annuals — blue ridge

"the sun's coming up; here I am again."

"now, I don't mind this thirst all the time..."

"to be cursed; it might be fun!"

"I forgot where I went in your heart."

and this record. jeeeezus. "All Is Illusory" into "The Giving In" is SO. GOOD.

"oh. i thought you were...
someone else"

Four perfect songs from my favorite band. I've probably posted about this EP before, but The Velvet Teen's No Star still feels perfectly-fresh to me every time I listen to it, even though — oh god — it came out in........ 2010???????????

☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️

Well, as the poet says, "Don't blame me, Apollo, for how little light is left to borrow!"

when this song gets in my head, "don't give in to callous ritual" turns into, "don't give in to california," but I disagree!!

I really disliked the movie when I saw it in the theater, but I'm not going into that! If you liked it, neat. I tried reading the book a while back but couldn't get into it. Revisiting last week was easy; I read it in just a few evenings. Here are some sentences I marked; almost entirely devoid of plot, don't worry, the story is so much weirder and quieter than the movie, dry and angular and brittle and bright.

Inevitably my focus netted from my parents useless lectures of worry over my chronic introversion, as if by doing so they could convince me they were still in charge.

There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.

I was adapting to it, but at times like this, I remembered that just a day ago I had been someone else.

Nothing we brought with us is from the present. Not our clothes, not our shoes. It’s all old junk. Restored crap. We’ve been living in the past this whole time. In some sort of reenactment.

But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan. I had to leave it there, compartmentalized, until I could write it all down, and seeing it on the page, begin to divine the true meaning.

I had the unsettling thought that the natural world around me had become a kind of camouflage.

That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

The meandering paths of crabs and worms continued to be written into its surface.

Part of my husband’s life had been defined by nightmares he’d had as a child. These debilitating experiences had sent him to a psychiatrist. They involved a house and a basement and the awful crimes that had occurred there. But the psychiatrist had ruled out suppressed memory, and he was left at the end with just trying to draw the poison by keeping a diary about them. Then, as an adult at university, a few months before he’d joined the navy, he had gone to a classic film festival … and there, up on the big screen, my future husband had seen his nightmares acted out. It was only then that he realized the television set must have been left on at some point when he was only a couple of years old, with that horror movie playing. The splinter in his mind, never fully dislodged, disintegrated into nothing. He said that was the moment he knew he was free, that it was from then on that he left behind the shadows of his childhood … because it had all been an illusion, a fake, a forgery, a scrawling across his mind that had falsely made him go in one direction when he had been meant to go in another.

Damn.

I have never done well in cities, even though I lived in one by necessity—because my husband needed to be there, because the best jobs for me were there, because I had self-destructed when I’d had opportunities in the field. But I was not a domesticated animal.

I really wanted to lose myself. People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control, have never wanted control.

Some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.

wow this album just karate-chopped the seam between my cerebra

what a voice!

David Mitchell, Ghostwritten, p 155:

“One of the things that my years of wandering have taught me is, the more impotent the country, the more dangerous its customs officials.”

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Helena Deland — Lylz

I linked to another song by Helena Deland a couple weeks ago; the album is out now! It's red tail lights in the mist, but no hurry to meet them... if you know what I mean!!!!! I really like it. Other first-listen highlights are "Comfort, Edge" and "Dog." Also, see if you can guess which song title made me double-take when it appeared in my little heads-up-display music player!!!!

had this in my head. please enjoy the vibes, even if home only exists in your mind

I’m 34 years and one month old. I’ve “owned” two cars in my life; a 1993 Accord that my parents bought for I think somewhere south of $1000 in 2004; and my grandmother’s 2003 Grand Marquis, which she sold me for a symbolic dollar when THAT car was nearly a decade old, when she was too far into dementia to be able to drive it anymore, and my Accord was pulling pretty hard to the right constantly.

I stopped driving that car a little over a year ago, because a (late by about a month) routine oil change revealed that there was almost no oil in the car. Maybe a leak? I'd need to get it inspected, and a leak in the oil lines can be pricey, they said. I didn't have a spare $100 let alone $1000, so I parked it in the driveway and decided to wait until I had enough money to deal with it. Well, I never did! So since then I've gotten around on foot, by occasional Lyft, buses to and from Atlanta (before covid), rides from friends (also before covid), and by borrowing my partner's car periodically. It's been a huge pain in the ass, and only possible because I happened to live within reasonable walking distance of a few key places.

At no point in my adult life have I ever thought seriously about being able to buy a vehicle. I've just never had reliable money available.

Anyway, I saw an ad for a truck, and suddenly wondered how many car commercials I've seen despite never being in the market for one. I regard all cars with indifference; they are something I have basically no opinion about, because they are beyond contemplation. And yet I have seen the ads; people do buy cars. New ones, even! Somehow.

... No point to this. Just thinking.

But if you want to be deeply angry about wealth inequality, you can listen to an episode of a watch-enthusiast podcast (I don't want to go into why I did this) where they refer to a watch as "surprisingly affordable" because it's available "for less than ten thousand dollars." I bought a $30 Timex maybe seven years ago for work, five apartments ago (which have also never had anything to do with desire, but only affordability and happenstance), and I don't know where it is now.