nola loves:

"Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture." -Stoppard

We walked down Decatur, and I wondered if the pavement felt the same underneath your feet as it did mine. The ways that the bricks were sunken and worn down but the cement surrounding still held firm, making one teeter a bit with every step, felt pleasantly strange, as it made one take notice. But more than wondering if you noticed the tipsy topsy nature of the pavement, I wanted to crawl in your head and find out *how* you felt it, if it actually was the same to you as me, or, if perhaps, the experience was subjective and shifted according to nerves and skin, foot-body-brain. And did the smell of the Quarter sing to you, yes, sing, the right word for what it did to my brain, did it sing to you in the same way? Like a faintly remembered lullabye from a previous life's childhood, unknown and yet infinitely familiar and comforting? Like something struggling to pull memories hidden to the forefront? The magnolias and stale beer and whisky and water and cigarettes and andouile and dirt and grass and bougainvillea and fried chicken and coffee and beignets and sliced bright watermelon and crawfish only to be made brighter by the way it saturated every pore, suspended in waves of humidity? Did it feel the same? And how is it that, in those moments, I also thought again of somehow swimming in your brain, to feel the way your consciousness moved in the world, the way that your body moved in the world, and the way your smell served to turn the key in a music box and play out some long lost strain of music and made me wish I could simply inhale and never feel the lungs subside...and as it started to pour, we ran down streets and in and out around people and in and of bars, laughing.

tv is dumb:

first response prego test commercial just said, "your body can tell you're pregnant before you can." the idea that i'm not my body is bizarre and makes no sense. thanks, ad people, for your minimally exceptional rhetoric.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.--Albert Camus

The past few years have felt very much like the Camus quote. Like the Vonnegut quote about being as close to the edge without going over because you can see more interesting things out there. We certainly all chart our own roads and the ways that those seem alternately purposeful, predicted, and hand-cut swaths through territories outlying are often little more than an aesthetically pleasing puzzle we examine for meaning, finding it occasionally. Some days these sort of far-flung intellectual/emotional/physical rambles are exhausting, some days feel a little like liberation. I hope it all balances out in the end. xoxo-

what a great halloween costume this would be:

“And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: / And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.”

re((vision)ing) in progress, aka old stuff that's finally getting reworked:

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do and damned if you don't."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

Untitled

Who’s to say where a road really goes when staring it down, front-seated and flying over freeway? There are the inked ribbons that flow over maps zigging and zagging according to the whims and dreams of glaciers, rivers, and engineers (past and present). And then there’s the road we keep preserved in blood and flesh – hope-heart-cranium-bound made manifest in internal tattoo and cauterized wounds…a figurative fantasy then made steel, a marriage of convenience between alloys and paint, sparking electric starts, slick oil, and gasoline. It is a vehicle of contradictions…of movement and liberation, and yet a sedentary vinyl womb for its passengers, searching for new-city virginities, and answers to“please please please me”-like prayers.

We like our roads and rambles, our Icarus inspired attempts at liberation, with infinite faith and hearts, cracked wide open.

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Miranda had always been a vivid dreamer, to the point where, upon waking, it took a moment or three to discern the “real” from the “dream,” but since “The Dream,” as she thought of it to herself, her dreams had been pastoral scenes at best, and now often nothing. In “The Dream,” she had been walking in a known/unknown city, downtown and yet on the outskirts in sight of trees and endless country, in that nonsensical just-outside-of-time-and-place way things in dreams often are. Knowing she was followed by a man who wanted her to stop, she kept walking, slowly, moving forward but casting all sensory perception behind her, taking in scent and sound.
He got closer and she smelled forest and fire. He also had a scent of something that she would later say could only be described as evidence of miles covered. He breathed on her neck. She shivered with pleasure, inhaled deeply, and walked faster. His breath was warm, and smelled faintly of cinnamon. He said, “find me,” in a deep, quiet voice. She kept walking, suppressing a half-smile at the order given by a seemingly pretend man, but also made nervous in a way that made her skin tingle.
He breathed on her neck. She shivered, inhaled deeply, and walked faster. His breath was warm, and smelled faintly of cinnamon. Judging from his footfalls, forceful, smooth, and even, he was powerful. He pressed his right hand onto her naked right shoulder blade, and said, “Please.” His hand felt like hot metal and it seared her flesh. Suddenly crying out from the pain, she woke up gasping for breath, only to find her eyes wet, and, grabbing with her left hand at her shoulder, she winced as she touched the inflamed skin, finding it hot, moist, and bleeding slightly.
She wiped her eyes as her breathing gradually slowed, her body damp with sweat and heart racing with adrenaline. She sat for a minutes, upright in bed, legs crossed, trying to calm herself. When she rose from bed, she walked the few steps into the bathroon, and, wincing in the light, angled the mirror to see her shoulder. Her breath quickened again. The man who had ordered, “find me,” had left a perfect hand print on her shoulder. It was tattooed into her skin in black and grey, complete with all the lines a palm-reader would expect to find, and, upon closer inspection, the looped, whorled, and arched ridges of fingerprints. It was as raw, shiny, and puffy as a new tattoo might be, and Miranda could do nothing but collapse onto the cool tile of the bathroom floor. She sat there, mind racing to nothing, until she dozed off, forehead and cheek pressed against the bathtub.


please feel free to gently tell me what you like and don't, if anything at all. it's been a while since i've done this. xoxo, she-