Beast of Two Backs

If only we'd stop and wonder. and wonder, and wonder.

[thenationalyrics]

The Inn at Cos Cob (1914), Lowell Birge Harrison / Baby, We’ll Be Fine (2005), The National

[noknowshame]

why is religious Christmas imagery all so joyful and pleasant? where is the inherent horror of the birth of Christ? A mother is handed her newborn child, wailing and innocent. Her hands come away sticky. Red. Simply by giving her son life she has already killed him. He is doomed from the beginning. Her love will not save him from suffering. Because the thing cradled in her arms is not a baby, it is a sacrifice: born amongst the other bleating animals whose blood will one day be spilled in the name of what demands it. the night is silent with anticipation. Mary, did you know? That your womb was also a grave?

[noknowshame]

[frigidmusings]

Tags via @noknowshame

You don’t get to leave this in the tags

[nixscriptum]

[trannydurden]

need need need need everyone to see this graph i just encountered

[catsplay500k]

[iamthecutestofborg]

AUDIO ON IM NOT KIDDING

[stevviefox]

That’s some good water.

[lifeinpoetry]

“In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you—on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck—even then. And afterwards—perhaps most of all afterwards—I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B…without looking, or, without lifting the pencil…or in some other way…we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn.”

— Vladimir Nabokov; "Invitation to a Beheading" (via petrichour)

[firstfullmoon]

Ibrahim Nasrallah, “Palestinian,” trans. Huda Fakhreddine

[quotespile]

“It’s as if everybody’d made this tacit agreement to live in a state of total self-deception. The hell with reality! Let’s have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let’s all be good consumers and have a lot of togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality — and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we’ll all get busy and pretend it never happened.”

— Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

[luxe-pauvre]

There is a notable absence of whistleblowers in the OxyContin story. This may be due to the fact that when people did attempt to blow the whistle, Purdue did its best to crush them, as company lawyers did to Karen White, the Florida saleswoman who lost her lawsuit against Purdue in 2005. But I came to believe that it was also a function of denial. I would spend hours talking with intelligent people who had worked at the company, and they could acknowledge all sorts of infirmities in the corporate culture and make astute observations about the personalities involved, but when it came to OxyContin’s role in the opioid crisis, they would do their best to explain it away. Even in the face of voluminous evidence, of guilty pleas to felony charges, of thousands of lawsuits, of study after study, of so many dead, they retreated to the old truths, about abuse versus addiction, about heroin and fentanyl. I wondered if, for some of these people, it was just too demoralising to take a sober measure of their own complicity, if it was simply too much for the human conscience to bear.

Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

[garadinervi]

Gail Tarantino, You See and You Don't See, (acrylic ink and paint on linen with stitched kogin thread), 2024 [Uprise Art, New York, NY. © Gail Tarantino]

[philosophybits]

“Some people are never complete and are always lacking something. Others take a long time to form themselves.”

— Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

[free-my-mindd]

[classycookiexo]

[catchymemes]

[lucerants]

"Oh, he's fine! You're fine! This is fine! We're all fine!"

[chilewithcarnage]

'you still listen to music from 10 years ago 🤨?' bitch if prehistoric humans had audio recording technology id be sat up here listening to grog and unga bunga's greatest hits don't play with me

[valtsv]

there's this specific kind of "bad"/unsympathetic victim narrative that i'm obsessed with when it's executed well, where someone's trauma response is to become increasingly destructive and selfish, at first in the hope that there will be consequences - that someone will follow the broken, bloody trail they're leaving behind them and try to stop them - because that will mean that they've been seen. that someone has finally noticed them, acknowledged their pain, and done something about it. but then, when those consequences never arrive, or are too easily brushed aside, they realise that they're enjoying being in control (or the illusion of control) for once far too much to stop, and start to buy into this delusion they've begun to construct for themselves, where what they're doing is Justified, Actually, because of what they've endured to reach this point. they've long since crossed sunk cost fallacy event horizon. to look back now would be unbearable. which is, of course, when the consequences they cannot so easily ignore arrive, and they're forced to reckon with the fact that they've mistaken the grave they've been digging for a great and gleaming tower, the crumbling walls of which are now starting to collapse inwards on them. it's such an inevitable but compelling tragic route to go down.