On Loneliness

bell hooks

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.

- Jim Morrison

#PersonalRevolution

April 6, 1963

comments left on the video for Iceblink Luck by Cocteau Twins 

“All the madnesses, each and every blinding one, they can all be traced back to the gates. Those carved monstrosities, those clay and chalk portals, existing everywhere and nowhere and all at once. They open, things are born, they close. The opening is easy, a pushing out, an expansion, an inhalation: the dust of divinity released into the world. It has to be a temporary channel, though, a thing that is sealed afterward, because the gates stink of “knowledge, they cannot be left swinging wide like a slack mouth, leaking mindlessly. That would contaminate the human world—bodies are not meant to remember things from the other side. There are rules. But these are gods and they move like heated water, so the rules are softened and stretched. The gods do not care. It is not them, after all, that will pay the cost.”

Excerpt From Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

“Somebody says draw a map. Populate it with the incidents of your childhood. Mark the spot where the lake receded after a winter of light snow. The stairs on which someone slapped you. The place where the family dog hung itself by jumping over the back fence while still on the dog run, hours later its body like a limp flag on a windless day. Draw a map, someone says. Let yourself remember. In the refugee camp a hundred thousand strong draw the stony outcrop from which you could no longer see the plume of smoke that was your village. Draw a square for the bathroom stall where Grandpa hid each day in order to eat his one egg free from the starving eyes of his classmates, an X for the courthouse where you and he were naturalized, a broken line for the journey. Draw a map, Jon says. Let it be your way into the poem. Here is where that plane filled with babies crashed that I was not on. Here is where I was ashamed. On the second floor at Pranash University the people wait their turn. Have you drawn your map, Jon asks. He has rolled up his sleeves. Forty-five minutes to noon the Prince stands up and says that the monks must be excused. We watch them file out, saffron robes as if their bodies have burst into blossom. Draw a map. Fly halfway around the globe. Here is the room next to the library where you realize how poor your tradition is, the local people with poetic forms still in use that date back to the time of Christ. Tell us about your map. Explain how these wavy lines represent the river, this rectangle the school-turned-prison where only seven escaped with their lives. This is my map. This star the place where I sat in a roomful of people among whom not one was not touched by genocide. Every last map resplendent with death though nobody knows where their loved ones lie buried. How many times can I appropriate a story that is not mine to tell? The woman stands up and says she is not a poet, that she doesn’t have the words. She points to a triangle on a piece of paper. Here is the spot where she found human bones in the well of her childhood home, and how her mother told her don’t be afraid because it was not the work of wild animals.”

— “Loose Strife,” by Quan Barry

how do i even explain Everywhere Everything All At Once? It’s got multiverse shenanigans, sapphics, kung fu, generational trauma, taxes, rocks, romance, sausages, immigration, laundry, ADHD, nihilism, absurdism, bagels, yin yang, existential crisis, the fear of being a failure and all your choices being wrong, coming out, acceptance, choosing love and kindness despite the coldness of the universe and it’s lack of meaning, dildos, butt plugs, milfs being badasses, girlbosses, malewives, scifi, depression, passive metaphors for suicide, mother issues, ratatouille, confetti, the IRS coming for your ass, James Hong

‘Love is the one thing that we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.’

“Eulogy from a Physicist” by Aaron Freeman, with quotes from Interstellar by Christopher Nolan, and images from NASA, Interstellar, Getty, Petrichara, and Reuters.

1- NASA: GOODS-South.

2- NASA: NGC 1850.

3- NASA: Iberian Peninsula.

4- Christopher Nolan: Interstellar.

5- NASA: From the Earth to the Moon.

6- Hannah La Folette Ryan: Subway Hands.

7- Adams Evans: Heart Nebula.

8- NASA: Exploring the Antennae.

9- NASA: Crescent Moon from the International Space Station.

10- Petrichara.

11- Getty Images.

12- NASA: SMACS 0723.

13- Reuters

me, looking back on it all: