straight person: but how do you Know when someone around you is gay?
me: today in yoga class our instructor said “this exercise is about being straight” and i immediately said “i’ve never been good at that” and only one (1) woman laughed. she had four piercings in her ears. what else do you need me to tell you
Defamation lawsuits in UK are heavily weighted in *favor* of the plaintiff. You have to have a pretty weak case to lose over there. If there wasn't a rabbid, inescapable social media campaign against Amber Heard, he would have lost in America too.
wow i wonder if that 300 year gap could be explained by any outside factors…….whoa! for some reason it lines up with the timeline of britain’s invasion and subsequent colonization of ireland! wild, huh? i wonder if the two are connected in some way? i guess the world will never know….
Hey guess what alcohol is often used as a coping method by poor and disenfranchised people in order to get away, if only for a few minutes, from the absolute shithole that is their lives
I WONDER WHY a group that wasn’t permitted to own media, have privacy in their own homes, go to church or any other desired social gathering, and which was considered guilty until proven innocent might have turned to alcohol.
I also wonder why that might have happened at a time when drugging your children with alcohol would quiet their starving screams because the English stole all your food and you had nothing left to feed your babies.
I WONDER.
(In other words any time you see the accusation of “they’re all drunks” leveled at any particular group, it’s a good time to ask what the Irish, Native Americans, Black men, American men in general in the 1930s, Soviet Russian men, and Indians have in common. If you came up with “oh! Absolutely crippling levels of poverty in the face of a government that either valued profit over lives or actively oppressed them, and an inability to change this due to the structural nature of said oppression,” congratulations, you know a depressing amount about history.)
Hot dog water - there's a Tumblr post out there I've seen saying hot dog water is the opposite of holy water, due to the fact that a single drop of it will contaminate what it touches. I assume this was partly inspired by this allusion but who knows for sure.
Also the the idea of holy water as inhuman and cleaning vs hot dog water as the remains of feeding someone - often a child - and entirely human. It may be dirty and I do not want it on me but God hot dog water has some memories. You will not wash away my sins. They're mine. Also, anyone can make hot dog water but holy water is refined, restricted (yes anyone can make it in an emergency but lay people are restricted from it)
"you and I both know"
Unlike baptism for babies, this one is done between two people who are both aware of what is happening. The one receiving the baptism gives the orders about what they want to happen. The giver and receiver are portrayed as equals. They are equally aware of their humanity.
"the holy stuff won't take"
Ooof heartbreaking, amazing line. Raises so many questions. What does it mean when the water "takes"? What has the receiver done that makes them unfit for holy water? Or, what has the holy water done that makes it to weak to help, to be a part of your life?
The poem as a whole - I love the lack of capitalization. It adds a sort of intimacy to the poem, and the statement from the speaker. The high words "baptise" and "holy" being offset by "take" and "hot dog". Also "hot dog water" vs "holy stuff." The cadence! I would lick it.
Not to turn this into another house full of chintz, but I'mma fuck this poem on the floor.
Meter
There are two readings of the poem's meter that I immediately identify, the first is how I'd want to read it, and the second is how a normal person would probably read it, but both make the same point.
In my interpretation (left), the first line is four wholely irregular feet: an iamb into a dibrach into two trochees; The second line is two trouches into a hanging stressed syllable; And the third line is three iambs.
In the more normal interpretation(right), the first line and second line are six trochees all together plus that hanging syllable in 'knowing' which transitions the poem to iambic trimeter.
And look at the interesting result of that laid bare:
In English poetry there's a tradition, all other things being equal, that iambs are considered the sophisticated foot with trochees often being contrasted as the vulgar or common foot.
The vulgar in specificity "hot dog water" is put in trochee, while the respectably vague "the holy stuff" is afforded iambs. Without the poet having thought of the stress things the pattern actively, this incapulation of the English poetic tradition is astounding. Especially when you consider the
Chiasmus
Chiasmus is a figure of rhetorical construction, in which two pairs of ideas are laid across each other, A B B A. It's one of the more popular figures of rhetoric and if you're looking for it you'll see it everywhere.
In the most literal sense, it's about repetition; but, you can apply it more liberally to ideas, thoughts, or in this case, parts of speech:
The nouns and verb pairs in the first and third lines crossover each other. They are in chiasmus. Structurally, the inversion makes the poem feel more solid, while still furthering emphasizing the contrast between the idea of hot dog water and the holy stuff.
when a man in a work of fiction looks at a woman with heart eyes as she carries out atrocities. when he looks a little scared a little horny. when he aids and abets. when he enables her in her killing and maiming and execution of violent revenge or whatever. i get very barbie as the princess and the pauper i'm a girl like you.mp3 about it
I want the writer’s strike to last until they get everything they demand and more. I want the SAG strike to last until AI is entirely forbidden across the board in the entire industry. I want CGI artists to unionize and strike. I want animators to strike. I want composers and directors and designers and VAs and techies and producers and stage hands and game devs and programmers and recording artists to strike.
I want every aspect of the entertainment industry brought to a grinding halt for months or even years to take it from the corps and put it back in the hands of the artists.