The Railroad Earth @the-railroad-earth - Tumblr Blog

been a while since i wrote a song, and this one came together extremely fast.

Al Murrah; girl with a cradle containing an infant over her shoulder, holding two camels. March 27, 1959. Qatar. Scanned from the book Bedouins of Qatar; Klaus Ferdinand; 1993

"I listened to the driving rain, the gurgling of the flooded wooden gutter, the pigeons scratching with their legs and their sleepy cooing. And all those silent noises became part of a night that would not pass, part of a world that was not alive. I was no longer looking for reasons, for a whole, for uninterrupted continuities. At the end of everything that I had been trying to determine, to link, and give sense to, there was a long, black night, and waters that were constantly rising." - Meša Selimović, Death and the Dervish

#mesa selimovic #Meša Selimović #death and the dervish #the fortress #lit

its been a while 😁

#songsong

#listening to caterina

45 second clip of my performance last nite. fun 😊

#me

Fighting through an hour of 40-50km/h headwinds to get here. It was miserable, but, I like to exercise my willpower. I thought about turning around early because my cruising speed was cut from 30kmh to around 13-15kmh by the winds. Miserable. Worth it? The amount of food I ate when I got back home was certainly worth it.

lostinmac

The Shadowless Tower (2023)

Dir. Zhang Lu

I uhh, don't know.

#didnt know how to end it lol #but its okay

lunellaria

the human body is about 60% water and large bodies of water know it, its why they welcome you so willingly like a loved one returning home

the-railroad-earth

caroline polachek singing softly

"closing in on the sparkle of the waves, go on, take me, it will feel like going home"

Watching geese fly over the cemetery off Royal Oak — it’s never really as perfect as you imagine it. One arm of the V is broken and trailing behind, the other arm zig-zags its way in and out of formation. This isn’t their best work, but that’s fine — it’s still early — and the mist rising off Deer Lake subsumes the whole valley in white. I take the road through this little valley every day, nestled between Kingsway to the south and Canada Way to the north. You’d never expect it, unless you already knew, that this little valley used to be the home of Oakalla Prison — a prison that closed and was demolished in the 90’s, and was the centre of riots, escapes, and hangings that marked the history of incarceration in BC. The last hanging at Oakalla Prison was of Leo Mantha, a man convicted of stabbing his lover to death in an Esquimalt navy base. Today, the former site of the prison is a park, a playground in the middle of several residential buildings. The staircase leading to the front doors of the prison is still intact, but it now leads to a swingset. According to Earl Anderson, former employee of Oakalla prison, if the gallows where Leo Mantha and 43 other prisoners were hung were still standing, they would deposit the bodies onto a children's slide.

Hm.

I’m reminded of the book I’m reading right now, called The Bridge Over the Drina. The synopsis is this – in 1577, a bridge was completed in the small town of Višegrad, Bosnia – bridging the gap over the Drina river. The bridge is still standing today, and the novel tells the story of its construction and the life of the town which develops around the bridge for the next several hundred years. Throughout those several hundred years, the bridge remains a mass of unchanging, unaffected stone. Unflinching and silent. I think it’s fascinating that such rich history can live, vibrate even — because to just be near them provokes such rumination — within the inanimate bounds of a stone. The stones that led to the front door of Oakalla once took the blow from a prisoner who escaped and jumped off the roof of the prison. The stones of the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge hold untold and countless other memories. But they’re still there, you know, being stones. And I’m driving past them, you know, watching the geese.

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#substack #writing #me