Second Star To The Right

and straight on till morning

[yesterdaysprint]

El Paso Evening Post, Texas, February 23, 1928

[barcarole]

Camus in 1957, by Loomis Dean.

[shijuri]

「 悲 」

[spicyhorror-deactivated20220222]

[jademerien]

Black and White / Monochrome cat post. 

https://www.instagram.com/jademere/

https://jademere.deviantart.com

https://www.youtube.com/c/JadeMereArt

http://jademere.tumblr.com

www.jademere.com

[f-u-g-i-t-i-v-o]

B&w

[dressedindeath]

Tô tentando, parede.

[nemanja-bogdanov]

[tamascotchi-deactivated20190101]

me walking into a mcdonalds in 2037: i’d like the 5 for .0000005 meal please :)

cashier: sure thing! that’ll just be .0000005 bitcoins. would you like to pay with wifi or take out a McLoan?

me: comcastie-kins can i pwease use the intewnet to twansfew some bitcoins to mcdonawds? ówò

comcast: uh oh pumpkin, you didn’t upgrade to the new premium money exchange package yet :(

me: guess i’ll take out another McLoan then!

cashier: sir it looks like you’ve actually exceeded your limit, you currently owe .13 bitcoins to mcdonald’s and im legally required to arrest you

me: not if i kill myself first

cashier, chasing me with a net: mcdonald’s owns the rights to your life so you’re not allowed to die

[masonimage]

Window Light

An open door to any old building can be an invitation to a photographer and I’m no exception today as I walk by. I have been inside this place before, several times actually, but the open door still calls me for one more visit - my last day here in Saigon. This old Provincial Palace with its 25-foot ceilings and colonial architecture usually brings me here in the middle of the day when the heat makes it impossible to be out in the sun. Today I decided to come early in the morning, the air is cooler and the light is low streaming inside the open shutters of the windows.

The first floor is a museum, but much of the rest of the building is open space, former ballrooms and massive bedrooms mostly empty. A historical treasure that receives surprisingly little foot traffic.

I spend a lot of time walking around. Never in a real hurry to shoot. It’s enjoyable to really feel the grandeur of the rooms. Taking in the size and scale they create. Walking from corner to corner seeing how the light strikes each wall from the different angles. Imagining the people who have been here before and the history contained within. An adjacent hallway I have never shot before has a row of windows that highlight the patterned floor tiles below. The space is pretty much empty of color so it’s not much of stretch to visualize it in black and white.

There is something satisfying about returning to familiar places to shoot. Visiting previous pictures and discovering new ones. The open doorway. A invitation to return again.

[cinema-whore]

It’s two a.m. The emergency room psychiatrist looks up from his clipboard with eyes paid to care and asks me if I see people who aren’t really there. I say, “I see people how the hell am I supposed to know if they’re really there or not?” He doesn’t laugh neither do I. The math’s not on my side ten stitches and one lie. I swear I wasn’t trying to die. I just wanted to see what my pulse looked like from the inside. Fast forward one year. I’m standing in an auditorium behind a microphone reading a poem to four hundred latino high school kids who live with the breath of the INS crawling up their mother’s backbones and I am frantically hiding my scars ‘cause the last thing I want these kids to know is that I ever thought that my life was too hard. I’ve never seen a bomb drop. I’ve never felt hunger. I’ve also never seen lightning strike but we’ve all heard thunder and it doesn’t take a genius to tell something’s burning. The smoke rises between us, forming walls so high they split the sky like slit wrists and then the stars fall like blood. We’re all left with nothing, but a death wish. He said, “call me by my true name I am the child in uganda all skin and bone” Do you remember the rest? how about this one, America Jesus wept. America, Jesus wept but look at your eyes dry as the desert sand dusting the edges of your soldier’s wedding bands. Look at your soul playing dead because your ribcage is abu ghraib is san quintin is guantanamo bay and your heart had beaten them so many times they bleed the moon. Do you know children in Palestine fly kites to prove that they are still free? Can you imagine how that string must feel between their fingers as they kneel in the cinders of our missile heads You can count the dead by the colours in the sky The bough is breaking. The cradle is falling. Right now a six-year old girl is crutched in a ditch in Lebanon wishing on falling bombs. Right now our government is recording the test scores of black and Latino 4th graders to see how many prison beds will be needed in the year 2021. Right now there’s a man on the street outside that door with outstretched hands full of heart beats no one can hear. He has cheeks like torn sheet music, Every tear a broken crescendo falling on closed ears. At his side there’s a girl with eyes like an anthem that no one stands up for. Doctor, our insanity is not that we see people who aren’t there. It’s that we ignore the ones who are. Till we find ourselves scarred and ashamed walking into emergency rooms at three a.m. flooded with a pain we cannot name or explain because we are bleeding from the outside in. Skin is not impervious. Cultures built on greed and destruction do not pick and choose who they kill. Do we really believe our need for Prozac has nothing to do with Baghdad, with Kabul, with the Mexican border with the thousands of US school kids bleeding through budget cuts that will never heal to fuel war tanks? Thank god for denial. Thank god we can afford the makeup to pile upon the face of it all. Look at the pretty world. Look at all the smiling people and the sky with a missile between her teeth and a steeple through her heart and not a single star left to hold her And the voices of a thousand broken nations saying “wake me, wake me, when the American dream is ove

“when the bough breaks“  Andrea Gibson (via cinema-whore)

[subtleceiling]

relearning how to exist (post-trauma) in a body 

[inkskinned]

dear universe;

hello. i am writing to let you know you did good job on the stars, and also on cats.

yours respectfully, me

[inkskinned]

dear universe,

in the original post of this, it says “dogs” where it now says “cats”. i do not know when (or how) it got changed, but i am glad that someone loved cats enough to do that, because i love my dog and i also love my cats and i felt bad about not mentioning it that first time. i’m also glad for all the tags where people told me what i should have added (like libraries and waffles and maple syrup) and i am glad for all the comments about how much they love their pets (and some people have such cool pets!)

i kind of think, universe, if we are your children, this is our macaroni art. see, see, see, you gave us a little bit of the stars, and we’ve made our own constellations. we tried to give back to you by making art and music and books and bad poetry and our laughter and our love and our tv dramadies. we took pictures of the night sky and pictures of sunsets and pictures of dew, we fell in love with space and the rivers and the rain. i personally have my desktop background as a picture of one of your nebulas. your hair looked great that day.

i think…. you did a good job, universe, on the stars, and what the stars became, because you put us together and yes, yes, things might be terrible - but good gracious did we make so many things worth loving, worth writing to you about, worth telling you - thank you, i’m taking the spark you put in me and using it to be kind, to be alive, to be wildly fierce about our gardens and gentle about our pets.

so hello. i amend my previous memo. i am writing to let you know you did a good job on the stars, and on my dog and my cats and the lizard i kept illegally in my apartment. and universe, i hope you’re watching, because some of the people you made? they’re great, universe, and they’re full of love, just endlessly capable of loving. and they give me hope.

and through them, universe, that’s you. that’s how the stars sing.

yours respectfully, me

[cymlea]

Ross Romanov - 2017

[vvvtired]

me too nancy. me too

[inkskinned]

there will be a moment when you realize you are more grown up than your parents are. this is the loss of childhood, my love. it is when you’re standing in the kitchen and one of your parents is screaming about something and you recognize: you will let them win the fight not because you are wrong, but simply because you know that they will keep shouting unless you drop the subject. you expect them to have childish understandings of things. they will hold onto their concept of the world as if it was not a changing thing. they must be right, and they must be somehow more right than you, always, in everything. their idea of control is so necessary to who they are that you just let it go.

this is the moment. you are 11 or 17 or 21. and you realize that you’re more mature than they ever were. 

and in some odd, sad way, this frees you. where they have stagnated, you continue.

[slolutions]

Your past is just a story. And once you realise this, it has no power over you.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters (via slolutions)