According to George Chauncey’s eponymous Gay New York, the Harlem Renaissance of the ’20s provided an opportunity for gay men to create their own social and cultural spaces within the burgeoning nightlife in the neighborhood.
Love is the look she gives me when we both come from work and we’re tired, but one of us has to figure out what dinner will be, and so we both go into the kitchen, put our hands on our hips, furrow our brows at what’s in the fridge. Love is each of us showering before bed, one after the other. We can’t shower at the same time, because we like very different temperatures of water, and that’s love too. I brush my teeth and she pees. The fog in the mirror gives way to a portrait of the two of us preparing to sleep. It’s a portrait of love, and we look at it every night.
Love is the way her neck smells. That’s where it’s strongest, the side of her neck. And I lean into it and I breathe in, and I remember what it means to live with another person.
Love is the hours we spend under a blanket on the couch, and love is also the hours we spend apart, earning a living so that we can return to the couch, once more lie down together. Love is the beat of the heart and the passage of air and it’s the circulation of fluids and it’s the equilibrium of all the functions that sustain us.
Love is the absence of all she could say to me. It’s knowing that there is pain and choosing to never activate it. Not as a single choice made once and left secure forever, but a daily choice. Each morning we wake and she holds my betrayal in her hands and sets it gently down and we go on with the day.
Love is not freedom. But freedom isn’t inherently good, there can be terrible freedom and wonderful captivity. Love is wonderful captivity. It is a constraint from which you never wish to escape.
Love in the morning is a cup of coffee made just the way she likes it. And love at noon, as the way the sun through her hair makes an imprint on my breathing. And love in the afternoon, when I nap alone but nap knowing that she is pacing around the house somewhere. And her motion is near my stillness. And love in the evening, as a laying of hands and a stretching of limbs. And love in the quietest hour of night, when in a moment of wakefulness between hours of dreaming, I hear the soft hiss of her sleeping and feel what birds must feel when nesting.
We are nothing if not absurd. We are nothing.
Love as an activity and as an emotion and as a bodily function and as a series of decisions and as a meal prepared and eaten together at a home we share.
Love as a person who returned to me and then never left again.
Alice Isn’t Dead, Part 3, Chapter 10: “An Ending” (via @alicescripts)
I can’t believe this needs to be said, but the rich are not doing you a service by employing you. They require you. Everything they have is contingent on the fact that you work for them and do what they say. Without you, the rich have literally nothing. Workers have power over the entire economy.
It is actually workers doing a major service to their employers by not unionizing and not starting a revolution, since literally the only thing workers need to do to grind the entire economy to a halt is put their hands behind their back and stop working. That is it. Workers could crash the entire machine in one moment if they wanted.
Stop calling them “job creators.” They aren’t. They literally require you. But you dont require them. You are wealth creators. And you have the power to take it back whenever you want. You just have to organize.
One of the most useful insights my father ever gave me was that “your employer owes you money”.
At any given moment, you have done work that your employer has not yet written you a check for. They owe you money, and you owe them nothing
R.I.P. The 2976 American people that lost their lives on 9/11 and R.I.P. the 48,644 Afghan and 1,690,903 Iraqi and 35000 Pakistani people that paid the ultimate price for a crime they did not commit
this is the only september 11th post I’m reblogging
“wouldn’t you rather earn something than have it just handed to you?”
Yeah when it comes to actual awards and fancy goods, but when it comes to basic needs, basic human decency, and accomodations, those things should always be handed to people. No one should have to “earn” those things.Value people as people, not base it on how much they produce.
yeah but that creates a severe dependency that could be exploited easily, and creates a slippery slope @musical-clarity
Actually studies show that people who live in places with universal income (who are given money with no strings attached just for being citizens) do far better work than those who don’t and are more enthusiastic to do work.
This is because they still want nice things and will work for those but the part of their energy that was devoted to worrying about if they have enough money to pay the rent and bills this month is now freed up to do other things.
Some people will always be lazy and take advantage of the system, but they are always a tiny percentage and it seems ridiculous to me to punish the majority and severly hamstring their abilities just because a handful of people will simply live of basic income rather than work.
It’s been tested a couple times. In Canada, in some European countries, and the results are always the same.
There are two groups of people who show a statistically significant (Greater than one half of one percent, or 1 in 200) increase in Not Working and living off the guaranteed income. Parents of Children under school age, and full time students.
Among ALL other groups, employment actually INCREASED. Why? Because guaranteed minimum income means that homeless people can get at least a basic low end apartment. It’s hard if not impossible to get an above board job without a permanent fixed address. Also more people were able to have and maintain a BANK ACCOUNT. It is often hard to get a decent job without an account that can accept Direct Deposit for paychecks.
Also, lost work time due to illness and injury decreased across the board. It turns out if people are getting a decent amount of money each month they can A> afford to eat better, and B> obtain decent medical attention both preventative and emergency. Crazy right?
So why hasn’t it caught on?
Because it doesn’t directly benefit the people in power, and it increases THEIR PERSONAL taxes, their CORPORATE TAXES, and thus decreases their PERSONAL INCOME.
So, because Jeff Bezos and Alan Greenspan might fall from making 100 billion dollars a year to making 99.8 billion dollars a year, it’s a hard NO and we can all fucking die..
The End.
The other reason the people in power hate it is because it fundamentally changes the relationship between employer and employee. In regular capitalism, the employer has all the power because if you quit you starve and if you get another job it’ll be equally shitty because all the bosses know that they have you by the gonads.
But with universal income, power is given to the workers. If your boss is an asshole, you can just quit without worrying about starving. So the employers are the ones that have to sell themselves and offer value for your time in order to keep enough staff to survive. And they HATE that.
And universal basic income would mean that people could have the chance to figure out what they REALLY want to do with their lives rather than finding the first office/retail/whatever job they can get once they finish education and end up stuck there for years, totally miserable because they couldn’t just take a break and try different things.
Universal basic income would also mean people being able to have more leisure time and pursue their passions. It would mean people could discover a love of writing, art, languages, music, anything! It would mean more innovation, as people could take more opportunities to invent things or start up new businesses or charitable organisations. People could donate to charitable causes more! Honestly the possibilities are endless
Capitalism depends on people to be universally miserable and desperate.
I really hate how “your partner shouldn’t be a psychic” has evolved into “you cannot expect your partner to be intuitive to your needs or wants at all” because that’s… quite frankly ugly and a really good way to make your relationship feel like a chore.
I pay attention to the things my partners like and Store That™ in my little brainspace until it becomes useful. My bf likes tea. We were cleaning out an office full of stuff yesterday and they had some tea leftover they would’ve thrown out, so I took it home to him. Wow! He didn’t tell me he needed or wanted that, but he appreciated it because it’s something he likes.
Not everything has to be some grand gesture to show your s/o that you’re into them and you’re paying attention to them. I recall someone saying they wrote down things about their S/O and their interests so they could look back and remind themselves since their memory sucked. Things like that matter.
And I think it’s really cruel to tell people, and especially women who this type of shit is always put towards, that they aren’t allowed to want romance or spontaneity because it’s an “unreasonable” expectation. It really isn’t. Healthy communication does not inherently mean constant hand-holding.
Ronald K. Siegel has studied the precursors of religious faith in African elephants and concludes that “elephants are aware of natural cycles, as they practice “moon worship,” waving branches at the waxing moon and engaging in ritual bathing when the moon is full.“[7] Observations by Pliny the elder also note supposed elephant reverence for the celestial bodies.[8]
