random-bird

[random-bird]

[June 24, 2025]

I find it remarkable that I can move at all. Once you approach/hit your bodyweight in weight training it just becomes Weekly Visceral Reminders Of How Heavy You Truly Are (From Four Different Angles). It’s funny that all along, I was unknowingly inviting myself to a challenge just by existing in this particular body—a friendlier physical version of the usual turmoils one deliberately puts themselves through (i.e. worry, obsession), essentially. I’ll take it.

[random-bird]

[June, 20, 2025]

Some nice highlights from a few weeks of reading Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972):

"The night closes in like water over a stone." (Like Water Over a Stone, 1963)

"To be born is a miserable thing, but this time around it made me laugh. Humor corroded my extremities and made me phosphorescent..." (The Dream of Death, or the Site of the Poetical Bodies, 1964)

"I am afraid given all that I carry inside me [...] so many things in motion, so many figurines in blue and gold that dance and gesticulate [...] and then there is the black space [...] the threshold of your greatest innocence or merely the border of madness. I see my fear as a kind of mutiny among these blue and gold figurines." (Extracting the Stone of Madness, 1964)

"To write is to rummage through a tumult of burnt bodies, for the arm bone that corresponds to the leg bone. A miserable mixture. I restore, I reconstruct, so surrounded am I by death. Without truce, without halo, without grace." (Extracting the Stone of Madness, 1964)

"Someone dreamed this up so poorly, / someone consumed by accident / the forgotten distances." (Falling, 1965)

"When you look at me / my eyes are keys, / the wall holds secrets, / and my fear carries words, poems. / Only you can turn my memory into a fascinated traveler" (Who Lights the Way, 1965)

"Years and minutes are making love, / Green masks in the rain. / Church windows with obscene stained-glass. / Blue fingerprint on the wall. / I don’t know it. / I don’t acknowledge it. / Dark. Silence." (From the Other Side, 1965)

The last in particular is such a sharp description of isolation—the kind of isolation that renders the world utterly foreign, even obscene, carnivalesque; it is full of all sorts of acts and colors and signs that are within your knowledge but beyond your participation.

[random-bird]

[June 20, 2025]

I'm not a dualist but sprinting at the end of a long distance run is the closest I'll get to feeling my consciousness separate from my body. Everything is in slow motion. I'm a floating mind, a loose passenger; “my body” is only a mechanism and a distant pain; I even lose the beloved music in my earbuds. Don't do drugs, just run

[random-bird]

[June 19, 2025]

When the period cramps are so bad that "tomorrow" feels uncertain

[random-bird]

[June 17, 2025]

Listen to Ravel and the world becomes marine, while Poulenc is a warm hug with feet on the floor.

[random-bird]

[June 11, 2025]

Yes, I am looking—I am seeing the state of things, the cones and the demarcations existing so loudly yet so numbly, the signs posted in all sorts of directions like listless sentinels—the state of myself, the summer heat eating my patience, and having a crisis

[random-bird]

[June 2, 2025]

1992 #7 by Vladimir Velickovic (1992)

I love Thornhill's The Dark Pool so much. I've only really pondered the lyrics of Nurture but today I had a really exciting time pondering Red Summer. The instrumentals alone are already quite immersive, but a little extra thought towards the lyrics has just made listening to this song an absolute fever dream. I'm going to have the most banger train rides.

Eros II by Juliano Kaglis (2016)

My interpretation is totally liberal and probably not the band's intention. But it feels self-consistent enough, and this is no school assignment, so whatever. The basic concept is this: night personified stands on a hill, bringing all people to a dark pool. Both are symbolically equivalent. I visualize the latter as a dark, almost red, slow whirlpool. This could be a metaphor for all sorts of silly angsty things, but my best stab at it is uncertainty. Not quite the buzz of anxiety, nor the gnawing of depression, but a massive, numbing uncertainty that totally annuls all meaning and thought you have gathered to your life. It is like meaninglessness, plus the energy that we expend and all that we violently upheave in our existence to deny it, distilled to a potent venom. Summed over all humanity, it is a bottomless, inescapable pool. In the last parts I highlight the particular form of denial that is a desperation for love, sampled in myself and many others my age.

Sleep by Eugène Carrière (1897)

On a more fantastical or mythological note, a messiah-like figure, whom I reference as “the one,” is an entity whose responsibility is to bring people to the pool, gently and painlessly—either as one the night enlists to enact mercy, or as a distinct intervention against the merciless night. Or, the night contradictorily simulates its own mercy by manifesting itself as a second apparition that is "the one." (Holy shit, I've just recreated a dark holy trinity: the night, the one, and the pool!) Regardless, they wish to save everyone they bring, but they cannot, and that is their burden. It is a burden that makes them desire the same destruction that they escort people to. They could be a former human; they could be some anthropomorphic angel; an extraterrestrial; who knows. I have even considered them being the “angel” that I refer to in my interpretation of Nurture. If not the angel of Nurture (the more worlds the better), I have thoughts on expanding this scenario to some surrealist psychological fiction… but not today because I’m sleepy.

Below, the lyrics from Red Summer are italicized. They are not necessarily separated by their original stanzas, but they are in consecutive order and read as part of this thing that I spontaneously wrote. It is vaguely from the perspective of "the one," probably because my interpretation of the song lyrics is.

Summers dream and the night stands still Waiting patiently on the hill

The recollection and brightness of summer days float away for now. We do not live them, but they live, separate from us, dreaming in distant rivered color as the light leaves us for black. Black comes over the hill. A tall figure, called night, stands on the hill. At first we thought its two eyes were stars. What else could those be? But it does not contain other worlds, such as stars and their planets. It is the world, which will take us all.

Just take my hand All these faces turn into sand

One stands besides you, whose purpose is to take you gently into the night. Their hand brushes yours. It is eerily cool, but nothing is as exceedingly cold as the two eyes on the hill, so your senses, which seem to fail you, take it as warmth. You fumble within for courage; namely, the same animal resolve with which you claw yourself out of paralyzing fits of sleep. But it is as if it were made of the same color as the summers which now leave, a boil of color far behind the night. The last colors to leave are red. The one who stands beside you is red so you take their hand. The last summer is red; a red summer. What does that mean? What do you recall?

Follow me to a land I made Sightless eyes in this synthetic shade

Red encloses you and it is like you are inside a mouth. So you are still alive. But this means you are also tired. A grainy shadow breathes cool particles onto your skin.

Watch as you fall into my arms Peaceful charm, safe from harm

You are the ache of another world to the one who holds you.

Can you breathe?

The air is slow. Red, purple, black. You are soft because you wrinkle and you bruise. The night enjoys wide space; you are a flower on a wide lawn.

The sky can’t hold us all I won’t leave I won’t let you fall

Will you lay with me?

The one who holds you wonders if the two of you could be buried in the same lawn. Then they can watch you forever, even if with dead eyes. Because if there is light, it will reflect off of your saddened face, then off of their eyes, and that is all that matters to them. But there is no burial, only softening procession. Infinitely many for you, still infinitely many more for them…

The lies I’ll shine And never mourn

You are promised nothingness, eternity, oblivion, rest. You see the last of the red summer. Or does blood fill your eyes? What do you remember now?

I’m not strong enough Can I wish that I could save them all?

The one who holds you mimics your valiant last efforts.

Well I know Someone, somewhere is meant for you Drowning in the dark pool Body and mind not ready for love Buried in ravens hoping for doves

Your whole life, you believed yourself entitled to love and to a person; if not by merit, by nature, necessity, and the general order of things. The one who gently lowers you into the dark pool can recall this from their own life. Indeed, the closer they come to the pool, the more bitter this becomes. The water stings. The water laps only their fingers but they feel it up to their waist. They look into your fading vision, aware that your eyes too are now dark pools, and remember your belief. Then they repeat what they do for all: they acknowledge themself as the last person to look into your eyes, the last possible person you could have thrown yourself at and lulled yourself into loving. But nothing is possible in the night. The red summer ends and there is nothing left. The other ones you could have loved have been in the pool. You have been in the pool. Always…

If someone, somewhere could pick me up I’m drowning in a pool of blood Into the deep end ready to swim I’m ready to let the water in

The water stings. The water surrounds only their waist but they feel it around their throat.

[random-bird]

[June 2, 2025]

Miss Fowler is quite busy, for he dispatches both dental scams and DMV scams

[random-bird]

[June 2, 2025]

Love how my grandma just looks you in the eye and says “You got chubbier". Calorie limit -100, disordered eating EXP +500

[random-bird]

[June 1, 2025]

Not being able to run as usual because of injury legit has the same pain as unrequited love. Even worse, because I know running actually helps me so much mentally. I’m so fucking done

Maybe I have to stop conceptualizing “running” as a beloved entity separate from myself and think of it as just something my body does, a headspace that my body simulates… my body is always there as long as I’m conscious. Still miserable

[random-bird]

[May 31, 2025]

Maybe it’s because I entered an era, the DIY beaded choker era. Spectacular, will make 14 more

[random-bird]

[May 31, 2025]

Why do I suddenly gain a will to live at midnight for five minutes

[random-bird]

[May 30, 2025]

It’s So Hard To Be Green, 2000

My first thought stepping into this exhibition at the NGA was that it smelled like burnt rubber. And indeed, these sculptures, made by American sculptor Chakaia Booker (1953–present), were made of tires, as an environmental statement. Apparently the average U.S. car emits five pounds of particulate tire matter via friction per year.

It’s So Hard To Be Green, 2000 (detail)

Personally I think this is a cool visual concept for a demon in a dark urban fantasy setting. The coiled, cut, gaping rubber; the dark mass of it all, the heavy-duty, grotesque feel. Say they emerge from abandoned dumpsters, or abandoned parking garages. They locomote by extending tentacle-like rubber limbs, of course. Maybe younger ones more resemble a single wheel, and roll about. The longer they spend in darkness and abandonment, the larger and more complex they become.

[random-bird]

[May 30, 2025]

Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, 1715 (detail)

I can stare at these sorts of still lives forever. I think they almost stimulate the same brain states as scrolling on Instagram, whatever that means neurologically. When I spy one of these across the room I feel like a child about to be served a tray of candy. Total explosion of things, of detail! Every new dewdrop, receding leaf, insect, angle of slouched petal I notice feels like a sweet reward.

This one is by Jan van Huysum (1682-1749), Dutch painter, whom contemporaries generally acknowledged as Best Fruit/Flower Guy. The Van Huysums had four generations of artists during the Dutch Golden Age, a period following the Eighty Years’ War when the Netherlands broke free of Catholic Spain and began to experiment in art with more secular subjects. I was hogging the area in front of this frame at the NGA for a while.

Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, 1715

Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, 1715 (detail)

[random-bird]

[May 27, 2025]

Also, I feel that large train/transportation systems like the DC Metro are in and of themselves quite a thing to behold. In school clubs people meet to work on “projects” with almost no results and I scoff when I imagine humans attempting bigger things, but somehow this entire system was built. Of course, my pessimism in that regard is short-lived if you consider any sort of complex engineering that is well-integrated in modern life. Cars, for instance! But the Metro sprawls, and it must have taken an interestingly strong will to blast through all of the stone. Clearly some force was at play. I wonder what each step was like, who were the masterminds, what details were most perplexing and whether those details are usually the most perplexing in building a large underground transport… how many people were involved, how the work was divided and optimized, what resources had to be allocated… all of that is a secret now in the present moment, as I step into the shiny metal vehicle with only a next destination in mind. I am mere motion, with my own plans that are meaningful only to me and perhaps two other people—but I dually demonstrate—partake in?—the intended result of an impressive large-scale human project. That’s cool, and as an unrelated aside, it’s interesting how in an urban setting it’s more likely that my own actions are also conveyors of utility, or of fulfillment of utility and plan. By acting, I become an object. And this is not at all a depressive moment of feeling dehumanized by industrialization, urbanization, etc… it’s just all so interesting how these systems emerged and I’m experiencing them in real time. I would make for a very well-stimulated city dweller lmao

[random-bird]

[May 27, 2025]

I extremely fuck with the dim, unending stone tunnels and brown monochrome/white Helvetica signage of the DC Metro. The only use of other color is in labeling routes, each one like a member of a brutalist pantheon. A tiny mouse darting across a shadowed platform was the most badass thing I’ve seen in a while, so badass that it’s the Metro Mouse in my head now with a badass circular logo where the mouse is essentially a scribbled black dot with a hint of a tail and the words are handwritten in all caps. I don’t drink but I think it could make for great beer branding. And that’s a somewhat different aesthetic from the station itself. You know an aesthetic hits when it generates more :)

[random-bird]

[May 27, 2025]

This song and descending floors to switch lines at Metro Center