bmartinlevy

[bmartinlevy]

Your memory seems significantly worse than others. You hope it is not early-onset dementia. Could it really be a possibility? At this age?

It is actually, most likely, your Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder robbing you of the brain capacity. Just like it robs you of many other things.

But is the worrying about dementia actually your Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder? And how have you forgotten how to spell obsessive? You swore it always had 4 S's. Do dementia patients first lose their ability to spell?

You must resist the urge to Google this. Your urge to Google is Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. But it is relieving that you will soon forget this urge, because of the early-onset dementia.

[bmartinlevy]

[bmartinlevy]

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.” — Charles Bukowski

[bmartinlevy]

On the way to work there is a mosquito on the inside of the windshield. I tried to punch it to death but missed and hurt my knuckles against the glass. I realized even if I killed it, I'm currently driving 40mph and have nowhere to wipe the guts. I turn the defroster setting on full and it blows the mosquito out into the vacuum of the open window, sucked out into the car's jet stream to go on and annoy some other carbon-based life form assuredly.

[bmartinlevy]

'[Depressive Realism] puts forward the notion that depressed individuals actually have more realistic perceptions of their own image, importance, and abilities than the average person. While it’s still generally accepted that depressed people can be negatively biased in their interpretation of events and information, Depressive Realism suggests that they are often merely responding rationally to realities that the average person cheerfully denies.' - Christopher S. Putnam

[bmartinlevy]

[bmartinlevy]

[bmartinlevy]

[bmartinlevy]

[bmartinlevy]

People who listen to news radio first thing in the morning are a special sort of masochist.

[bmartinlevy]

Paris | 2025

[bmartinlevy]

Manchester | 2025

[bmartinlevy]

Cryptic symbolism as a form of art seems slightly out of place in a world that has, at minimum, 3,700 active nuclear warheads.

[bmartinlevy]

New Orleans, Louisiana | 2024

[bmartinlevy]

Louisiana | 2024

[bmartinlevy]

I come back to America now rarely. The drive from the airport always feels a bit alien. Time spent away causes the normality of America to fade. You get bug-eyed at the enormous vehicles in such numbers on huge open roads and endless miles upon miles of beige shopping malls. I forget how supermassive flags above car dealerships can be. Rows and rows of oversized trucks beneath the shadow of an unnaturally vast stars and stripes, baking in the sun even in the middle of winter. A foreigner can immediately feel the vulgar and overt nationalism, like a purposeful fuck you to climate change.

[bmartinlevy]

The branches have shed their final leaves now, discarded them on the pavement and the roads. The local council, forever beleaguered in delays, has not cut back many of the trees overhanging the streets. The spindly, bare tendrils of branches, in a networks of capillaries reach purposelessly towards the paved floors. The branch ends screech when they grow long enough to touch the oncoming vehicles, dragging along their hoods and roofs, like dragging your fingers along a grinder, until they catch on a windshield wiper or can no longer bear the abuse and snap, bits of branch mingling among the dead leaves beneath the car wheels.