In Blink 182’s video “All the Small Things,” they make fun of typical boy band videos.
They made fun of One Direction before there was a One Direction.
i don’t much care for blink182 but this is funny
Melissa Harris-Perry: Nothing is riskier than being poor in America [full video]
This video is SO AMAZING and you need to watch it right now.
What Dwells In the Dark: Chapter 2
I flopped down on my bed, dressing in nothing but my skivvies. My soaked clothes sat in a heap outside the door in anticipation of a good wash. It wasn’t long before a headache began to set in and further compound my already grevious list of woes for the evening. The bottle of pills clinked as I staggered across the room and downed a enough to hopefully satisfy the dull ache that only grew in size as the minutes ticked by. Nausea, too, began to well up in my throat and stomach, causing me to promptly lie down on the carpet and mope. For odd reasons unknown to myself, I, for some reason, enjoyed lying on the floor at times. Staring up at the dimly lit room of my popcorn ceiling, I desperately wished to scrap each and every kernel off with a chisel as irritability kicked in, adding to the already dangerous cocktail of not-feeling-well-ness.
I groaned and moaned in desperation as my symptons increasing in severity. Nights like these weren’t often, but they still occured. They happened generally after an especially stressing day…and I think this one just might qualify. Holding my arm aloft, I traced the imaginary lines of torn flesh seared into my mind. Memories of the day lazily drifted back into my field of vision: glass, blood, green eyes…and a view of worlds planes no human was ever meant to see.
Suddenly, I gasped in agony as the contents of my mind seared in newfound agony. My harmless headache morphed into a severe migraine, bringing an even more dire sense of nausea and a taste of rising bile in the back of my throat. I rolled onto my knees, still gripping both sides of my head as it throbbed away in my hands. Tangles of black hair rolled through the cracks between my fingers and obsured my vision, but something peculiar caught my attention through the rolling waves of pain.
The deep black of the tome managed to shine through what seemed to be a perpetual layer of dust clinging to its cover, obscuring any text that might’ve adorned its face. Just looking at the damn thing made my heart race with a feverish pace. Something, I don’t know what, but something told me that this… thing was reponsible for my current plight. That same thing told me to tear it apart.
Uttering a not-so-subtle growl as I crawled over to my tormentor, another feeling began to rise above the tides of anger and nausea rolling throughout my system. I cursed my inherit intelligence as I instantly understood the nature of this feeling: curiosity. I would never be able to live with myself if I destroyed the book without first knowing its contents, so I slowed my crawl as I came upon its location.
I gently blew across its cover, sending a herd of dust bunnies scampering through the air. The light caught on the emerald text embossed onto the black leather of the tome’s cover, illuminating a title written in arcane characters and symbols. I traced my fingers over each to which I felt a faint power behind their meaning…whatever it was. Seriously, I didn’t have a damn clue about what the text meant, but I had a feeling it was something not entirely normal.
I lifted up the tome, all eight or so pounds of its thickness, and fiddled with the clasped belt holding it shut. At the same time, I noticed my migraine and nausea diminishing as I further progressed in discovering the secrets my not so little friend held within. I raised the clasp holding the belt in place, eager to dive into whatever was waiting for me as my curiosity raged into an uncontrollable blaze.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” I snapped my head around, meeting those lovely green eyes. Lovely? Yes, lovely. Something about this stranger, my stranger, made him subtly endearing. Not in a romantic way…no. It was more like one of pure fascination.
I continued to hold his gaze, hoping for another glimpse of the view I had seen earlier. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“You have no idea what’s within. Why, you can’t even read what’s on the cover!” He exclaimed as a barking, mocking laughter echoed about the room and he held out both arms in jest. “You mortals are always diving into things you really shouldn’t be!”
Unlike my nausea and head ache, the irritability remained as strong as ever. “You were the one that gave it to me in the first place! Am I not supposed to read it?!”
My stranger crossed his arms and flashed a grin as laughter shined from behind the pools of green that I felt so absorbed in. Ever since I had seen them shine, not with emotion, but with real light, they had always been lurking in the depths of my subconcious, a subtle yet powerful entity. “Well then, I see it’s already begun to affect you. I think it likes you.”
A feeling of self-satisfaction joined in with my annoyance. So I was right about the book causing this causing me to want to open it even more. My hands resumed the process of undoing it’s clasp, only the find that the parts were entirely immobile. “Hey, what is this! Open god dammit!”
“Oh, no, no, no. I’m sorry, he doesn’t really like to open up when I’m around. He’s a such a little bastard about it to.”
My hands slowed to a stop as I processed what had just been said. He? A book can have a gender? Or was it also an entity not unlike Mr. Stranger? “But…” I plopped onto my butt, rolling off of the balls of my feet. I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “What was your name anyways? Or title. Whatever it is non-mortal beings like you go by.”
“Oh I like the Mr. Stranger moniker you call me within that wonderful mind of yours. It’s strangely endearing. My real name is a bit of a mouthful anyways.” Great, the bastard can read minds.
“What else have you found digging through my privacy? That’s not very polite by the way. I’m sure someone of your…caliber knows some form of restraint.”
“Well, I found the sarcastic musings that don’t make it out of your mouth. You’re one salty little girl, aren’t you?” Mr. Stranger said with a slight chuckle and relxation of his frame. “But that’s okay, great minds tend to think alike, and luckily, both of our minds do seem to be great…or even slightly more so.”
“Do god-beings even really have something you can call a ‘mind’? It just seems so…human.”
“Well, yeah, duh. How else would we think” he said with a roll of his eyes.
”Excuse me then, bu-“
“You are excused!”. Okay, this shit might get annoying. Fast. I paused, afraid I was going to be cut off again by my guest. For a mystical god-being, he sure did act like an ADHD five year old. “I take that as a compliment!”
“Okay, please, just get the fuck out of my head. That is the one place I get some semblance of privacy and I really don’t want to share it with someone else.”
“Fine, fine, fine. I’ll stop, but your mind is like a particularly interesting novel! Why, it could be a bestseller even!”
“…anyways. As I was trying to say, if you really are a…god…or something from a higher plane of existence…what the hell do you want from me?”
“From you? No, my dear, Melanie, I want you. All of you in your glorious entirety“ he said as he motion at all of my glorious entirety.
“For what? Sex? I know gods love to get their bang on with mortals for some bizarre reason. Just look at those crazy Olympians.” Mr. Stranger frowned at this comment, dropping his arms to his side and walking up to where I sat on the carpet in the middle of my bedroom. Crouching down in front of me, he told me “I don’t want your body. I want you. Your mind, your body, your spirit…You’re perfect for what I need” as he raised a hand and touseled my wavy black hair.
“Which is…?” the embers of curiosity once again welled in my chest, setting my heart aflame.
“I need you, Miss Melanie Gyre, to be my new hero.”
What Dwells In the Dark: Chapter 1
“What if I told you…that every pantheon, every mythos, every religion you have ever heard of…was just wrong?” The sudden voice pierced the silence, causing me to nearly rocket off the chair. A strange man sat in one of the empty wooden chairs on the other side of the small round table I myself was seated at. His eyes sparkled with such a bright green hue. They appeared to be glowing in their own right, but that may have just been the humor and laughter shining behind them.
I sat in silence just a few seconds more, still trying to steady my breathing as my heart continued to thump about inside my chest. The man’s eyes remaind focused on mine, never shifting for a second. “Well…I’d absolutely believe you. Never was one for that bogus religion-y shit. Never believed in it from the start. So yeah, I’d say it’s all made up as well.”
“No, no, no, no, no, no my dear! Wrong. Not made up. Just wrong.” Mr. Stranger leaned forward with every “wrong”, further enunciating the difference between what was supposedly wrong and what was supposedly just not true in general. All the way, his eyes never stopped smiling in their lime-colored way. All of that didn’t matter though, because this dude was seriously starting to weird me out. It was definitely time to go.
Turning towards my bag, I put away the book I was reading and swept all of the other miscellaneous stuff sprawled across the table in it. Fully intending to make a break for it before this lunatic started preaching even more of his crap to me. “Look, dude. I don’t want any of this new age-y religious bullshit. Not now, not ever. So why don’t you ju-” What. Mr. Stranger was gone. Gone gone. Not even a trace of him remained in the little coffee shop. I didn’t even hear the little bell above the door sing. Hell, that scared me worse than him suddenly appearing in front of me. At least when I’m reading, I know I space out and can’t hear background noises, but when he left I was definitely not in the zone.
“Hey, Bob, did you see where that crazy guy talking to me went?” The little coffee shop’s owner popped his plump face over the row of espresso machines, a confused look on his portly little face. “Uh, crazy guy? The only crazy person I see is some girl talkin’ to me right now. The only one that’s been in here today has been you, Mel.” Okay, if I wasn’t scared before, I was definitely, absolutely, positively, legitimately scared now. People don’t just walk in and walk out without anyone noticing.
I grabbed my shit and hauled ass out of the store into the dreary rain that so often plagued this little town. I tried to focus on just making it home, but the events that transpired in the coffee shop raced through my mind in a frantic mess. Was I finally going crazy? Crazier I mean. Did I need to visit my psychologist again? It’d been a year or two since I last saw him, maybe I was overdue. Or maybe Bob was just playing some crazy prank on me with a friend of his. Whatever it was, I had no fucking clue.
The walk home wasn’t a very long one, but the rain and biting chill unfortunately made it a very unpleasant one. Well, as unpleasant as I could find a walk. I love walking. Not so much a fan of running, but walking is nice. When I walk, I think. It’s as though my legs are moving a belt transferring power to the generator of my mind. Thoughts just come so much easier when I’m in motion.
I turned the corner into my shortcut, a dark alleyway lined with dumpsters and the refuse of people too lazy to bother even throwing it away. I yawned, scratching my head as I looked at the muddy ground beneath my feet. One step led to another as my shoes printed intricate patterns into the soft filth where so many had trod before me, but none of that mattered at the moment. The alley was empty of any other human life for all I knew. As it so turns out, my assumption was right as I barreled straight into the body of something that definitely was not quite human.
“Have you thought about what I told you earlier, my dear?” so said the fateful stranger of this fateful afternoon. I screamed and tried to skip backwards, the heel of my shoe catching on an empty beer bottle poking out of the mud. I didn’t even feel the pain of landing directly on my ass as I stared up at my green-eyed stalker. “Well?”
My breath came in hurried gasps as the extremities of my body turned numb. “What the HELL do you want with me?!” I screamed out in a frothy mix of anger and fear. I was done with this. I just wanted to go home, but the universe had decided to fuck with me today, turning me into nothing but a play toy for it toss about as I turned limp in its maw.
The stranger’s eyes shined even brighter than they had before. It was only just now that I realized that they were actually glowing. It wasn’t just laughter lighting them right now, some bizarre force was illuminating the green of his eyes, sending a brilliant green light dancing about the flesh around them. “I want you, Mel”.
A pike of cold terror slammed itself into my gut, rapidly spreading its chill throughout my veins. No, no, no, no, no. I was not going to be raped by some freaky man with glowing fucking eyes. I’ve had a lot of crazy shit happen in my life, but this is something that has not and will not even happen. I went to move my arms to find that bottle I had tripped over, only to notice that it now occupied my right hand in the form of grisly, jagged shards. That’s the funny thing about pain. You hardly ever notice it until you realize you’ve been injured.
I groaned in pain, holding my injured hand to my chest as rivulets of blood raced down my arm and soaked into my clothes. Whines and moans escaped from their prison of clenched teeth while tears began to slide down my cheeks. As someone who has never broken a bone or had stitches, I behaved as well as one might expect.
A noise and movement in front of me snapped my head up, my gaze met his about a foot away from my face. Without thinking a gutteral growl tore out of my throat and I raised my uninjured hand in a defensive claw. “Don’t you fucking touch me, you creep”. My gaze didn’t waver one second, fully meeting his during this feverish moment. I could feel my lips curling into a snarl. Something else was taking over, some instint promoting survival. It seems in the old question of “fight or flight”, I was a fighter.
Mr. Stranger continued in his movement where I had caught him previously, kneeling down in the mud in front of me. I noticed the laughter in his eyes were gone. In fact, a completely new look had crossed into his eyes instead. A serious look. Both of his arms grabbed my injured one as I tried to squirm and claw at him in terror. Just as I was about to slam my mangled,glass-filled hand into his flesh, a wave of calm washed over me. The tension in my limbs went slack, causing me to sink into the filthy sludge beneath us. It wasn’t until now that I realized I had been holding my breath as a heavy sigh escaped my lips.
“This will only take a minute, sit still”. I complied. Why should I move? The fear had drained out of my body faster than a black hole devouring part of cosmos. I took the time to study the…creature’s appearance. He looked like a human, but my gut told me otherwise. He had black hair, slicked back behind his head, giving him a sophisticated, if not shady, appearance. He was tall and lanky, not a shred of fat or muscle on his pale-skinned body. For attire, he sported a finely tailored suit, definitely inspired by old Victorian standards. And of course, his glowing green eyes were what you saw first. Even when they weren’t glowing, they had a magical sway of their own.
I stared into the more as his hands moved down towards the cuts and shards of glass wedged into the lower half of my arm. Suddenly, a bright spark lit his irises, similar to the way an electric screen spreads light out in an outward motion from the center. They were glowing so brightly that the light was casting a faint glow into the area around his face, giving him a foreign aura. Bright green tendrils appeared from the air about his hands, threads of esoteric energy dancing about his finger tips. I sat in awe as he weaved them about my injuries, delicately removing the shards while stitching up the gashes they left. The best part was that it didn’t even hurt.
The tendrils dissipated into the air around us. His eyes met mine once more, serious, but softer than they were before. He lifted my right arm, surprisingly flawless given the horrific injuries it sported only seconds again. Holding my hand with both of his, his eyes pierced mine, showing me more than I thought I’d ever see. I saw worlds behind his eyes, whole other planes of existence. “This isn’t over, go home and rest. And read.” A dusty looking book formed out of black smoke, floating in the air to my left. Pulling my hand from his, I grabbed onto it, feeling the rich leather bindings and heavy buckle that held it shut. Turning back towards where I expected the stranger to be, I found that I was alone once more. The rain once again began to fall, I hadn’t even noticed that he had stopped the rain from falling in the alley.
Dazed, I slipped the tome into my messenger bag and once again began to make my way home. This time, I was in my less of a hurry.
