By Eugene Golovesov

people want doing the right thing to be like pulling the correct lever at the correct time but actually usually doing the right thing is more like holding a moderate weight at arm's length continuously for seventeen years

The notes on a recent post got me thinking

By nature, I’m a fan of having 2 beers and meeting strangers at a bar somewhere you’ve never been, which is a thing that we don’t do in 2023 between COVID and being afraid of one another because of the prevalence of gun violence and regular violence and misdirected road rage and the million other little deadly social erosions of the past 10 years or so.

You have got to let go of this idea that any place is a complete nothing-burger full of nothing-people.

You have to.

Its vitally important that you navigate that airport with a stranger in Denver and realize he’s got a tattoo of lyrics from your favorite song. To sing House of the Rising Sun with four people you’ve known for 2 hours (and somehow managed to get into the DNCs private bar with) in the back of an Uber in DC when it’s pissing rain and entirely too cold for your southern blood. It’s important to cooperate and solve problems together and go about it laughing and singing. We are silly little creatures that love a puzzle and a story.

It’s also important to flee a tornado in the back of a shitty red pickup at pride in Oklahoma City and feel the sky break wide-open against the lazy /tick-lok/ /tick-lok/ of the windshield wipers while racing down what once was Rte 66. Its important to know that in the face of creeping fascism that place, of all places, has entire gay neighborhoods. It’s important to wake up in an apartment high, high up in NYC and watch the sun through the buildings and boulevards and watch the glorious great goddamn of that impossible number of people all cooperating and all not. To say Hyoo-stun, that way, on purpose just to get a rise of your born and bred NY friend who does NOT think you’re funny but will make coffee for you.

You need to see a beach full of people cautiously approaching and flinching away from a floating, dead horseshoe crab on Tybee Island, Georgia the way any troupe of wild animals approaches an unknown alien thing. Cows in a field, fish in the ocean flinching from a diver. Little children squealing and wide eyed behind their parents legs. You need to be the person that walks out and picks it up and watches the rest of the crowd creep in to investigate.

I don’t get to travel a lot in the way that most people do, when I go to a place it’s usually because something bad has happened there, but I have found it universally true that most people just want to tell you a story or show you a picture on their phone of the craziest thing they’ve ever seen and they don’t particularly care who you are or what your accent is. Sometimes they do, and those people suck, but those people are not the majority.

Sometimes if you let an old redneck talk he’ll tell you everything you never wanted to know about forensic accounting. Sometimes you’ll meet someone in the middle of the biggest city in the US who knows everything about show pigs. I’ve been to the smallest Kansas towns and the biggest cities in the US and I’ve found none of them were full of nothing.

Slime molds

I fucking despise when a middle schooler is like “I hate being 13.” and everyone is like “Oh honey, it only gets worse. You don’t know the meaning of struggle.” like no. Let’s be honest. 12-15 is a really difficult age to be. It’s usually when you start waking up to how fucked up the world around you is but you’re still so young and immature that you can’t begin to fix it. It’s a time of horrible change, mentally, physically, prospective-wise.

Personally, it was when the onset of my mental illness developed. My parents’ marriage dissolved in a series of drunk sometimes violent arguments, I was stuck in the house with them, helpless to leave. I would rather kill myself than be 13 again in all honesty. The best part of being 13/14 is that you’ll never be 13/14 again.

After the rain at Botanic Garden of the Jagiellonian University 🕸️🌱

My photography; Kraków, VI 2024

A collection of insect art I did this year, + a set drawn for the Invertober prompt list

Prompt list: https://twitter.com/fossilforager/status/1576249471695917056

A mannequin at The North Face.

(Source)

A chance meeting of Julien Cohen and the 10-year-old prodigy Yeonah Kim at an airport. Magic happens.

lonely people are like nooooo i love the silence i love being by myself and then you ask them how their day has been and they tear up a bit

Aftermath | Øystein Sture Aspelund