This Makes Me Very Happy

This makes me very happy

a helpful tutorial

I was taking with my friend about good omens and we were wondering how the hell aziraphale-as-crowley managed to get into that bath without getting his socks wet and so I drew this ‘helpful’ guide.

I like to imagine that all the demons had to just awkwardly stand around watching him clamber around getting into this bathtub… @neil-gaiman can you confirm?

You might never have heard of Sudan, or even know where it is located. But you know me. And I am From SUDAN 🇸🇩 and one week ago my brothers, fathers, sisters and mothers have been shot dead, these people exactly like me and you, they hope for a better country, they hoped for a brighter future, today they are all in heaven smiling at us.

Peacefully they protested demanding for a change, a new government that guarantee equal rights, no corruption and decent life.

160 unarmed people were murdered, that we know off so far, hundreds are severely injured, and much more arrested.

Please I beg you all, watch the news be informed and share, let the world know even if you don’t care just try.

Pray for Sudan 🇸🇩✌🏽

In a weird place between wanting quarantine to end because my mental health is absolutely spiraling, and hoping quarantine continues because I can’t imagine going back into functioning society again.

The way that we learn about Helen Keller in school is an absolute outrage. We read “The Miracle Worker”- the miracle worker referring to her teacher; she’s not even the title character in her own story. The narrative about disabled people that we are comfortable with follows this format- “overcoming” disability. Disabled people as children. Helen Keller as an adult, though? She was a radical socialist, a fierce disability advocate, and a suffragette. There’s no reason she should not be considered a feminist icon, btw, and the fact that she isn’t is pure ableism- while other white feminists of that time were blatent racists, she was speaking out against Woodrew Wilson because of his vehement racism. She supported woman’s suffrage and birth control. She was an anti-war speaker. She was an initial donor to the NAACP. She spoke out about the causes of blindness- often disease caused by poverty and poor working conditions. She was so brave and outspoken that the FBI had a file on her because of all the trouble she caused.

Yet when we talk about her, it’s either the boring, inspiration porn story of her as a child and her heroic teacher, or as the punchline of ableist, misogynistic jokes. It’s not just offensive, it’s downright disgusting.

There are not enough minutes for me to name the many people who during my 73 years on the earth plane have loved me into consciouses.  

André De Shields wins Best Featured Actor In A Musical for Hadestown at the 2019 Tony Awards

Neil Gaiman did a ‘where are they now’ for the Good Omens characters and apparently Crowley and Aziraphale are living out in a remote cottage in the English country side.

I believe in my heart that Crowley and Aziraphale tried really hard to make the cottage work. They really, very definitely honestly did. Fell Cottage* had a kitchen that was barely touched, a parlor that saw a great deal of traffic by  villagers fascinated by the arrival of two eccentric Londoners—it was a very small village, and Aziraphale had given up scowling at people since it seemed to have little effect—and a library full of poetry, prophecy, and various first editions that defied the actual breadth of the space it occupied.**

Aziraphale took to gardening, in that he spent a lot of time puttering in the garden and it definitely had plants in it. Some of them ate the small dogs who had the bad sense to widdle on them. Unfortunately, Aziraphale had very little structured knowledge of plants (it was mostly ethereal instinct) and absolutely no concept of restraint; a botanist stumbling into Aziraphale’s garden in —shire would very likely be baffled and then either delighted or driven mad by the sheer impossible biodiversity.

“I think that’s cheating,” Crowley said once when they were talking a walk through the garden. He nodded to a bush blooming with deep purple flowers that hadn’t been seen on Earth since another and rather more famous garden was around.

Aziraphale blushed. “Oh, well. There was a bush right by the Eastern Gate, I always liked them.”

Crowley had a thriving side-business doing what might, in a very posh sense, be called Automotive Repair. In an actual sense, he did things with cars. Cars, unlike houseplants, were high-strung things that didn’t tolerate a regime of fear; as a consequence, Crowley spent a great deal of time reading books like Nervous Nellie No More: How I Beat Anxiety and figuring out how to speak in a calm, soothing voice. A lot of Ford Fiestas in the village of —shire were really only desperate for a bit of teatime chat about how Mrs. Margo leaned too hard on the breaks pedal and Johnny Margo ruined the suspension cruising over speed traps. Really, what Crowley had done was single-handedly invented the motor oil klatch.

And for a while, it was better than Heaven.***

But despite being bucolic and domestic (&tc other things ending in ‘ick’) it doesn’t last. To both their surprise, it’s Aziraphale who gets itchy feet first—Crowley catches him popping back from Poland, because he heard there was a new restaurant there one had to try. Shortly afterwards, Crowley nudges Aziraphale’s foot with his own, and asks whether he’s ever been to the actual Casablanca. Aziraphale asks if he’s ever had borscht from…? And Crowley replies, well no, but I always wanted to see…

It devolves from there. Neither Heaven nor Hell is speaking to them these days—they’re not not speaking to them, since that would imply something had happened; but there’s a silence. So Aziraphale and Crowley go on what Aziraphale refers to as a ‘grand tour’ and what Crowley refers to as a honeymoon. The cottage sits empty for decades, collecting dust and horror stories, and then, quietly, dissolves into the grass one moonless night. Everyone in the village talks about it, since they can remember the—well, not their faces, or their names, but they know someone lived their once. Someone full of green, and magic.**** 

“Do you miss it?” Crowley asks once, when they’re in Japan. Aziraphale had wanted to try real sushi. “Fell Cottage? I miss it sometimes.”

“Not often,” Aziraphale says, helping himself to the nori. He isn’t especially thinking when he says, “You were always the best part of it, and you followed me here.”

When he looks up, Crowley’s eyes are yellow and bright over the rim of his sunglasses. “Well,” Crowley says, and his voice is raspy, low. “When you put it like that.”

(The next morning, they’re in Morocco. They watch the sun come up, and Crowley says, like that first one, and Aziraphale says, yes.)

* Crowley had picked it. “Does this mean you’re taking my name?” Aziraphale had asked, with a painfully studied casualness. Crowley tentatively touched his shoulder to the angel’s—they were working on that, the touching thing—and said, “More like, that’s what we share. You’re Fell and I’m Fallen.” (…as readers, we shall draw a veil over what happened next. It was private.)

** As this describes most libraries, no one much noticed.

*** No one had to watch The Sound of Music.

**** There is an unexpected resurgence in fairytales and folklore in South Eastern England; it’s baffling, unless you know that  there were a couple strangers in a cottage in —shire, and they made the world interesting, before they went.