Part of Me Gets Sick Part of Me Gets Sore

Sitting on the bathroom floor. Vodka mixed with Coca Cola. Deftones - Adrenaline (long time coming to be added to my Working List of Most Beautiful Albums). The smell of bleach processing. There is little that could remind me more of pre-highschool. There is little that could remind me more of being a teenager. Of choking.

Still choking.

I have found a few things that give me sense of purpose, sense of peace...if there's anything I've learned from being young and stupid, it's been gratitude; gratitude as the fundamentally most important thing you can have if you're going to have anything. You can live in the lushest of surroundings, have wine and dinner handed to you on a silver platter (and if you're there you're probably not grateful anyway), and if you have no gratitude, you have nothing. You have nothing.

Fucking Blogger

I tried to edit the template. This looks like shit. I don't have time to figure out how to change it back. Sorry you have to look at this ugly crap.

ἀλήθεια/Aletheia

According to Martin Heidegger, this painting by Van Gough of shoes, reveals the whole truth about the entire world:

I wonder what it would feel like to drown

Living for the inbetweens

Adult. Middle Class. Work all day. Properly sedated. Pharmacopia is the opiate of the inured, of the capitulated. So we resign ourselves to unfelt feeling. Happy dumb skin numb, so that we can try and live a few hours a week in paroxysms of fighting or fucking. Thank god for those, and those who don't forget that part.

SehnSucht

I don't usually post photos of myself, but my husband did such a beautiful job.

L'esprit d'escalier

Untranslatable Words From Around the World

My favorites from this incredible list: 20 Untranslatable Words From Around the World

1. Toska

Russian – Vladmir Nabokov describes it best: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”

3. Jayus

Indonesian – “A joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh” 

10. Cafuné

Brazilian Portuguese – “The act of tenderly running one’s fingers through someone’s hair.” 

12. Torschlusspanik

German – Translated literally, this word means “gate-closing panic,” but its contextual meaning refers to “the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages.”

13. Wabi-Sabi

Japanese – Much has been written on this Japanese concept, but in a sentence, one might be able to understand it as “a way of living that focuses on finding beauty within the imperfections of life and accepting peacefully the natural cycle of growth and decay.” 

15. Tingo

Pascuense (Easter Island) – Hopefully this isn’t a word you’d need often: “the act of taking objects one desires from the house of a friend by gradually borrowing all of them.” 

16. Hyggelig

Danish – Its “literal” translation into English gives connotations of a warm, friendly, cozy demeanor, but it’s unlikely that these words truly capture the essence of a hyggelig; it’s likely something that must be experienced to be known. I think of good friends, cold beer, and a warm fire. 

17. L’appel du vide

French – “The call of the void” is this French expression’s literal translation, but more significantly it’s used to describe the instinctive urge to jump from high places.

18. Ya’aburnee

Arabic – Both morbid and beautiful at once, this incantatory word means “You bury me,” a declaration of one’s hope that they’ll die before another person because of how difficult it would be to live without them.

19. Duende

Spanish – While originally used to describe a mythical, spritelike entity that possesses humans and creates the feeling of awe of one’s surroundings in nature, its meaning has transitioned into referring to “the mysterious power that a work of art has to deeply move a person.” 

20. Saudade

Portuguese – One of the most beautiful of all words, translatable or not, this word “refers to the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love and which is lost.” Fado music, a type of mournful singing, relates to saudade.

And a second list...
(source: http://www.makethelist.net/10-untranslatable-words/

2 Bilita Mpash (Bantu)

It perhaps reflects on our culture somewhat that in English we have the word nightmare for a bad dream, but no opposite equivalent. We can only assume that in the Niger-Congo region of Africa they have sweeter sleeps, as Bilita Mpash means not just a good dream, but a ‘legendary, blissful state where all is forgiven and forgotten’. The word has reportedly made its way into African-American slang in the bastardised form ‘beluthathatchee’.

8 Qualunquismo (Italian)

A word which could almost certainly be added to most modern societies’ lexicons, qualunquismo means to be indifferent to political and social issues. OThe term is originally derived from the name of satirical political journal L’uomo qualunque.

9 Ondinnonk (Iroquoian)

A truly uplifting word from the Iroquois tribes of North America, Ondinnonk means the soul’s innermost desires and its angelic nature. To follow one’s ondinnonk can often lead to positive and kindly acts.

10 Zalatwic (Polish)

Born out of the difficulties imposed by the state during Poland’s Communist regime, zalatwic means to accomplish something unofficially using acquaintances. This could range from trading simple foodstuffs to swapping homes.

Halos horizons white trash

2009

Ceremonial intertwining of tongues, religious

Sacrifices scrumptious feasts, delicious

Values sun-black

Love as Love-deep, deeply dispersing

becoming them all

nightmare hands of velvet, evenly careening

pouring cream sauce promises

over honey-liquor hearts

through your mouth I saw your aura

it glowed pickle-pink

and scented of

introductory notes on bestiality

front page, back teeth

the language of broken hearts

swallowed by red queens

we don’t speak that here.

I find heaven in the crashing waves of breath.

the perfect merging of contradictions in

heterochromatic clouds

motherland, my long lost, i’ve found you

may I stay?

hang on to your halo, animal

clutch your candle as you walk through night halls

of all that you can’t possibly know.

purity wrapped in palms

eyes for devouring lips

arms, sky branches to swing my bed

chest, snow-warm.. ..

visions of sunsets on white-trash horizons

i am home

2.11.09 Lvov Trip

Driven to desolate ends of the earth, where I run away with pieces of garbage flying out of my hair and little devils whispering incessantly into my ears until I step on needles and dirt and can't stand the sight, sound, the smell of it anymore.
Lifted up and up and up into beautiful worlds that don't exist like ones on the ground, they move upward without caring about forward, but move forward anyway, colored and graceful and fairy-tale magic.
It's a spiral, the core is wonder, made of faith and majesty and spirit and paint and fiercely beating hearts. Outside, the world around interferes for better or for worse.
With more and more excitement, comes more and more fear. The feelings grow and become more dangerous. Poems sing out loud for hearts, blood and broken bottles and flowers and candles in wind and crashing waves at night.

If the ocean had an equivalent, it would be this looking out onto the sunrise over the picaresque Hansel and Gretel wasteland, sunbeams passing through steam. It would be the violent crashing against cliffs of feeling, and their smooth abating into that world of aftermath and its eerie calm, where something inside you wakes up, sees in a way it never saw before. And suddenly everything around you looks different. Is different. Will always be different. It would be what wonders lie buried under high tide, the treasures in pieces of each other we all found when the moon peeled it back. I have learned something about all of you, and learning many things from all of you. Beautiful depths just barely set foot in, I know. There is something we all keep from one another at the same time as there is something we all offer. It came at many moments on this trip in the form of graceful, portent silence. A few specific moments: The first, on the train tracks in the middle of the night when we all sat struck, spellbound in the stillness of the blue and orange night of that other world, all trying, almost in pain to capture that moment with whatever tools we could use best, writings, photographs, sketches – all of us in perfect, harmonious, uninterrupted constitution. The second, in our Hungarian host's apartment, digesting a large dosage of the absurdity of life that this trip had offered us up so far, at the same time remaining in a state of constant wonder at everything around us, this dark and majestic city, this wise, unassuming post-modern novel hero―our current host―and his charming apartment (not lost on any one of us that this was holy ground), our new selves, our new perceptions of our world and of each other. Again we sat still and silent, writing, creating, drawing, smoking, thinking. We had sought the ingredients for a sensation, and it was made. We had sought relief from our established patterns, the one great established pattern that solidifies our existence and separates us from one another. And it was found. We sought connection and freedom from self-possession, we sought to lose ourselves in a realm of some great permanence. And we did.  

Cheap Iranian store wine glasses

2.3.09 

Cheap Iranian store wine glasses; those who cared wouldn't have chosen them. Half-empty Unicum bottle. Two tea pots, pieces of gold, ornate, haven’t been washed in months, or years. Rachel, “au poile de carrottes” with a pink coat, from San Francisco. Gold cup, the last one that wasn’t broken. Giant drawing tables. Prayers to St. Theresa. Big, blank, canvases. Ventilation tubes like giant gray snakes or thick-veined cocks or intestines. Words about reminding people of butterflies. Crimson, clover. Pastels. Russian industrial military heaters with prints of St. Petersburg. No one has ever seen heaters like that. Fake flowers; beloved not trash the way fake flowers usually are. Russian orthodox iconography. Rechargeable batteries in cut-open water. Empty tea tins, all Russian or green. The worst and most beautiful sufferers. No food, but exotic liquors. Blank pages full minds. Tight jeans, art-studio rejection. Arms re-opened after emotional vomiting. Pillows full of the dreams of those who left them. American stories. Russian stories. Hillary Clinton’s ecstasy. Incomprehensible diagrams that mean so much. Fucking lemonade beer. Female wine. Wires pens broken walkie talkies dried flowers military helmets fire signs, a concept similar to a universal but limited to phenomenal knowledge. Exhale all the air from your wrists. Have a vodka drinking lesson.

    Talk of politics floats. We spare ourselves. Jars of honey that glow in the preternatural portrait nights. Chinese lanterns jellyfish bellies. Paint-spattered concrete floors. Sweaters and tick tack toe hearts. Siberian memories from airports and frozen lakes. Heterochromatic confusion and brilliant dreams about cowboys. Evocation of spirits and road trips. Flat tires in South Dakota. Barbeque sauce and sweet cream south. Ideas of paintings, abortions on paper. Costumes for orthodox ceremonies and darth vader gold helmets. Pieces of furniture, bread and tea staples in wood iron picture-frames watercolor expressions in confused and inwardly turned fire, walls of shipbuilder leftovers fantasias grown far too high bubble wrap insulation for love and voices that burn in nighttime visions, no candles allowed pieces of gorgeous accents not revealing much. Ordinary voices revealing everything they are by saying almost nothing.




And it always comes back to the painting. 

Bang Bang

“Remember that you have only one soul; that you have only one death to die; that you have only one life. . . . If you do this, there will be many things about which you care nothing.” - St. Theresa of Avila