I Don’t Want To Look “hot” I Want To Look Alluring, Haunting, Bewitching. I Want To Look Like The

i solemnly swear i’m up to no good

Okay, buckle up buckaroos, because today I met an honest-to-goodness cryptid.

I was out running errands and I made a stop at Intimate Books (…for a friend), and on my way out I realized that the bookshop next door was open.

This bookshop has existed for more than a hundred years, and in all my life it has NEVER BEEN OPEN. I mean, I assume it has to be open sometimes, but never at any normal, reasonable hour. Everyone says it’s a front for the mob or something.

So what do you do when the weird mafia bookshop is open? You go the fuck inside.

The first thing I noticed was the smell. You know that smell when you accidentally leave your towel on the bathroom floor all day and you come back to that mildew funk? The shop smelled like that times a thousand. I expected to see stuff growing on the walls, but the books were pristine. We’re talking first editions, rare editions, weird Bibles and books inscribed to really famous dead people. Librarians would weep for the chance to accession this place. In the first two minutes I found a signed copy of The Crucible and what I think was a first edition of Blake’s Book of Thel.

Then a clerk showed up out of nowhere—honestly nowhere. He looked EXACTLY like a bookseller should look, kind of fluffy and bewildered and really, really gay.

“Are you lost?” was the first thing he said to me.

“Nope. Just browsing, thanks.”

“Browsing, I see. Erm. How do you feel about snakes?” he asked. And without waiting for me to answer, he just walked away and vanished around a shelf.

I figured it was a metaphor, or a code phrase for the mafia. Until I turned a corner like ten minutes later and found a little reading nook. It was really pretty, although I feel like that particular window should have been on an interior wall? Anyway, curled up in an armchair in a patch of sunlight was the biggest fuck-off black snake I have ever seen.

Like, I don’t mind snakes in general. But in their normal context, right? Outside. On the ground. Not six feet long and sitting on a threadbare velvet armchair like it owns the place.

I was about to turn around and leave, but I saw a gorgeous first-edition copy of Leaves of Grass on a shelf, a little too close to the snake for comfort. But I had never needed anything so badly in my life.

So I went back to the counter to buy it, but the clerk was nowhere to be found.

While I was waiting, I noticed a collection of pictures hanging on the wall behind the counter, dating back to the very dawn of photography. A couple were of this rock-star looking guy from the 70s that I should probably have recognized, but there were authors and landscapes and stuff, too. There was even an old tintype portrait of Oscar freaking Wilde, sitting in this very shop with a guy that I would ACTUALLY SWEAR was the clerk from before. Like, I know my family all has the same nose, but this guy had the same everything.

After approximately one year of waiting, the clerk came back out to the desk. By now I’ve realized that he’s too bad at his job to be anything but the owner of the shop.

“I saw your snake,” I told him.

“Did you? Was he behaving himself?”

“He was sleeping.”

“Yes, he enjoys that.”

“Does he just stay out in the open like that? What if he gets out?”

He shrugged and smiled. “He always comes home again, the dear boy.”

Right, a homing snake. That’s totally normal.

Then he cleared his throat and asked, in a weirdly reluctant voice, if I was going to buy the Whitman.

“Yes, please,” I told him. “I saw it on a shelf by the snake, and it was just too tempting.”

He sighed. “Oh, yes, I expect it was.”

When I started to hand him my card, he went all fluttery and said that they didn’t take cards.

All right, fine. I had some cash on me, but I told him that he’d sell a lot more books if he got a Square or something.

He got this scandalized look on his face and went, “Why would I want to do that?”

Oookay. I handed over the cash and he popped open the ancient till and started making change.

In shillings. Shillings! I swear to god I saw Queen Anne’s face on one of them. The silver value of the coins was probably as much as I paid for the book.

But I had to have proof that this happened—at that point, all I had was a book in a plain brown wrapper, not appreciably different from what I bought next door. So I asked him for a receipt.

He looked delighted and wrote one up for me.

By hand.

With a fountain pen.

And that’s the story of how I met a bookseller cryptid and his pet snake.

and steal their gold, then give it to the poor so that they can afford weapons to kill the rich and give them to  you (the dragon) to eat

A friendly reminder from your local dragon to eat the rich

Spectrum outfitters is a new UK BASED company that is about to start selling binders

I know this damn website is so Americanised but PLEASE reblog this! Transmasculine people in the UK have to pay a ridiculous amount of money for shipping from America. This could change all that.

Support your UK trans community. Reblog this. Get the word out.

I’m rereading Hamlet.

like for donald trump, reblog for this piece of grass

Parasite and Girl

List of bisexuals whose identities are erased by the media.

P!nk

Anne Frank

Megan Fox

Billie Joe Armstrong

Snooki

Drew Barrymore

Angelina Jolie

Azealia Banks

Kesha

Fergie

Lady Gaga

Madonna

Clive Davis

Anna Paquin

Bai Ling

Carrie Brownstein

Evan Rachel Wood

Amber Heard

Frenchie Davis

Vanessa Carlton

Jillian Michaels

Freddie Mercury (debatable, but considering he had had a long-term relationship with Mary Austin and he tended to keep quiet on matters of his private life, we’ll never know for sure)

All or which have either been given the name “gay” or “straight“ by the media despite coming out. There are more than two sexualities and this is a fact that most people (even on Tumblr nowadays) forget. People tend to assume that since someone is with a person of the same gender, they’re gay. (Or vice versa in Angelina or P!nk’s case) This is incorrect to assume because you’re erasing their identities in the process. The people on this list aren’t gay or straight, they’re bisexual. No matter how much the media tries to erase that.

Everyone loves polite villains to contrast with brash and sarcastic heroes, but consider the dynamic of polite villains clashing with equally well-mannered heroes. It’s very good. Very civil. Very alienating to everyone around them.