#Sleep It Off

[hannahssimblr]

For a brief period last year, I had this thing about wasps. Miss O’Reilly spurred the whole thing on after poring over my sketchbooks with me. She made some offhand comment about how nice it would be to see some animals too, amongst the endless scrawl of human arms and legs and feet and heads on every inch of every page, because it would expand my anatomical knowledge. This had never occurred to me.

So across town to the zoo I went. Where, through the spring and the earliest days of summer I would draw gorillas in their glass enclosures, giraffes, sloths, red pandas, while parents and children looked over my shoulder at my work, ogling as though I too was part of an exhibition. 

I returned that August, late, in that last week before school starts when the sun still warms you, but the wind carries autumn with it. By then, the leaves had lost that vibrant green and hung tired from branches, curled and russet at the edges. It was wasp season, when they emerge, as though from nowhere, angry, confused, in a ferocious pursuit of sugar. 

One landed on my sketchbook, near the thumb that held the page, and I resisted the tingle of fear in my body, the urge to swat him away. Instead I watched him, and then I drew him, his alien eyes and hairy body, papery wings and the abstract black and yellow stripes like caution tape wound around his horntail. I feared wasps - I think. One had never stung me and had no reference for the pain, but coincidentally, I had read about them in an insect encyclopaedia from the school library. I’d learned about their sad Augusts, when their purpose had been fulfilled, and their queens cast them out of the nest to die. 

That wasp, eating the ice cream fingerprint from my page, was no different. Here he was, addicted to sugar, drunk, perhaps, from the fermenting fruits he had managed to find. If I swatted him away, could I really blame him if, in his desperation and pain, he attacked me? He really was just another creature fulfilling his purpose, adapting to the new environment in which he had been thrown. 

“Oh, God!” Michelle cried, and whacked him with her zoo map. His insides left a stain on the paper, and I turned to her, outraged. “Why did you do that?”

“It might have stung you!” 

And things escalated, as they normally did, to an argument by the elephant enclosure. She erupted in front of a family of four and asked me when I became such a fucking vegetarian about wasps. We didn’t speak a word to one another on the bus home, and then, come September, we forgot about wasps for another year. 

A wasp lands on my arm. I feel it first, the weird little legs tickling my skin. Someone splashed cider on me in the Foo Fighters’ mosh pit. That’s what he’s looking for. For the first time in a year, I think about wasps again, while the rest of my friends plan their next move. He shouldn’t be out at night. He must be confused. Maybe he’s about to die. 

“Oh! Gosh! You’ve a wasp on your arm!” Claire waves her hand about me and the wasp makes a drowsy departure and swoops toward the overflowing bins by the barriers. 

Several seconds pass before it occurs to me to react. “Yeah.” 

As the others head towards the bar, she and Shane hang back, peering at me with that wary concern, as though there’ve sensed something deeply unhinged about me. “Are you okay?” She says gently. “You look like you got a bit of a knock there in the mosh pit.”

“No, it was fine. It felt good to kind of shove everyone around.” It’s true. I wasn’t thinking in there where I was thrashing to The Pretender, but I know how I must look. She eyes the collar of my t-shirt, stretched completely out of shape from where some beast of a man grabbed me to fling me out of his path like a rag doll. it was violent, but it felt good, like something that I needed.

“Look,” Shane scratches his head, “The lads there, they were talking about going to that rave at midnight. They wanted to grab some shots first, but like, if you don’t want to go, and you’d rather go back to the tent or something, that’d be okay.”

Claire nods. “We could even go with you, right? I wouldn’t mind just hanging out and taking it easy if you wanted company.”

Do I really seem that bad? I shake my head. “No, it’s fine. I’ll just do what everyone else is doing.”

They pause, and I press the issue. “Do I seem like I won’t be able for it?”

“Not that.” Shane says. “You just seem a bit wrecked.”

“I’ll survive another concert.”

“Yeah, I’m not saying you won’t, like.”

“Right then.”

They exchange a look, and I sigh. “I don’t know what you think is wrong with me, but I’m not drinking, I’m not on drugs,” I lean down to show them my pupils, which I realise too late is quite a manic, on-drugs thing to do, but I don’t know how else to prove my sobriety. “It’s just been a day, okay? I’m just… it’s been odd.”

“We can talk about it if you like,” Claire says, in that very kind, Claire way, but I shake my head. 

“Let’s not bother. Come on, we’ll just go to that rave thing and dance, yeah? Then I’ll go back to the tent and we can take it easy.”

“Okay, if you say so,” she says, and with her arms around herself against the midnight chill, she and Shane march past me, towards the big top of the marquee across the bottle-littered fields. 

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[bitter69uk]

Born on this day: post-punk No Wave chanteuse Cristina (Cristina Monet Palaci, 17 January 1956 – 1 April 2020) who made precisely two barbed, weird and distinctive albums - released by the cutting edge Ze label - that flopped commercially and then retired from music. Cristina’s trademark is setting scathing observations to perky music, and she mostly sings and writes within the persona of a jaded party girl or gold digger (a tradition that dates to Mae West and Eartha Kitt). Self-titled debut Cristina (1980) (reissued in 2004 as Doll in the Box) is her mutant disco album. Lushly produced by Kid Creole, it’s campy fun with Latin rhythm in its hips (if you like cowbell, this is the album for you!), but I prefer the 1984 follow-up, the tougher, darker and more cutting New Wave pop of Sleep It Off. Cristina’s venomous, spikily funny lyrics work as wry poetry already, but then she enunciates them in an alienated, deadpan can't-be-bothered snarl (she has “resting bitch voice”, occasionally punctuated with a Johnny Rotten sneer). Here’s a sampling of her wit and wisdom: “My life is in a turmoil / My thighs are black and blue / My sheets are stained, so is my brain / What's a girl to do?” from What’s a Girl to Do? is as lacerating as anything found on Lydia Lunch’s 1980 magnum opus Queen of Siam. “Don't tell me that I'm frigid / Don't try to make me think / I'll do just fine without you / Don’t mutilate my mink” from her punk masterpiece “Don’t Mutilate My Mink”. (In their obituary for her, The Guardian describes it as sounding like Audrey Hepburn fronting the Sex Pistols). See also: her icy Christmas classic “Things Fall Apart.” Like many abrasive early eighties New York punk funk musicians (see also: James Chance of The Contortions), she may initially work best in small doses and for many may be an acquired taste. But think of Cristina as analogous to Campari – once you acquire that taste, you wondered how you ever lived without it. 

[loubella77]

GOODNIGHT!!! Remember to be good ok?

Drink some water and take care of yourself.

I love you.

[esperensnared]

What's the matter with these people? Can I even get a drink in here? Nobody's laughing. But they all know how to sneer. Everybody's making jokes in French. Nobody dances, nobody sweats, But they X-Ray every inch of flesh As you walk by, but my mother said, Smile like they want you, Smile like you're in control. Smile like you mean in it, Smile, baby, you're on a roll. Smile, smile, smile!

[brsb4hls]

Loki drops at 2am here, so I'll probs just get up, skip to the end and if they do my girl Sylvie dirty in any way, head straight back to bed, lol.

[rongzhi]

Goldfinches napping on sunflowers

English added by me :)

[boat-crash]

That handsome devil is so goated. I am working on the full finished song but this is what i have with ~15 hours of work and im planning to finish this week if i can!

[wishfulsketching]

Both @dangerkrill and @teawithghosts mentioned this meme thanks to the leash art so I just had to do it!!!!

[majunju]

new astral express member duties 1/???: helping stelle sleep

[pangur-and-grim]

Pangur is THRILLED that I have mono! her favourite thing in the world is napping with me

[bitter69uk]

Born on this day: totally unique post-punk No Wave chanteuse Cristina (Cristina Monet Palaci, 17 January 1956 – 1 April 2020) who made precisely two barbed, weird and distinctive albums - released by the cutting edge Ze label - that flopped commercially and then retired from music. Cristina’s trademark is setting scathing observations to perky music, and she mostly sings and writes within the persona of a jaded party girl or gold digger (a tradition that dates to Mae West and Eartha Kitt). Self-titled debut Cristina (1980) (reissued in 2004 as Doll in the Box) is her mutant disco album. Lushly produced by Kid Creole, it’s campy fun with Latin rhythm in its hips (if you like cowbell, this is the album for you!), but I prefer the 1984 follow-up, the tougher, darker and more cutting New Wave pop of Sleep It Off. Cristina’s venomous, spikily funny lyrics work as wry poetry already, but then she enunciates them in an alienated, deadpan can't-be-bothered snarl (she has “resting bitch voice”, occasionally punctuated with a Johnny Rotten sneer). Here’s a sampling of her wit and wisdom: “My life is in a turmoil / My thighs are black and blue / My sheets are stained, so is my brain / What's a girl to do?” from "What’s A Girl to Do?" is as lacerating as anything found on Lydia Lunch’s 1980 magnum opus Queen of Siam. “Don't tell me that I'm frigid / Don't try to make me think / I'll do just fine without you / Don’t mutilate my mink” from her punk masterpiece “Don’t Mutilate My Mink”. (In their obit, The Guardian describes it as sounding like Audrey Hepburn fronting the Sex Pistols). Like many abrasive early eighties New York punk funk musicians (see also: James Chance of The Contortions), she may initially work best in small doses and for many may be an acquired taste. But think of Cristina as analogous to Campari – once you acquire that taste, you wondered how you ever lived without it. Portrait by Jean-Paul Goude.

[mafuyuakgae]

even if I came to love humanity in the end, there’s no proof I was ever here, right?

[dragonbonez]

An actual angel?

[lo-batteryy]

A wolf in sheep’s clothing.