[xaoca]

Steeple Mountain on Jupiter’s moon, Io.

[joeinct]

Amsterdam, Photo by Kees Scherer, 1958

[292901092489]

do you think you could ever be a mother? how does one know? is it something intuitive?

It goes like this: baby daughter dreams, waking up sobbing, teeth and tongue, stupefaction, the desire to teach you everything of me before your real parents get home, the desire to die before my parents, for my life to be contained within theirs, bone marrow, stained glass, weekend sunlight, the mornings, pancakes, guitar picks, streams of undifferentiated language, pure delight, the conservative’s phantasmic history, the homosexual’s tragedy, we all deserve a tragedy, the so-called divorce in contemporary women of tenderness and strength, real estate square metreage, European cities, temporary contracts, downward mobility, the irreproducibility of the nuclearity into which we were born, forced sublimation, another abandoned project, tutoring, teaching, a “novel”, therapy, becoming too invested in my little students, tears of anger in the car, in their kitchen with their fathers, advising them on everything but calculus, being patient with the things they want to show me in their bedrooms, saying oh I’m just an eldest sister, saying crazy things in romance, your hair plus my height, we’ll be the first two women, like two new Virgin Maries, getting down on one knee, oxytocin, the lust for anachronism, false biology, false climate, impossible economics, the lust to know nothing of the Real, in the very process of hurtling towards it, down a dark well, towards premonitions: names and loves known behind the eyelids…

[5179]

something incredibly compelling and fascinating to me about groupies, or rather that’s a euphemism because actually I mean I understand them so deeply and being a fan of someone feels genuinely painful to me and I would do Anything to be closer like the intimacy and being elevated above the crazed masses for an illicit moment inside its so narcotic. But then the fact that you’ll always be a lesser than leech to the object of your desires, he’ll use you for your body and his ego but you’ll never be the girl of his dreams, the girl to whom he’s nothing special because that’s what he covets when the whole world wants him… but despite this knowledge a droplet of his essence is enough for you, just to be in his orbit..

[5179]

I draw from my “grew up in the Bay Area” mythology for every essay I write and everyone eats it up so hard

[5179]

this show is perfectly made for me

[a-quiet-green-agreement]

This was just before my thirtieth birthday. I was in graduate school, of all places. I had no idea why. None of us did. We were extremely well spoken rubber duckies. You could push us in any one direction and we would flounder on forever. Sometimes, in the drowsy winter hallways, my conscience would rear up and remind me I was dumb with luck. Other times, I wished they'd turn the whole place into a homeless shelter.

– Steve Almond, from “Run Away, My Pale Love” My Life in Heavy Metal: Stories (Grove Press, 2002)

[5179]

[5179]

The sunshine girl is sleeping

[pmamtraveller]

The Mermaid Fountain in Urayasu, Japan

[harrylawlor]

Summer evenings at Godrevy, 2017

[5179]

[the-night-picture-collector]

Robert Adams, Summer Nights, Walking: On the Colorado Front, 1976 - 1982

[5179]

the worst part about living in new york is this underlying fear that i'm never capitalizing enough on being continuously in the midst of the exact concentrated specialness that entranced all the great writers and artists and creatives and films and tv. all the days i spent walking down lexington when i lived on the upper east side could have become a joan didion essay or a gossip girl episode but i made nothing of it. every morning getting ready and going to school at union square, gazing out at the empire state building when i'm up late at the school library, summer internship in the classic midtown skyscrapers on 5th avenue, taking the 1 train and thinking of asap rocky, my favorite bookstore in the lower east side that childish gambino immortalized in my teenage brain, walking past the comedy cellar to go to amc only for the comedy cellar to be a central location in the movie i watch that day, even in avengers there's a scene right outside the coffee shop by my house, coming home to put on my comfort tv shows, 30 rock, the mindy project, friends, seinfeld, kimmy schmidt, and they're all exactly where i was all day, it's endless... i don't know what to make of it all. i feel this nervous energy buzzing in me all the time knowing i'm in the Beautiful place and the historic place and so much has happened here and keeps happening and keeps getting immortalized and i feel the desire to drink from this fountain as well, i want to create something out of all of this, i want all of this to have meant something in the end

[ageofheaven33]

Spanish archaeologist Manuel Esteve posing with a Corinthian helmet he found back in 1938.

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Misty view of the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan, 1922-24.

Photo: Consuelo Kanaga via the Brooklyn Museum

[petaltexturedskies]

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned