Aleksei I. Valentín (he/they) ✡️♿🏳️‍🌈

The poster for "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," featuring Dolly Parton on the left in red lipstick and lavender eyeshadow and Burt Reynolds on the right in a grey cowboy hat.

It's ok to not feel ok.
It's ok if your antlers haven't grown in yet.
It's ok if you can't shape-shift into a raven.
It's ok if you haven't haunted the night for a while.
I know you're doing your best, and that's all any of us can do right now.

I will also say that it’s a bit wild to me that no press freedom organization or professional journalistic association has tried to contact me or even put out a statement here.

I mean Jesus Christ. A little solidarity from institutions would be nice here!

Well, gas is expensive, and food is expensive, and we’re doing a war nobody wants, but at least there are no jobs

I was in the grocery store where our pharmacy is, and I thought I was hallucinating this weird, low background sound. Then, I realised it was 3 or 4 cell phones all playing the Call to Prayer alerts at the same time across the store.

Proselytising is inherently gross. It's always an enforcement of power, trying to wield social conventions in order to get compliance from the target.

It is terrifying! And so objectifying. It wasn't about me, just about his need to hit a conversion goal and any lever he had would work. So he went for probing questions about my disabilities as soon as he was told that we're not having this convo. He thought it was a power play. It was just gross.

... except I got it backwards, thinking the orange packaging was caramel, go me. Those rice crisp bars were everywhere in Harford County in the 90s.

That caramel one just unlocked some middle school memories, holy crap.

The Zong Massacre is an event that lives forever in my brain as a warning against anyone attempting to soft-pedal slavery.

"When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline, and the wheels of progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low the one will fall or where the other will stop".
Frederick Douglass, 1894

Maggie Gyllenhaal: Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, I call this the tale of the bride!
Gyllenhaal: the exclamation point denotes excitement
Gyllenhaal: please clap

Perhaps he was hoping to get the sunstroke ghosts out of his own blood. Idek.

If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!

It's just so weird! Sunstroke! A pill for sunstroke!

Sunstroke. Experiments. And from that, a pill? To do what? Take him out of the sun? Spring a parasol into being? I have So Many Questions.

"Physicians themselves purchased enslaved individuals. The 1791 city census documented that all eight doctors were enslavers. The 1830 federal census listed eighteen New Orleans physicians as enslavers, with a total of 144 enslaved individuals. Some doctors enslaved people suffering from an illness for relatively cheap in the hope of curing them and then selling them again for a large profit. Other physicians purchased enslaved individuals to conduct medical experiments. In Louisiana in the 1850s, a doctor bought a man named John Brown to conduct sunstroke experiments on him, and later developed a pill that he sold for large profits based on this work. As detailed in a subsequent section, medical experimentation on enslaved people became a common practice, with many such incidents occurring in the hospitals of New Orleans." - from "A City Without Care: 300 Years of Racism, Health Disparities, and Health Care Activism in New Orleans" by Kevin McQueeney

Since this factoid about C19 medicine and slavery lives in my brain now, it gets to live in y'all's, too.

An image of a crow staring intently with a grim expression, captioned, "the crow of judgment."

Branch manager branching out

I busted out laughing reading this waiting for the streetcar. Like, doubled over, cackling.

That is *amazing*. A truly cursed talent.

I've got to learn to be less polite. Which is an awful thing to say. But the script provided by politeness isn't being followed by people when they clock that I'm Jewish lately. And it's shitty. Real shitty.

I just completely shut down and started answering questions when he came up to us, because I'm polite and I want to educate people when they're curious about things, and that generosity is so not serving me when weirdo evangelicals are about.

A brief interlude of Praise And Worship Music (a capella), and now, thankfully, they're gone.

I would not have anticipated this in the quirky, queer vegetarian cafe, but even weirdo evangelicals eat their veggies, I guess.

Yeah, I'd say the homey quality the Chabad houses offer is more in line with some of the Mormon mission fields I've seen, especially when the girls are the missionaries. Jesuits are known for creature comforts, but a home cooked Shabbes meal isn't one.

Broseph came up to me to quiz me about being Jewish and why I carry a cane and thankfully, Lev shut that shit down.

I feel so gross. My crippled Yid ass is not a missionary opportunity.

A group of young folks are at this cafe, loudly sharing their experience faith healing a little disabled boy, and chat, it's gross as hell. I'm willing my crippled Jewish ass invisible, lest I get the same treatment.

It is so good. The acid in the coffee and orange juice cancel out, and it leaves a chocolate flavour not unlike Tootsie Rolls. (Kahlua and orange juice will do the same, unsurprisingly.)

Tucker Carlson’s saying the Iran attacks are secretly being orchestrated by Chabad

which, in addition to being a scarily dangerous claim to make, is a deeply fucking funny idea

I'm supposed to be doing shit for work and I am so categorically braindead. I don't even understand it. I've had food, a walk, and I have my favourite coffee beverage for springtime (it's a Bumblebee -- cold brew, vanilla simple syrup, and orange juice). I should be firing on all cylinders. And yet.