C. A. Voss

Personal blog: Writing, art, and thots

[cavoss]

Have a perfectly ephemeral 48 hour romance.

Part ways amicably but clearly.

Wait two months and send them a record they would love with a note attached that reads, “you are an infernal pestilence upon my mind. I think you would like track #3.”

Stay silly my friends.

[cavoss]

The joy and hope deficit

I watched a movie the other day that I would have loved as an angsty junkie teenager -  which by happenstance is exactly when it came out. Now I don’t know if it's a change of taste or if the movie was objectively bad (as is often the case, the answer is probably a little bit both), but what I do know is that it was the product of its time… and oh, how much times have changed.

American Honey (based on a quick Wikipedia read) was largely filmed during 2015. Yes, the good times, before all of - this-and-that - happened. Let's think back to why a slice-of-life-too-long-americana-poverty-porn-coming-of-age movie would have won accolades like Best British Independent Film and Jury Prize at Cannes.

Personally, as I do for most societal ills, I blame the Kardashians, but specifically their role in the 2014-2016 era.  Their distinct brand of decadence and plasticine athletics was influencing the cultural ethos, pathos and logos. It was the reign of King Kylie, lip kits and all. It was still bad to be broke and look like it - right at the precipice of golden goose sneakers and trying to look poor… the turning point.  

Authenticity wasn’t something to be desired in this moment - there was social capital to be gained by looking like a member of the upper class (I mean there always is pressure to do that but stay with me). The world was bordering on 2000’s style McBling with full coverage foundation and the rise of the influencer. 

Then, pooped out of an artist’s mind, comes this film. A film that is shaky, laboriously paced, and artistically striking, focusing on the true grit of the lower rungs of American social classes. It strikes a chord. It’s authentic - Lana Del Rey-real-americana, baby.

But… the director was British, right? …yeah, authentic. I digress.

I don’t think the point of view of the film is totally incorrect. Artists are ever so ahead of the curve of what society needs to hear. Big Pharma just starting to get caught with their little oxy problem, people still crawling out from underneath the upheaval of the 2008 Great Recession, the poverty of middle America - people needed to see it in the midst of quickly flooding flashy social media timelines. 

So now, why does it taste so stale?

And, even though (despite my personal takes and dislikes, cough-cough, two, over-3-minute long sex scenes that did not drive plot, intimacy, tone or feeling…), the core story is just a more realistic take on a coming-of-age narrative. American Honey is only about 10 years old, cinematography-wise holds up to scrutiny, and the story itself is pretty evergreen. 

It really shouldn’t feel particularly dated, and yet to me, it does. 

Why? A problem I am dubbing the joy and hope deficit. 

Nostalgia is a powerful drug, and while there is tragedy happening everywhere, all the time, in 2015, the West was beginning to resurface economically. Everything didn’t hurt so bad anymore - even with the opioid epidemic and other societal ills happening around us. So, the artists show us authenticity and reality. They tell us about all the bad, all the scary and grimey because we have the bandwidth to digest it and empathize with the characters. And, maybe in turn, even begin to be kinder to our neighbors in similar situations.

But now, in 2025? We know it's bad. 

We can debate up and down about how and why we got here, but we cannot deny that the general feeling is hanging somewhere around apprehensive to downright anxiety inducing. So now, the artists, in all their foresight, are getting silly.

They are trying to fill in the joy and hope deficit. 

We see the homeless people on the street, I see the sweat on my own brow about the rising costs, and the media boxes steadily hum songs of despair disguised as headlines. 

So now we get movies with hope. Hope, at all costs, no matter where it is. A really great comparable film in both tone and style to American Honey is The Florida Project - same american-poverty-authenticity idea, only produced a year apart, and yet the latter has one thing the other does not.  The Florida Project reflects a growing theme within the indy-grit genre - hope.

People now need hope. We need joy. We need to be able to envision a way out of this mess, or at least that the mess has meaning, and someone can clean it all up. We didn’t need that messaging 10 years ago. 

Look at what garners attention from reviewers now even, think Companion (the story is FUN), even Nosferatu - it is fanciful and scary, but the message is goodness defeats evil, hope and joy - the characters display hope and obstacles overcome.

This pattern of digestibility has happened before. The top grossing films of 2009, when things were also looking quite bleak, were Transformers, Twilight, and Up for the big box office, but even in the indie department (500) Days of Summer was making reasonable trips to the bank. When compared to both mainstream and independent box office rankings in 2006, the titles listed, excluding children’s films, were largely more pessimistic featuring the likes of V for Vendetta and Little Miss Sunshine respectively.

I think if a film like American Honey hit the box offices today, it would feel like someone trying to pawn off a Rothco-immitator in the MET. It is not the time anymore, we have no desire for the doggedness of reality. It’s not because it's unimaginative or unimportant, we just can’t take it right now. No fun looking in the mirror when it’s not something pretty looking back at you.

I looked at all the major box office movies (yeah, American Honey and The Florida Project, albeit indie films, still did numbers) for 2024. What do you notice? No hardihood, no grit. It no longer strikes a chord. The thing in the mirror is staring back at us - it is scary and ugly.

While this movie did pave a path for more imaginative films, the time has passed. If it's a coming-of-age story, I think movie goers now would like to be smiling rather than confused walking out of the theater. We have plenty of reality waiting for us at home.

[cavoss]

A three day weekend when you work corporate feels like you’re on furlough from a life sentence in a jail that lets you have a TV and snacks

[addzeysatticofasinine]

[cavoss]

Rehoboth, DE.

It is the warm time because we are in the wash and not the deep, because the deep is where we go during the cold time.

My family and I are rolling, swimming, burrowing, and snatching bits of food with our fans. We must eat as much as we can because it is the warm time and there is much to eat, unlike when it is the cold time and we are in the deep.

The little ones flutter all around me, sprite-like with youth. I was like them before our last trip to the deep, but now I am almost all done. I have maybe just one more grand venture to the deep before I go and never come back.

I am not scared, this is just how it goes.

The world around us churns, but our smooth, elliptical bodies slip perfectly into the soft sand, aided by burrowing legs and inward curled tails. Our eye-stalks stick out as we wait for a lucky break, waving with our fans to capture food passing us by.

The fin-swimmers and tall-pinchers must have it rough, having to move all around to grab a bite to eat, and having to do it all alone. Sand-retreaters all stay together, little, big, old and young. It is safer this way.

I wonder sometimes if there was more to us, like big claws or gnashing teeth, the Aboves would leave us alone - or we would at least have something to fight with. They swoop down with big yellow beaks and white heads, grabbing us all up, no matter how quickly we try to throw ourselves into the sand. I do not wonder long because I know everyone must eat, just as we grab the floaters in our fans, we become food for the aboves. I do suppose that is why so many little ones happen all at once, though.

We can hear them before they crash into the wash, the aboves. We can see their shadows from outside the wash, where they live in the dry. We can venture into the dry, but we cannot live in it like the aboves do. Some of the tall-pinchers sleep up there at night, and travel by way of wash to get to their next destination, or to escape an above. I am thankful the aboves can’t get very far into the wash; even with the constant threat, at least we have somewhere they cannot go.

But in the warm time, a new type of above comes around.

They are big. So big my eyes cannot even see them all at once.

They are so loud. Lying beneath them in the wash, they sound so heavy I think they must be able to crush worlds.

They are built on big columns of smooth flesh, with strange fins at four long ends, with a great big bulb on top. The fins we can see in the wash are bent so strangely I don’t know how they move at all, if the wash even gets deep enough for them to be fully submerged. And they have these little - things - on the end of their flattened bottom fins - little protrusions with scales on the tops. Sometimes the scales are colored wildly, other times the same as the stumps they emerge from.

And they stomp on the sand with those bizarre fins - it makes an awful racket.

At first we thought it was to crush and kill us all. But they moved away, deeper into the wash. They act like we are not here. Sometimes, they dip into our sand and take some of our family, but we don’t know to where or why.

The regular aboves with yellow beaks and white heads strike down and tear us limb from limb, but these ones, the big ones, we don’t know why they are here. They are only around when it is light and hot in the warm time. During the cold time when we are in the deep we do not see them at all. Some stay behind when we leave for the deep, but the hoards of them and their cacophony of flabby bottom fins quiets.

Today it is warm time. It is light and hot in the dry, and I am buried in sand, waving my fans, eating and enjoying the warmth of the wash, surrounded by my family all doing the same.

I feel the sand beneath me shift. This has never happened before.

I am afraid.

I no longer hear the rush of the wash, I cannot see or feel my family burrowing around me. I am aware I am in the sand still, but I feel it undulating.

The top of my small round body has been exposed to the dry, and I finally muster up the bravery to push out my eyes. I am in the dry, in the sand still, but on one of the beastly, big Aboves other strange flippers. They prod me with what look like tentacles attached to a long appendage. They are booming and screeching, making such strange sounds.

I fear, for once I fear.

My family is gone, I am alone. Held hostage by a beast so grand it confounds my mind! What does it want from me? I am afraid!

The air shifts - whooshing past me. I am back in the wash.

I skitter into the sand to collect my thoughts. I do not know what God would look like, but I do believe I have encountered it - I must go find my family to recount to them the full magnitude of the beasts which thunder above us during the warm time in the dry.

***

I’ve always loved mole crabs. They remind me of my childhood - finding them in the Outer Banks, but they have them in Rehoboth, too. I went and caught some. I giggled as the babies tickled my hands as they tried to burrow into sand that had fallen away. I hope they have a good story to tell when I set them back down in the sand.

[moonlit-drafts]

Hottest Sauce

My dearest love, my crimson fire, You fulfill my every desire. While others add a simple dash, I glug you down with frantic splash.

My eggs, my ice cream, and my cake, A burning, spicy, sweet heartache. I put you in my morning tea, You’re all my taste buds ever see.

The bottle sleeps beneath my pillow, Your vinegary scent, my favorite willow. I dream of Scovilles and of heat, Of peppers dancing, fast and fleet.

My friends all whisper, “It’s a phase,” And give me quite peculiar gazes. They don’t know how your siren call Makes me forget the world and all.

So let them have their milk and bread, I’ll have my lava, thick and red! This odd addiction, pure and true, I’ll always have a spot for you.

[cavoss]

And just as the wheel of seasons turns to early autumn - a fresh batch of granola twinks begin their maiden shift at the rock climbing gym.

[enchantedbook]

'Elizabethan Galleons' by N. C. Wyeth, (1882 - 1945).

[addzeysatticofasinine]

[cavoss]

Putting a copy on infinite jest in all four cardinal corners of my property to ward off pseudo intellectual cretins

[cavoss]

Taking even half of the corporate red pill which I’m actively trying to pull trig and vomit back up has proven to have dire consequences

[cavoss]

I’m trying to do some gingham pattern for these boarders - any suggestions on a medium that will make the ink more transparent/increase pigmentation when layered?

[cavoss]

Opening my mind and heart to change from the universe, but making a face like the prisoner who winces at the wall in front of them looks while the executioner readies his rifle

[electricgecko]

[mendeljef-ill]

Some woodcut illustrations i made for my masters project "op eigen houtje", a book about woodworking for children. //op eigen houtje-2025//

[cavoss]

I have felt for a while the pressure to read good books. Academic books. And for the most part, yes, I agree it is important to have an understanding of literature and not just fill your eyes to the brim with smut. But, after reading one genuinely academically challenging book (Absolom, Absolom) and two morally challenging/thinky books - I grabbed what I thought was going to be a piece of nonsense garbage marketed toward, “lonely women”. It had been sitting on my shelf for years at this point, but I am happy to report that I was wrong about letting it rot there for so long.

Call Me Zelda by Erika Robuck, is a historical fiction revolving around the psychiatric nurse to Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of famous author F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In the first 20 pages I thought, wow, this might be bad, but then I realized what I had on my hands. I am dubbing them, movie books. This book was not preaching to me, it had no high brow lesson to ponder on, but what it did have was a beginning, climax and end. And, it genuinely did keep me guessing where the story would go. Fundamentally, it's about journeying through grief and all the weird shit it makes you do and not do, using psychiatric nurse Anna as a lens.

The thing I found most refreshing was it is a story about an adult woman, going through a traumatic adult experience, with another adult woman. Sex is mentioned, but it's not at the forefront. Family is mentioned, but the female characters are not defined by motherhood. Mental health issues are addressed, but it is not the backbone of what makes the story compelling. All the characters have visible flaws and perfect cut edges of their personhood, and it wraps up with a nice little bow. Fundamentally it is just a story about a woman sorting through her grief by way of adventure through a quirky and at times toxic friendship - most importantly ITS A FUN READ.

This is the adult fiction I want. These are genuine mature themes of loss, mental health, the impacts of addiction on marriages, and growth. I don’t want to read fairy porn, and I don’t always want to read a mind bending piece of literature that leaves me thinking for days. Sometimes I want a movie book, just like this one, and I highly recommend it.

[cavoss]

Gen Z isn't puritanical because of the current state of global culture - sort of, I think.

We know the tradwife in her milk maid dress, or the conservative female politician in that atrocious, shiny polyester with platinum hair. Sure fire, loudly shrieking dog whistles on our current political climate - and yet... The rat boi skirt is a must have item with the fashion girlies, its gingham hem skimming the ground. Boatneck dresses are all the rage. Anecdotally, most women I know are no longer opting for heavy make up in their day-to-days. The outcome may look similar, but the causes could not be more different.

For a long time, women were told to be, “sexy” as a way of reclaiming their own “sexiness”. For a while, it seemed to work. We shouted, “get your bag, queen!”, “No, girl you look so good!”. We applauded the risque outfits and “self-care” beauty rituals as women flocked to online sex work and strip clubs. This is not to say this isn’t a valid way of reclaiming what is rightfully yours… but the fumes billowing off reek of the same gold paint the road to good intentions was paved with. 

The applause is beginning to quiet, not out of hate or malice, but because some people, myself included, are finally starting to decode what it really means to reclaim yourself for yourself. 

Once you peel back the layers of sexuality reclamation being discussed circa 2018 to 2021, it is not hard to see it was still always centered around the male gaze.

I am so sexy you will pay to see me.

I can be sexy without you, even.

I can be beautiful without you.

I can mean something without you.

Without you.

Who?

Him.

His gaze is still the indirect object of every sentence in your internal monologue.What happens when you remove him all together? Who are you being sexy for, then? Attractive for? Why are you trying so hard?

Just the first of a myriad of questions that pop up when women (have some nuance here, please) really decenter men and actually start doing it on their own terms.

I have been sexualized since I was far too young. Woe is me, born pretty! I know. This is different. The difference in the attention I got from boys my age on the playground and the predatory gaze of a man in a store is palpable. I know I am not the only one who has felt the difference. When you present as a woman and you are young, to be beautiful is to be in danger.

Sexy, in all its mystique, had gotten old by the time I was 18, still too young to have grown into my adult face. So when I was told to reclaim myself through sexuality it backfired wildly. I still centered my desire for male attention. No matter how hard I tried to convince myself I was above it, over it, I wasn’t looking for someone’s eyes brimming with desire to meet my own - or my ass in too-tight shorts at least, I was always wrong. It took years. Years of scraping my knees and breaking my nose on the same piece of emotional concrete to understand this futile effort was getting me nowhere and was actually hurting me. Sexiness was part of how I was getting consumed, and frankly, I am tired of being meat.

I know I am not alone in this - the famous example of Billie Elish comes to mind first. She knew what would happen if she wore a tank top in public before she was 18, and she was right. When you are less focused on the palate of those eating you, the type of dressing you apply changes, preferably toward your own taste.

I do not care about being or feeling sexy through traditional means anymore, because I am not available for easy consumption.

I exist solely for myself. A self that I love. Others are figuring that out for themselves too.

Young women are opting for less skin because they don’t want to be eaten and no longer resonate with that method of self definition. The jig that a man will make you happy when become the apple of his eye is up. It was a lie. We figured it out. 

This is not to say you shouldn’t want to feel or be sexy, or the simple act of showing your knees is in a divine feminine ouroboros way of, “asking for it”. Everyone deserves to feel good about themselves, everyone deserves to feel beautiful and desired in their own skin, but the one-size fits all system backed by patriarchal values again fails. It doesn’t fit all, it barely fits most. 

My argument is also coming out of my mouth. A mouth which happens to be in a happy relationship with a man. Deconstructing the idea that your life purpose is to shrink-to-fit yourself into someone else’s is not meant to conjure up hatred for half of the global population. It's about examining the direct or indirect influences being pushed upon people from the moment they are old enough to understand what it means to live and present as a woman. It is about finding freedom from the outdated paradigm that has so often left women to the wayside. The logical argument of if you are sexy, you will be wanted, and in being wanted, you will be fulfilled, is not true. Beyond it not being true for women, it's not true for anyone! 

So, if you have been told to lean into a type sex appeal your whole life, which has frankly put you in harm's way at times and you didn’t have a choice in to begin with, the leaning in starts to feel like throwing your body weight into the tilt of a sinking ship. Counterintuitive to say the least.

While my generation has its obvious challenges and humanity has a way of letting the cultural pendulum swing so hard we almost always knock a tooth out, I am fairly confident this is a good thing. Young women are finally breaking free from the alluring spell of patriarchal sexiness and femininity. I could do without the extreme conservative ideology and the Gileadification of the U.S.A. and all, though.

That said, Gen Z being weird about clubbing, dancing, and generally often being wet blankets? Different essay topic entirely.