A High Stakes Personal Encounter

a sort of no-brow spam filter

[highrelease]

Visit Original Link

[atavus-blog]

[mythologyofblue]

Juan del Junco - The Ornithologist’s Dream, 2008-09

+

(atavus)

[frenchtwist]

[shinji--moon-deactivated2017123]

How to Hold Hands, vintage Japanese time lapse illustration from Young Person’s Sexual Guide

[thinknorth]

[highstakespersonalencounter]

I could listen to this all night long tonight.

[highstakespersonalencounter]

Resolved: resolved

one year ago today: (it feels amazing to look back at this and think: CHECK, CHECK, aaannnd CHECK.)

I resolved only three things, and then made a long list of things to do wishes to fulfill, places to be traveled, things to learn.

for now, it is this:

-photograph more -let go of expectations -seek revelation

[highstakespersonalencounter]

Resolved: resolved

Three things:

1. Learn to ask better questions

2. Cross the equator

3. Take time to be holy

[highstakespersonalencounter]

The purpose of things

I particularly like writing these things with you in mind when I'm almost sure you are not reading them. My paralyzing fear of indifference dissipates as the ether absorbs and metabolizes these thoughts; it feels more solid than a one-sided conversation.

 I think: perhaps one day you will remember this exists and be alarmed at the things I wanted to tell you. That my best thoughts, my most honest narratives, were what I tried to send in your direction.  You've become a repository for the truths I've wanted to give away for a long time, but never found the right space or the right voice for them. 

I think that is the purpose of things: to find a voice for your best, and to give it away fearlessly to those whom you hope will understand. 

I hope you understand; It's nothing more than that. 

[highstakespersonalencounter]

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed & that necessary.

[highstakespersonalencounter]

This is what war looks like when I close my eyes and listen.

He ran away from the hospital on a flower truck. He had been in a coma for 10 days;  they had already buried his wife. So my 27-year-old father convinced the young woman who saw his plane go down, and who had visited him in the hospital every day thereafter, to bring him clothes.  He got dressed, sliped out, and hitch hiked, on a flower truck, to a bar near the airstrip in Sugar City, Idaho.

When he woke from the coma, the doctor said, You have had major head trauma before, haven't you?   The scar tissue from what looked like an old wound was the only thing that kept the propeller from splitting his head straight in half.  

When I meditate on the interconnectedness of things, and the inspiration that takes us on one path or the other, I think of the moment when a Viet Cong perched behind a machine gun in the jungle started tracking a cobra across the sky, and something whispered in his mind to pull the trigger, right then.  Could you see in that brilliant burst of rapid fire the next century played out at light speed?  A love affair, a plane crash, a long drive to Montana with a shotgun in a truck; a school teacher, a bridge in Germany;  a son lying in a hospital bed, a daughter backed up against a tree with a gun pointed at her; the son holding one of his own daughters in each arm; the daughter standing on a crowded street in a foreign city, on a deserted mountaintop, on the beach in the snow?  Did he continue to stare up at the sky long after the chopper disappeared into the overgrowth, awestruck at the vision--the promise of my existence, of my progeny's, of the one person whose suffering I was created to abate--that he had just created?

[highstakespersonalencounter]

[highstakespersonalencounter]

I still wonder

What is it I'm meant to find in that space on the water just below Delancey street that I kept seeing in my mind all spring long?

True, there are years that ask questions, and years that answer them; but I'm not convinced it is always in the traditional order. 

[highstakespersonalencounter]

Warning Label: potentially heartfelt

nine things, three things, one thing

The oft-unnoticed wonders of these:

-sharp kinves

-bicycle rides to the sea

-French by osmosis

-Fasts answered

-knowledge of the natural world

-a soft place to land

-good chemistry

-singing with real intent

-how much things change, and how much they stay the same

The inexplicability of these:

-the amount of capital I managed to raise between Thanksgiving and Easter last year

-the scott free survival of all my limbs, and all my lenses

-the willingness of strangers to take me into their homes, their lives, their stables and barns, their kitchens, cars and calendars. 

This:

-the moment, so clear and savory, walking up over the hill from Pleyben back to Kerjean in the half-light of another big-weathered Breton afternoon, of feeling as though I had awoken, and rejoined the living, after I am not sure how long. 

[highstakespersonalencounter]

Hey, wait a minute!  This book doesn't have any rainbows in it at all! Grrrr. It's about a rocket. A rocket?! Yes. Specifically rocket 00000. Wow, what a clever name. Don't ever allow the person in charge of naming rockets set up anything requiring password protection. 

This really long and complicated rocket book has been described as incomprehensible and unreadable. What fun! it also has something like 400 characters, but we only need four of them for our purposes.

It's set at the end of and in the aftermath of World War II.  The main character (or main-est) is US Army lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop.  He has lots of sex, just ask him.  There is a connection between the sites where he gets sex and where V.2 rocket hits. 

He falls in love with Katje and rescues her from an octopus attack on the beach.  Slothrop is forced to stay at a casino in France.  A casino in France?! World War II sounds fun!  This is where eh learns about Rocket 00000 and S. Gerat, which, as far as I can tell, is a plastic box.  The rocket is extra special because of its number.  Apparently zeros are never repeated.  I don't know...this is clearly significant to our protagonist who escapes his casino prison in search of the rocket and the box....

[highstakespersonalencounter]

One of the best things in the world is when you discover that you captured something in a photograph that you didn't even know was there; when the camera reveals secrets to you.

Tiny Sufis with Midget, Thieves' Market, Mumbai

{yes}

[highstakespersonalencounter]

"Simply put, we are in the business of brining people closer to our Savior—gay or straight—regardless of where they are in their personal lives. To quote my Bishop, Don Fletcher, 'We welcome diversity in all its magnificent forms—every stripe, spot, color and pattern. Everyone should have a home here—and everyone should feel at home here.'

"I believe that one of the things that makes us unique is the philosophy of my leadership—a philosophy of viewing themselves as humble servants of our membership and our Savior, not of one as the police or the governors. If one among us has a problem they think we can help with, we encourage them to approach us, and we will do all we can to help. But we will not seek out individuals, investigate them, and create problems where, in fact, none may exist at all.

"When it comes to LGBT members, this creates a safe space for all to walk in our doors, just as they are, without fear of persecution or retribution. It enables them to genuinely feel that they have a home here, and allows them to grow and develop as equal children of our Father. Resultingly, we now have about 15 new MoHos who have returned to church. Each of them is in a different place in their personal lives, and each one is welcome as a valuable member of our ward family.

"This isn’t a doctrinal shift, brothers and sisters—it’s a cultural shift, and a philosophy change. Policy as we understand it today hasn’t changed. But we believe that even if an individual has sinned, we do them a disservice by stripping them of their membership, of the guidance of the spirit, of their ability to take the sacrament, and their ability to fully fellowship with their peers. All of these things we believe, encourage people to do good and to live righteous and honorable lives—so removing these things from them if they have sinned doesn’t help bring them closer to the Savior—and it may, in fact, drive them from the one who loves them the most."

--Mitch Mayne

[highstakespersonalencounter]

3327

The cell phone that had all the pictures I took at the Standard those two days last February met its demise at the hands of a (mis)trusted friend this summer, but I still think about my back pressed to that frigid glass fourteen stories up, the jersey city skyline sparkling behind me like a mouthful of silver teeth caught in the moonlight; I might have seen all that deceptive splendor reflected in the mirrored panels over the bed or in blacks of your eyes, but mine were closed: the vision of Tesla's room at the New Yorker--of his last view of the midtown rise, the incandescent glory of alternating current pulsing through the metropolis that forsook him--vibrating beneath my eyelids. 

то је оно што ја видим сваки пут кад затворим очи и мислим на тебе.

[mianoti-deactivated20150312]

[highstakespersonalencounter]

“Then at one point I did not need to translate the notes; they went directly to my hands.”

— Francesca Woodman*** [ + ] [ txt ]