Art cetera

waffles and runoff This will probably be my homepage.

[tobermoriansass]

i guess the thing that really irritates me about people resorting to fictional analogies to grapple with the current political situation is that while yes, fiction can absolutely be used in the conscientization process and to help people make sense of what’s going on around them, it is essentially useless if not coupled with a critical discussion of the kind of history and sociopolitical factors that have led up to this moment and to discuss, therefore, the multiple points of action that are necessary to actually eradicate the problem of fascism at its root - rather than just engaging in emergency action, which is what we are doing at this time. we’re in emergency mode, not preventive mode. preventive mode started somewhere in 2k14 but hindsight is 20/20 i guess. 

and its irritating because a) there are a lot of people making these comparisons and some of them are doing it for notes and b) most of this fiction draws on irl histories…. that people have no idea about. i mean jkr straight-up ripped the whole pureblood/half-blood/muggleborn thing from how the n*zis conceptualized the pure aryan race but… the vast majority of fandom treats it like its a cultural thing and that the purebloods just want to protect their culture from being bastardized. which is. interestingly enough, also a thing the n*zis believed - and the fact that we don’t know the history which jkr is drawing on makes this kind of discourse possible and makes this analogy ultimately vacuous because we’re not actually using it to further our understanding of irl anti-semitism or racism. just to map who’s good and who’s evil onto various things. 

and its even more irritating because like, for a lot of people we don’t start off with mapping this kind of analogous fiction onto reality, we start by seeing how the author has captured our political and social realities in fiction. very often while excluding us from the narratives and stories that borrow from our oppression! so yes you know, by all means use fiction to understand reality, but also man, some of us do not actually have the patience to be patient with this because this… kind of is our lived reality - and a good chunk of mainstream liberals won’t actually accept that this frames our everyday realities until we reach crisis or emergency mode. at which point you know, its also kind of frustrating to see actual history and historical parallels be ignored in favour of the popular media du jour. i understand it, but i find it extremely extremely difficult to empathize with it or feel patience with it. the unkind and uncharitable thought inside my head: if you actually cared, you’d have noticed that this fiction was reflecting a certain reality a long long time ago, but congratulations on waking up to what a lot of marginalized folks have been saying for ages.

(no its not kind but i’m not always kind. i’m just trying to explain why people are pissed off)

and the thing, i guess that ends up being the most frustrating is that people just stop at these analogies. there’s no attempt at in-depth political discussion at all. if people attempt it before the analogy is ‘discovered’, its treated as fearmongering and just someone reading too much into the text and someone bringing their dirty politics into fiction while totally not getting the universe (hi, did you know i have a reddit thread dedicated to bashing that slytherin meta i wrote because i pointed out how the rhetoric being used in there was basically fascist prop 101? but i guess i just have to analyze it within the universe or whatevz LOL). its so easy to map the good guys and bad guys onto irl folks, but its not so easy to understand the underpinning ideologies and modes of thought that exist even within the context of fiction - pureblood supremacy as white supremacy, for example - and so ultimately when people fail to grapple with ideology and then reproduce said ideology in fandom spaces while turning around and hating irl fascists, that’s when it gets really fucking frustrating. because its evident that there’s….. no real understanding of what fascist, esp yt supremacist, ideology looks like and how it expresses itself in multiple modes of thought ranging from patriotism to sentimentalism to being fond of cultural heritages. because surprise! its not all about hate, a good chunk of the time its about love (c.f. sara ahmed’s the bond of belief) and wanting to protect - which means we have to interrogate how we form our praxis and whether or not we are verging dangerously into the territory of still operating under some of the tenets of nationalist or fascist supremacist thought. 

and that, ultimately, is i think what gets everyone’s goat because the same people who are using fiction to understand their reality - and look, full disclosure, i see so so much of my daily political situation reflected in both HP and star wars that i understand this - are almost always inevitably the same people reblogging good guy j/oe b/iden and o/bama memes which is troubling for the reasons i’ve outlined here (tl;dr: it obscures their own complicity in creating a system that is violent, warmongering and is essentially tailor made for the rise of a fascist state) or the same people engaging in fannish spheres without an ounce of political criticality about the media they’re consuming. and no i don’t expect everyone to be politically and mentally engaged and on point all the time but damn its frustrating, you know? and its even more hellishly frustrating when you’ve been talking about this shit for a long time and now you have to listen to people make vacuous and empty comparisons (that almost always become omg hillary is hermione granger! jeremy corbyn is dumbledore!) without trying to engage with and understand real world ideologies and how they’re reflected in fiction, or alternately, for getting mad at you for having tried to do so at some point in time, you know?

[bryanbower]

I once came across a "HRC is basically Leslie knope" thunkpiece* while parks and rec was playing in the same room and I had to stop all the computers :/

*not a typo

[winkfrown]

avi, culture ;-(

“Help! I’m trapped in a car with a madman…”

That was the post that started it all; the proverbial message-in-a-bottle that I vaguebooked onto/at the internet shortly into the start of my journey. Sure, sticklers will try to interject that clearly “it all” must have started sometime earlier seeing as I was already trapped in the car with said madman when I wrote that, but I have no patience for such shortsighted thinking when my posting that is the catalyst to what is easily the real story here. Because even tho I was already in a situation more or less worth telling about, I had so little idea where I was going or what I was doing, and until I got a response to my starting to my first fleeting missive there was hardly anything worth telling yet at all.

You see I got into the car willingly, before I realized what I was getting myself into - as these things often go - and I’d committed myself to a misadventure already, so I was still trying to roll with it. But since I received from Mom my first-ever mobile device that wasn’t just a crappy flipphone with an unusable browser, a way to stay in touch with her I guess, it only made sense to also use it to share even my mildest misgivings. Even if it was just on Facebook :-/

Sometimes the world can surprise you, though, when you just try reaching out a little bit. I will say that much.

Just in case you’re interested, and so that I don’t have to come back to it, I’ll clarify a bit: I don’t really use Facebook at all, as well-versed in the internet as I am or thought I was. But suddenly hurtling far and then farther away from anything I know, I found myself latching on or reaching out for some semblance of normalcy somewhere. I wanted to know that I still knew anything, I guess.

I didn’t though. Facebook is terrible and no way to build or maintain relationships. After starting from scratch and even rebuilding the drawing board, I know that much again now. I also managed to recall that the web is one big deception, and that nothing is ever as it seems until it is. So for a little while I didn’t want to give in either you know, i wantd to just kinda get used to it and besides, I was remembering everything I didn’t like about social media all over again in no time anyway.

But perhaps I should explain: I’m 25 and living at home, or I was until I wasn’t any more, which is perfectly normal nowadays and wouldn’t be so bad by itself if it weren’t for everything else in my life being terrible :-( but it was most definitely terrible in ways I can’t even get into right now. it’s why I left home, though, and left in that way where you’re running away from something way more than running toward anything… Only I was fully aware of that fact and had simply concluded it was the right and logical thing to do. I’m not saying my home-life was a war zone or anything, but there are plenty of places in this world that it makes sense to run from regardless of whether or not you have a destination in mind at that moment.

And that is ultimately the reason why I am terrified right now, and why I am sitting here in a car plunking this all out into my phone, autocorrect be damned, which actually think i successfully turned it off just now… this is a defense of some kind against the sudden crushing reality of my decision. Only a day out but it’s my first night sleeping nowhere in particular, blowing away with the evening breeze because at this moment I belong nowhere. I’ve left where I was but i haven’t ended up anywhere yet, and all the safeties of home are gone along with the comforts. I’m not worried about tonight really. I’m worried about next month and next year, and about never actually landing anywhere.

I tried a sublet for the summer, a few towns away in what passes for a major city in connecticut, and for awhile that worked. It was different at least, and since i was renting from a grad student at yale it was surprisingly nice :-) but almost insulting tho how it was among the best places ive ever lived and it had as much to do with the convenience of someone richer as it had to do with how well i was acutally doing. But i ignored that as best I could & instead focused on how well i was living for once.

The job that had me doing so well just doesn’t matter because, long story short, i lost it, right at the end of summer - downsized in a bad economy thats busy almost kinda sorta recovering as long as you had lots of money already and didnt lose it when everyone else did. All that matters is it was enough to keep me in this place, and that I worked at night and didn’t really know my roommates. So i lost it, the job, and then i started to lose it. you know, my mind. cuz i had been tentatively offered one of the other rooms in the apartment long-term - a nicer room that was another $150/month - but i couldn’t even keep the room i had if they were open to that. I didnt even ask.

And when one of my fellow subLetters ran into me on my 1st unemployed night as he came home from work, and asked me where i was going next, it never occurred to me that he hadn’t been asked to stay - he seemed to have a lot of purpose and direction as he told me about his plan to go out west anf take a job that was waiting for him, that i just assumed thatd been his agenda from the start. Hell, he wanted to leave a few days before his lease was up so he must be really excited about his new life. Again, i didn’t even ask.

I just knew i couldn’t stay here any longer, and i’d be damned if i was going back home again. So when this roommate who i only everr drank with once or twice on a random weekend night said i should roadtrip with him out west, pay for some gas, keep him awake on the road and maybe he could get me a job at his dad or whoever’s company? What do you think i did?

I made plans to dispose of whatever i couldn’t sell, sold whatever i could, sold all but one of my guitars </3 went to tell my mom and whats-his-name and he gave me some cash & a slap on the back. Mom gave me this phone and the Mom goodbye, tearful hug, hankie in hand, everything exactly as you would expect. So glad i went to the old house for that, to drop off the few things i couldn’t get rid of - it was actually traumatic in ways i can’t bring myself to go into now.

And despite the huge red flag the night before we left where he’s drunk as hell at 7:30pm and finally lost a wrestling match to his button-down shirt at around ten, at which point he passed out on the living room couch - I was all in at this point. So when he woke up a few hours later, threw up in the bathroom, then started drinking again, I just set the coffee pot and went to bed. He managed to hold a job all summer, after all. Hes just blowing off steam.

Following the same logic i also just shrugged it off when he woke up mad late after saying he wanted to hit the road early - well he got really drunk last night, i told myself. So i just made the full pot of coffee, smoked a cigarette and waited. Then i unpacked my stash and got high, drank some coffee and waited. Then i found his keys and started packing the car, my stuff and any of his bags & boxes left out in the living room. Then i drank coffee and waited, and was almost at the point of being actually annoyed when he got up.

“Is there any coffee?”

I told him yeah, a little bit. Then i hit the bathroom, smoked another cigarette, and waited. It was just getting dark out when he was finally ready, and by this time i was annoyed, but grateful that my annoyance was over, so i kept my mouth shut hoping we could just get going already.

My breaking point didnt come til we were about an hour or so into the trip, driving along the parkway out of CT to the parkway through NY to avoid the GWB. Not alot of cars on the road but he’s speeding and weaving through everyone, getting a little faster, and faster still. I asked him whats going on, why are we going so damn fast, and he just blurts out, "Dude I have really got to find a bathroom like right now! I know there’s a rest area around here somewhere, used to come this way all the time with Dad and… OH SHIT!“

He slammed on the brakes, threw it in reverse without even looking (no one was there behind us thank god) and sped into a rest area that was just a sad brick building where the only doors were on the maintenance room, and not the actual bathrooms. The lot was completely empty, but a moment after we skidded to a complete stop a small truck or a van zipped by in the darkness of the parkway behind us.

He all but dove out of the car, leaving it running while he started to, in the direction of the dismal brick structure. How he managed to shut the car door at all in the process is a mystery i missed, i was still staring at the black tire marks behind us that he left when he screeched us into this spot. Not that we’re parked properly in a space but the entire lot is empty so i didn’t even really care about that. But now you know why, sitting there in the car, it made sense to post that message online. And that’s when it happened.

I got a lot of pings back immediately, mostly just "you ok?” and other stuff that i wasnt really looking for - i don’t know what i WAS looking for - when at the bottom of the comments appeared text from a ‘Slingo Lang’:

“Maybe he’s trapped in that car with you, Rorschach.”

There was nothing about that reply i didn’t like, but i didn’t know who that was or how or why they were looking at my posts. So i asked, who is Slingo Lang?

“Prince Caspian”

It took me a moment of staring into space before i got it. “….Robert? is that you???”

“Shh. we’ll talk later. slingo dot lang at g ma il dot co m”

All I said was “ :-x ” and copied his email into my contacts - and good thing too cuz i just sent one to him that said “got it!” and when i went back to Facebook, his comment was gone.

So i sat here in the car long enough waiting that i pulled out my drawing pad & sketched i guess a still life of the view out the rear window, started filling it in and coloring. I only started tapping out this story when my phone went off: someone else liked a comment someone had made about a thing i think i said i liked on facebook and i fell for the whole ruse - my phone was in my hand again. I closed the app in disgust, probably how people in the olden days used to slam phones but way quieter, and just opened the browser, and in small text google randomly presented me with a word of the day because they know i probably need the help, and i saw

aviculture [ey-vi-kuhl-cher] n. the practice of keeping and breeding birds and the culture that forms around it

and of course my first thought was something like “avi… culture?… is that what they’re calling hanging out online now or?…” before i had even read the actual definition. Then i did read it, and then i realized that the internet is full of humans who couldn’t belong and so instead turned into birds & flew off into the Cloud. Maybe just to justify my own weird thought to myself, i had a weirder one, which is a good defense til you run out of turtles on the way down. And to further justify it i suppose, i opened Facebook again and posted my half-baked notion anyway - what the hell, it’s late enough right? Who cares? Nobody, probably, and for some reason that was comforting. Nobody replied and nobody liked it.

I guess that’s what that means.

So i downloaded this app to better tell stories that no one would see, let alone anyone i knew, and typed for awhile before going back to my drawing, just coloring it in with markers now really, when he finally comes back out to the car.

“Sorry about that, dude - shouldntve had those burritos right before we left.”

You gonna live? I asked for entirely selfish reasons.

“Yeah, I just feel like i shat a whole chicken just now.”

:-o

We pulled out of the rest area onto the parkway and drove on in silence for awhile before i finally thought to turn on some music. The roads were smooth so i pulled out a portable reading lamp from my bag & clipped it to my sketchpad so i could work on my drawing awhile, til he said the light was bothering him. So i went back to tapping out this story on my phone, using my jacket to shield him from the glare.

But actually we just stopped again for gas and i’m OK with the drawing as is:

So now that i ve typed all this there’s no way around coming back to that earlier bird-thought, the word of the day, and realize that there are all sorts of reasons to need an escape, some more drastic than others - and that I’m taking flight from a fight I can’t take anymore just like basically everyone online who isnt a bot or a troll. We are all coming together with our shared sense of not belonging where we come from or where we are…

And pulling back onto the road just now and tapping out that last paragraph while listening to the soft fuzz of fading radio music, my phone went off again. Slingo has replied to my recent post like a voice in my head:

“it’s like a tragedy we’re all in on ;-(  birds of a feather flock together?

Couldn’t have put it better myself. 

-Remi

[bryanbower]

Test

Even I it was just wondering what your thoughts on this forum and the video of my life in general but knowingo the same.

sure why the hell is that the name of the time of the time? true tho

was all this really necessary??

[nellucnhoj]

…

Tumblr — Twitter — Facebook — Instagram — Buy my books — Support me on Patreon

[boneyardchamp]

Your professor will not be happy with you if he says the Stanford Prison Experiment shows human nature and you say it shows the nature of white middle class college-aged boys.

Like he will not be happy at all.

[cannon-fannon]

For real though. That experiment. Scary shit.

[hollowedskin]

This reminds me of a discussion that I read once which said Lord of the Flies would have turned out a hell of a lot differently if it was a private school of young girls (who are expected to be responsible and selfless instead), or a public school where the children weren’t all from an inherently entitled, emotionally stunted social class (studies have shown that people in lower socioeconomic classes show more compassion for others). Or that the same premise with children raised in a different culture than the toxic and opressive British Empire and it’s emphasis on social hierarchy and personal wealth and status. And that what we perceive as the unchangable truth deep inside humanity because of things like Lord of the Flies and the Stanford Prison Experiment, is just the base truths about what happens when you remove any accountabilty controlling one social group with an overwhelming sense of entitlement and an inability to feel compassion.

[lady-feral]

I will always reblog this.

[chloedayee]

Coffee Mug Pipe!

[bryanbower]

AKA Coffee Pot

[link-together-with-all]

[drakebarmitzva]

liberalism is a wild ride, pornhub advertises for breast cancer awareness, monsanto is an “LGBT-friendly” place to work, “this is what a feminist looks like” t-shirts are being made by impoverished bangladeshi women for cents a day. literally what is it going to take for people to wake the fuck up and realize that this is not what “progress” looks like?

[deepened-thought-deactivated201]

Reblog if you are lesbian, bisexual, or polyamorous !!!

[polylove-girls-blog-deactivated]

Hello! :)

[winkfrown]

Somewhere in the vast expanse that is New-York-State-Not-New-York-City, there is a Walmart with a huge parking lot, like so many others, only this one stands out to me because we parked the car there and spent the night. I can’t really say that i slept there since I didn’t really. Couldn’t....

[bryanbower]

“Free Speech” 

scanned drawing 2015 sometime

[winkfrown]

chapter one: avi, culture ;-(

"Help! I’m trapped in a car with a madman…"

That was the post that started it all; the proverbial message-in-a-bottle I vaguebooked onto/at the internet shortly into the start of my journey. Sure, sticklers will try to interject that clearly “it all” must have started sometime earlier seeing as I was already trapped in the car with the madman when I wrote that, but I have no patience for such shortsighted thinking when my writing that obviously started what is easily the real story here. Because even tho I was already in a situation worth telling about, I had so little idea where I was going or what I was doing until after I started getting responses to my telling about it.

You see I got into the car willingly, before I realized what I was getting myself into (as these things often go), and I’d committed myself to a misadventure already, so I was still trying to roll with it. But since I received my first-ever mobile device that wasn’t just a crappy cellphone with an unusable browser as a gift, specifically because I was making this trip - my mother insisting I had no excuse not to stay in touch after I left - it only made sense to use it to share even my mildest misgivings. Even if it was just on Facebook :-/

Sometimes the world can surprise you, though, when you just try reaching out a little bit.

But just in case you’re interested, and so that I don’t have to come back to it, I’ll clarify a bit: I don’t really use Facebook at all, as well-versed in the internet as I am (or thought I was) but, suddenly finding myself moving quickly, far & then farther away from anything I know, I found myself latching on or reaching out for some semblance of normalcy. I wanted to know that I still knew anything, I guess.

I didn’t, though. Facebook is terrible and no way to build or maintain relationships. After starting from scratch and even rebuilding the drawing board, I know that much again now. I also managed to recall that the web is one big deception, and that nothing is ever as it seems until it is. So for a little while I didn’t want to give in, you know, i wantd to just kinda get used to it and besides, I was remembering everything I didn’t like about social media all over again in no time anyway

But perhaps I should explain: I’m 25 and living at home, or I was until I wasn’t any more, which is perfectly normal nowadays and wouldn’t be so bad by itself if it weren’t for everything else in my life being terrible :-( but it was most definitely terrible in ways I can’t even get into right now. it’s why I left home, though, and left in that way where you’re running away from something way more than running toward anything. only I was fully aware of that fact and had simply concluded it was the right and logical thing to do. I’m not saying my home-life was a war zone or anything, but there are plenty of places in this world that it makes sense to run from regardless of whether or not you have a destination in mind at that moment.

And that is ultimately the reason why I am terrified right now, and why I am sitting here in a car plunking this all out into my phone, autocorrect be damned (actually turned it off almost as soon as i started): this is a defense of some kind against the sudden crushing reality of my decision. i’m only a day out but it’s my first night sleeping nowhere in particular, blowing away with the evening breeze because at this moment I belong nowhere. I’ve left where I was but I haven’t ended up anywhere yet, and all the safeties of home are gone along with the comforts. I’m not worried about tonight really. I’m worried about next month and next year, and about never actually landing anywhere.

I tried a sublet for the summer, a few towns away in what passes for a city in Connecticut, and for awhile that worked. It was different at least, and since i was renting from a grad student at yale it was surprisingly nice :-) almost insulting tho how it was among the best places Ive ever lived and it had as much to do with the convenience of someone richer as it had to do with how well i was acutally doing. But i ignored that as best I could + instead focused on how well i was living for once.

The job that had me doing so well just doesn’t matter because, long story short, i lost it, right at the end of summer - downsized in a bad economy thats busy almost kinda sorta recovering as long as you had lots of money already and didnt lose it when everyone else did. All that matters is it was enough to keep me in this place, and that I worked at night and didn’t really know my roommates. So i lost it, the job, and then i started to lose it. you know, my mind. cuz i had been tentatively offered one of the other rooms in the apartment long-term - a nicer room that was another $150/month - but i couldn’t even keep the room i had if they were open to that. I didnt even ask.

And when one of my fellow subLetters ran into me, on my 1st unemployed night as he came home from work, and asked me where i was going next, it never occurred to me that he hadn’t been asked to stay - he seemed to have a lot of purpose and direction as he told me about his plan to go out west anf take a job that was waiting for him, that i just assumed thatd been his agenda from the start. Hell, he wanted to leave a few days before his lease was up so he must be really excited baout his new life. Again, i didn’t even ask.

I just knew i couldn’t stay here any longer, and I’d be damned if i was going back home again. So when this roommate who i only everr drank with once or twice on a random weekend night said i should roadtrip with him out west, pay for some gas, keep him awake on the road and maybe he could get me a job at his dad or whoever’s company? What do you think I did?

I made plans to dispose of whatever i couldn’t sell, sold whatever i could, sold all but one of my guitars </3 I told my mom and whats-his-name and he gave me some cash + a slap on the back. Mom gave me this phone and the Mom goodbye, tearful hug, hankie in hand, everything. So glad i went to the old house for that, to drop off the few things i couldn’t get rid of.

And despite the huge red flag the night before we left where he’s drunk as hell at 7:30 pm and finally lost a wrestling match to his button-down shirt at around ten, at which point he passed out on the living room couch - I was all in at this point. So when he woke up a few hours later, threw up in the bathroom, then started drinking again, I just set the coffee pot and went to bed. He managed to hold a job all summer, after all. Hes just blowing off steam.

Following the same logic i also just shrugged it off when he woke up mad late after saying he wanted to hit the road early - well he got really drunk last night, i told myself. So i just made a full pot of coffee, smoked a cigarette and waited. Then i unpacked my stash and got high, drank some coffee and waited. Then i found his keys and started packing the car, my stuff and any of his bags + boxes left out in the living room. Then i drank coffee and waited, and was almost at the point of being actually annoyed when he got up. 

"Is there any coffee?"

I told him yeah, a little bit. Then I hit the bathroom, smoked another cigarette, and waited. It was just getting dark out when he was finally ready, and by this time i was annoyed, but grateful that my annoyance was over, so i kept my mouth shut hoping we could just get going already. 

My breaking point didnt come til we were about an hour or so into the trip, driving along the parkway out of CT to the parkway through NY to avoid the GWB. Not alot of cars on the road but he’s speeding and weaving through everyone, getting a little faster, then faster still. I asked him whats going on, why are we going so damn fast, and he just blurts out 

"Dude I have really got to find a bathroom like right now! I know there’s a rest area around here somewhere, used to come this way all the time with Dad and… OH SHIT!”

And he slammed on the brakes, threw it in reverse without even looking (no one way there thank god) and sped into a rest area that was just a sad brick building where the only doors were on the maintenance room, and not the actual bathrooms. The lot was completely empty, but a moment after we skidded to a complete stop a small truck or a van zipped by in the darkness of the parkway behind us. 

He all but dove out of the car, leaving it running as he started running toward the dismal brick structure, and how he managed to shut the car door at all in the process is a mystery I missed - I was still staring at the black tire marks behind us that he left when he screeched us into this spot. Not that we’re parked properly in a spot but the entire lot is empty so i didnt even really care about that. So now you know why, sitting there in the car, it made sense to post that message to facebook. And that’s when it happened.

I got a lot of pings back immediately, mostly just “you ok?” and other stuff that i wasnt really looking for - i don’t know what i WAS looking for - when at the bottom of the comments appeared text from a ‘Slingo Lang’:

"Maybe he’s trapped in that car with you, Rorschach.”

There was nothing about that reply i didnt like, but i didn’t know who that was or how or why they were looking at my posts. So i asked, who is Slingo Lang?

"Prince Caspian"

It took me a moment of staring into space before i got it. “….Robert? is that you???”

"Shh. we’ll talk later. slingo dot lang at g ma il dot co m"

All I said was ” :-x ” and copied his email into my contacts - and good thing too cuz i just sent one to him that said “got it! - remi” and when i went back to Facebook, his comment was gone.

So i sat here in the car long enough waiting that i pulled out my drawing pad + sketched a still life of the view out the rear window, started filling it in and coloring, and only started tapping out this story when my phone went off: someone else liked a comment someone had made about a thing i think i said i liked on facebook and i fell for the whole ruse - my phone was in my hand again. I closed the app in disgust, probably how people in the olden days used to slam phones but way quieter, and just opened the browser. then in small text google randomly presented me with a word of the day because they know i probably need the help, and i saw

aviculture [ey-vi-kuhl-cher] n. the practice of keeping and breeding birds and the culture that forms around it

and of course my first thought was something like “avi… culture?… is that what they’re calling hanging out online now or?…” before i even read the actual definition. Then i did read it, and then i realized that the internet is full of humans who couldn’t belong and so instead turned into birds & flew off into the Cloud. Maybe just to justify my own weird thought to myself, i had a weirder one. it’s a good defense til you run out of turtles on the way down.  

But yeah, i opened Facebook again and posted my half-baked notion anyway - what the hell, it’s late enough right? Who cares? Nobody, probably, and for some reason that was comforting. Nobody replied and nobody liked it. 

I guess thats what that means.

So I went back to my drawing, just coloring it in with markers now really, and i’m just about done at this point when he finally comes back out to the car.

"Sorry about that, dude - shouldntve had those burritos right before we left."

You gonna live? I asked for entirely selfish reasons.

"Yeah, I just feel like i shat a whole chicken just now."

:-o

We pulled out of the rest area onto the parkway and drove on in silence for awhile before i finally thought to turn on some music. The roads were smooth so i pulled out a portable reading lamp from my bag + clipped it to my sketchpad so i could work on my drawing awhile, til he said the light was bothering him. So i went back to tapping out this story on my phone, using my jacket to shield him from the glare.

And actually we just stopped again for gas and i’m OK with the drawing as is:

So now that i ve typed all this there’s no way around coming back to that earlier bird-thought, the word of the day, and realize that there are all sorts of reasons to need an escape, some more drastic than others - and that I’m taking flight from a fight I can’t take anymore just like basically everyone online who isnt a bot or a troll. all coming together with our shared sense of not belonging where we come from or where we are…

And pulling back onto the road just now and tapping out that last paragraph while listening to the soft fuzz of fading radio music, my phone went off again. Slingo has replied to my post like a voice in my head:

" it’s like a tragedy we’re all in together ;-(  "

[bryanbower]

Xray Vision from Love Ya, Mean It by Bryan Bower. Currently 2/12 on the first album, second one still there. 

[bryanbower]

Right Back At Ya (music)

Second half of the double album, Right Back At Ya is done and even a couple on the first half. Almost done! 

<a href="http://bryanbower.bandcamp.com/album/right-back-at-ya">Right Back At Ya by Bryan Bower</a>

[kaisketch]

I’ve been having bad days and drawing this helped me remember things.

I hope it helps you, too.

[postcardsfromspace]

this is good

[ohddaniellee-blog]

Reblog this if you are literally surprised when people find you attractive.

[bryanbower]

literally and actually, practically and for all intents and purposes, in perpetuity throughout the universe. 

[al-grave]

"What do you play?"

"The Clarinet, you?"

"I play the fucking HAMMER”

[bloogue-deactivated20160524]

I like how the brass guy knew it was coming while the bass clarinet still gets caught off guard

[rinasaurusrex]

I would like to thank tumblr for giving me a reason to google the phrase “What musical composition includes the FUCKING HAMMER.”

[bryanbower]

No the bass clarinet player owns that board and table being smashed - they belonged to his grandmother - but he was bad and so they took his table and his board away for hammering purposes. That is why he flinches.