"To experience the joys of people while actively avoiding them."

- Cliff Sargent on why he reads

I'm a Man UTD "fan" who knows nothing about it except for Rooney. Yes, I'm old and so are you.

Anyways, congrats to Arsenal fans. Your happiness is contagious!

Blessed are the amnesiacs for they can't remember the past.
Me, I'm suffering from photographic memory.

Why am I doomed to entertain the past so? Why do I lie and say I don't look back? I guess I don't. Because it's a plus one to the present. It never passed. Maybe time isn't linear and it never was.

I started early. Ran so fast. But I was on a hamster wheel.

So I can't truly have ambitions. Because what is the point of achieving things when everything that could happen to those I would protect has already happened? Everything bad and then some.

I reason that the people whose pain I'm feeling by proxy haven't given up. I don't have the right to own their pain and give up for them. But
sometimes, it gets to them too. And that gets to me.

This is what happens when you pull the divine rug you stand on from under you. For better or for worse.

I'm tired. I'm writing this semi-comprehensible letter to the void that stares me down. Through the internet, which is a mirror. A shallow, two dimensional reflection of you. Sometimes it's unwise to believe the mirror. Sometimes it's the only right thing to do.

I have to release this shadow that follows me. Oscar lied. That's not where the soul resides. At least, I can't believe that. I have to cut my shadow from around my ankles. Lead life reflection-less, possibly soulless. A vampire eternally forgetful. I can't risk looking back and being turned into a pillar of salt. Salty.

Or I have to love my shadow and breathe it into a companion. Like Maui's mini-Maui tattoo. I don't think I'm the type, though. I can't look at suffering as learning. I don't respond well to being preached to about the Grand Plan. If this was the plan, it is more like a plot. Even if this was the diversion, the detour to the grand plan, I can't accept it. It shows neglect. Negligence. Cosmic apathy. There can't be a plan. There can't be a planning God. There can't be a planning God that's Good.

How the mighty have fallen, right? I am just tired of being cooked on fire to be ripe and digestible. This is me raw, lukewarm and spit-out-able because I don't want to be consumed anymore by higher appetites.

I don't like moaning about life. Who does? I know I can excel at anything, fit anywhere. I just don't see why, haven't wanted to for a while. So if you do see me moving mountains, know that it happened despite my best efforts.

And if you have to diagnose me, please be creative about it. Don't slap pop psychology at me.

Days like this, a whistle will topple me and I can't carry a feather more ; I have run out of shoulders, which makes it impossible to mingle with people.

That's why I'm writing this. To make room for tomorrow. To welcome unwelcome surprises. I've done good. I have to do better.

Eid Mubarak!

So y'all would let me say anything?

Jk. Here's a Pessoa poem.


I Am Tired
I am tired, that is clear,
Because, at a certain stage, people have to be tired.
Of what I am tired, I don’t know:
It would not serve me at all to know
Since the tiredness stays just the same.
The wound hurts as it hurts
And not in function of the cause that produced it.
Yes, I am tired,
And ever so slightly smiling
At the tiredness being only this —
In the body a wish for sleep,
In the soul a desire for not thinking
And, to crown all, a luminous transparency
Of the retrospective understanding . . .
And the one luxury of not now having hopes?
I am intelligent: that’s all.
I have seen much and understood much of what I have
seen,
And there is a certain pleasure even in the tiredness this
brings us,
That in the end the head does still serve for something.

Desperately need this guy in my life right now.

Call her pet names
when her face brings you sorrow
Play these cute games
postpone truth to the morrow

It had always been important to him to say goodbye, in tender and frequently quite prolonged and ceremonious ways. She had a thousand memories of little notes he’d written,
kisses blown from windows, his small hand chattering up and down at her from the backseats of departing cars: goodbye! goodbye! When
he was a baby, he’d learned bye-bye long before hello; it was his way of greeting people as well as leaving them. It seemed particularly cruel to Charlotte that there had been no goodbye this time.

...

Libby, in the worst days, had murmured something to her
over and over again, something that she hadn’t understood.

We were never meant to have him, darling. He wasn’t ours to keep. We were lucky he was with us for as long as he was.

And this was the thought that came to Charlotte, through a
narcotic fog, that hot morning in the shuttered room. That what Libby had told her was the truth. And that, in some strange way or other, ever since he was just a baby, Robin had been trying to say goodbye to her all his life.

-The Little Friend, Donna Tartt

"Aegon Targaryen himself, strangely, was as much an enigma to his contemporaries as to us. Armed with the Valyrian steel blade Blackfyre, he was counted amongst the greatest warriors of his age, yet he took no pleasure in feats of arms, and never rode in tourney or melee. His mount was Balerion the Black Dread, but he flew only to battle or to travel swiftly across land and sea. His commanding presence drew men to his banners, yet he had no close friends, save Orys Baratheon, the companion of his youth. Women were drawn to him, but Aegon remained ever faithful to his sisters. As king, he put great trust in his small council and his sisters, leaving much of the day-to-day governance of the realm to them…yet did not hesitate to take command when he found it necessary. Though he dealt harshly with rebels and traitors, he was open-handed with former foes who bent the knee."

-Fire and Blood, George R. R. Martin


I wanted to get into GRRM but I hate multiple pov's so I couldn't read ASOIAF. Besides, it's incomplete. So I picked up Fire and Blood. So very enjoyable!

Was surprised to find out Aegon the conqueror wasn't one of the mad Targaryens.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

-The Stolen Child, W. B. Yeats

I am daily affirmed in my belief that there's a collective well of inspiration from which we all fetch fragments. The artist needs only reach deep enough to find it. It's not as deep as I'd have thought, but it's by no means shallow.

When inspiration pops out of the ether, catch it and relay it. Because it does not go back to the source just because you failed to transmit it. Another, more wakeful one will do it for you, but not quite in the way that you would have.
Then you'll be left with the bitter taste of not having captured that idea in your own way.

I always think of what Gints Zilbalodis said:

"It takes time for your abilities and your skills to catch up with your taste."

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

-Ira Glass

"The world is a god having a nightmare."
Yeah, I can see that.

My friends and I have actually seen a lipstick stain on our teacher's collar. In middle school. And that's the least interesting story we got. We've lived fulfilling lives.

Consider me Catholic now.
#MotherChurch #DaPope

The woman is actually not Catholic but The Pope is against AI😊

Starry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds in violet haze
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue
Colors changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now

For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night
You took your life, as lovers often do
But I could have told you, Vincent

This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you

-Don McLean, Vincent

Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land