OK But There’s Another “critical” Here, And It’s Also Getting Confused With The Others. Critical

ok but, this was around 13 years ago so my parents would have been around 68 years old. They’d been to Maritzburg to visit my gran, and they got home and my mom was complaining about my dad, how, when they’d had a flat tyre and he was messing with it putting in the jack to change the wheel - he said to my mom “just lift the car for a moment”. So she did that, and he got the jack in, and then she was complaining about how he’d just casually ask her to lift the car, but...

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.

This haunts me.

"why would urban supercities depopulate?" plague, obviously

something to look forward to in 2020

please please expand on your list of Things Which Have Actually Worked, your ask box ghost wants to hear about this

I have the best ask box ghost and I’m sorry to have gone so long without responding to this; I wanted to wait till I was in a place where I could give it the thought and attention it deserves. <3

(Original post here. I totally encourage other people to share their lists of Things Which Have Actually Worked; that seems like the sort of valuable information which is really useful to have available.)

(Cut for length, and various mental illness stuff.)

Keep reading

#if you’re a us citizen of course 

Do this now.

Do this now.

Take a pause from President Trump’s latest outrage (sending federal police to foment violence in U.S. cities in hopes that it will help his flagging campaign) or inanity (“Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”) — and do the only thing guaranteed to end the nightmare.

Go to Vote.org, or, if you are reading this in the dead-tree edition, type vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote into your browser, spend 30 seconds entering your name, address and date of birth, and you’ll find out instantly if your voter registration is current. If not, follow the instructions to register.

Next, click this link or type vote.org/absentee-ballot into your browser, and sign yourself up to receive an absentee ballot for the November election. That takes about two minutes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/24/stop-fretting-about-trump-do-something-about-it-right-now/

hey what if we didn’t combine dozens of unrelated political positions into two color-coded options

March has some fucking nerve showing it’s face around here again

Happy Apollo Day!

edinburgh, 2019

anyone who says “the bible is clear” about an issue, is 100% of the time wrong. the bible wasnt clear once. the bible couldnt be clear about how to make a table if it came in an ikea box