legionofpotatoes

[legionofpotatoes]

‘you put that cig out, you can hold her’

[legionofpotatoes]

all those clunky thinkpieces I've written about art being an insufficient form of escapism from difficult processes like grief and insecurity to only find myself doing exactly that in throwing my ass at work and videogames in order to escape from seeing my apartment as a quiet tomb to my cat. and suddenly one of those videogames is about a girl who throws herself at her made-up world in order to escape from seeing her home as a tomb to her brother. clair obscur grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me over and over again until I remembered that escapism is never ever ever enough and you gotta like use it as a process and eventually shed it to face the music. otherwise it immolates and hollows you out dude. it warps your perspective into perceived objective reality. and then there's no hearing anyone trying to push you out into a far stranger, far richer life that might just surprise you with a path to actual healing. you're just left with yourself, fractured and limited

[legionofpotatoes]

SINNERS (2025) dir. Ryan Coogler

[legionofpotatoes]

SINNERS (2025) dir. Ryan Coogler

[legionofpotatoes]

And here we go! I'm practically foaming at the mouth from excitement 🙈

We're just doing full renders of single characters for now, but I am willing to discuss pairs and whatnot 👀

So if you have a Rook, or Tav, or Hawke, or any other sort of character you want me to draw, drop me an email at the address below or just message me here!

ghilenan@gmail.com

[legionofpotatoes]

here's my full piece for @daflowerzine ! 🌼

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now what the fuck is a Labubu . don't piss me off, man

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kind of hate my stupid caustic pussy for dissolving my underwear over time but it's kind of cool, like, scientifically

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wizard who's too lazy to name things properly and so can't ever find the incantation she's looking for bc her spellbook is full of spells called shit like 'aaaa1' and 'asdfghjk'

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Synchronized “😐”

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SOUTH OF MIDNIGHT ˗ˏˋ 4 / ∞ ´ˎ˗

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oof i could smell albеrto miеlgo on that mаrathon trailer before i even had time to scroll down and confirm it

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there she is

[legionofpotatoes]

did i tell u guys i got into an argument on twitter bc i said foxes are dogs and someone tried to bring up their actual fuckin. classification or whatever and i just said “foxes are dogs cause they are fluffye” and they kept arguing with me. the entire time i was like “you will not survive the immigration to tumblr you are lucky we are not there right now”

[legionofpotatoes]

I had been floating through my apartment these past days suppressing every sense that blared alarms at the gaping hole in the middle of everything. Was pretending she was still snuggled up somewhere out of view. Finally processed it by cleaning up last night. Her toilet, her brushes, her little paw prints on the counter. This shit sucks fellas

I'll self soothe by pointlessly journaling again I guess!

I just don't know how to exist without her at home it feels like. After cremating her I stayed with my partner for a few days and then the first night back home was the emptiest I'd felt in my entire life. Dramatic!

why'd I just make a joke there? It did feel that way. Her smell was everywhere, her stuff was everywhere. Took so many photos of those faint paw prints. I move through the rooms like a ghost. I feel like I am floating because my body is rejecting every attempt at being present. Does this make sense? I don't want to focus on any one moment. Like rolling a boulder up an incline and the boulder is also punching me repeatedly because the boulder is reality itself that I am pushing away.

I am not good at grief and death. This is a lesson that I had to have beaten into me these past three years. I don't deal with it linearly, properly, healthily, or at all like an adult should, I think. I hate how much it shuts me down and turns me into a black hole of energy. Through the haze I can see myself being a nuisance to my loved ones sometimes but I have no heart to push through it. I feel like this is a pretty universal thing. Seen it happen from outside in.

they say grief isn't a finite thing but a process. And I can attest that it definitely transforms over time! But it's also additive? Everything else in life feels balanced in its give and take. But death only compounds. And I often feel like I am running out of places to store it in. It's like a game of tetris each time. Where does this terribly mangled piece fit into my psyche in a way that doesn't unravel everything? Oh it's nowhere? No worries just bolt it on there anyway and the aerodynamics of moving through life will smooth some of the edges eventually. Others not so much.

I have a deeper insecurity that pisses me off in this whole thing. A lot of my worldview and baseline beliefs rest - theoretically, it now seems - on a staunch respect and acceptance of what death is supposed to be. In the natural order I mean. Circle of life and all that. I feel like I look at so much loathsome reactionary sentiment around and trace it back to feelings of inadequacy, powerlessness, and on an even deeper level, a paralyzing fear of death. So, intellectually, my ego rages against it. I chase those themes in stories and philosophical theorems, I pay lip service to the ineffable value of mortality, I worship at the altar of transience, of change, of being a temporary perspective point of a universe that constantly expels and subsumes them to and fro. I like that framework of understanding life and death; I want to inhabit those beliefs. They feel right, primal, divine.

But then death touches my life and I have such idiotic trouble squaring what I feel with those beliefs. There's a lot of physiological trauma associated with it for sure - body recoils at the sudden shift in routines, absence of familiar patterns, lack of crucial stimuli. Maybe that's why? Feels almost like love is a resource I gently tap from multiple sources across the lives that surround me, for nourishment and fuel, and when an ore is lost there's no recourse. I cannot simply truck on and aggressively reallocate remaining channels to maintain bandwidth. Gotta grieve, gotta change somehow.

It's not for them, my partner tells me. And she's right. The cats are at peace, no longer in pain, no longer inhabiting their tiny perspectives of our greater whole. Everyone else too, all the loss I keep recirculating like a demented merry-go-round inside my head, they're okay now. In whatever context that can be defined in, however you spin it - their corporeal suffering is at a confident zero. Their essence, one could say, is in a far less entropic state, peacefully blanketing and guiding the flow instead of being confined to a confusing and traumatic flesh puppet caught in its currents. So yeah I know they don't need my tears, my head understands that, but I think there's something less personal in mourning all this.

Like with chichi specifically when I drill down to it it's the experiences. I collapsed on the floor and wept at the small hairs still visible on the brushing glove because the specificity of that ritual between this particular kitty and her dad, that small gesture of love, is forever lost. The kitty is at peace and her idiot companion will be fine with his drawings and video games, but the experiences that bound them cannot carry on unchanged. That's quite sad. Bodies and lives ending is normal, necessary, and kind. Relationships and experiences, however, were never a predestined vessel born out of stardust. They formed out of thin air, from that magnetic chemistry between unlikely cohorts. Seeing those end abruptly isn't as easy to chalk up to cosmic scales. It's fair to lag and glitch while your brain deals with the sudden loss of those calcified rituals. Maybe that is what's crossing my wires when reconciling personal loss with my highfalutin beliefs.

I sound like a loon. But mostly just reassuring myself that my grief is normal maybe and not as weird and childish as I try to make it seem. I know cats are idiots and pets in general represent a selfish type of unconditional love we like to cultivate, but it's also more than that. It's stupid to even assume otherwise. My favorite artwork of all time is, and don't punch too hard if you've heard this one before, brosio's two earthlings. And it is one hundred percent because of the name. Cause they're both the same thing. Separated not just by time, but biology, sapience, death itself. and yet they're still somehow the same exact thing. Like me and chichi were.

Different eyes and different brains watching and interpreting the same strange reality, and choosing to coalesce in that experience. I don't know how true it is that ancient felines domesticated themselves in order to live alongside people for a steadier supply of food, but there's something so whimsically sacred in that possibility. these utterly alien hairless beasts seem prone to throw food our way, so maybe we'll hitch a ride and see where it takes us.

I hope chichi had a good one with me. She was the sweetest, gentlest, kindest soul in the tiniest, fluffiest body. I knew her mom, was there for her birth, and watched her maintain that peculiar enjoyment of human contact even as she matured and went through her own challenges on the streets (I couldn't rescue her until after I moved into my own apartment). Nothing seemed to blunt her spirit, no expected pavlovian defensiveness or aggression manifested. one day I discovered she had a BB pellet embedded between her shoulder blades, skin already healed over the impact point, trapping the tiny bullet under her epidermis. the vets said it was okay to leave it in.

I hope whoever shot at her is living their worst life. but her response to me touching the pellet was to immediately plonk into my arms for a cuddle. that was her response to most things. she lived to love and be loved. she made pancakes all the time. it was her form of response prioritized even above meowing. she'd be asleep with her paws up and if I quietly whispered her name, her upwards beans would start gently curling and opening in mid-air before a single peep would leave her mouth. I kept her her nails untrimmed due to us living on a higher floor - better safe than sorry - so those kneads were felt keenly. today I would rip my arm off and eat it just to feel one of her paws digging into my knee again. but I like to think the clouds are extra cushiony in the sky since she went up there and started fluffing them up.

she had many litters, and after arriving into my home, she enjoyed a calm half a decade of retirement. eleven years isn't a long time for a cat, but I like to think it's more than most get in her predicament. we had to remove her teefs due to an infection, move to an all-soft-food diet, and take extra care not to run into that silly tongue hanging out as a result. I'm not sure if she would have lived more years or less without me swooping her into my arms, but I like to think it's the former. and that it was her own choices that made that possible.

I loved not just the warmth she spilled into my heart, but the very real being behind her eyes. the interior life of this impossibly small idiot who made it her life's mission to cuddle every living thing. I would sometimes look at her contended face squished against my thigh, gently vibrating from a deceptively strong purr drive, and I would wonder. just how can any form of life possibly hope to aspire to something more than this, something purer or kinder than a simple yearning for quiet togetherness. why greatness? why is goodness not enough?

chichi was very good. she made me better, too. she greeted death as she lived life, with dignity, calm, and relentless biscuits. I'll never forget cradling her head as we drove to the final vet appointment. I was in the left back seat, she was lying down in her bed on the right side, and her body was too weak to move. but her eyes were darting, inquisitive, curious. I lifted her noggin and gently cupped it from behind to guide her gaze upwards. dappled lights danced on the window as we approached the clinic, and I could see them reflect in her eyes like stars. we parked the car, and her side of the door opened.

right as she was about to get picked up for her final on-foot transit, I saw her squeeze out one last pancake. simply built different.

I love you pancake monster. I'll try to be okay and remember you fondly. I would say you'd hate the gauche etsy urn I picked out for your ashes, but you hated nothing. you contained only startdust and love.

I hope to feel you again sometime.

[legionofpotatoes]

My partner's wonderful tribute to my late kitty ♥️ @etodraws