Strength Like A Tower

[secondlina]

New Crow Time 🐦‍⬛🦊🌟

[wowwforever]

if you told vin diesel fast and the furious you were gay he'd be like "Some people like driving stick…some people like driving automatic…what matters is you cross the finish line.." and then he'd rev up a dodge challenger and drive through a building and kill 16 people

[sansgod]

might as well

[thoughtstherapy]

[weltenwellen]

when Ingmar Bergman said "To feel. To trust the feeling. I long for that.”

[notquiteaghost]

"it's okay, i can peel back the layers of you until i find the soft and gentle core of you you've had to work so hard to hide"? no. no, it's okay, i know you're hollow; i'm here anyway. you don't have to pretend it isn't masks the whole way down. whatever face you want to wear, i still love you. i don't need you to be good or unflinching or the antonym of violence. if i did, i wouldn't be here. i wouldn't ask that of you.

[notquiteaghost]

i have nothing against a character who is layers of scar tissue and callous protecting a small little sliver of their before self, who just wants to be safe to let that sliver grow and heal

however. when the only thing under all the scarring is more scarring. when there's nothing of the before self left at all. when there was a precipice, and they tumbled over it, and even if they got back up they'll never heal right.

and then to have someone still say i care for you. you are broken and i can't fix you and i'm here anyway. so what if you're a ghost of yourself? you can haunt me

[derangedrhythms]

Still, when I wake up […] I feel as if I were rising from a grave, gathering my moldy, worm-riddled limbs into a final effort.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath ⁠— 17th April 1958

[weltenwellen]

It’s weird to grow up in a family where you know you’re loved but you don’t feel loved. And then later in adulthood you understand how almost impossible it seems to cross that distance and let yourself experience closeness, how otherworldly love feels now and how love feels unbearable at times. You flinch when someone tries to wholeheartedly love you. And over and over you see so clearly how you cannot be loved unless it's from afar and love is mixed with that familiar sensation of distance and coldness.

[weltenwellen]

when Florence Welsh said "What a thing to admit that when someone looks at me with real love I don't like it very much / Kinda makes me feel like I'm being crushed"

[weltenwellen]

Sense8

[teslacoils-and-hubris]

saw an ant on the bus today, what a horrible fate. moved an unfathomable distance from everything you've ever known because of forces you could never possibly understand. no matter how long you follow the pheromone trail you laid you'll never find your way home.

[teslacoils-and-hubris]

Did the spider that made a web in my cars mirror survive being barreled down the highway at light speed? Can insects feel fear in a way we understand? If I think too hard about this I start wondering if this is what the other side of a lovecraftian story looks like. An ant lost on the bus.

[maureen2musings]

...on a mission

julianradwildlife

[hedgehog-moss]

I received a couple of asks about aquaponics after yesterday's post so I thought I'd show how I add a new plant to the aquaponics system, to get a better idea of how it works!

Step 1. Grow your plants from seed in seed trays like normal seedlings (pictured here, young green beans)

2. When it has well-developed roots, extract the seedling using a teaspoon or some kind of other thing

3. Rinse it a bit (that's just to avoid having too much dirt end up in the fish tank) (if it's a little it's fine, the filter will catch it)

4. Let your dog carry out a routine inspection

5. Wet a piece of cloth, which is just here to wick fish tank water and ensure the plants' roots are damp all the time. (5bis. Let your fish carry out a routine inspection)

6. Place the seedlings on the cloth and the cloth sandwiched in the grow medium that'll go in the tower. It's a piece of foam and it's here so the plants' roots can hold on to it and not fall down as they grow vertically (you can see old dried roots from ghost beans still holding on to the foam)

7. Insert the foam into the tower like a little train of plants

8. Hang the tower next to its friends

You can also grow seeds directly in little bits of growing medium, so then you just pop them in a free spot in a tower when they've sprouted, without having to take down the tower. I do this with plants that have tiny roots that would have trouble holding on to the cloth / foam on their own (here baby onions)

Some plants that are doing really well in the towers right now include pickles and strawberries! I've already pickled some pickles (2 jars) and am hoping for more. I'm not doing anything special with the strawberries because I just gobble them as soon as I can.

[babyfoxcollectionthings]

[thelupuslady]

True.

[tinyeggpeople]

[weltenwellen]

Stephanie Garber, Once Upon a Broken Heart

[on-poetry]

He kisses—how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you. 

Andrew Sean Greer, Less 

[nickyandmikey]

when two musicians sing into the same microphone and lean in very close to each other… like omg are you guys gonna kiss now to relieve the homoerotic tension?😳

[nickyandmikey]

THIS IS NOT ABOUT ONE DIRECTION I DON’T KNOW WHO THIS “HARRY” PERSON IS GO WATCH BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND CLARENCE CLEMONS KISS ON STAGE RIGHT NOW

[irrelevantlyvalid]

op is the only valid person i’ve ever met. everyone else needs to come to the light

[chokolattejedi]

Okay, but this is really important: Bruce Springsteen occupied this really weird place in music history. His songs were all from this pessimistic, nihilistic view of an America that had let him down:

Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.

Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.

It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thriller video.

Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.

So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.

Passages from American Popular Music by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman

[executeness]

I used to think that Bruce and Clarence kissing onstage was exuberance, showmanship, and telling racist homophobes to fuck off. Like, they picked up a certain kind of audience and went “Racist homophobes? Not in our house!” And started the kissing then but then I actually looked it up and

https://www.gq.com/story/this-fucked-me-up-bruce-springsteen-singing-about-clarence-clemons

It was a story where… we remade the city. We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing. - Bruce Springsteen

It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage

It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own

Clemons said in one interview. “Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for.” In another version of the story, Clemons says “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love.”

I’m having some emotions about it!

“He was elemental in my life,“ Springsteen adds, “and losing him was like losing the rain.”

Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!

We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!

God I’m not okay about it

[ramshacklefey]

Now I’m mad that this is not among any of the things I was ever told about this artist.

[jbbartram-illu]

I knew about this in general (& via all those fabulous photos), but this just adds even more beautiful context <3

[eregyrn-falls]

Just to add to the pile: this was the cover of Springsteen’s break-through album Born to Run, in 1975:

I mean, will you LOOK at this:

This was the pic chosen for the album cover from an extensive photoshoot, too. A few others:

There’s a lot more online if you search. They’re all pretty amazing. But the photographer is right, the one chosen for the album cover just pops.

[lookingattheedgeoftime]