@leaves-wanders - Tumblr Blog

Posts

Had the most insane dream. Undoubtedly influenced by fishtank, battle royale, the titanic, hurricane Katrina and my last trip to New Orleans.

100 punks and weirdos were sent to live in an abandoned school for a month as a hidden camera game show. The school was built of a light grey limestone in the gothic revival style. Points and money were given for entertaining antics like fights, musical performances, and moments of comedic value.

There were the usual wars, messing with people's stuff and personal drama. There was a bar, and I ordered a drink. When my order was wrong I politely asked them to remake it while I went to the bathroom. When I came back I saw at my seat two third pans of watery kimchi with my phone , wallet and charging block submerged within, and a straw sticking out for extra insult. The bartender and I got into it and I lost allies. I lost another challenge for which the prize was $100,000 cash.

The very last day me and one other student climbed the gothic spire in the front of the school, with bronze sculptures of anthropomorphic frogs representing the stages of life, one of them being a bride and groom and the last being a frog skeleton. The spire was surmounted by a fountain with a giant bronze statue of cupid, although the statue had been removed temporarily for repair. The colleague I was with wanted to "leave his mark" permanently on the fountain and the place in general, pulling a wax letter seal out of his pocket. He found a pot of molten metal, which at first I thought was molten tin. Bringing it into the bar on the top floor, that looked onto the spire's fountain, he stirred the pot and dipped his seal into the liquid silver metal. It dripped right off instead of sticking to the seal. Gradually people started coughing and a noxious odor filled the air. By the time we realized it was mercury it was too late. People who were further back in the bar passed out drunk inhaled the fumes and died, nearly a dozen. This caused a frenzy to spread throughout the school as it was the last day and a free for all was declared. No personal item was safe, no person was safe.

The pot of mercury had been left unattended in the bar and a fire soon broke out on the top floor. Those who tried to retrieve the bodies of their comrades were themselves killed by the smoke and flames that spread rapidly through the halls of the decrepit school. By now a state of anarchy reigned and production called in the national guard to control the situation. Paintings were torn, cartel style executions were executed, flaming curtains and rugs were torn into strips and thrown into rival rooms, fluttering through the air. Looting began and many died retrieving valuables from infernal rooms, and many more were shot by the Guard. Makeshift forts were fabricated with whatever was available. Couches, refrigerators, statues, tree branches were all used as fortification.

I had a team that chose a bathroom and adjacent storage room in the basement as our fort. We found large plywood panels that we used to subdivide the room into sections, false tunnels and secret passages to make it more easily defensible. Cabinets, tree branches and fake ivy from the storage closet camouflaged our precise layout.

Meanwhile up on the ground floor a war raged between the Guard and the punks who, outraged that their own had been killed for looting, decided to stage a last stand in the main foyer of the school, some choosing to ingest poison rather than be captured alive. All night the sound of guns, screaming and flames ran through the massive school, and we being barricaded in the basement could not see what was going on though we could hear it. I was exhausted from the chaos and so were my teammates. We decided to stay in place with two at the door to stand guard. I closed the lid on the toilet and slumped down and closed the lids of my eyes. I had slept for about two hours when suddenly I was woken by a commotion by the door. I could only peek through the artificial vines and gaps in the plywood. Smoke filled the room and I passed out again.

When I came to it was morning, and the silence was pervasive in an ominous way. Calling out to my teammates I received no answer. Pulling aside the plywood partition, I saw in front of me two of my teammates dead, one on the floor and the other on a bean bag in the corner. I ran out of the room into the hallway and booked it for the main front door, ignoring the bodies littering the floor, the charred ceilings, the bullet riddled walls and banisters. Finally I made it and stood on the portico, tiled with black and white marble covered in dead leaves and smeared with blood, processing what I had just seen. A voice in the woods called out to me. Going towards it I saw a small group of survivors. They had stayed hidden like me, and because of this they were spared. They had decided to leave the same day and to never mention again anything that had happened here, on which we all swore a solemn oath. I followed them down a path that led away from the school. The sandy trail was gray, and the sky was gray, with occasional breaks in the cloud casting shadows of naked branches across the ground.

The end

Hard truth: dr*gs and alcohol make you look like shit.

And I do not mean that in some shallow, surface-level way. I mean they eventually start showing up everywhere — in your face, in your eyes, in your skin, in your posture, in your energy, in the way you carry yourself, in the emptiness behind your smile, in the exhaustion you cannot hide no matter how much you try to act normal. People think addiction only destroys internally at first, but give it enough time and what is happening inside will absolutely start introducing itself on the outside.

You can try to clean up before going out. You can throw on decent clothes, fix your hair, spray cologne, smile for the picture, laugh in the room, and pretend everything is fine — but substances have a way of eventually making your body tell the truth your mouth is trying to hide. Your eyes lose life. Your skin changes. Your face starts carrying inflammation, heaviness, and fatigue that sleep alone does not fix because the issue is deeper than being tired. It is depletion. It is your body constantly trying to survive what you keep putting it through.

And the dangerous part is, when you are deep in it, you usually do not see it clearly. Addiction distorts self-awareness. You think you still look normal because you are comparing yourself to yesterday, not realizing the slow damage stacking over months and years. You think you are hiding it better than you are. You think people cannot tell. But the people around you often see the difference long before you are willing to admit it.

Because drugs and alcohol do not just age you physically — they drain presence from you.

That is what people notice first even when they cannot explain it.

Something looks off.

Something feels absent.

The body is there, but life is not sitting in it the same way anymore.

The eyes tell that story louder than anything else. 🖤

There is a certain emptiness addiction creates — a look that says the body is moving but the soul is tired. A look that says sleep happened but rest did not. A look that says you laughed, but internally something still felt disconnected. A look that says your nervous system has been carrying chaos so long it no longer remembers what calm feels like.

And it does not stop at appearance.

It affects how you speak. How you react. How you smell. How you age. How you recover. How you think. How you show up in rooms.

Alcohol bloats. Drugs hollow. Both eventually expose themselves if given enough time.

That is why recovery often shocks people — because when substances leave, life starts returning to places that had gone dim.

Your face changes. Your eyes sharpen. Your skin clears. Your energy shifts. Your posture changes. Your spirit starts showing again.

People often say someone in recovery looks younger, healthier, stronger, brighter — and it is because they are finally seeing what the body looks like when it is no longer fighting poison every day.

It is not magic.

It is what happens when destruction stops being fed.

And for people still trapped in it, that truth can sound harsh, but sometimes harsh truth is needed because addiction spends years lying softly.

It tells people they still look fine. It tells them they still have control. It tells them the damage is not that visible yet. It tells them they can keep going because the consequences are not immediate enough to scare them.

Meanwhile the mirror keeps documenting what denial refuses to admit.

The deeper truth is this: substances do not just make you look physically rough — they slowly make you look disconnected from yourself.

That is why sobriety often looks like somebody returning home to their own face. 🙏🔥

The life comes back.

The clarity comes back.

The eyes stop looking haunted.

The body stops carrying constant evidence of internal war.

And that matters because some people have forgotten what they actually look like when they are fully alive.

Not surviving. Not numbing. Not hiding. Alive.

So yes — hard truth:

Drugs and alcohol make you look like shit.

But an even harder truth?

They also make you slowly disappear while convincing you that you are still fully there.

And that is exactly why freedom matters.

Because nothing looks stronger than a person whose life finally starts showing again. 💯

— j. anthony | @TheSoberSessions

Strange angels strangle us at straight angles

concupiscience

unisex-muffin

Things you can watch/do instead of YouTube, For those who may have trouble finding things to do.

1. Internet Archive. Has plenty of videos to watch, plenty of games you can play that are emulated right on the website. You can also find entire collections of roms. For emulators, check out Emulation General Wiki to find the best emulator for the system you want to emulate.

2. r/piracy has a wiki full of safe places to read comics and manga, to watch anime and cartoons, and to watch movies.

3. Virtualbox, you can set up a Windows XP virtual box and get old PC games from Internet Archive. You can also check out CD Game World if you need a no-cd patch.

4. Saltybet. A Livestream of MUGEN with thousands of characters fighting against each other, sometimes things get hilarious. Runs 24/7.

5. The Cutting Room Floor, spend hours reading up on cut content from your favorite games.

6. Lost Media Wiki, read up on lost movie, books, animation, video games, etc.

7. Neocities, learn coding and make your own website!

8. WebDSR, explore shortband radio

9. Radio Garden, listen to radio stations from around the world

10. Every Noise At Once, explore the widest archive of music genres, with samples and Spotify playlists

11. My Retro TV, pick and era and watch popular television from that time period

12/28/2015

I had such a weird dream last night

I was going to a version of Hogwarts but it was in the desert with a group of people but for some reason we all got expelled. We drove around the desert in a van until we stopped at a bridge over a river. Suddenly the bridge collapsed and we all fell into the river. we drifted down the river until we appeared in a strange jungle type environment. We found a fresh water river and a cave system and decided to found a new society. There was a mattress there also

concupiscience

Patches I'm gonna sell at friendsgiving tomorrow

concupiscience

The Chronicle of Matt ‘n’ Jimbo

I first met Jimbo shortly after my close friend Freddy Hemond died of a fentanyl overdose in New York City on 11/11/22. My first sight of him was him sleeping outside the Biomat building near Big Lots right off 13th street in Gainesville, Florida. I didn’t think twice about it, I just thought he was just another homebum. My friend Casper, who had parked his RV in the Big Lots parking lot, had offered him some narcan and he came to hangout with all of us. All in all, there was me, Casper, Mariah, Chuck, Casey and Jimbo. Jimbo had his dog Brutus, a huge yellow husky-lab mix with aggression issues. We all sat around, recollected stories about Freddy, and drank a great deal. We sat on the curb and talked about life. Liz, Lucas, Sarah and Xanadu had ditched him at the Wawa because Brutus didn’t get along with Lucas’ dog.

A man approached us in the parking lot with a styrofoam cooler full of venison, saying his wife wouldn’t let him bring it home. There was sausage, jerky, steaks, and ground venison. Jimbo suggested that me, him and Casey should hit up the Aldi’s dumpster, which we did. We found bell peppers, eggs, an entire box of bananas and another of dog food. I wanted to go home and grab my spices and seasonings and a few vegetables, since I lived very close by. I drove Casey and Jimbo to my house and told them to wait in the car. We fired up Casper’s camping stove and cooked up the venison, which was delicious. We progressively got more drunk, and Jimbo came out of his shell as soon as we had established we were both queers. I kissed Jimbo as we both lay in the parking lot mulch.

Whenever he ran out of money, he would spange passerbys and try to look as pitiful as possible. He carried a corrugated plastic sign that said “Travelin’ Broke and Hungry” with train tracks drawn into the corner. I sat with him at the corner of the Wawa while he begged for money. To my surprise, he made a good deal of money in a short time! I remember a middle-aged man with “Jesus” in a fancy cursive script tattooed above his left eyebrow giving us each 20 dollar bills. I was fascinated by his lifestyle and he knew a wealth of information about train riding. I asked him if he could show me how to hop freight trains and we formulated a plan to ride from Jacksonville to Miami in the time between my college semesters, since I had no Christmas break plans.

With the 20 bill, he sent me into the Winn-Dixie liquor store to get a bottle of liquor, since he had no ID. I came out with one of the largest bottles of vodka the store had. He liked Steel Reserves, or “211s” as he called them, and was apprehensive when he saw the bottle of cheap vodka. We returned to the Wawa parking lot, where Casper was fueling the RV. Jimbo was standing outside the RV with Brutus. We got to drinking and Casper was speaking of driving out to Starke the same night, which I did not want to do. Casey had packed up all the spices in a box with all the camping gear, and by this point I was very drunk. I was mad at Casey for carelessly packing away my spices I used on an almost daily basis so I was arguing with him. I was so drunk and upset at him I left without saying goodbye to anyone. Jimbo chased me down and hugged me. And we promised to stay in touch.

I gave him the grand tour of downtown gainesville.We went behind St Francis house with some natty daddys and I asked him where he was from. Pittsfield, Massachusetts he said. We sat at the tables near the 4th ave food park. We went up onto the parking garage and talked for a long time.

The trip

The day of departure I drew my tarot. Temperance, Ace of Wands, Six of Swords. It seemed to be warning me. When Lanza pulled up I drank a shot of Kentucky Gentleman for Freddy and said a prayer to Hermes I had written for the occasion. O swift-footed Hermes, son of Maia, I supplicate unto you. Protector of travelers, messenger of the deathless Gods, make the path smooth before me. O guide of the souls of the dead, protect me from peril and harm. I triple-checked my pack. A sleeping bag, clothes in sealed plastic bags, emergency food, my sketchbook, toiletries, some booze, my altoids tin of weed, a knife, and some other comforts.

Lanza came down to take me up to Jacksonville on December 11, 2022. I stayed with him at his house and sat around watching tv until I got more word on Jimbo’s whereabouts.

In the meantime, while Lanza was at work, I wandered around downtown Jacksonville. It was my first time on foot with all my gear, and it felt heavier than it did back at home. I took pictures of the interesting architecture. I slept in a park near Five Points in the afternoon. I was exhausted and didn’t sleep well the previous night. Some stranger walked by me and said, “That’s that fentanyl right there”. I kept remembering that tarot card. Temperance. I tried not to drink as much as possible.

Jimbo suggested that I should stay with his friend Kat who lived relatively near the hopout. She came to pick me up on December 14th around 2:30 pm. I went with her to her trailer. I stayed there for what seemed like an eternity while I waited for Jimbo, who was stuck down in Fort Pierce waiting on a train. He told me he was determined to come up as soon as possible to put me on a train. “I like you a lot bro, and I promise I’m going to do everything in my power to get to you.”, he texted me. We were both so excited for Miami. Jimbo had bought tickets to see Dirty Rotten Imbeciles play in Jacksonville that night, but since he wasn’t going to be able to make it up in time, suggested that Kat and I should go with the tickets for him. So we went downtown, and made it all the way to the venue, only to find out that the show had been cancelled due to one of the band members having an eye problem. Thus, we decided to just walk around Jacksonville at night. Kat didn’t drink, but I most definitely did. We did a great deal of walking, and I was fascinated by the old beaux-arts architecture and the churches in particular. Kat took us back to the trailer park. Exhausted, and in a drunken stupor, I fell asleep on the living room couch while we watched Saw. The next day she drove me to the hopout behind winn-dixie and I painted on one of the pillars under the bridge “THE ONLY HELL ON THIS EARTH IS THAT WHICH HUMANS MAKE.”

Jimbo arrived on the afternoon of the 16th and we hung out for a while at Kat’s place, but she had to go to work so we sat on the street corner by circle k to fly a sign. He sat on the corner for a long time while I took baby hits off my one hitter. A school bus stopped to give him money. He walked on and there were kids on board, he thought it was fucking hilarious. Another person just threw a single quarter at us. “For the spange gods”, he would say, throwing a large handful of coins into the road, “Anything I throw comes back in big bills.”. He always managed to get just enough for what he needed, which was usually a 211 and a black and mild. We decided to get a bag of wine for our train ride.

Jimbo and I waited by the hopout under the bridge and waited for our train. After waiting for a while, our train pulled up. Our ride was a pigback underneath a semi truck trailer. “Throw all your shit on and grab Brutus’s leash and pull as hard as you can”, he ordered me. We got on and as soon as it started moving we kissed each other in victory. “Let’s open that bag of wine!” I said. We sat with our backs resting on the truck tires and Brutus laid down between us on the central beam. Brutus had a blanket with a picture of a puppy that looked like him on it.

We rode for a while and shouted a conversation to each other while we watched the landscapes roll by. The weather was mild and the speed of the train caused a chilling wind to whip at our ears. The stars wheeled overhead as I held on to my belongings for dear life. “Trains put me to sleep”, he said. I slept for a while due to the sheer emotional exhaustion combined with the bag of wine making us lightheaded.

I woke up and looked over at him. He was fast asleep. The train slowed down and I looked around for signs that would tell us where we were.

“Hey, I think we’re in Hialeah” I shouted to him. As the train slowed down we realized that some of our stuff had fallen off the train in the course of the night. My phone was gone, as was Brutus’ blanket and our bag of wine. We were more upset about the wine. “Trains take everything from me”, he told me.

He looked around in panic as he realized the train had taken us right into the yard in full sight of two railyard bulls in white trucks. We got off the train and the weather was humid and hot, and it was probably in the early hours of the morning by then. We walked as quickly as we could but we saw the headlights of the bull’s truck drawing near us. He rolled down his window and said “No, no no!”

“Which way is out? Which way do we go to get out of here?”

He pointed the way. He thought we were trying to hop on, when all we wanted to do was leave.

Jimbo kept saying “no, no, no!” and laughing.

Dec 17

We slept in a grassy lot near a bridge and a canal of some sort, right next to someone’s front yard. The smell of dead possum wafted over us the whole night, but we were so tired we didn’t care. Brutus woke us up barking at the cat that lived in the house nearby. We drifted back to sleep on the grass. I was awoken by small raindrops falling on my face. “Jimbo, wake up, it’s raining.”

We went under a nearby bridge to escape the rain while we came up with a plan. We had to go to walmart, so I could get a replacement phone and so he could spange. After a long time I came out and he said “That old lady over there is talking shit in spanish about me smoking and making disgusted faces at me. Old bitch. As she’s literally sitting in the smoking area in front of walmart.” We laughed. “I’m going to the dollar store to get sunglasses, do you need anything?” “Could you grab some skin cream? My feet are chafing in these boots.” He shortly returned with the cream, some weird chicken and cheese chimichange in a plastic package, and large white sunglasses that amusingly clashed with the rest of his faded, tattered clothes . I didn’t really want the chicken, but I put it in my backpack to be polite. “We need to get on the Tri-rail to get down to south beach.”, he told me.

Miami

We got off the tri-rail in miami. Near the station here were dozens of bums hanging around in a park near the Miami-Dade Library, so naturally we both wanted to go somewhere else. He took out his water key and unlocked a spigot for us to fill our water jugs. We walked around downtown aimlessly for a while. There was a 7-11 Jimbo wanted to go to on 2nd street. When we reached it, we sat on our packs at the corner of the store and spanged the passerby. I took out my sketchbook and started doodling. We posted up in the gravelled area behind the 7-11 for a few hours. Jimbo went off to do something, I was too drunk to remember what. “That guy over there is cute!” I told him. “Hey, my friend here thinks you’re cute!”, Jimbo immediately shouted after him. A random stranger said “Catch!” and threw me a glass jar full of dried out delta-8 weed. I passed out and Jimbo took a photo of me asleep on my backpack against the red wall. He woke me up and said we should move to a better sleeping spot. He rolled out his tarp in an empty storefront on Flagler street across from Alberto Cortes Cosmetics and Chandi Liquors. I bought us a bottle of white wine. “I wanna save some of this for the morning”, I told him. We talked for a long time. We were up until at least 4am, when some nearby event was letting out. As we wound down for the night groups of drunk people in tuxedos and fancy dresses passed us by, loudly blathering about something idiotic.

Dec 18

We woke up pretty early, around 8 in the morning.

To get to South Beach from downtown we needed to cross three bridges along the Macarthur Causeway, which was a two hour walk. The weather was overcast but unbearably hot and humid. We began walking and i felt exhausted. We passed several islands of nothing but ultra-modern mansions, which Jimbo said looked like shipping containers. We stopped to rest at a bus station, regretting our choice to not buy bus tickets beforehand.

There were two fishermen with lines in the water standing on the last bridge. “Catch anything?” I asked. “I haven’t, but that guy over there has” He replied. The walkway was littered with bloody, rotting fish parts. We breathed a sigh of relief as we walked the last stretch of the bridge leading to the island of Miami Beach. Jimbo muzzled Brutus as we came up to the intersection of Alton Road and 5th street, where there were many pedestrians walking dogs. “This is where I got his muzzle, actually”, he told me. “I need to go fly, so can you take our phones and charge them in that Burger King?” Covered in sweat, I gladly agreed. I bought us both whoppers and held onto his while I waited for him to come back, which he soon did, setting down his gear on the only corner of the building without windows. While I was inside using the bathroom, a BK employee came out and aggressively swept the ground around Jimbo and probably said something rude to him. “Bro, you’re the bouncer at a Burger King. Get over yourself.”, he said to me, laughing. A Miami Beach police officer pulled up to the BK, and Jimbo asked him if he had any patches or stickers. He said he had no patches, but gave us each a silver foil police badge sticker that said “Miami beach junior police officer” on it.

I told Jimbo I wanted to see the beach. “What was the point of coming all the way down here if we’re not gonna even go to the beach?” I asked him, annoyed. “You can go, but I can’t take Brutus on the beach. This county kills dogs.” he said.

South Beach

On the strip we slept on the street across from a hotel that had good wifi. Jimbo didn’t make much money at that spot. He put his dog bowl out with his sign. A guy rolled up in a black car and said he would give him cash if he handed out fliers for his company. Jimbo agreed and the man gave him the small fliers, a bunch of change and a dollar bill that was so torn it would have only taken a small pull to tear in half. The man remained parked directly in front of us for another hour. “I can’t wait for this guy to leave so I can stop holding these fliers.” As soon as he drove off Jimbo took them and stuffed them into a drain. “Let’s go.”

We passed Gianni Versace’s mansion, whose gate was replete with gilt ornaments. “Can you imagine waking up in this place every day? Crazy.” I said.

Hialeah

West Palm

We awoke to an extremely loud bang from a nearby construction site.

Port St Lucie

Fort Pierce

Jacksonville

Eugene. Met him playing guitar on main Street, he came home with me and we hooked up. He's somewhere out west now, haven't heard from him in a long time.