide as much of the scorch marks as possible. You wouldn’t be able to see anything even if you did turn around, so you don’t.
You put some chapstick on, the glide of the balm against your wind chapped lips grounding.
“I said,” the Hero says, voice tightening, “How. Much.”
There’s the sound of gravel crunching now. They’re wearing heavy boots and the scent of fresh blood grows stronger the closer they get. Their breathing is smooth and even which means it’s not their blood.
You put the cap back on your chapstick and tuck it into your leather jacket’s inner pocket. “I don’t take money.”
“Then what do you take?” The Hero rounds the Y and comes into your line of sight. The dark hides most of their features, but you can make out a glittering gold mask and the dull shine of drying blood on their chest plate. Their breathing may be even, but their stance isn’t. They sway in place, back and forth, back and forth. Their arms wrap around their stomach. “I’ve got land. A house. You can have it.”
I love it when ppl who listen to a lot of country do the whole "rap music is bad because of Crime and Drug" thing cuz listen Brantleigh not 5 minutes ago you and me was joyously singing along to Steve Earle talking about defending his weed farm from the cops by blowing them up with improvised explosive devices so I think u might just be racist
I love how varied and universally weird the circumstances for making lifelong friendships are. Here's this guy I accidentally messaged once and I could not imagine my life without them now. Here's this girl I was so scared of when I met her, I would kill for her and remind her to rest on the regular. Here's this other guy we have so much in common we used to joke we were the same person in different timelines. It took us years to meet in person and I attended his wedding. There are also people who entered my life in absolutely unremarkable ways but changed it forever for the better. It's wonderful how easy it is to find people to love.
It's too bad tumblr doesn't seem to talk all that much about the 'Edge Chronicles' by Paul Steward and Chris Riddell, with the foundational book being 'Beyond the Deepwoods'. There would be so much to get into, it remains one of the most impactful fantasy worlds for me, but today I just wanna talk about this little gem:
Termagant Trogs
The strange cliff continent of the "Edge" is home to thousands of sophont races, many of them humanoid. Predictably, our pov characters are usually "fourthlings", the most recognizably human-like species.
The termagant trogs are an interesting culture within the series, providing some important characters for the story. They are a reclusive matriarchal race dwelling in caves underneath the deepwoods. The shortest way to describe their biology in contrast to the fourthlings is that they have both severe sex dimorphism and undergo a metamorphosis between their juvenile and adult stages.
Young female termagant trogs are a larval stage that invariably looks like Merida, from 'Brave' - long red-orange hair, fair skin, blue eyes, slender feminine form - and are considered by fourthlings, certainly our male pov characters, to be exceptionally beautiful. However, once they come of age, a ritual called the "Blooding" (subtle), involving the sap of a carnivorous oak tree, triggers their metamorphosis into their ultimate "termagant" form: an absolutely gigantic butch woman, perfectly bald and packed with muscles and a fameously choleric temperament. They usually elect to cover their entire bodies with elaborate tattoos, and usually one of their first acts, as a rite of passage, is to violently destroy all of their childhood toys... and murder their pets, to let go of their weak attachments and fully embrace the sisterhood as the only company they need.
Now, there is obviously a lot to unpack here (this is a blatant metaphor, but for what exactly; it reads like a mirror parody of how boys are turned into men in a patriarchal society; how self-aware are the authors, exactly, of the feelings and preconceptions and attitude towards women that went into their writing here; etc.).
But maybe we can start with the fact that the metamorphosis is not inevitable - if the vital component of the blood sap is missing, then young termagants may end up stuck in their juvenile form forever, indistinguishable from fourthlings except that they never age. What I want to talk about today is how characters in the story have vastly different perspectives on this. Fourthlings consider it a stroke of luck, thinking that the young termagant has dodged a bullet, escaped a horrible fate, and now gets to remain "pretty" forever. Termagant girls however consider their lives to be ruined, if they miss the ritual: they think of the gigantic butch form as their "true selves", yearn for the community of the sisterhood, and see the ritual as the happiest moment in their lives. It is as if a human was stuck in the body of a baby or a toddler, forever.
A lot can be made of the little detail that the story and world building comes from a (cishet) man, but what sticks with me after all of these years is that contrast of perception, and how the story deals with it. Yes, the male pov characters are horrified by the termagant life cycle and always shocked when they learn that the termagant girls in their life find the transformation and ogre-like state to be aspirational. But crucially, they never say that out loud. We are privy to their inner thoughts, but they never, ever try to talk the girl out of it. They do not challenge her dysphoria, do not question her yearning, her cultural values and her sorrow.
So ultimately the most important thing to take away from this may be that the authors articulate confusion and a degree of horror at the transformation, and the real world things to which it may serve as a metaphor, in a way that may read as fairly ignorant and ugly to you, but they also don't question how much it means to those characters, and the real world people they stand for. It all boils down to
"I don't get it. But I don't have to. It's real to her."
(And in case of a completed ritual: "And now I better get the fuck out of here".)
I love the dynamic in the Discworld fandom on this site, I think it's mainly because there are a lot of dormant fans, if you will, who've read and loved the books for years but haven't engaged much recently, who sort of reappear whenever a fun post is doing the rounds. It's fantastic. We get the cozy small fandom vibe without the screaming matches, but also get the popular posts from time to time, y'know?
To everyone tagging and commenting with some variation of “Oh, I almost forgot that it’s tomorrow!”
“Damn! Damn! Damn! Every year he forgot. Well, no. He never forgot. He just put the memories away like old silverware that you didn’t want to tarnish. And every year they came back, sharp and sparkling, and stabbed him in the heart. And today, of all days...”
#oh I need to read enough discworld to understand what emotions day is
For anyone who's confused today, I won't spoil/explain what the 25th of May is in the Discworld fandom, because I think a big part of what's special about it is the way the plot unfolds in the book.
What I will explain though is that it'll make sense when you reach a book called Night Watch, which is the 29th book in the overall series and the 6th book in the City Watch subseries. If you haven't got that far yet, just take your time and enjoy the series! If you want to start with the City Watch stories then the first book you should check out is Guards! Guards!