desolateforest

[desolateforest]

Literary Vision Board

Swirling around in my mind I worry about time --

When she is here and the days pass I need to keep everything in balance.

The one thing that has always snagged my serenity is security.

I never feel at home in my employment and envision my home life and work life flowing together naturally and respectively separate.

I still have my business, website, passion for what I do -- Why I worry is something I keep asking. No action has come to manifest in furthering my reaches into something secure and something I am proud of -- a symbol of growth and contribution. I don't want to have someone else take care of my daughter so I can work away from her. Is there a possibility that I can care for her and work simultaneously with a natural rhythm that makes one wonder why anyone would do it differently?

How can I work with my skills from home so I can have a fluid and full home and family life?

[desolateforest]

MOOD.

For a moment I had a grip on reality, but it was so slippery and quick it twisted and got away… – Michael Lipsey

[desolateforest]

CODE RED FOR HUMANITY

The alarm sounds at 4:40 am

I am 28W5D pregnant.

Wheezer’s long furry body is hyperextended on the carpet as I turn on the bathroom light

She is so cute, I think to myself. 

I look into the mirror at my red, tired eyes and wonder what today will hold.

My small world is spilled on the counter in front of me: toothbrush, a tube of paste, a bag of new makeup, eyelash curler, hair straightener, disposable flossers. 

The larger picture: life is being squeezed from the earth as all the junk and industry and consumption piles and bottlenecks nature’s ability to recycle and replenish. 

In the dryer is my only clean pair of pants that fit me, and I am disappointed because today is the beginning of another heat dome. Days in a row of 100 + temperatures. 

In the car he drives with his arms almost hugging the wheel, “Yeah, I might not work in the afternoon today, I almost passed out yesterday. The world is fucked babe! I fucking hate all the old hippies who are all PEACE AND LOVE AND THE WORLD. What the fuck did you guys do to change anything? They didn’t do anything now we have to deal with it and our baby will have to deal with it.” 

...What are we doing, I think to myself...

At work I get a text from my aunt saying my cousin has tested positive for the virus.

My boss’ brother is on a ventilator in the ICU in Tennessee.

Moving backwards into the future.

[desolateforest]

Vaccinations

I believe everyone should be free to make their own decisions about things. I believe people should have freedom. But what happens when someone’s exercise of their own freedom interferes with the freedom and health of others? This vaccination debate is akin to whether or not you have to stop at a red light. YES YOU HAVE TO STOP AT A RED LIGHT. Why? For the safety of yourself and others that also use the traffic system. The Covid-19 vaccination has killed 0, and the virus itself has killed millions worldwide. Why is a congresswoman comparing the vaccination pressures and mask mandates to gas chambers in the Holocaust? 

[desolateforest]

It’s Been Awhile...

It has been many years since I have posted on this Tumblr. I actually forgot I had it until I tried to make an account and it already said my email was tied to an account. I reset my password and read through all my old post and feel ready to pick up where I left off. 

Right now in my life I am a personal trainer. Within the last year I have met my life partner, want to have a child, started my own business, and my current endeavor is to get a remote job doing front-end web development. I want the ability to raise kids, stay home and have a rich interpersonal life with my family. Fuck the rest. 

I guess I’ll just post as if I were talking to everyone and no one. How liberating. 

--Desolateforest

[desolateforest]

I looked up the artist of a collection of mixed media stencil paintings hanging in the cafe I work at, and found this...

The Second of the Short Stories I Wrote Last Night

Letter Not to Be Sent

By Ace Troy

You should never take my advice, little one. Can you not see where life has left me? I believe it was Hemingway who said, “Happiness in intelligent people is one of the rarest things I’ve seen.”

            You are young, I don’t know you very well and I will never send you this letter, because if I was going to send it I wouldn’t make some of the admittances I will now make.

            The beauty of youth is mostly held in the ability to be naïve, and in being so naïve you are able to love freely with your whole heart. Being naïve is something that fades throughout life, but the ability to not be ignorant to the awareness of the various layers of life, both socially, romantically and also on a day to day basis, is not something I believe that you that posses and I have my doubts that you will ever move from the spot of awareness which I currently believe you are at.

            Don’t feel bad, very few posses this awareness and I can honestly tell you that it is no walk in the park to have it. I would have far preferred to have not been jostled and scarred and bumped out of position by other people thought life in the way that I have been. Still, I cannot lie and say that I regret the pain I went through in order to live the times in my life that I believe few people get to experience; but I can tell you that the bigger your heart is, the harder it will break.

            On the other hand, as I have already stated I do not know you. You might be a fucking genius for all I know. I could most definitely be judging you completely inaccurately. Which would spurn the question of why you want guidance, advice or the involvement in your life of a character such as myself. Why you would seek the opinion of the person in our fucked up family who has spent years walking in shadows and peering out from behind dark corners only to jump into the flood lights and show themselves as the anomaly that I am and have become. I am our family’s Missing Link; Big Foot, or the Loch Ness Monster. No one should take advice from a monster.

            But am I ‘a monster’ or the man behind the monster I’ve been made out to be because I ask people to ask questions?

            Am I a monster for asking people to ask themselves things? Should no one ask themselves whether or not they are happy? Is life worth living if you are unhappy?

            But I digress.

            Ignorance is bliss.

            There are things about this world that you would live easier not questioning. Life is always easier when you don’t question things. It always seems safer to sweep things under the rug.

            Don’t think that even from the pedestal of bullshit that I have raised myself onto that I don’t still sweep things under the rug. I might not do so much sweeping once something has appeared on the floor, but there is definitely an avalanche of skeletons hiding in my closet. This avalanche of skeletons have become ghosts at night, and they dance around me as I sleep, penetrating my subconscious to be reborn as what seems like fucked up details of the ever playing reels of my waking life.

            Want to know a secret? When I am sad, I live in my dreams.

            I sleep all day and all night because my dreams are better than reality.

I believe it was Dr. Suess who once said “You know you are in love when you cannot sleep, because your reality is finally better than your dreams.”

            You may not know this, because even my mom and my dad and my sister don’t know this, but when I was nine or ten I wrote an entire novel; complete with illustrations constructed out of pictures cut out from the newspaper of men’s swim trunks, and TVs, and glorious meals, and people that I didn’t know, depicted in catalogs fun and being together in a way that I could not be with my peers at that time in my life. Funny how real the fake people in fake situations in fake advertisements can seem so real to a child who is so alone.

            That’s why I wrote that novel, and that is why I still write now; because in the middle of the night I am drunk and alone. When I am drunk and alone the only thing that could even halfway comfort me is the dialogue bouncing around back and forth in my head between me and myself. This dialogue almost seems comforting when it starts, until my often immediate realization that this pseudo-dialogue it is the most lonely thing in the whole world, and I begin to wonder if it makes me human or if it makes me crazy.

            I hope this feeling is one that you never meet or become companions with in the way that I have.

            If you are still reading this letter I hope you have realized that I am either an asshole, or ambivalently pretentious, or completely off my rocker; because if you haven’t I feel so terrible for you.

            If you are sitting there nodding your head and understanding these words that I am writing to you, then I feel worse for you than any other person in the whole world because you are plagued by the awareness that I realize on a day to day basis.

            Do you know that what I have wanted most in life, since always, is to fall in love and live my own happily ever after? Even though it goes against everything that is me, all I really want is to fall in love and then marry the shit out of that woman and make a life together. I want the chance to pretend that I’m just like everything else, everything that was promised to us in the 90s.

            I know you are younger than I am and that extremely few (or any) of your memories are in the 90s, but back then they promised all of us that we would grow up and be rock stars, and politicians that saved the world with Captain Planet. They promised we would solve mysteries with Scooby and the gang. That we would be brilliant little child movie stars like Lindsay Lohan in ‘The Parent Trap’.  Look at poor Lindsay Lohan now, getting mistaken for Debbie Harry, who is at least thirty years her senior.

Such an unfortunate product of the 90s Lindsay was. It’s not fun to watch the aftermath of the 90s crash around you when all of a sudden the economy has flopped, we are in a recession and everyone is additionally even poorer from getting divorced. Meanwhile, the offspring of these pour souls are left to walk the earth wondering what happened to all the promises that were made to them fifteen years ago before you were even born.

Soon enough you’re going to come to an unfortunate understanding of the world around you. I shudder for where the world may be when you graduate from high school. I shudder for the realizations you will make about the world once it is forcibly set upon you by the course of your life.

I come back again to the question of why in the hell you would seek out an individual such as myself to gather advice or experience from. In the context that you know me, I am nothing less than the last person you should seek advice or guidance from, because even at over a decade your senior, I’m quite sure I am still just as lost you are, just a little less naïve and therefore less able to love than you are; and the ability to blindly love other people is, and continues to be, a quality in a person which should be held sacred and will always be rare to find.

[desolateforest]

Love is an absence of time To think love takes time is to place love into a box that can be packed away or opened To believe it is the mind that decides in the unmindful consciousness to love or to stop doing what is mistaken for love To interchange love and task To be drifted away from the present in a tragic dream believed to be love And once this shadow of the mind expires such love the end brings the familiar beginning and exact end-- This infinity a perfect analogy for the true love-- the closest a mind creating infinite false love may come to love itself.

desolateforest

[desolateforest]

“If you want to kill yourself, kill what you don’t like. I had an old self that I killed. You can kill yourself too, but that doesn’t mean you have to stop living.” kalifornyah

[desolateforest]

The human life like all the other lives, but not so straightforward our lives are built on perception mediated deception; our lives pretend to be special, drinking old resputin sibelius listening to me playing just for me, a blue bird out the looking glass playing in the row of shrub screened by the smothering ivy jumping foolishly aimlessly just for fun-sake around up and then down, the human life like all the other lives.

desolateforest

[desolateforest]

'I'm doing good,' he says, only his mother would ask first thing how he's doing. 'I'm pulling myself out of it,' he tells her. 'yup,' he confirms, 'yup,' confirms again, 'yup,' one more time. 'i'm uh, i'm going with the backpack thing, i'll try and focus on that,' he says. 'oh, she's fine. yeah, she deleted her facebook account, it was getting to her.' A long silence. 'yup, uh huh, yeah, ok, i love you too buh-bye'

desolateforest

[desolateforest]

I believe in free education, one that’s available to everyone; no matter their race, gender, age, wealth, etc… This masterpost was created for every knowledge hungry individual out there. I hope it will serve you well. Enjoy!

FREE ONLINE COURSES (here are listed websites that provide huge variety of courses)

Alison 

Coursera

FutureLearn

open2study

Khan Academy

edX

P2P U

Academic Earth

iversity

Stanford Online

MIT Open Courseware

Open Yale Courses

BBC Learning

OpenLearn

Carnegie Mellon University OLI

University of Reddit

Saylor

IDEAS, INSPIRATION & NEWS (websites which deliver educational content meant to entertain you and stimulate your brain)

TED

FORA

Big Think 

99u

BBC Future

Seriously Amazing

How Stuff Works

Discovery News

National Geographic

Science News

Popular Science

IFLScience

YouTube Edu

DIY & HOW-TO’S (Don’t know how to do that? Want to learn how to do it yourself? Here are some great websites.)

wikiHow

Wonder How To

instructables

eHow

Howcast

MAKE

Do it yourself

FREE TEXTBOOKS & E-BOOKS

OpenStax CNX

Open Textbooks

Bookboon

Textbook Revolution

E-books Directory

FullBooks

Books Should Be Free

Classic Reader

Read Print

Project Gutenberg

AudioBooks For Free

LibriVox

Poem Hunter

Bartleby

MIT Classics

Many Books

Open Textbooks BCcampus

Open Textbook Library

WikiBooks

SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES & JOURNALS

Directory of Open Access Journals

Scitable

PLOS

Wiley Open Access

Springer Open

Oxford Open

Elsevier Open Access

ArXiv

Open Access Library

LEARN:

1. LANGUAGES

Duolingo

BBC Languages

Learn A Language

101languages

Memrise

Livemocha

Foreign Services Institute

My Languages

Surface Languages

Lingualia

OmniGlot

OpenCulture’s Language links

2. COMPUTER SCIENCE & PROGRAMMING

Codecademy

Programmr

GA Dash

CodeHS

w3schools

Code Avengers

Codelearn

The Code Player

Code School

Code.org

Programming Motherf*?$%#

Bento

Bucky’s room

WiBit

Learn Code the Hard Way

Mozilla Developer Network

Microsoft Virtual Academy

3. YOGA & MEDITATION

Learning Yoga

Learn Meditation

Yome

Free Meditation

Online Meditation

Do Yoga With Me

Yoga Learning Center

4. PHOTOGRAPHY & FILMMAKING

Exposure Guide

The Bastards Book of Photography

Cambridge in Color

Best Photo Lessons

Photography Course

Production Now

nyvs

Learn About Film

Film School Online

5. DRAWING & PAINTING

Enliighten

Ctrl+Paint

ArtGraphica

Google Cultural Institute

Drawspace

DragoArt

WetCanvas

6. INSTRUMENTS & MUSIC THEORY

Music Theory

Teoria

Music Theory Videos

Furmanczyk Academy of Music

Dave Conservatoire

Petrucci Music Library

Justin Guitar

Guitar Lessons

Piano Lessons

Zebra Keys

Play Bass Now

7. OTHER UNCATEGORIZED SKILLS

Investopedia

The Chess Website

Chesscademy

Chess.com

Spreeder

ReadSpeeder

First Aid for Free

First Aid Web

Wolfram Demonstrations Project

Please feel free to add more learning focused websites. 

*There are a lot more learning websites out there, but I picked the ones that are, as far as I’m aware, completely free and in my opinion the best/ more useful.

[desolateforest]

Things I don't like: madonna, over-drinking, small-talk (mine and others'), when people ask, 'so what are you planning on doing with your degree?', plastic male genitalia hanging off truck tailgates, tri-met police, student loans, the aMERICAN education system, facebook, online dating websites, organized religions used like weapons of mass destruction, mindless watching of television, passivity, using umbrellas, my ego victimization, when people believe reading is dumb because they don't have will power or mindfulness, extremist natural mentalities that seem almost unnatural, the fact that it is harder for poor college students who are in massive debt trying to make something of themselves to get food stamps than anyone else, that pro college basketball players don't get paid, Dr. Phil, banks (banking on people's irresponsibility and/or desperation), boy band idols, palm trees in Portland, cigarette butts, MLA format, self-proclaimed self-help books, the term 'law of attraction,' crocks, oprah, fast and furious movies, grades, standardized testing, mass dependency, california drought, internet monopolization, term 'nigga,' bad food service, american healthcare, monstanto, fruit stickers, advertisements on thepiratebay, police brutality, eye contact, menstruation, the term 'women studies,'      more to come...

desolateforest

[desolateforest]

There’s no use in telling myself it’ll all get better as time passes and things adjust it will only get harder to take I leave after I punch out grab my things collect stapled bills from the servers and I get the hell out of there but the thing is, something leaches on and as I walk up Hawthorne Boulevard and try to shake off the confusion of what it is exactly that angers me I feel something hanging on and now I realize that I don’t work just eight hours a day four days a week but four whole days without much of a break its really hard work possibly harder to muster up the courage to do something with the rest of My day when I’m not there the pay just doesn’t fit the work.

desolateforest

[desolateforest]

My personal theory about life and all it entails. Made for me by Matthew Riley.

[desolateforest]

sitting at a table in a new coffee spot feeling the place out, ahead of me against the wall a leaning, slumped guy reading a book he's about half way through, there's some guys up at the counter laughing loud like they're at a bar, a girl sits at a window counter with her shoes off no socks and her feet are dirty messy, unwashed hair but man, she's pretty on the other window sits a table and two lovers i looked at them caught in one of those sparkling moments the intense gazing into a lover's eyes i can't stop looking and thinking to myself, oh the trouble they've gotten themselves into, people look much better when they're alone.

desolateforest

[desolateforest]

sometimes lovers fight and one tries to be the bigger person you know, for the sake of the relationship, a phase of self righteousness, 'i just want to be honest about the way i feel...' but it's honestly code for something not being said because really it's too harsh and really it's not working but it's a hard thing to admit more to the self i think than the other honestly and words are exchanged long pout stares into the nothingness then when the thing isn't going anywhere getting a bite to eat is the next practical move but really, carbs and alcohol might just ease the disappointment so you get a bite and a beer and talk cutting each other off and subtly being more tolerable and postponing the real conversation for another day.

desolateforest

[desolateforest]

Haikus are easy, but sometimes they're confusing, refrigerator.

unknown, saw it on a t shirt today