…‘desert’ is a term Europeans use to describe areas where they can’t grow wheat and sheep.

She wants her own house? Pen tried to interpret this. Most women do, Des returned, at some point in their lives. Getting one without going through some man is made nearly impossible on purpose, I suspect.

If Feather’s Your Blue Eyed Boys got me through the brutal aftermath of Mum’s death in the summer of ’14, sassbandit and were_duck’s Draculoids Will Never Hurt You is shaping up to be the essential text for this spring under Fascism. The irony is that I first read it in June of 2011 without losing myself in it. It took six more years of working for Better Living Industries to get to the point where I know I’ll die if I don’t art-bomb the Man and write punk love songs to all my friends. (Ironic twist: gonna die anyway!)

For the full immersion experience, I’ve spent the last week listening to Danger Days on endless repeat and reading The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. In the back matter, Gerard Way, who turned 40 this week (thank you, good sir, for surviving your descent into Hell), describes “looking inward, to that inner 16-year-old girl.” As a former 16yo girl myself, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate those rare moments when the culture at large stops shitting on 16yo girls even for a nanosecond, let alone acknowledges them as something strong and important and worth protecting.

But Way also identifies the Man as… himself. His drive, his ambition, his ego, his death wish. I don’t know why I am even a little surprised. Every text that speaks to me on that deep level is somehow about complicity.

I used to believe, bless my naive little heart, that I had something to offer the robbed dead. Not revenge—there’s no revenge in the world that could return the tiniest fraction of what they’ve lost—and not justice, whatever that means, but the one thing left to give them: the truth.

§ Because I am chronically behind the times, here is a Tweeter Essay about the Millennials, those 90s-amnesiac little bastards.

§ Millennials uploading their exquisite, funny, wrenching, trauma-aware love stories to AO3, for no compensation, while holding down day jobs

§ Millennials imagining a world in which relationships built on consent and vulnerability and authenticity are not the exception but the rule

§ …while finishing challenging Master’s programs in library science and psych. So dedicated they make us Gen Xers look like fucking Boomers

§ Would I enjoy even the approximation of sanity I have today without my secret Internet village of Millennials? The fuck I would

§ Whatever I achieve now and for the rest of my life, for art, for love, for the resistance: I am standing on the shoulders of giants

§ Now go read everything by lalaietha and staranise and gyzym and Avoliot and scioscribe and idrilka and Speranza and too many others to name