If anyone can find this gentleman I’ve got a package with my entire catalog with his name on it…. -Britney
i still can’t believe this
Feelin it <3

No title available
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

tannertan36
trying on a metaphor

roma★

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Today's Document
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ

if i look back, i am lost

★
todays bird
Jules of Nature

⁂

ellievsbear
Sade Olutola

izzy's playlists!
wallacepolsom
Cosimo Galluzzi
we're not kids anymore.
cherry valley forever

seen from Thailand

seen from Malaysia

seen from Türkiye
seen from Finland

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Finland

seen from France
seen from Germany

seen from Romania

seen from Malaysia

seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom

seen from United Kingdom

seen from Netherlands

seen from Morocco

seen from Türkiye

seen from Malaysia

seen from Türkiye
seen from Spain
@huvudstupidity
If anyone can find this gentleman I’ve got a package with my entire catalog with his name on it…. -Britney
i still can’t believe this
Feelin it <3
wise words
You can come for Swedish healing anytime, Drake
you gotta be jay z about life
No fooling this bitch
God, today was a morning when I woke up with memories of Bangkok hitting me in the heart like a sledgehammer. The smell of warm garbage and chilli and exhaust as you walk down the streets, the neon lights and palm fronds in the wind as you ride past them on the back of a motosai at night, dressed in your best, sandals and a little dress only, and never feeling slutty for it because that's how everyone dressed. The tiny little plastic chairs and tables next to the street food stalls, yellow rice and steamed ginger chicken squeezed in-between a construction worker and the CEO of the bank across the street. Pieces of cantaloupe and pineapple and watermelon in plastic bags, fifteen baht. Even the sugar-chilli-salt mixture they put on it. The lady making juice outside my school in Silom, claiming to have the cure for everything from cancer to bad skin to depression. Rang Nam Road at night: fairy lights and steaming bowls of Tom Yum soup. Turning a corner and the five lane highway becomes a tiny alley with yellow houses and a fish pond. Going to Patpong not for the hookers but for the cheap Adidas knockoffs. But the hookers too, horsing around with us during downtime in the bar, laughing their heads off at our terrified Western faces. The amazing Mexican food by Nana Plaza, full of underage prostitutes, katoeys and overwintering ex-marines who knew their chimichangas almost as well as they knew their ping pong showtimes. The teenagers singing their Thai ballads in the funky bars of Ari. JAM Cafe and the film nights, Chula playing The Handsome Furs behind the bar. Oh, The Handsome Furs. Listening to The Handsome Furs at top volume as you navigated the BTS at night, dressed to kill, tiger print tights and platform shoes and a tiny onesie, and nobody looked twice, or, well, everyone looked twice cause you were Western, but nobody cared. Everyone was just out in the thirty degree nights to have a good time, and everything was a game, and my heart was breaking every minute of every day. The BTS aircon as always freezing but that was good, it made my eyes de-puff on the way to school so that people didn't instantly know I'd been up all night crying. Again. Trying to make it inside a car before 8am so you wouldn't have to stop for the national anthem. Buying sticky rice and pork for breakfast. Orchids everywhere, the pink petals of the gardenia tree blowing into our pool. Your wasted friend who pissed off the balcony, twenty-nine floors up, and wrote about it in the note he left before disappearing with your stereo. Still you'd insist on the parties. Said we needed to keep our social circles wide, especially so far away from home, that we couldn't let isolation catch us. You were right, but you were still wrong. It's always like this.
I am so thankful that my heart broke in Bangkok. I will never again be twenty-five and walking down those hot and colourful streets every morning, not like that, not on my way to work with my whole life falling apart. Music meant so much during that time. I was wallowing in pain and confusion, but it was real, and it was felt. Funny how the worst part has so much in common with the best: colours look brighter, sounds sound deeper, the tropical winds are like hands on your face and the smells are enough to make your chest implode. Bangkok is no longer mine but little splinters of my heart will forever mix with the rice and petals and discarded chicken's feet of her gutters.
brilliant approach to fashion.
OMG IS TRUE
And there she'd sit, in the afternoons, drinking black coffee and picking at the pieces of coconut, they'd be out in the sun so long that they'd go slimy, acrid, and still she'd suck on them, slowly chew down on their flaky texture, then the dates, she'd suck endlessly on dates to get rid of the acridity, then be overcome by sweetness, crave the sour, and so on until the sun began to set and Jim came back from a day's shooting. "Show me what you did today," he'd say, every time, but she'd just smile, spit out some half-chewed coconut, and ask if they could make love. He was lucky, really; he had to keep reminding himself of this. He was lucky. Men dreamed of women like Tracey, sweet and loving and uncomplicated, never a cruel word, a look, just smiles and starry eyes and a request for more, again please, do it to me again. She was insatiable in every respect of the word: carnally, spiritually, nutritionally. More, was her word, more food, more wine, more love and more places. More more. The sound of their RV roaring past cactus and mountains and cars on the highway became her pulse, her swooshing heart, and as long as they didn't stop she was kept alive, happy, feliz como un chilingue.
SCARSDALE, NY—Local couple Alison Fry and Peter Hartman told reporters Thursday they have both been pleased since opening up their relationship, saying the exciting new arrangement allowed them the freedom to psychologically wear down other people.
Tired of endless questioning? Just send 'em this link!
Settling In
The shop assistant, dangle earrings and silver curls, is sorting through salt crystals on the counter as I walk up.
"Hi sweetheart," she says and smiles, warm, motherly. "How can I help you?"
"Um," I start, at one percent of her at-home-in-the-worldness, "I'd like some of those, uh, reiki oils?"
"The Kate's Magik ones?" she asks and turns to a wall of small, round, brown-glass bottles."Sure! Which one would you like?"
"I'd like 'Healing,' and, uh..." I look around the shop. Its denizens are engrossed in choosing spirit animals guides, smelling aromatherapy candles, not eavesdropping on the tarot reading going on at the top of the stairs. "And 'Moon Goddess,' please."
***
I'm an SF gal now, folks.
Screw you, Beach Boys
In November the cold hit San Francisco so hard that I stopped going to school. In retrospect this was not a very clever move; school had heating, my house not. But stayed in my house I did, huddled under three blankets and a down duvet, sipping endless cups of the PG Tips tea that my mother had brought with her from England. Only tea seemed to warm the icicles that dangled from where my hands had used to be; so effectively, in fact, that one day I found myself warm. Warm! It was like a cramp dissolving. Tryingly, I reached a trembling hand out from my duvet-and-three-blankets cave, and touched the biscuit plate. It was cold! But it didn't make my fingers feel as if they were going to fall off! It was the strangest feeling. I kept touching the cold porcelain, removing my hand, touching it again. And it struck me, as I marveled at the sensation, that this must be how normal people experience cold. How people who say, 'Oh, I just love it when you can start wearing sweaters!' experience cold. As a pleasant, somewhat intriguing, but ultimately tolerable variation of sensory input. Not as death itself closing his icy fingers around your every blood cell. I made a little epiphanious sound, and then, realizing my hand had been outside its incubator past the seven seconds it takes my flesh to freeze solid, quickly pulled my hand back under the covers.
In case you're having a "whatever" kind of day...
Devoting one’s life to an activity with little chance of bringing any sort of significant cash reward is a revolutionary act within the virulent capitalism we inhabit.
- Dodie Bellamy, who teaches at SF State, where I am now. It was tough choosing against the LA I'd dreamt about for so long, but I think SF has more like-minded people. I mean my OkCupid stats are through the roof. Also nobody stares at me like I'm from outer space when I say I can't drive.
Today I went into a class called 'Experimental Fiction,' ready to drop it, cause you're supposed to do three courses a semester and I didn't know that so I'd signed up for five. And I thought this one had the least to do with what I plan on doing this semester, but I had to go in to see my advisor so I thought I might as well drop by anyway.
My God. Three minutes into the class I was about to fall off my chair with excitement. My teacher is the coolest person on the planet. She was in the Feminist Writer's Guild in the 70's, she wrote a book called Academonia which is like a dissertation but with 'fuck' replacing all the verbs (or, as she describes it, an 'epic narrative of survival against institutional deadening and the proscriptiveness that shoots the young writer like poison darts from all sides' - OH GOD), she wrote a book of cut-ups called Cunt-Ups, she started Small Press Traffic, she's mad about embodiment, she spent twenty minutes talking about gay porn in the class, she's every reason I thought of going to CCA over SF State, and, judging by the above quote, there is a chance she won't find me a complete waste of space despite the paralysing crush I've got on her which will undoubtedly make me a stammering mess in each and every one of her classes. I may be incoherent, but at least I'll never be rich. So, REVOLUTIONARY I AM.
2 new anthologies - Precocious Children and Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction. Grab one, both, or even something from our back catalogue.
Guys! I have a story in this anthology. It features a rehabilitated sex offender, a disillusioned hotelier's wife, a handicapped crab, a very cross young girl and enough heartbreak to satisfy the most tainted of souls. You'll be able to buy it through Amazon, OR you can show off your avant-garde sensibility by preordering 'Allusions of Innocence' through Indiegogo. The rest of the world gets it on Hitler's death day (April 30), but YOU get it on the day Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones became the first to circumnavigate the Earth in a hot air balloon (March 21; duh). $3 eBook, $17 paperback
HOES GET YA HOES OUT
Time for some emotional gardening.
KNOWING YOURSELF … And knowing your programming. As we have said before, we are all carrying around a lot of garbage in our minds about sex and gender. No one can grow up in our culture and escape picking up puritanical and inaccurate ideas about sex. Some of these beliefs are buried so deep they can drive our behavior unconsciously, without our knowing it, and cause a great deal of pain and confusion to ourselves and the people we love. All too often, in the name of these beliefs, we oppress other people, and ourselves. These deeply held beliefs are the roots of sexism and sex-negativism, and to be a radical slut you are going to have to uproot them. To truly know yourself is to live on a constant journey of self-exploration, to learn about yourself from reading, therapy, and, best of all, talking incessantly with others who are traveling on similar paths. This hard work is well worth it because it is the way you become free to choose how you want to live and love, own your life, and become truly the author of your experience.
The Ethical Slut (Dossie Easton) - Your Highlight on Page 81 | Location 1220-1229 | Added on Saturday, February 15, 2014 10:55:28 AM
It's 15:07, I haven't washed, brushed my teeth, or left bed, and I feel AMAZING. This hasn't happened in months and months. I had stuff to do, stuff that required putting in my contacts and leaving the house, but writing out my favourite stories and decorating them with watercolours took supersedence, as did writing about polyamory and memorising Fitzgerald and emailing all the people I've been too ashamed of my general persona to email over the last couple of weeks. I'm a sucker for outside confirmation, of course, and yesterday I found out I've been accepted to the graduate writing programme at OTIS College of Art & Design in LA, in LA, IN LA. I am Swedish so obvs it's been my dream since I was about 11 to live in fucking LA. Just listen to the intro to The Drunken Taoist: 'from the future capital of the freethinking world known as Los Angeles.' That's where it's at, peeps, so if you feel like sponsoring me with $30,000 I might not have to get into escorting, although, I really like sex, being sociable, and making people feel good about themselves, so maybe it's all meant to be. Anyway I CREATE again. Who needs soap when you've got art.
As would surely agree, although with less annoying self-awareness, the cronopios who are really the idols after whom the entire concept of huvudstupidity was created.
The Emotional Wreck's Guide to Music #5: LOVE'S AN ENSLAVING MYTH (and especially when I can't have it)
February marks a year since I broke up with my boyfriend. I cannot believe it’s been a year. Sure we had relapses, and my last week in Bangkok we hung out as if we’d just met. Amazing sex, heartfelt conversation, a sense of unique significance the shield between Us and The Rest of the Foolish World. That was June. Then I went to Mexico and galloped bareback along sun-drenched arroyos and cactus-strewn hillsides for about three months, healing my bleeding heart and restoring my faith in the unbelievable possibilities of life. I had unlimited access to amazing horses, fish tacos, homegrown organic vegetables, Italian surf instructors, piñatas and deserted mescal bars playing Mercedes Sosa. FOR THREE MsONTHS. Safe to say I came out unstoppable. Ecstatic. Overall gushing, and to top it off, pretty damn fit and unbelievably tanned.
Two weeks in Lapland and a month in Barcelona later I am not so fit. I kind of ran for a bit, and I have started martial arts classes, and I am a member of a tennis society on SUNDAY MORNINGS of all times. Pretty dedicated. But it’s nothing on lifting decorative stones for six hours a day in the baking sun, nothing on eating only vegetables you planted yourself, nothing on spending every day off paddleboarding, learning to kitesurf, sunbathing and fucking beneath the moonlight. The tan has faded, I’m back to being unable to do a single press-up (my ex once offered me 500 Thai baht per press-up, i.e. 11 euros, and I earned precisely zero baht), and if I want to go riding I better cough up four hours pay and prepare to be herded along with twenty American tourists at a walk for two hours.
So my circumstances are not so ridiculous as they were about two months ago. No swimming with God (I’ll post a photo of that diary entry, it conveys pretty well my emotional state during the entire Mexico stay), no dressing like Pocahontas for the sunrise ride, no jumping onto the nearest horse, bareback and bridleless, to go fetch some pomegranates.
BUT.
A very important thing is about to take place here now in Barcelona. Something I’ve been preparing for in theory for almost three years, but have not had a chance to try out in practice. Sure I’ve read Sex at Dawn from cover to cover, sure I’ve listened to every episode of Tangentially Speaking, taken (and aced) The Ethical Slut Test, read the book, too, and generally championed the allowance of a more flexible attitude to sex and love into our lives. But. I’ve been monogamous! I can rave as much as I want against the futility of jealousy, the starvation economy approach we’ve been conditioned into mistakenly applying to sexuality, the benefits of using sex as a social lubricant and not a means of auditioning, trapping, and keeping individuals away from the rest of the world. Talking ain’t hard. Watching the man you love flirt with another woman is hard, knowing he’s not with you cause he’s, right this moment, inserting his penis into a vagina that isn’t yours - that’s the ticket to freedom from puritan values and a possessive attitude to relationships.
So.
2014 is the year for Free Love Field Studies. It’s time to put to the test all the perfectly open-minded and logical opinions I can so easily defend in words. It’s time to see if I can actually stomach sharing people whom I care about, to see whether I’m as liberated from the normalising forces of sexophobic governmentality as I truly think. I frigging CAN’T WAIT. Nothing I love more than having my preconceptions crushed, being pushed over and exposed as a fraud, having to admit I was wrong and swallow the experience to grow as a person.
Because the fear beneath all this talk of natural promiscuity and the lack of logic in loving someone only if they swear off loving anyone else ever is, of course, that I might be embracing all these theories only because the love I did have and tried to sustain didn’t work. That I am swearing off love only cause I couldn’t have it. Surt, sa räven om rönnbären, we say in Swedish: sour grapes. Aeslop’s fox in the fable saw some grapes he couldn’t reach, and so he decided they must have been sour anyway. Makes it easier to deal with not getting them, right?
So of course I worry that I say I do not want love because, just like the fox, I could not reach it. Had to end something that had had all the potential in the world, and for no reason other than it just fucking died. As I put it in a raving, incoherent, and absolutely true story written as catharsis during the breakup months: They had the most beautiful thing in the world and nothing went wrong and yet it died. That was pretty fucking hard to swallow, I tell you. JUST LIKE SOUR GRAPES OMG I AM AN ANALOGIST. Anyway. I digress. This is, after all, a music post.
Essentially: we do not always know why we want what we want, and a good way to figure it out is to dive in headfirst, try the theories out with your body, and if they weren’t what you actually wanted, hope that some part of your id will revolt and send you back to less brainwashed pastures. Because lord if the id isn’t unaffected by social conditioning I will jump off the Sagrada Familia.
To the point. To the tunes. As I embark on my polyamourous explorations I have found myself drawn once again to Bright Eyes, a band my superego told me was too emo, too teen, to listen to in your late twenties. But lord, that boy can write lyrics. As I’ve already told you, ‘A Song to Pass the Time’ contains the best line I’ve ever found to describe finding like-minded people, fuck, who am I kidding: TO FINDING MY EX BOYFRIEND WHOM I LOVED MORE THAN ANYTHING AND WHOM I HAD TO LEAVE TO SAVE MY OWN HEART, anyway, it goes, ‘Now there still is hope, I can be healed, there’s someone looking for what I’ve concealed,’ and anyway II, that’s not the song we’re sitting down to listen to today.
The song we’re sitting down to listen to today is called ‘Take It Easy (Love Nothing)’ and OH MY GOD. That’s it. It’s about accidentally sleeping with your best friends whom you secretly love, and being SO STOKED, cause finally you’ve made it from friends to lovers, just to find she’s not quite on the same page, in fact:
Left by the lamp, right next to the bed,
On a cartoon cat pad she scratched with a pen,
"Everything is as it’s always been.
This never happened.”
And so you go all sour grapes ALL OVER HER FACE by swearing off love forever, becoming as hard as she was towards you, because it’s easier to be the hurter than the hurtee, right?
Now I do as I please and lie through my teeth
Someone might get hurt, but it won’t be me
I should probably feel cheap but I just feel free
And a little bit empty
But towards the end of the song, which is where the honesty always comes out (I fucking love songs, I wish I could write stories like songs), we all understand why you became like this in the first place, and how hollow this new persona is, and how, as Joan Didion with characteristic genius put it, ‘self-deception remains the most difficult deception:’
And I’ll try and be kind when I ask you to leave
We’ll both take it easy
But if you stay too long inside my memory,
I will trap you in a song tied to a melody
And I will keep you there so you can’t bother me
The recorded version is more beautiful but I like that you can see Conor's emotion here:
And also, so fucking true about why we write, or at least why I write, and so often, so much more often than I’d like, about shameful things a sane person really wouldn’t want others to know about them: if something or someone is trapped in a story, or a song, then they really can’t fucking bother you. Writing is exorcism, is deportation, is othering and abjectification and emotional fucking incarceration. My stories are my emotional prisons, with guards who’d make Byron Hadley weep with embarrassment.