something something

I'm not sure yet, actually.

[cucumberrcarrot]

So into Ram Han at this time

[cucumberrcarrot]

Albert Namatjira

[deca-dente]

[cucumberrcarrot]

🤷‍♀️

[hungryhungryhiba]

[flowers4562-deactivated20220115]

[lovlae]

i want to sleep here 

[julay-fanzine]

[gotitforcheap-deactivated201611]

[cucumberrcarrot]

That trip was like all my life, distilled: a compulsion to thrust myself toward adventure, offset by a longing to crawl into the pouch of some benevolent kangaroo who would take me bounding, protected, through life.

The Rules Do Not Apply - Ariel Levy

[vengodelvalle]

[violetssssss]

[wishcandy]

Same

[jimjarmusch]

[distorte]

Part of my assumed model for growing older and wiser is increasingly reserving judgement. That is to say: where my first instinct as a young man with all the answers was to note disapproval and distaste wherever possible, so as to feel more clearly my frangible superiority, this is slowly giving way to a kind of defeated awareness of the complexities of human behaviours, motivations, habits, possessions. And the unimportance, of course, of the vast majority of these surface irritants that chafe me. If I believe that people are decent, which I do, then anything that I dislike has infinite causes and explanations. To cast harsh judgement is unfair and ultimately self-reducing.

Reading Tove Jansson again rubs up against this strangely, because within her stories you can often feel an ironic and self-aware disapproval of a great many things. To read her novels is to be invited into the confidence of these disapprovals. To understand what is meant when a character hems politely over a painting, or rants about awful tourists in a ugly purple plastic boat. There is an implicit aesthetic territory that the reader shares with the characters. (Do the owners of ugly purple plastic boats ever read a Jansson novel? How would they feel about these characters?)

I find these small, confident stances immensely refreshing in my life of stumbling judgements and retracted grimaces. It makes me wonder where to find a good balancing point. Somewhere at the extreme end of amiability I seem to lose a part of myself. My enthusiasms diminish alongside my disfavours, a marshland of neither land nor sea. I wish to somehow go on without rancour or bile, but still never pretend that the purple plastic boat is not, indeed, a terrible thing.

[dailyactress]

Jenny Slate photographed by Joyce Kim

[peashooter85]

A dog smoking a pipe. circa 1875.

[mongtron]

@tinatinaboooooo

[different-folks]

Lars Lerup. A Fat House for a Thin Man.

[cucumberrcarrot]

Babette and I tell each other everything. I have told everything, such that it was at the time, to each of my wives. There is more to tell, of course, as marriages accumulate. But when I say I believe in complete disclosure I don't mean it cheaply, as anecdotal sport or shallow revelation. It is a form of self renewal and a gesture of custodial trust. Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another's care and protection. Babette and I have turned our lives for each other's thoughtful regard, turned them in the moonlight in our pale hands, spoken deep into the night about fathers and mothers, childhoods, friendships, awakenings, old loves, old fears (except fear of death). No detail must be left out, not even a dog with ticks or a neighbor's boy who ate an insect on a dare. The smell of pantries, the sense of empty afternoons, the feel of things as they rained across our skin, things as facts and passions, the feel of pain, loss, disappointment, breathless delight. In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak of them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

Don Delillo (White Noise)