Nonsense art and things

When I said run, I meant in circles

[blunderpoons]

I spend a lot of time thinking about how how art and creativity have been romanticized. How artists have been viewed as fragile, delicate flowers, not long for this world, needing to be sheltered and nourished and likely to waste away for nebulous reasons anyway.

Or the link between creativity and madness.

Or the way mad people die.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the 27 club.

I also spend a lot of time thinking about the link between neurodiversity and creativity.

Or the link between neurodiversity and devastating burnout.

Or the comorbidities of neurodiversity.

I keep thinking about the ways we know autistic people are likely to die.

[blunderpoons]

You'll wake up one morning, and there will be a vivid memory in your mind. It wasn't there before, but it has always been there now.

It's ok. The memory will be of a time your shitty parent came home screaming about a stranger attacking them with a dead fish.

It will have been a random Tuesday, of otherwise no significance.

It just means in the future, we'll be best friends.

I'll get the time machine to work.

I got you.

[inbabylontheywept]

there is a stripper pole in my attic. i saw it in a dumpster one day, and i went, shit, this is exactly the kind of thing my wife would want. and i didnt really want it in the house, what with it being a used stripper pole lightly seasoned with dumpster juice, but i mentally decided that if she were to see it and ask for it, i would say she could have it, and then sure enough, later that evening, she went soooo baaaaaaaabs there's this thing by the dumpster and i want it but i get it if you don't want it in the house but i have to show it to you- and i went, no you dont, you can have the pole, and that was the most surprised i have ever made her look. even compared to the day when i proposed to her, which she was prepared enough that we both knew she would say yes, and she could also get her hair done up and have a cute outfit, but not so prepared that she was not fucking flabbergasted by the 12 empty decoy ringboxes i sprung on her. i handed her so many decoy ring boxes that day. still one of the funniest things i've ever done to her.

anyway we like pacing around together and ranting in the attic but sometimes instead of pacing one of us will just hang on the pole and spin, and the other person will watch on the beanbag, which makes for these really goofy conversations where the person on the bag will say something that gets the other persons goat, such as, hypothetically, that xylophones do not belong in rock music, and then the other person will go on a tirade about this, but they'll actually only be facing the Hot Take Speaker half of the time, what because of the pole, so the response will sound something like

I can't believe

you would even suggest such

a stupid opinion. You've

been to a Danny Elfman

concert! How can you

have heard Oingo Boingo

live and say with a straight face

that they alone do not justify

rock and roll xylophones

and then that person will continue until they get too dizzy, then they'll get off the pole, and by unspoken agreement, the person on the bag will get up and trade places with them to deliver their rebuttal while also spinning and it just creates this sort of crazy strip-court lawyers debating absolute nonsense for no reason kind of vibe that frankly just really does it for us.

i don't really have any marriage advice for this i guess its just a look at what being married can look like. i thought that being married would involve a lot more stuff like carving the turkey, or barbecuing, or watching the sunset, and if id known how much time it would involve arguing for xylphones in rock music while spinning upside down i might have prepared for it a little differently.

[blunderpoons]

Absolutely never settle for anything less than this

[blunderpoons]

Weird microgenres I did not know existed, but somehow stumbled upon: Books that end with someone turning into a jellyfish:

"Our Wives Under the Sea" by Julia Armfield

"Devil is Fine" by John Vercher

and Honourable Mention to "The Haar" by David Sodergren, where someone turns in to a gelatinous marine blob that may or may not be a jellyfish Suggested names for the genre are welcome.

[a-cherubikon]

[blunderpoons]

Me: "...so every year we celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ by decorating the unborn and hurling them downhill."

my foreign friends: "Are you making shit up again?"

[solarprominence]

I maintain that the best summation of my feminist beliefs are that men and women are not fundamentally different. There are a few quantifiable differences if you average out every woman and every man, but they are not qualitative. And most of them are socially constructed, and would be fixed if we started treating men and women the same. Neither is inherently smarter, neither is inherently kinder, neither is inherently more stoic or stronger or angrier or softer. Everyone is obsessed with the differences between women and men, with finding them and creating them and distancing themselves from the "other half". It's fucked up

[crownedinmarigolds]

One thing I love about VTM coteries so much is you can have a guy licherally pulled from the industrial era and then someone who was Embraced in the 80s and then you have a Gen Z'r and heck maybe even someone predating modern language and they're just hanging out at a McDonald's at 3 am.

[prokopetz]

Apparently AO3 has a specific tag for heresy, and I'm not sure which prospect is more entertaining: blocking the tag, or filtering for it. The idea of someone only being interested in reading about twinks getting ass-blasted by randy werewolves if it's in accordance with the Nicene Creed is funny, but the alternative is hilarious.

[prokopetz]

I was about to make a 4/10 shitpost about the Epic of Gilgamesh, but it's been entirely derailed by the discovery that my autocorrect dictionary recognises "Gilgamesh" but not "Enkidu", and one of the suggested corrections for "Gilgamesh and Enkidu" was "Gilgamesh and Pikachu".

[blunderpoons]

Me, staring at the literal stick in my hand that somehow can also hold my hair together, wondering if I'm losing my mind or if this is just what self care feels like.

[blunderpoons]

so the thing about reading anything written by a man prior to embarrassingly recently is that you can pretty much take it as read that he had no idea how to do his own laundry. Which makes it damn hard to take anything he has to say seriously.

[blunderpoons]

So I know dystopias are bad and all, but I can I just have the version where I can go to my little assigned job at the factory wearing frumpy overalls and never make decisions ever again?

[blunderpoons]

Eat me, Brother

I've been reading weird books again. "Brother" by Ania Ahlborn is about a family in some woods somewhere in the mountains. One of those places where america keeps their true weirdoes. The family is poor, drunk, insane, have bad boundaries, and a variable amount of kids. They eat what they kill. Also they're serial killers.

They eat meat at every meal, to put it mildly.

But beside that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? We follow Michael, the youngest of the Morrow clan, who doesn't actually want to be a serial killer, but it's hard to leave the family business. Michael doesn't know why things are the way they are. He tries to protect his sister, he's dominated by his violent older brother. The parents are mostly a strange absence. Then there are questions. Why is Micheal the only dark-haired kid in a family of strawberry blonds? What happened to their older sister? And why is Big Bad Bro suddenly insisting they start dating some local girls? The plot is tight, and ticks along at a decent clip. By the time the reader figures out whats going on, its way too late. If you enjoy splatter movies and don't mind all the trigger warnings (and I do mean all of them) then by all means, read Brother. I enjoyed it, but hey, I'm a lunatic.

[zazun]

voidborn girls supremacy

[blunderpoons]

Homegoing

Book broke my heart again. Every time I think I'm too old and too jaded to cry over a book, some author puts on their stomping boots. In this case it was Yaa Gyasi, and the book was *Homegoing* If you've read it, nothing more needs to be said. I have never seen such a precise portrait of how the past influences the future, how slender is the thread that keeps us tethered to the life we're born into. I think part of why I reacted so strongly is because I *do* know my family line quite far back. Hell, I can look it up back to the 15-somethings if I want. More importantly I have so many stories of pain and awfulness, beauty and strength, breathtaking absurdity, unfairness in either direction, and plain luck, good or bad, that the idea of family legacy, known or unknown, is very familiar. And this is exactly what Homegoing offers too. Of course, in specifics, the story of Maame's two daughters and their children down the generations could not be more different from mine and my ancestors story. This to say that it once again proves true: the more specific a story is, the more general will be its ressonance.

Please excuse me, I need to go back to crying.

[blunderpoons]

Girl in (old) pieces

I’ve read “Girl in Pieces” because someone else asked me to. I would typically not pick up something like this - really? A book about a very young girl dealing with self-harm and sexual trauma? - it sounds like exactly the sort of literature I’m tired of.

What finally intrigued me enough to give it a go was a reviewer comparing it to “Girl, Interrupted”. I love both the book and movie “Girl, Interrupted” and “Girl in Pieces” certainly begins as a seeming love letter to it. The same vignette style, the same disjointed but flowing narrative, and of course the setting in a psychiatry ward.

But the book moves on to Arizona, and so did my interest. The main character, Charlie, at 17, suddenly has to deal with the horrors of rent, finding work, dealing the horrors of other people, and trying to create art. All of which are very relatable.

Now, have I ever been committed to psychiatric treatment center? No.

Can I find Arizona on a map? Also no.

Have I ever made regrettable dating choices? No comment.

The fascinating thing about this book is that, while the main character is a teenager, it feels very much written for an older reader. The book lets you see the various disasters of Charlie’s choices coming a mile away - really girl, a musician?- but in a way that lets you understand every choice she makes.

Would I, a 40-something very privileged and jaded adult, have been able to deal with Charlie’s life in a better way? Would I have been able to navigate my own life competently, if all my support and all my resources were removed?

I’ll be pondering that for some time.

17-year-old me would have hated Charlie. 40-year-old me loves her and wants to give her a hug.