okay this reminded me of the strongest human being (I use that label with some reservation) I have ever met and I still think about him like once a week because about 4 years ago on Thanksgiving night my sister, cousin, and I were going to pick up a friend about a 40 minute drive from home, and I got lost and tried to turn around on a little gravel pull-off on the side of the road, but my front tires got stuck in the snow.
we were in the middle of nowhere with no cell reception, and the only sign of life was a single, completely dark house across the road from us.
We all did our best to push the car out, and we’re strong people, but we couldn’t make it budge. Cold and stuck, we climbed back and wondered what to do. A car full of men pulled over beside us and asked if we needed help, but getting out of our locked car on a backroad at night with strange men felt like a bad idea, so we said a tow was coming and waved them along. We did that twice before finally deciding our only option was to accept the next offer for help and just risk it,
when a man came out of the house across the street.
He’d clearly been watching us and figured out why we’d been lying to people, which really surprised me & he said “it’s okay, you can stay in your car and keep the doors locked. Just start backing up when I say so.”
I had the window cracked and told him “it’s too stuck. There’s no way we’re getting out. Could you call a tow?”
And he said “just back up when I say so.”
So he walked around the front of the car, squatted, and said “okay back up,”
and I did, and
he lifted
the front of the car Into The Air. Off its front wheels, and we backed up while he essentially wheel-barrowed us back onto the road.
And we were honest to god yelling. We couldn’t help it. We just yelled until all four wheels were back on the ground and he was waving us off while we thanked him.
And then I looked at my sister and cousin & said “he REALLY told us we can KEEP our doors locked as if THAT WOULD’VE FUCKING STOPPED HIM!!!! As if he couldn’t have just RIPPED EM OFF THE HINGES.”
I later looked up the weight of my car, and it’s 3200 pounds without anything or anyone in it.
Old people can"t understand when younger people are willing to cut a whole relative off. They have lived their entire lives in guilt or based on some sense of loyalty to someone based on blood. People will abuse you betting on that fact, just because ya’ll are blood that means you have to accept it. No, you don’t.
Remember boys, girls, and nonbinaries, the phrase isn’t blood is thicker than water.
It’s actually the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.
Which literally means the family you choose is and always will be more an important than the family you were born into. So you do you.
I’m going to save up for a new motorcycle by running a scam where I bet straight dudes at bars twenty bucks that I can get a girl’s number in under five minutes and then politely walk up her and say, “I just bet that asshole twenty bucks that I could get your number. I’ll split it with you if you pretend to laugh like I just said a good pick up line and then write a fake number on my hand.”
Like, I never understood those kind of bets in those shitty teen movies. Everybody loves being part of a scheme, man. Use your head.
If anyone ever does this to me I’ll call them out on being a con artist.
Joke’s on you, buddy. That’ll only have consequences the first, what, couple dozen times? I can take a punch.
But then eventually, I’ll have money for the bike, and whenever I get called out, I’ll just speed off, and, sure, maybe I crash and die in a gutter and the police can’t figure out why I have hundreds of fake phone numbers stuffed in my jacket and it launches a huge investigation that becomes sort of a local legend, but you know whose problem that is? Not fucking mine.
Because I’m a slutty motorcycle ghost, and who’s gonna’ stop me then? The ghost cops? Nice try. Everybody knows cops can’t become ghosts because they just go straight to hell. It’s basic math.
Moral of the story, don’t be a con artist or you will die in a horrible accident and become a lonely ghost.
First of all, don’t you ever accuse me of having morals, narrative or otherwise, ever again.
And second, where did I say I’d be lonely? I’d be a ghost on a motorcycle. That’s the sexiest thing that there is. You look me in the eyes and tell me you wouldn’t bone Ghostrider. Look me in the goddamn eyes.
ultimately i think kindness is the most radical thing you can do with your pain and your anger. it’s like, you take everything awful that’s ever been done to you, and you throw it back in the world’s teeth, and you say no, fuck you, i’m not going to take this. you say this is unacceptable. you say that shit stops with me.
humans are fucking terrible and this awful world we live in will fucking kill you but if you are kind, if you are brave and clever and try really hard, you can defy it. you can impose on this bleak and monstrous structure something beautiful. even if it’s temporary. even if it doesn’t heal anything inside you that’s been hurt.
i’m gonna sleep and i’m gonna wake up and i swear by everything in this deadly horrible universe i’m gonna make someone happy.
i’ve seen a number of comments and tags where people feel that they must swallow or repress their anger in order to engage in kindness. that is not at all what i am recommending here. radical kindness is an expression of anger. it is not passive. it is not repressive. it does not require you, in any way, to forgive those that have fucked you up. it does not require you to be quiet.
it just requires that you be kind. viciously. vengefully. you fight back. you plant flowers. give to charity. play games. pet someone’s dog. scream into the dark. paint and write and dance, tell jokes, sing songs, bake cookies. you have been hurt and you don’t have to deny that hurt. you just have to recognize it in other people, and take their hand, and say: no more. enough. fuck this. no more.
have a cookie.
i will say this again: we are all going to die. the universe is enormous and almost entirely empty. to be kind to each other is the most incredible act of defiance against the dark that i can imagine.
i will say this again: we are all going to die. the universe is enormous and almost entirely empty. to be kind to each other is the most incredible act of defiance against the dark that i can imagine.
3. Two good quotes by Kurt Vonnegut: “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the
winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve
got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of,
babies-“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
And: “Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do
not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your
sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may
disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”
#hopepunk
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
-Rebecca Solnit; Hope in the Dark
I really needed this right now. Thank you
Indeed.
I think it’s important to clarify that radical kindness doesn’t mean you have to be kind to your abusers, or to asshole men in power (like the orange one or his horrible judge). It’s not biting your tongue, smiling, and allowing yourself to be mistreated in order to fulfill some sort of fucked up ideal of “the high road” or whatever. It’s refusing to allow anyone else to be mistreated without comment. It’s extending kindness to other survivors and other folks facing oppression, even when that oppression is different than the kind you face. The folks in charge want us broken down into easily-controlled bite-size chunks. Empathy, compassion, communication, cooperation, collaboration - these are kindness, and they are powerful, radical tools that we can use to help one another heal and to build our communities into something stronger and better.
Be kind out of spite.
HOPEPUNK
“If nothing we do matters, all that matters is what we do.” - Angel
