i’m still PISSED about harry potter leaving draco to die because “oh boo hoo there aren’t enough seats in this minivan someone has to stay behind” like you fool. you fucking fool. i’ve ridden to walmart and back in an 11-person shuttle seating 17 people just bc i didn’t wanna wait to get some skim milk. are you really telling me that you couldn’t put a dude in the trunk for the sake of getting away from a collapsing island? you worried about not having enough seat belts??? people died bc of your poor minivan management skills, harry
i drafted this in a blind rage immediately upon waking up today and i may have misremembered some plot points of the Harry Potter series
i thought i’d written this up on here before, but i can’t find it. so let me tell you my favourite story about my time in oxford.
my college library is a converted church (with graveyard still attached). and it closed at about 1am every night, but they let people keep working in the vestry – where there were… i think six desks? – overnight. i was not very good at doing my work at anything other than the absolute last minute, and would fairly often end up in the vestry the night before an essay was due.
it was grim. honestly i do not miss it.
the highlight of those nights was when i allowed myself a break to go out to buy a burger from the kebab van that was on the other side of the high street. the nearest kebab van was ahmed’s. kebab vans in oxford are serious business (there are few kebab shops, and they’re mostly not near the colleges, where the first and third-year students often live in). i just looked ahmed’s up to check i was spelling his name right and found this amazing painting of the van!!
anyway. so one night in – i guess it was probably april? i think it was in my final year, and not too long to go before exams – i walked out to the kebab van. it was 2am, or maybe 3am. a weeknight – maybe a tuesday – and there was nobody around. too late for other people taking study breaks, and maybe the people who were out clubbing weren’t coming back yet. i felt like i and ahmed and the other guy who worked in his van were the only people alive.
and then an entire band of men turned up in full 16th century regalia.
i think maybe one or two of them had musical instruments with them, but not all of them. they stood there. they didn’t seem to think that they were doing anything unusual. i guess for them, it wasn’t. nobody else came by. nobody said anything except to order some food.
i thought: am i hallucinating??? what is happening???
i always ordered a cheeseburger at ahmed’s, and as it wasn’t a busy night they didn’t already have any cooking, so i stood by the van for a good five minutes while it cooked, just watching these men, who seemed like time-travellers, solemnly order their kebabs. none of them had phones out or anything. nothing broke the illusion except the situation we were in. it honestly felt like time was collapsing. like we had all been pulled out of the timestream and were just chilling here together. it wasn’t april whatever, 3am, 2011. it was no time, no place. The Kebab Van At The End of Time.
they just seemed like people from the past who wanted to get something to eat. an eternal constant. and the guys in the van were as nonchalant about it as the men themselves were. yeah, we get sixteenth century people through here all the time.
Play idea: perform MacBeth, but when the witches are doing their prophecy thing, they segue into telling the story of Hamlet. Hamlet is chatting with the ghost when it starts telling a Midsummer Night’s Dream. The audience becomes slowly aware that the programs and advertisements did not publish a runtime for the performance. Ushers start handing out new programs, with new actors’ names on them in previously unmentioned roles. Every single known Shakespeare play is nested inside the performance. The theatre doors are locked.
At intermission they play one (1) It’s Not Unusual
Hey so you all remember Dakota Access? Well what if I told you that right now nearly the exact same thing is happening in Canada. On Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia, about an hour from where I live, our government is trying to build a pipeline right through indigenous land. Protesters have been camping in the mountain for over four months now, surveilling and delaying the pipeline, in a camp named Camp Cloud. Bring attention to what our government is trying to do, support Camp Cloud.
Find ways to support the fight for the right to clean water here. Protect our land!!
How do people get to own secondhand bookshops. Not the big/newer quirky ones, but the little dusty ones that are piled high with books and always staffed by that same old guy who’s reading behind the desk. How do these businesses even begin, how do they survive, they feel like they were passed down by immortals and staffed by retired druids or something
[Caesar: “hey guys”
Senator: “oh hey Caesar”
Caesar: “i uh, i brought my knife”
Senator: “your knife?”
Caesar: “Octavius said to bring one in the group chat”]
I'd Much Rather Have a Dragon 