Gator Moment

ITS GOING TO BE OKAY AND I LOVE YOU. I HOPE YOU'RE SAFE I HOPE YOU GET TO REST. I LOVE YOU! I CARE ABOUT YOU. I WANT YOU TO BE WELL. ITS NOT GOING TO BE LIKE THIS FOREVER I PROMISE. I LOVE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

im so proud of you. im so very very proud of you. did you know how beautiful you are? how lovely you are? im so happy youre here. did you know theres a universe inside every person? i love you. youre beautiful. im so glad youre here and you made it and youre still going. im so very proud of you. you are special just because you are alive. i love you, okay? you're going to be okay. i am so, so proud of you

you'll feel like a total dipshit train wreck and no matter what some girl is gonna see you and think "role model". you can't kill yourself you have to go be clocky in the gas station so a 14 year old can have the trajectory of her life altered forever

Being clocky when i was working as a barista was one of my big joys. Being clocky when i was teaching high schoolers how to play the marimba was my reason for being for half a decade. It sucks how scared I am to leave the house I live in now. But I still need to try and be clocky at the grocery store. I wish i had a job to be clocky at. Being visibly me is one of the most radical acts I'm capable of, and I hope that one day we live in a world where it isn't radical at all.

that's exactly what I was feeling when I wrote this. we all find ways to defy our fear, love is an excellent motivator.

it has blown my mind in recent months to find out that not only do people notice my existence when I'm outside, some people actually think it's cool that I am visibly trans? And also a gigantic nerd carrying a bag with a D&D reference on it? Like, somebody I just met referred to me as a 'cool person'? What?

I guess the reason all that Backrooms stuff has never really fazed me is because I worked in on-site networking support for a while, and literally every city's downtown district is just Like That once you get off the beaten path. Not just the really big cities, either; the one I'm currently living in has a population of less than 250 000 – metro area included – and a downtown area about six blocks across, and the service corridors still manage to do some House of Leaves shit. At one point I was trying to map the route of a misbehaving network cable, started out in a shopping mall parking garage, and ended up surfacing in the basement of the casino across the street. Totally unsecured – apparently neither the mall's administration nor the casino's managers knew that particular service corridor existed.

Like, I once bumped into a fully stocked and operational Coke machine in an unlit maintenance corridor twenty feet below ground level. Its display lighting was the only illumination for a hundred yards in either direction. I don't even know what it was plugged into.

Somewhere below this city there's a room the size of a high school gymnasium filled floor to ceiling with rotting mattresses. I've seen it with my own eyes – and, more importantly, smelled it with my own nose. I can't recommend the experience.

(That last one isn't even mysterious. The room in question is within easy walking distance of the basement of a major hotel, if you know where you're going; I imagine the hotel started stashing their old mattresses there at some point rather than pay to have them hauled away, and over the ensuing decades the situation got out of hand.)