I joked with someone recently “In The Walking Dead, when did everyone decide they didn’t have to go to work anymore?” Or it felt like a joke. But my brain keeps returning and returning to it.
Apocalypse movies show us sunny life as normal. Then hard cut to our hero waking up in a world broken beyond repair. No need to check emails at least.
But what happens when the world crumbles slowly? A time of endless uncertainty. When we’ve blown through our mental health days and we’re expected back to work on Monday? When we watch someone else’s apocalypse from the safety of our phones?
I don’t know how we’re expected to keep doing this. To see a father holding the arm and leg of what was his child. To see a boy hugging a body bag. To see the charred remains of a car a six-year-old girl sat trapped in. Trapped with the bodies of her loved ones begging the world to help her. “I’m so scared, please come.” Please come. To watch, to watch, to watch.
And then. To keep moving. To go to meetings. To one-on-ones. To performance reviews. To talk about work load and quarterly goals and oh man, I did drop the ball on that, won’t happen again. I just seem. I guess I. I can’t seem to focus lately. To abruptly look up from our phone as someone impatiently hovers at our desk. God, so sorry. I was just, I was just, I was just. Watching.
Because in this time of politicians so blatantly disregarding the wants and desires of their constituents, sometimes it feels like all we can send across the world is our attention. We drift between two worlds. Skimming the email over and over and over, no room to take it in as our mind conjures only the image of a woman screaming with endless grief.
What is it doing to us to continue to buy into this illusion of structure as everything we ever believed about the world shatters?
return to the quiescent inorganic state whence we all came.
thoughtportal reblogged
As I stared into the Abyss, I became aware the Abyss was staring back at me. "What are you looking at?" I said. "You," the Abyss replied. "You are fascinating. I have never seen anyone like you before." I blushed. "I bet you say that to everyone." "I do. And it is always true."
thoughtportal reblogged
thoughtportal reblogged
thoughtportal reblogged
What's that poem about the cockroach and the moth where the cockroach is like "I wish I've ever wanted anything the way that moth wanted to burn itself up in that lantern" because we had to read that in high school and it still fucks me up to this day
Ok I found it it's called "the lesson of the moth by archy" and it's by Don Marquis
archy and mehitabel are a treasure, newspaper columnist Don Marquis wrote a lot of these free-verse poems in character as a cockroach named archy (always lowercase because he's a cockroach and can't reach the shift key!!) who was using his typewriter & while it started out as a way of poking gentle fun at the avant-garde poetry of his time (the 1910s - startling how little "avant-garde poetry" has moved forward, isn't it) it evolved over time into some genuinely beautiful and moving poetry
ALSO many of them have illustrations by Krazy Kat author George Herriman which are frankly iconic and adorable!!
Marquis introduced Archy into his daily newspaper column at New York's Evening Sun. Archy—whose name was always written in lower case in the book titles, but was upper case when Marquis would write about him in narrative form—was a cockroach who had been a free verse poet in a previous life, and took to writing stories and poems on an old typewriter at the newspaper office when everyone in the building had left. Archy would climb up onto the typewriter and hurl himself at the keys, laboriously typing out stories of the daily challenges and travails of a cockroach. Archy's best friend was Mehitabel, an alley cat. The two of them shared a series of day-to-day adventures that made satiric commentary on daily life in the city during the 1910s and 1920s.
Because he was a cockroach, Archy was unable to operate the shift key on the typewriter (he jumped on each key to type; since using shift requires two keys to be pressed simultaneously, he physically could not use capitals), and so all of his verse was written without capitalization or punctuation. (Writing in his own persona, though, Marquis always used correct capitalization and punctuation. As E. B. White wrote in his introduction to The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel, it would be incorrect to conclude that, "because Don Marquis's cockroach was incapable of operating the shift key of a typewriter, nobody else could operate it.")
There was at least one point in which Archy happened to jump onto the shift lock key—a chapter titled "CAPITALS AT LAST".
the lesson of the moth by archy (a poem by Don Marquis)
i was talking to a moth the other evening he was trying to break into an electric light bulb and fry himself on the wires
why do you fellows pull this stunt i asked him because it is the conventional thing for moths or why if that had been an uncovered candle instead of an electric light bulb you would now be a small unsightly cinder have you no sense
plenty of it he answered but at times we get tired of using it we get bored with the routine and crave beauty and excitement fire is beautiful and we know that if we get too close it will kill us but what does that matter it is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while so we wad all our life up into one little roll and then we shoot the roll that is what life is for it is better to be a part of beauty for one instant and then to cease to exist than to exist forever and never be a part of beauty our attitude toward life is to come easy go easy we are like human beings used to be before they became too civilized to enjoy themselves
and before i could argue him out of his philosophy he went and immolated himself on a patent cigar lighter i do not agree with him myself i would rather have half the happiness and twice the longevity
but at the same time i wish there was something i wanted as badly as he wanted to fry himself
archy
sometimes. . .
Do you live in a cotton-candy house?
the meaning of life
