east-of-nowhere

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You deserve to be loved. Not liked, not lusted after, not settled for, but loved.

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one of the saddest things is when someone in your family tells you you would've loved someone who died before you were born. like my mother has told me & my best friend that we would have loved talking to her father. that me & my brothers have the same humor as our late uncle & even look like him. everyone is everywhere & nowhere & here & gone & dying & coming back. it's as though you know them through their shadow or their ghost or your own actions, but you won't ever really know. haunts me, i guess

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Please remember that almost everyone around you is traumatized. I didn’t understand this when I was younger. I wondered why people acted so strangely and irrationally. Maybe all children wonder this. The author Robert Anton Wilson said (paraphrasing), “We have never seen a completely sane adult human.” No one makes it out of this life alive. It’s not their fault. Mercy, kindness, forgiving — these are what makes one human. They are other names for love. People break in the strangest of ways.

[east-of-nowhere]

On Friendship.

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Kyiv-based artist Alexey Kondakov uses surrealistic documentary photography to superimpose figures from classical artwork into everyday scenes of modern life. He is renowned for his Photoshopped collage series in which Kyiv, Ukraine served as the backdrop for characters from old world masterpieces. The artist merges the past and the present, showing with a deft eye how classical figures fit seamlessly into contemporary situations that, in themselves, are timeless.

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you ever just minding your business and then you feel The Grief

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listen. aging into your thirties rocks. yes your joints get a little creaky. yes you can’t sleep in a pretzel on the floor anymore after a concert or a convention. and you lose some friends. but the thing is that you sort out who your real friends are and you sort out who you really are. and you get to see your friends settling into careers they like, and adopt new dogs and cats, and you find a job you can stand, and get really good at arts and crafts, and maybe that book you loved as a kid gets a movie deal and it doesn’t suck, and you learn to like new food and bake your own bread, and you realize that the great portfolio of self harm scars you all used to curate are going white with age and not updated, and half your friends are a different gender now and so much happier and maybe you are too, and you know who you are, and that it’s a journey and not a revelation. it’s a direction you’re headed, and you’re enjoying the trip.

reaching your 30′s rocks. and i’m hearing good things about what comes next, too.

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they should invent a grief that doesn’t define you in new and strange ways for the rest of your life

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When people say, “nature is my religion” are they talking about flies that feed on shit, maggots in decomposing corpses, lionesses with stained teeth and mouths full of blood? Are they talking about floods and fires and things from which we should always run? Are they talking about carcasses, rot, death?

Or do they just mean “this particular copse of benign trees is my religion”

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What Being Is Haunting You? by Irefiish on uquiz

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smth abt the lyric "and i'll dream each night of some version of you, one that i might not have but i did not lose" really gets me

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thinking about when i was small, how my mom told me that pipe cleaners were just a tool until people started idly shaping things with them and it grew so popular that they were marketed as crafting materials. and that story about how the original frisbees were disposable pie plates that students flattened to throw. and how when i was a child i had a wooden mancala set with shiny, colorful stones, but on invention it was played with rocks and grooves dug into the dirt. and middle school, paper football and tic-tac-toe and mash and mad libs, games that just need pen and paper. and before that, games of pretend with pirates and princes and masked marauders. how at slumber parties after lights out, we used to whisper storytelling games, i say one sentence and you say the next. and shadow puppets. and the way all the kids in the neighborhood used to divide into teams and throw fallen pine cones at one another. and the floor is lava game, and the quiet game, and the games i play with my coworkers that are just words and retention. and "put a finger down" on the high school bus. and little girls clapping together, and how the first jump-rope was undoubtedly just a length of rope who knows how long ago, and how natural it is to play, how we seek play at every age and with any resources we have and with whatever time we can squeeze it into in a day. i'm not an anthropologist or a psychologist but i think after food and shelter and water and air what comes next is games and stories and laughter. i think that there is nothing -- not sex or fighting or forming unlikely bonds with animals -- there is nothing more human than to play.

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Me: You know how when you were a kid and you’d wish that you’d get sick or injured in a way that would justify why you didn’t live up to your potential?

Everybody, apparently: No?