a pocket stitched shut

Here's how you can help Palestine!!

Educate yourself and spread awareness with the help of these sites:

Al Jazeera - This is a news site that gives constant updates and information on Palestine.

Decolonize Palestine - This is a website that informs you about the history of Palestine, debunk myths, and gives out a lot of resources to look into.

Visualizing Palestine - This site creates infographics that can help people visualize the statistics from data collected about Palestine. They are free to download and share around.

US Campaign for Palestinian Rights - This website includes numerous campaigns and resources you can look into and support.

The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive - This site features a collection of many things from Palestine that archives documents, letters, and other items that show the lives and experiences of Palestinians.

Ways you can donate to/support families in Palestine:

Arab.org - Just do your daily clicks and you get to donate for free. Please take the time to donate to all of the causes.

Gaza Funds - Every time you refresh the site, it leads you to a different GoFundMe page for the people who need help.

Care for Gaza - This is an organization that sends aid out to Palestine, you can find more in their Twitter/X account. They also have a PayPal.

eSims for Gaza - You can send an eSim to people in Palestine to help them connect and reach out.

Emergency Relief for Gaza - This is a campaign that gives food, medical supplies, and other humanitarian aid to families from donations.

Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) - They also give medical aid to the people in Palestine and you can also support by donating to them as well.

Palestine Children's Relief Fund (PCRF) - Donate here to give funds and support to the children in Palestine as they specialize in pediatric care.

Google Docs/Spreadsheets:

Make sure to look at the other tabs within the spreadsheets as they lead to more options/resources!

Help Gaza - This is a spreadsheet with a list of fundraisers for different families/causes that need support! Look through and donate when you can!

Operation Olive Branch - This is a spreadsheet with many links and ways to help in the project! There are campaigns, fundraisers, volunteer work for other parts of the causes and such! Make sure to check it out!

★RESOURCE LINKS AND INFO★ - A google document made from Twitter/X user: para_docx. This includes links, resources, and information for the other ongoing genocides as well.

Some of these documents intersect and have similar resources and links, but I'm adding them just to make sure as they may also have some that aren't listed in this post either.

creature derek design yay (he also got his ass stuck in minecraft adn is walking around as an enderman)

he has some horrednously petty one-sided beef with hastur but doesn't do anything drastic (something something aware of canon universe but can't do much something)

minor notes below:

I was playing in the barn, but I was also hiding from my grandpa. I was aware that this hurt his feelings, but I didn’t know what else to do. Every year I’d ever visited him before, he’d seemed kind of mad at me, but I’d hoped still that year was the year that we’d finally be friends. I even made a list of things to do together. 

Unfortunately, the list did not fix things¹ so I'd been forced to acknowledge that if he couldn't be happy with me there, and he couldn't be happy with me gone, then perhaps he simply could not be happy. At least, not until someone invented The Secret Third Thing.

(But I was only nine. So. That someone would probably not be me.) 

Fortunately, being happy is a task that I've never needed to delegate - I’m actually quite good at it. I’d been sad in the barn for maybe an hour or so, but eventually that got boring, so I invented a new game where I would chase big clouds of shiny blue flies off the sun-warmed horse-poop and try to shoo them towards a corner of the barn that I knew had a large spiderweb in it. 

I was perfectly aware that this is not ideal for the flies, but I had just read Charlotte’s Web, so my empathy function was very biased towards spiders, who I perceived as patient and compassionate and slightly maternal women. Who just happened to have eight legs.  

(I, like most nine year old boys, would have personally been willing to fight a war for every patient, compassionate, slightly maternal woman I had ever met. If you, personally, have ever hugged a little boy who was trying very hard not to cry in front of his friends after skinning his knee, know that there is a child in this world that would kill in your name.)

(Now live with that knowledge.) 

I played my game with the flies for a long time. Long enough to get into a rhythm of running and laughing and then panting outside on my back while wallowing in the long green grass.

It was during one of those walks outside to lay in the grass that I noticed my mom. She was sitting on a hay bale, looking baffled. I don’t know how long she’d been there, but I was too young and confident to even feel odd. She asked me what I was doing, and I just kind of gestured to the ceiling, and said, You know, just. Feeding spiders.²

She nodded. I was feeding spiders. Of course. 

We sat there a few moments. It was an amicable silence, but I was still faintly relieved when she broke it.  

Your grandpa’s been looking for you, she said. He got some grapes earlier. Wanted to take you to feed the ducks.

I've always really liked feeding ducks³. Visiting them had actually been the next thing on my list. 

I was baffled by the effort. 

He’s mad at me, I pointed out. My mom, to her credit, looked genuinely confused. 

He’s not, she said. 

But he was mad when we picked blackberries, I pointed out. And when we went on that walk down to the prairie. And he snapped at me this morning when I asked if I could have some of his dried mangos. 

The mangos had been my last straw. The weirdest part was that he didn’t even say no, he just (angrily) said of course you can, as if it was an insult to his hospitality that I was asking when just the year before he’d yelled at me because I ate a tin of dried apples. Apparently, I was just supposed to know that those apples were exclusively reserved for The Apocalypse. 

(To be fair, my grandpa has always been very worried about the apocalypse, but mostly in the context of not having enough dried apples for it. There was a period of my life where I thought that The Apocalypse referred to some kind of prophesied biblical event where there would be No More Apples. This thought has stuck with me for a very long time⁴.)

Well. Yeah. My mom said. He’s mad. But he’s not mad at you. He’s just… Mad. 

I mulled this over. 

What about the mangos? I asked, and she shrugged at that. 

Alright, so that time he was mad at you, but that’s being mad one time in three days. Cut the man some slack, you’ve been asking him for permission before eating anything. 

I just don’t want to eat the wrong thing, I said. I’ve always been very defensive of my rule-following. Both because rules are important, and also because that #10 can of dried apples ripped through me like a shotgun full of razor blades⁵. That “snack” had 400% the recommended daily fiber for an adult man. And I was very definitely not a grown man when I ate it.  

It was a very painful experience is what I am trying to say. 

I know, my mom said. 

I don’t even like apples, I added. Still defensive. 

I know, my mom said again. She’s very good at saying it. It always feels like she’s agreeing with me, and not just trying to rush me onto The Point. Sometimes, people need to make detours from The Point in order to explain things. Like, hypothetically, why they once ate a very large number of dehydrated apples. My mom is wise, and she has always known this. . 

I just really wanted to eat something sweet, I continued. They don’t keep anything sweet in the whole house. The day before I ate those apples, I licked all the salt off a saltine just so I could eat the cracker plain. And then the cracker tasted just like a cookie. To me. That’s how crazy I was going. 

My mom nodded her head sympathetically. 

My first month of college, she said conspiratorially, I ate about a box of poptarts a day. 

There was another longish pause as both of us considered what led us to this point. 

My parents are crazy, my mom said at long last. It’s a very peaceful statement to her. I'm sure it was stressful when she first realized it, but she's had a long time to make her peace, and she's made it well.  

Will you go with me? I asked. To feed the ducks?  

He’s not mad at you, she said again. Reemphasizing her point. He’s just mad. It’s just how he is. 

But she went with me anyway.

I watched Grandpa Dale closely the whole way to the pond to see if my mom was right. She was. She almost always is.  He was angry while he drove, and he was angry while he parked and he was even angry while he strode purposefully towards the park. When we got there, he took several grapes, and he angrily put them in his hand, and angrily extended the hand towards the ducks, and he looked at me, and for maybe a tenth of a second he looked okay. Not exactly happy, but a little less mad. Then a duck bit the webbing between his pointer finger and his thumb.

He immediately, without hesitation, without even a second thought, hit the duck with a haymaker⁶. For a human, the punch would have been devastating, but the duck had the benefit of having essentially no inertia, so it just kind of moved sideways and looked perplexed. 

You son of a bitch, my grandpa said. This is a funny thing for anyone to say to a duck, but it was especially funny to hear coming from a former Mormon Bishop. 

Quack,⁷ said the duck. 

My mom started laughing. I'd felt a sort of holy terror at the anger my grandpa was exuding in that moment, but the moment she laughed I realized how absurd it was. I was watching a grown man beef with a duck. I was watching a grown man beef with the world. 

I started laughing too. In a better world, maybe my grandpa would've joined. Maybe he would've taken a good hard look in the mirror and questioned why exactly he was so angry. But he didn't. Instead he swore at the duck some more, and he threw his remaining handful of grapes at it overhand, like a baseball, and then the duck ate the grapes out of the water, and my mom actually laughed so hard she started dry heaving a little, and my grandpa had to go sit in the car for a few minutes by himself to regain his composure. 

Erika, referencing ebenezer scrooge: You, boy! What day is it?!

Not verbally. He never stands in the center of the room and announces it. It just… happens.

He opens cabinets with growing confidence. Rearranges spices by usefulness instead of height. Judges the state of D3r’s cookware with increasingly dramatic facial expressions. Starts grocery lists unprompted. There are suddenly fresh vegetables in the fridge where previously there had been condiments, smoothies, and three separate microwave meals with nearly identical branding.

D3r, for his part, takes this with surprising grace.

Mostly because he knows his limitations.

He can survive. He can feed himself in the strictest biological sense. He knows how to heat frozen meals, boil water, make toast, and once managed to assemble a sandwich so structurally unsound it collapsed before reaching the plate. But cooking-cooking? Timing things? Seasoning? Using more than one pan without entering a fugue state?

No.

Avery discovered this the first morning when D3r offered to make breakfast and produced something that could only be described as apologetic eggs.

Avery had stared at the plate, then at D3r, then back at the plate.

This was probably the most concerned he'd ever seen Avery before but Avery still ate the eggs without complaint.

Now, standing in front of the stove with an apron he absolutely did not bring but somehow found in a drawer, Avery moves like he belongs there. Confident. Efficient. A little bossy in the most attractive way possible.

D3r leans against the counter, trying to be helpful.

Trying.

“What if I chop something?” he offers.

“No.”

“I can stir.”

“No.”

“I can supervise.”

Avery turns, wooden spoon in hand, and points it at him. “You can get out of my kitchen.”

D3r blinks. “My kitchen.”

“Not currently.”

There’s no real heat in it, only amusement. Avery crosses the room, places both hands lightly on D3r’s shoulders, and gently steers him backward out of the kitchen threshold.

“Shoo,” Avery says.

“I pay rent here.”

“Go be pretty somewhere else Derek.”

D3r’s face goes blank for a second, like his brain has momentarily lost connection to the server. Then he quietly retreats to the couch.

That should have been warning enough.

The second incident happens two days later.

Avery is making dinner—something that smells incredible and involves a level of pan confidence D3r finds vaguely intimidating. D3r has made the tactical error of wandering in to refill his water and then lingering.

He watches Avery work. Watches the easy strength in his forearms as he stirs, the quick precision of his hands, the way he moves through the small kitchen without wasted motion.

“You know,” D3r says, “I can hand you things.”

“I know.”

“I’m capable of opening containers.”

“I know.”

“I feel excluded.”

Avery glances over his shoulder. “You are in the way.”

“I’m standing still.”

“You’re standing exactly where I need to be.”

D3r looks around the tiny kitchen. “There is plenty of room.”

Avery gives him a long look.

Then he sets the spatula down.

D3r immediately senses something has shifted in the atmosphere. “Aves.”

“Mm?”

“What are you doing?”

“Problem solving.”

Before D3r can process that answer, Avery steps forward, slides an arm behind his knees and the other around his back, and simply picks him the fuck up.

Effortlessly.

Like D3r weighs nothing.

There’s no grunt. No dramatic wind-up. Just a smooth, decisive lift that leaves D3r staring down at the kitchen from several inches higher than he was expecting.

His brain fully crashes.

“Aves,” he says again, except this time it comes out much less authoritative.

Avery carries him two steps backward, deposits him just outside the kitchen entrance, and sets him down with absurd care.

“There,” Avery says cheerfully. “Better.”

Then he turns around and resumes cooking like he didn’t just entirely change how D3r saw him.

D3r remains where he was placed.

Motionless.

Blinking.

His face is warm.

Warm enough, in fact, that he touches one cheek just to confirm it. Yes. Blushing. Great. Excellent. Fantastic development.

From the stove, Avery glances back and immediately notices.

“…Are you blushing?”

“No.”

“You are.”

“I’m experiencing things.”

Avery snorts and turns back to the stove, clearly pleased with himself.

D3r retreats to the table this time, choosing a safer observational distance. He watches Avery move through the kitchen that absolutely used to be his, listens to the sounds of sizzling and chopping and casual humming, and tries not to think too hard about being picked up.

He fails immediately.

A few minutes later, Avery sets a plate in front of him.

D3r looks up. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

A beat passes

Then D3r says, very carefully, “If I stand in the kitchen tomorrow, are you going to do that again?”

Avery’s smile turns wicked.

“Depends,” he says. “Are you going to be in the way again, Derek?”

> accidentally meme your way into creating a hit song made entirely out of slurs

> song gets banned from the dance charts right as its about to chart

> every gay bar in the country immediately adds it to their playlist in protest

Tempted to actually put this on spotify so I can secretly stream it at work...

We slid off a hill and down to a lake. In the lake was a man claiming to be here to hunt whales. Apparently after you kill a whale it would regenerate itself and become bigger, and he wanted to kill the whale that ate his husband.