I have been at many times in my life too obsessed with statistics. I used to post my most listened to artists on my instagram story at the end of every month. I’ve used Last FM for a few years now, tracking data across Spotify, then Apple Music, and now Qobuz. I log every movie i watch on Letterboxd and every book i read on StoryGraph. I appreciate the data this provides me, which helps me track what i’ve been engaging with or consuming, but i believe that to genuflect to these statistics is a grave misstep. This begs the question, what is truth? — and that’s beyond the scope of this little reflection of mine, but i do think it’s important to address a sort of society-wide obssession with a kind of objectivity that i find utterly unhelpful. There’s a complexity to truth that involves contradiction, interaction, layer, etc., and i think sometimes we just need to hone in on something (subjective as it may be) and elucidate some quality about it blah blah blah anyways my point is that rote stats aren’t nearly as illuminating about our lives as i think we give them credit for.
Last.fm tells me my top ten artists of 2025 (by “scrobbles” aka tracks played) in descending order are Fiona Apple, esperanza spalding, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Wayne Shorter, Donna Summer, Mike, Brandy, Tracy Chapman, and Norma Tanega. StoryGraph tells me i read thirteen books this year (seven fiction, six nonfiction) and three thousand some pages. Letterboxd tells me i logged 368 films, and ranks Buster Keaton, Bulle Ogier, Greta Garbo, Alex Descas, Isabelle Huppert, Lily Gladstone, Michel Piccoli, Hanna Schygulla, Maggie Cheung, Gena Rowlands, and Marlene Dietrich as my most watched actors of the year and Maya Deren, Keaton & Eddie Cline, Jacques Rivette, Ousmane Sembène, Elia Suleiman, Louis Feuillade, Barbara Hammer, Stan Brakhage, Mati Diop, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Josef von Sternberg as my most watched directors of the year — i even made this list ranking the year’s best new releases, with Seven Veils, Marty Supreme, and The Chronology of Water taking the podium while detestable garbage like Companion and One Battle After Another sit squarely at the bottom.
But that doesn’t give you the full picture. It says nothing of my relationship to these various artists and works of art, nor the relationships between them, etc., etc., which i believe would be far more fruitful. (In many ways, i want this blog to stand in for the monthly Last.fm screenshots i once posted to my story — it’s not just about posting the same shit somewhere else, it’s about putting myself “out there” in a fundamentally different way, communicating not rote 3rd party statistics about my life but the actual shit that’s on my mind and heart and soul and how that is stirring / being stirred by this album or that movie etc., etc.)
Statistics don’t give you a frame of reference of lineage and the connections between which artists i’m engaging with etc etc. Rimbaud → Surrealists / Bob Dylan → Rivette / Patti Smith (and Rimbaud → Patti directly “Land of a Thousand Dances”) → Pixies (and from Buñuel → Pixies directly “Debaser”) / Fassbinder / Pierre Clementi, etc., etc., etc. I’m opening a real can of worms with this, there’s literally so many directions i could go with it i don’t even know where to start, but i guess that’s kind of the point. Even without getting into any details or elaborating on any of what i’m saying, a simple sentence even just putting these name in conversation with one another has more generative power than a quantitative list.
These statistics also don’t count artists who are playing on each other’s albums. Milton Nascimento, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lee Morgan, Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Mary Lou Williams, etc., etc., etc. play on various recordings with one another in various combinations across various eras/“genres,” (and i could continue the lineage thing here because there is a trajectory from Duke Ellington to Bird and Monk and Coltrane similar to the trajectory from Jean Renoir to Godard and Resnais and Rivette and in both cases i could keep going with that but whatever i digress). The same can be said, in a different sense, about 2Pac and Dre and Snoop Dogg etc. on each other’s albums in the post-NWA 90s West Coast hip hop era. And to return to lineages for a moment, i’m so compelled by the influences funk has had on so many different pockets of music like the James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Betty Davis, Miles Davis (In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, etc.), Teo Macero (production for Davis, Wayne, Herbie, Weather Report, etc.), Redbone (self-titled, Wovoka), George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, Dr. Dre, 2Pac (Me Against the World sort of but especially All Eyez On Me), Janelle Monáe (particularly The Electric Lady), esperanza spalding (particularly Emily’s D+Evolution), etc., etc., etc.
The statistics don’t count the shit i listen to on SoundCloud (by strangers or loved ones) or the unreleased songs Sofia plays for me live on the couch. They don’t count music i listen to on BandCamp, or analog listening seshes with vinyl or CDs or cassettes. And they don’t count the music i listen to when someone else is on aux.
Last.fm’s scrobble system also means that an artist with a bunch of short songs is gonna get ranked higher than an artist with a few long songs. If the ranking was by seconds-listened to, artists with many or even just some long tracks (like Julius Eastman, Igor Stravinsky—and another thing is, is it being counted as composer or performer or conductor or producer, etc.—Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Donna Summer, Patti Smith, etc., etc., etc.) may be ranked higher.
So far, i’ve mostly been addressing music alone. Another thing these statistics don’t account for are connections from one medium to another: Maya Deren describes Meditation on Violence as “a kind of cubism in time. The same movement is seen from different approaches just as in cubism simultaneously different aspects are seen, but here not in space but in time.”
Eric Rohmer similarly describes Alan Resnais as a cubist filmmaker during a discussion on Hiroshima Mon Amour. Building on this, Jacques Rivette says “Resnais is close to Braque to the degree that the work of art is primarily a reflection in a particular direction… He is a painter who wants both to soften strident colours and make soft colours violent. Braque wants bright yellow to be soft and Manet grey to be sharp.”
Despite the comparison i make here, Deren herself excoriated Hiroshima, describing “its unbelievably cynical use of the monumental Hiroshima tragedy” as “an aphrodisiac gimmick.” This tracks with Deren’s resistance to art which trends toward destruction rather than creation. She critiques the Surrealists for completely abandoning a sense of auteurship, determining towards non-logic rather than forging an artist’s logic. And within the context of the (undeniably formative / foundational / important) methodology of filmmaking-as-art that Deren puts forth, a stance against works that are deliberately anti-art makes sense. But from where i stand, there’s something irresistibly compelling about the determined illogicity of Un Chien Andalou, for example. After all, i wanna grow up to be a debaser. For me, in as much as creation is necessary, so too is destruction.
A final thought: brute statistics don’t give you insight into how often someone is on my mind, how they’re impacting my thoughts and actions, or anything of the depth of my engagement with various art. I think there’s a distinct difference between what’s the most consumable and what’s the most enriching in terms of a critical engagement. consume vs engage, object vs subject, so on, so forth.
Here’s to more making/engaging with/talking about/writing about art earnestly, enthusiastically, seriously, and critically in the new year<3
Here’s to 2026!
There was a storm here recently. Rain fell and the river surged.
Paayme Paxaayt. The West River. We use the name Juan Crespí gave it, though. (More or less.)
Crespí and Junipero Serra reached Yaangna with Gaspar de Portolá in 1769. Crespí named the river El Río de Porciúncula to honor some Catholic holiday or festival. He sought to establish a mission there, near Yaangna. Serra instead founded Misión de San Gabriel Arcángel several miles east, near Toviscanga. This Mission enslaved Indigenous people from Toviscangna, Shevaangna, Yaangna, and other neighboring villages, forcibly converted them, killed them, displaced them. In 1781, Felipe de Neve, governor of the Californias (and namesake of the local library branch i used to live by because evidence of this colonial history is everywhere — this city revels in its legacies of violence) established El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula, on the authority of Charles III, King of Spain.
El Pueblo de Los Ángeles.
LA.
(There was a storm here recently. Rain fell and the LA River surged.)
1785: Nicolás José and Toypurina led a revolt against Misión de San Gabriel, against colonization broadly, and specifically against the outlawing of baptized Indigenous people from dancing in their villages (because this ban prevented them from participating in death rituals for their loved ones, including an annual mourning ceremony). Participants in the revolt were captured and publicly lashed. Toypurina, Nicolás José, and Chiefs Tomasajaquichi and Alijivit were put on trial. Among the sentences were exile, incarceration, and forced labor.
Six years later and thousands of miles away, Dutty Boukman, Cecile Fatiman, and others revolted against their enslavers in Ayiti. The revolt spread, sustained, grew. The revolution (at least by an immediate metric) succeeded. France reeled from the loss of the stolen revenue it had grown so accustomed to and in 1803, desperate for cash, sold the so-called Louisiana Territory to the U.S. With this land acquisition, the U.S. now disputed borders with Spain. Over the course of the next few decades, Mexico gained independence from Spain, the U.S. continued to seek expansion and dispute borders, and in 1846, declared war on Mexico.
I didn’t set out to write a detailed history of these events (nor to write a history at all — and i will return, in time, to the river), but before i move on too hastily, let me add these footnotes: a significant factor to the U.S.’s westward expansion in this period was specifically the expansion of slavery; the U.S. was at this time also disputing borders with the U.K. (Canada); the land of course did not belong to any of these settler colonial states; and the U.S. was actively at war with Indigenous nations throughout this same period of time (notably with the Nʉmʉnʉʉ and Apache, both of whom also fought against Mexico).
My point in outlining all this is to contextualize the settlement of so-called California in the early- to mid-1800s by non-hispanic europeans/euroamerikans like John Sutter, Edward Kern, John C. Frémont, Benjamin D. Wilson, George C. Yount, John Marsh, John Bidwell, and James W. Marshall. Sutter notably enslaved and exploited hundreds of Miwok, Nisenan, Maidu, and Ohlone (as well as several Kanaka who had accompanied him from Hawai'i) in a ranching network often decried even by his european contemporaries as depraved and horrifying, comprabable in depravity and method if not in scale to the plantation-based chattel slavery of the U.S. South. Throughout the 1840s, Sutter, Frémont, Edward Kern, Thomas Breckenridge, and others carried out massacres against the Wintu, Patwin, Konkow Maidu, and other Indigenous peoples, enslaving, displacing, and killing hundreds.
1848: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Alta California belongs to the U.S.
1848: Marshall finds gold at Sutter’s Fort.
1849: Well, you know. The year itself says it all. The 49’ers. Amerikans arrive in California seeking gold.
1850: California becomes a state.
1850: The first session of the California State Legislature enacts the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, legalizing the kidnapping of Indigenous children, invalidating Indigenous testimony against white men in court, allowing for white men to offer enslavement as punishment for any convicted Indigenous person, and detailing that Indigenous people found loitering are subject to being arrested “hired out” to the highest bidder.
1851: Peter Burnett, first Governor of the State of California, delivers a state of the state address in which he says “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected. While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert.” (Not long before this, he says something which i find epitomizes this well-beloved settler colony, this la la land: “The love of fame, as well as the love of property, are common to all men.”)
In any case, the Gold Rush came, and with this influx of settlers, California — Californians — carried out a genocide against the Indigenous peoples, killing upwards of 15,000 directly, with tens of thousands more dying due to disease, famine, and other infrastructural violence. And so a confluence of Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. colonization birthed the California of today with displacement, enslavement, and mass murder forming the foundation for the development of new, old, and repurposed forms of theft, exploitation, and destruction.
“The rush called into being a new creature: the California engineer, master of water, stone, and labor. These frontier scientists were a superior, more evolved form of the panner, still entrepreneurial (and often motivated by an equity share in the project rather than a wage) but also dependable and often college-educated. California exported these men to English-speaking colonies, from the Hawaiian Islands to British-occupied India and Palestine to South Africa and Australia to foreign-owned mines in South America and East Asia. There they replicated their Golden State experience, turning the water against the land and subordinating the nonwhite laboring populations. California’s cowboy scientists helped transform the colonies for commodity agriculture and the societies for white capitalist rule, increasing the profitability and therefore the plausibility of colonial projects.” - Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, p. 38 (emphasis mine)
In Los Angeles, these colonial “masters of water” (like James W. Reagan, Fred Eaton and William Mulholland, namesake of the famous Drive) waged the “California water wars,” building an aqueduct to divert water from the so-called Owens River to Los Angeles, which grew rapidly as euroamerikans settled, with (of course) no regard whatsoever for Indigenous relationships to the area’s waterways nor their capacity to flood. Instead, like “Israelis” in Palestine (who i have heard Californians praise for their development of drip irrigation, part of the domineering effort to “make the desert bloom” and commit cultural and ecological genocide against Palestine), Californians sought to dominate rather than work with the land and the water. The resultantly cocky and brittle infrastructure saw the consequences of this style of settlement when several floods throughout the 1930s (most notably the Los Angeles Flood of 1938) destroyed buildings and killed upwards of a hundred people. As the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would put it, “Historical records indicate that a total of 17 floods occurred between 1815 and 1938, calling for the river to be tamed, especially in light of an influx of population to the area.” (emphasis mine)
TAMED.
In 1941, a plan to channelize the river with cement (which had already been begun in some parts of the river) was approved by Congress. The Corps suggests that this approval was based on the presence of defense contractors (particularly aircraft manufacturers) in Southern California, including pre-merger Lockheed and Martin. Of course, the whole plan was bullshit. Sure, the channelization protects from smaller floods, but it does nothing to protect against larger floods — in fact, channelization exacerbates larger floods, disrupting the absorption of water into the ground, working against nature instead of with it so that damaging floods are all but an inevitability with no holistic recourse accounted for. The concrete is a detriment to the water, to the land, to the plants, to the animals, to us
This is the context for my first blog post.
There was a storm here recently. Rain fell and Paayme Paxaayt surged.
A few Sundays ago, about a week after the heavy rains i’ve been referencing, i visited the river. It wasn’t as full as it had been during the storm, but still, water rushed past with force. I was at the soft-bottom portion of the river, right off Fletcher Drive. In this part of the river, channelization failed — 8 miles (called the Glendale Narrows) which the Corps “declared too wild to cement.”
Cement. Cement. Cement, cement, cement, cement, cement. Power lines and drains. And in the midst of it all, a river, wetlands, birds, daring to live.
Being there, i too felt alive. I reject assimilationist/complacent/apathetic axioms like “existence is resistance.” There’s a sense, though, in which it’s true — maybe more so in the reverse: resistance is existence.
This river, this section of the river, these birds and plants, trashed as they are, stand as a stalwart FUCK YOU to colonialism, one that says anti-colonialism is still viable, that Indigenous ways of life are still viable, that the land and the water and the life persist (and do so more sustainably than the arrogant colonial ways of life). In Crespí’s diaries, on August 1st, 1769, he wrote: “At ten in the morning the earth trembled. The shock was repeated with violence at one in the afternoon, and one hour afterwards we experienced another.” (emphasis mine; I call to mind NK Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy, in which the earth itself retaliates, fights back, punishes, etc.) The following day, August 2nd, the day he named the river Porciúncula (and made camp nearby), he wrote “Here we felt three consecutive earthquakes in the afternoon and night.”
Let us turn now to Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête — i could hardly write about storms and colonialism without referencing it. In the play (a response to Shakespeare’s The Tempest), Caliban — a Black slave longing to rise up violently against Prospero and the white masters of the island — marches, singing a war song:
Shango wields a staff
He strikes and money dies!
He strikes and lies die!
He strikes and larceny dies!
Shango Shango ho!
(translation mine)
At the start of this year, two and a half centuries after Crespí wrote of the earthquakes that greeted him upon his arrival in Tovaangar, the Eaton and Palisades Fires raged, burning thousands of acres to the ground and taking dozens of lives.
Seventeen of the eighteen people who died in the Eaton Fire lived in West Altadena, a largely Black neighborhood which wasn’t given an evacuation until three in the goddamn morning, hours after evacuation notices had been issued to residents in East Altadena. (My parents, for example, were issued an evacuation notice around 7:30PM the evening of January 7th.) The Eaton Fire began in the first place because that villainous corporation known as SoCal Edison refused to de-energize its power lines. But the root of the problem lies much deeper than even this because WILDFIRES HAPPEN HERE! It wasn’t only the response that was the negligent, it was the very construction of this settler colony upon principles of dominance and extraction rather than stewardship and communion. This, of course, applies to both the fires. The fabric (the cement) of our daily lives is colonial. Earthquakes and strong winds remind us just how foolishly arrogant these colonial ideologies of architecture and engineering really are. But satisfying as it may be to watch wealthy ne’er-do-wells like Mel Gibson and Paris Hilton suffer, this isn’t divine retribution. The undeniable power of the earth’s forces to wreak havoc against even “the 1%” doesn’t change the fact that an incalculably greater magnitude of that havoc has and will continue to have been wreaked upon those less protected.
The language of protection has been very compelling to me lately: i feel i have a duty to protect those i love (and myself and others, too). This language feels couched in a chivalry and macho pride that i reject and also just feel totally removed from, but there’s an immediacy to all this infrastructural violence/collapse that cannot be avoided. The stakes are literally life-or-death and that’s not hyperbole or melodrama, it’s the actual reality. I am so afraid of losing the people i love. I think what compels me about a commitment to protect is that it encompasses long-term macro-level shit (whatever the fuck that means/looks like, but like infrastructural protection i guess? liberation?), the more immediate defense of myself and others (violent when need be; the chivalry-adjacent kind of protection i suppose), and the day-to-day labor of caring for and with (feeding, tending to, meeting needs, so on). I think at times i have centered the first of these three too much, yearning for some magical “revolution” after which everything or at least most things are better. Using the language of protection allows long-term dreams of liberation to guide me without tethering me to the abstract and (as-yet-)unattainable. It marries the long-term with the day-to-day and that’s a helpful conceptual shift for me. But words are categorically abstract. So i find myself, still, in the abstract.
The name of this blog — young/untender/true — comes from an exchange in Act I, Scene 1 of The Tragedy of King Lear. Lear, divvying up the kingdom between his three daughters, asks which of them loves him most. Goneril and Regan don’t hesitate to feign adoration, wooing him with their praises. Lear then turns to Cordelia, asking “what can you say to draw // a third more opulent than your sisters’? Speak.”
Cordelia replies: “Nothing, my lord.” There is nothing she can say to prove to him she loves him more (“since what I well intend // I’ll do ’t before I speak” she says later).
Lear treats her wordlessness with contempt, eventually demanding of her, “So young and so untender?”
“So young, my lord, and true.”
Sans words, what do i have to show for myself? What deeds exist to tangibly demonstrate the love and the values i profess? The reality is that myself and those i love are all mired in abject misery and i feel that i am failing abysmally to protect us.
I really have been miserable lately. Not that this misery is anything new, but it pervades my being so wholly that anything that isn’t misery feels unreal, which is to say that life is fucking hard and i am not good at it, i am not built for it — not the life i find myself faced with anyhow. I find things difficult which ordinarily are not found difficult, i near the top of the hill only for the boulder to roll back down, i cry, i writhe in agony, i get high, i numb myself, i find that the numbing is the last thing that i need, that it is incongruous with my goals, and so again i begin to push the boulder up the hill, etc., etc.
There was a storm here recently, and in King Lear, there is a storm, too.
In Act III, Scene 4, Lear — abandoned by the daughters he chose over Cordelia for their willingness to dickride him when she wouldn’t — has gone mad and resists an offer of shelter thus:
Thou think’st ’tis much that this contentious storm
Invades us to the skin. So ’tis to thee.
But where the greater malady is fixed,
The lesser is scarce felt. Thou ’dst shun a bear,
But if thy flight lay toward the roaring sea,
Thou ’dst meet the bear i’ th’ mouth. When the mind’s free,
The body’s delicate. This tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else
Save what beats there.
Sometimes, indeed, this tempest in my mind doth from my senses take all feeling else. Not infrequently do i neglect in various ways the needs of my body and soul, all too consumed by the torment of my mind.
But it works in reverse, too.
I recently watched The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut. It’s a smart, daring, expressionist film somewhere between Window Water Baby Moving, Morvern Callar, and Romance (1999). So many sequences and images from it have lingered, replaying in my mind even now.
In the film, Kim Gordon plays Kathy Acker (which really is so perfect — one of those things that’s just right, satisfyingly so… like thank god it exists). In a scene that is equal parts sterile, sadomasochist, therapeutic, and downright glorious, Kathy instructs Lidia (Imogen Poots) to tell her what she wants. Poots’s performance (in this moment, she is shaking, nervous, self-conscious, pushed to the edge of self to borrow a turn of phrase from the author), the camerawork, the frenetic cutting, and disjointed/abrasive voiceovers mismatched with reality create a sense of torturous shame/repression/restraint and a simmering release of it all, a release of desire.
When Lidia gives an unsatisfactory (easy, dishonest) answer to what she wants, Kathy says, “No, that’s not right, Angel.”
Release.
“I would like to be whipped.”
“Where would you like to be whipped, Angel?”
The film is an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s autobiography of the same name. I read it back in June and found it to be formally transgressive, experimental, and provocative, engaging with fuckedupness, sexuality, and a love for words in ways that really strike a chord with me. Since watching the film, certain lines from the book have been resurfacing, sticking in my brain. In the source version of the above scene, Yuknavitch writes that “territories that had caused me psychic pain were now available to recross physically through a pain that … cleansed me like water.”
Yes, where the greater malady is fixed,
The lesser is scarce felt. To feel the pain of flesh
doth from my mind all tempest take.
Sweet, momentary relief. But no amount of bruises or orgasms can suffice to resolve the tension between my life as it is and as i would like for it to be, nor that tension between the world as it is and the world as it could be. Paayame Paxaayt persists/resists, the birds and the willows defy taming, but this perseverance is not an inevitability. Every day in this bleak world, new points of no return are passed. The untamable river cannot be relied upon to indefinitely and unshakably resist, of its own volition. Pollution and bureaucracy, scourges of this settler colony, may yet destroy it. Waxing poetic about ecological resilience in the face of colonialism doesn’t make me anti-colonial.
A line from the film: “I am a woman who talks to herself in lies.” (In the book, the line is: “I am a woman who talks to herself and lies.”)
There was a storm here recently. There is a storm in my mind. Many storms.
Let the rain fall. Let the river surge. I do not want to be well. I do not want to be sane.
“For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of … And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, nor the merely safe,” writes Audre Lorde in “Uses of the Erotic.” Words to fucking live by. I was thinking and writing a lot about that quote / that idea / that essay earlier this year but i haven’t revisited it in a while and i started crying typing that out. Frankly, i have not known myself to be capable of much joy lately. Even in my better moments, try as i might, knowing in my mind that i have felt great magnitudes of joy in my life, i have not been able to feel nor even to conceptualize that i have the capacity to feel joy. In fact, even in my memory, when i went to look for this quote, i wasn’t expecting it to be about feeling joy deeply so that we are compelled to pursue/demand that joy, i was expecting it to be about letting ourselves feel our pain deeply, so that we are compelled to fight for better. And to be fair, i think the two go hand in hand and it’s not really like i altogether misremembered, but i did just cry quite a bit at the implications of my subconscious reframing of that sentiment from demanding joy to demanding not-pain. I digress.
I cannot seek to resolve my inner turmoil prematurely — that is, i cannot be ok with a shortcut or a bandaid. This tempest in my mind — this tempest of a world fucking hurts. To numb myself to that is to submit to being hurt more. To numb myself is to choose complacency, complicity. I feel a lot of sadness. I feel a lot of anger. But i do feel joy, too. There are people i love, people who are more than the objects of my compulsion to protect. People i love who love me in ways that, make no mistake, keep me alive. What a joyous thing that is. And all this starts with joy. The untamable Paayme Paxaayt, the birds, the reeds. I cried when i was at the river, saltwater spilling out of eyes taking in a vastness of beauty. I can feel joy. I choose to feel joy.
And so, with this inaugural blog post, i find myself having begun with joy, having defined that joy by the pain and sorrow and strife and death and violence within which it is situated — pain and sorrow and strife and death and violence which i find all too inescapable (first, second, or third hand). And despite it all i find myself returning to joy, remembering that as much as the joy cannot be defined without its miserable counterparts, neither can this misery be isolated away from joy. So i find myself beginning to demand from myself and my life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with the joy which i know myself to be capable of.
There was a storm here recently. I admire so deeply the power of water. To erode rock. To carve canyons. To drown. To hydrate. To rush. To evaporate. To sustain. I love the feeling of running in the rain, dashing for cover, and i love the feeling of submerging myself entirely in water, swimming and flipping and playing, and i love the feeling of a hot shower beating down on me while hot tears stream down my face, and i love the refreshing glug glug glug of water gliding down my throat. I love the aliveness. Water is violent. Water is healing. Water is movement. The only lasting truth is change. I have no idea what the fuck i am doing in this world i am clueless and aimless i am without hope or answers, but whether or not i’m moving forward, i’m moving. I am in motion. Like water, like liquid: flowing. Or like a torrential downpour or a cyclone or a riptide or boiling water or a trickle or a drip or a ripple.
I don’t have any answers but i’m not giving up on asking questions. Life as trial and error.
Stay in touch.
XO <3