this picture says maybe everything you need to know about me

an odie stuffed animal, posed with his mouth full of 20s, photo taken by me, on my 9th birthday.

the past / the future

accidentally went down an email rabbit hole (one of my favorite kind of holes, if i’m being honest), looking for info about octavia butler (i read one of her books in a college class, “Gender, Sexuality, and Migration,” and images from it are burned into my brain — think it was dawn, but i can’t totally remember) (makes you think the images were perhaps not literally BURNED into my brain) (FACT: brains lose cells) (FACT: brains stop remembering things) (FACT: brains might never have remembered anything actually). TO WIT: this story from when i was living in san francisco in 2006 working for yahoo! —  very strange time of my life and one that i associate mostly with disappointment / sadness but actually there were many sweet spots, like this one that i wrote to chad:

– saturday night, i finished munich! which i rate with a netflix 4-star rating! i really liked it and in fact thought to myself, “this is the best movie steven spielberg has ever made” but then there was a real cheeser part at the end, so i had to mentally retract it. after finishing it, i went ALONE to a music/dance party my friend evans was involved in. took the bus ALONE at 11:30pm. i was like this: i dinna wanna go. but i forced myself, because chad, check it, this chick does not want to die alone.

i got there, saw evans for 0.5 seconds, and then was alone. knew no one. so i watched a band for awhile, then went into the hip-hop dj room and tried dancing, but dancing alone to hip-hop…a little awkward. please picture that. i’m picturing it again in my mind. awkward. i was like, “my life is really, really weird.” just as i was like, ENOUGH! some of my friends arrived. so happy. then i met one of their friends, and he did this weird double-take, and was like, “i’m sorry, but i’m a little bit in love with you right now.”

i was like, thanks, you are awes. my ego really really really really really really needed to hear that.

then i went and danced and didn’t see him again. but i want him to know that he TOTALLY made the dancing alone in the hip-hop room worth it. he really did.

humble brag apologies, but also let’s be real, there’s no glamour in taking the bus alone at 11:30pm to a venue and dancing alone to hip-hop. or actually is it slightly madonna-in-nyc-in-the-early-80s. but back to octavia butler. read dawn, it will blow your mind. it basically presaged all transgender / the gender neutral future, in the form of sci-fi (if i’m remembering the right book). also shout out to munich, i forgot how much i loved that movie, minus the terrible magical sex scene at the end.

robert adams

Colorado Springs, Colorado (1968)

from Summer Nights Walking 

Longmont, Colorado (1979)

more images here

(via creatures of comfort)

so be it! see to it!

Octavia Butler’s handwritten note-to-self from 1988, courtesy of ann friedman’s newsletter.

SO BE IT! SEE TO IT!

the sad tale of amtrak 188

Brandon Bostian, Amtrak 188’s engineer, in 2007. Credit Photograph by Huy Richard Mach/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated Press

the tragic tale of the wreck of amtrak 188 and its engineer brandon bostian:

There seems never to have been a time when Brandon Bostian did not dream of a career on the railroad. Growing up in suburban Tennessee, a shy and slightly gawky introvert, he papered the walls of his bedroom with pictures of locomotives and made regular pilgrimages to Central Station in Memphis. There, in the evenings, he would observe the arrival of the City of New Orleans, an overnighter immortalized in the 1971 folk song of the same name (“Mothers with their babes asleep rocking to the gentle beat/And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel”). “When you heard the name Brandon Bostian, the first thing you would think is trains,” one friend told The Times.

Most kids outgrow their love of trains. Bostian never did. At the University of Missouri, he studied journalism and business and attended a nondenominational Christian church called the Rock. Openly gay later in life, Bostian dated women in college. “He was never exactly the life of the party,” a fellow Rock parishioner told me. “It took some time to get to know him. Once you did, you saw how truly kind he was, and how smart.” And yet the railroad was never far from Bostian’s mind. A college roommate remembers him holed up in his dorm room, playing train simulators on the computer. He amassed books on trains, small metal models of them. During his senior year, he landed a part-time gig as a brakeman with a regional railway and then later a conductor with Amtrak, and by 2010, he had migrated out to the Bay Area to work as a contract engineer for Caltrain, the local commuter-rail line.

guess i’m just on an eleanor kick

been listening to this and new view a lot lately. every day a little closer to freedom.

note to self

Note To Self: Be Kind, Be Kind, Be Kind. Print by Rob Reynolds.

found this in on old email: my skillset, STILL RELEVANT

i’m considering going back to school, too, maybe for library science. but i’m taking the fall to consider it. what am i good at?

BEING A BRAT!

SOME COMPUTER STUFF!

WATCHING TV!

HOLDING BABIES!

EATING JUNK FOOD, BEING LAZY!

what was i searching for exactly?

chickens are living in the future

All this is to say that I am trying to enjoy the process of getting there. I get bored even writing that sentence. People who live in the moment don’t get shit done, and I like to live in a constant state of shit-getting-done. But the other thing that is occurring to me is that if I continue to jump from one goal to the next without awareness and enjoyment in the journey then I’ll be dead. Because life will speed by.

Animals help with this because dogs and sheep are always just living right in the moment, and to watch them is to imagine that singularity.

Chickens are living in the future, I can’t tell you why I know this but I do.