Be Brave,Be Honest,Be Smart,Be Kind,Be Selfless

Welcome to the inside of my head... stay a while Instagram: @tessyloowhoo

[soracities]

Sophocles, Elektra (trans. Anne Carson)

[tessyloowhoo]

[wthruw8ing4-blog]

[danger]

[tessyloowhoo]

[tessyloowhoo]

The feral ones

Mouthing memories of  dumpster feasts. Wandering or sleeping  in backs of cars or  tucked up into  cold carboard beds. No warmth and lullabies just harm,harm,,harm. 

Abruptly at the doorstep with garbage bag suitcases.  Talons, overgrown and sharp, dig up wonderbread skin; clawing at what has burrowed there. Smearing up their faces- war paint so red, red, red.

Narcaned neonates  with powerranger prayers. Echoing mockingbird profanity in hollow, hungry mouths- battle cries and spit. Playing war in the backyard,  consequences for keeps.

Thin arms and legs sprawl, alien,  decorating the floors with despair. Spilling out of doorways like lamplight.   Moving in the night as

feral things do.

Cooing out “mother?”

As I pass in the dark. 

[howardhawkshollywoodannex]

John Gilbert and Renee Adore in The Big Parade (1925), directed by King Vidor.  King has two entries on the TSPDT list of the 1,000 Greatest Films - The Crowd (ranked number 234) and Duel in the Sun (number 967).  The Fountainhead was also on the TSPDT list, but fell off the 2019 edition.  The Citadel is his entry on the New York Times list of the 1,000 Best Films.  On Halliwell’s Top 1000, The Crowd is ranked number 290.

[darling-with-no-problems]

[fishstickmonkey]

MALICK SIDIBÉ © (via http://www.voicesofeastanglia.com/2013/06/malick-sidibe.html)

[losetheboyfriend]

Sammy Davis, Jr. & May Britt; by Brian Duffy (1960)

[tessyloowhoo]

[vintage-sweden]

Trucker, 1946, Sweden.

[fuckyeahdinoart]

[neusa-skelling]

[the-blue-hedgehog]

[tessyloowhoo]

Do not resuscitate paperwork is neon pink; a shade a little girl would paint her fingernails. Scotch taped to the fridge, intentionally conspicuous and blaringly bright. The patient name was barely legible, scribbled in rushed doctor’s penmanship, translated underneath by typed print, screaming his name in uppercase. 

He never wanted to die like this. He wanted to go off into the woods to freeze or hang. Said alone would be best. I never tried to convince him otherwise. Just asked him to leave a note  of where I would find him. And we carried on like that for a while, with our plan and silent understanding. But on my drive home my throat would stiffen,  preparing.

 I settled grooves into my new identities; carved molds of all the different people I could be at once. I carried each role carefully, walking a line of sagging tightrope,  always off balance. And it carried on like that from the day that I first knew. The day he came home drunk to tell me how it was burrowing into his brain, his spine, his liver. How he could taste something rotting,  already dead inside him.

It ate him. I turned mother to this new fragile thing, having buried the feelings of being someone’s child deep in the backyard. I asked him once if he wanted me to help him end it. But he said he had gotten used to the idea of dying at home, to give Ellen a little extra time to get used to it coming. And we carried on like that for a while. The plan regretfully accepted, like if we didn’t look at it, it wasn’t there. We carried on until the morphine didn’t work and he couldn’t get up without falling and I had to sleep next to him on the floor.

Ellen cried out like a wounded thing when they called. I woke to the startle of it. Morning was beginning, September ending and he had waited to be alone to die. We didn’t go say goodbye. We just sat next to each other on his bed. Sat that way in silence for a while, too ashamed at our relief  to do anything much else.

 Tess Nicholson 

[tessyloowhoo]

Mt. Lafayette