i am an amalgamation

in the name of the spouse / who is haunted night by night / by the dream of the snake on a branch

[raedas]

no more of the agonies. have you seen the wonders

[softgrlfriend]

casting a spell. love will always find you! no matter how much you hide

[pocula-blog]

[weltenwellen]

Buttercream Joy Sullivan

[purritt]

from neuroaesthetics: why the brain loves pretty things

[salemwitchtrials-deactivated202]

i made a folder on googledrive for poetry&relevant literature that i find myself coming back to when i need to ground myself again. most are fairly well known so it’s also a good place to dive into literature if you haven’t already. all should be free to download but let me know & i’ll try to do something about it. hope some of you get just as much from these authors as i have. 

[niktipolos]

Do you have any favourite essays?

Hello. Thank you for the question, and sorry it took so long—as always—to work my way to this. I don’t know about favourite, but the following (off the top of my head) are exquisitely written—searing hot and furious, cool and elegant, intimate and sensuous, clinical, arch, playful…all of them have different voices and rhythms and lives contained with them:—

A Rumbling of Things Unknown, Jacqueline Rose

Let Them Drown, Naomi Klein

On Not Going Home, James Wood

After the Genocide, Philip Gourevitch

Two Kinds of Wilderness, Jeremy Miller

On Self-Respect, After Life, & Some Dreamers of The Golden Dream, Joan Didion

Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag

Where On Earth Are You? Francis Stonor Saunders

Being Sane in Insane Places, David L. Rosenhan 

The Shape of My Impact, Alexis Pauline Gumbs

A Kind of Grace, Hannah Black

Not Knowing, Donald Barthelme

On Optimism And Despair, Zadie Smith

The Brain on Trial, David Eagleman 

Beyond Anger, Martha C. Nussbaum 

‘I Have No Choice But to Keep Looking’, Jennifer Percy

On the Violent Language of The Refugee Crisis, Christina Sharpe

Baghdad, Year Zero, Naomi Klein 

The Opposite of Glamour, Delia Falconer

Woven, Lidia Yuknavitch

The Omega Glory, Michael Chabon

Hunger Makes Me, Jess Zimmerman

The Mark of a Masterpiece, David Grann

Giving Voice to the Women of Syria, Linza Mounzer

The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley 

Into the Underworld, & The Last London, Iain Sinclair

The Laugh of the Medusa, Hélène Cixous 

Ghosting, Andrew O’Hagan

Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco

The Megacity, George Packer 

Seeing Faster, James Gleick 

On Not Knowing Greek, Virginia Woolf 

Mythologies, Roland Barthes

I Have Seen The Tops of Clouds, Quinn Norton

The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Arundhati Roy

Speed, Oliver Sacks 

Speaking of Nature, Robin Kimmerer

What History Tells Us About the Refugee Crisis, Lyndsey Stonebridge

Looking for Zora, Alice Walker

Undefeated Despair, John Berger

Phew. There you are. Have a look through to see which ones stick with you. Hope this was helpful.

[heavenlyyshecomes]

Hellooo here's a link to my drive folder which has a collection of 200+ books, essays, poetry and short story collections and a lot of other things. Most are epubs which can be easily downloaded if u have a reader app and there are a pdfs too. Let me know if there's a problem in any of the files. Happy reading!!!

[dazeylo]

[havingapoemwithyou]

missed time by Ha Jin

[delicatethunders]

[heavensghost]

the memory hurts but does me no harm

[strrawberrryjam]

Hello there, I'm so sorry for asking again.

I'm an autistic queer woman and I need all the help I can get to pay my debts. Going to work is extremely hard for me and I manage to do it as much as I need to but I've been sick for 2 weeks last month and I haven't been able to get on top of things since.

If you can help me by rebloging, boosting or donating anything even a dollar, it would help me tremendously and I'll be forever grateful.

Ppal

Kofi

0/500 cad $

Thank you so much 🥹

[inkpressedpetals]

[misfitwashere]

I wrote a eulogy

"I wrote a eulogy for my best friend last week. Then I read it to him. At the pub. On a Tuesday."

He was alive, holding a pint, looking at me like I'd lost my mind. Maybe I have.

I'm Mick. I'm 70. The man across the table was Barry. Seventy-two. Best mate for 46 years. Met on a building site in 1979. He dropped a plank on my foot. I called him something unrepeatable. He bought me a pint after the shift. Haven't gone a week without talking since.

Three months ago we went to a funeral. Bloke we'd worked with. Cancer. The eulogies were beautiful - people saying what he meant to them, things they'd clearly never said to his face. And all I could think was, he can't hear any of this.

Every beautiful sentence. Every "he changed my life." Said to a room of crying people and a box of wood.

I turned to Barry. Whispered, "What a waste."

Drove home. Couldn't sleep. Because I realised, if Barry died tomorrow, I'd stand up and say extraordinary things about this man. Things I've never said in 46 years. And he'd be in the box, missing all of it.

So I wrote them down. Took a week. Harder than expected - not finding the words, but admitting I had them.

Rang him. "Tuesday. The Crown. Need to read you something."

"Have you joined a book club?"

"Just come."

Same corner table. Pint of bitter. Crisps. I pulled out the paper. He saw my hands shake.

"Mick. What's this?"

"Your eulogy. I'm reading it now because I'm not wasting it on a day you can't hear it."

"Have you gone mad?"

"Probably. Shut up and listen."

I read it. In a pub. To a man very much alive and very much uncomfortable.

I told him about the plank and how it was the best injury of my life. About the night he drove forty minutes in rain to help change a tyre. About how he rang every day for three months after my divorce and never once asked "Are you alright?" - just talked about football and weather, because he knew I didn't need a question. I needed a voice.

I told him he was the funniest man I'd ever known and his jokes were terrible and both things were true. That he'd been a better father than he thinks. That his wife's a saint and he knows it. That I'd have been a worse man without him.

He didn't look at me. Stared at his pint. Jaw tight. Doing that thing men do when the feelings arrive and they'd rather swallow glass than show it.

When I finished, long silence. Then he picked up his pint, took a sip, and said,

"You're paying for the next round. And the one after."

That was his answer. Perfect. Because Barry doesn't say "I love you too." He says "you're buying."

But in the car park, he hugged me. Not the quick back-pat. A real one. Thirty seconds. Neither let go first.

And he said quietly into my shoulder, "Don't read that again at the real one. I want new material."

Who would you write a eulogy for - while they're still here?

Don't wait. The flowers can't hear. The box doesn't laugh. Say it now. At the pub. Over a bad cup of tea. You'll feel ridiculous.

They'll look uncomfortable. It'll be the most important thing you've ever done.

Read them the speech while they can still hug you in the car park.”

.

[organell]

[rythms-of-synthax-deactivated20]

Quote of the day

[baffledtreesquid]

I’m seeing a lot of people saying this post changed their brain chemistry, and as a neuroscientist I wanted to say yes!!! Yes it does!

Wanting something requires dopamine signaling, but liking something doesn’t.

If you have a mental illness/disorder that affects dopamine, you might feel that you don’t want to do the things that you like. You do still like them. You will appreciate having done them.

Let your likes guide you.

(If you want to read more, here’s one experimental paper about it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5171207/ This theory called the incentive-sensitization theory was originally created to explain behaviors in addiction but can be applied elsewhere as well)

Rewards are both ‘liked’ and ‘wanted’, and those two words seem almost interchangeable. However, the brain circuitry that mediates the psych