kick-it-in-the-sticks:

Johnny Cash feeding Mildred the bear at Grandfather Mountain, NC 

Here’s a zoom. Still blobs. 

Another zoom. 

And one more. 

There they go in the sky. 

“Look at that giant grey balloon lying on its side on the snow and ice—that was once someone’s big beautiful doomed irresistible idea. Why did he go? Because it was his idea, and he had to see how well it could do.”
— From “Doomed,” an essay I wrote about my book and the Arctic for The Awl’s year-end series.

gwendabond:

smallbeerpress:

vintagegal:

Seventeen-year-old Bianca Passarge of Hamburg dresses up as a cat and dances on wine bottles in June 1958. Her performance was based on a dream. She practiced for eight hours a day to do this. (x)

8 hours a day and 57 years later minds: still blown

Me inside starting revisions. 

magictransistor:

Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai, Beached Whale, Sanur, Bali, c. 1975.

To the puppy’s great chagrin, today Lowell removed the bear poop that was in the corner of the yard for the past five days and to which, whenever she’s been taken out, she’s led us with great delight.

It’s hard to know her exact feelings right now but I think they’re similar to what a remote villager might feel if an amazing meteorite had landed at the edge of the village, they’d admired and revered it for a season, and then one day it was gone.

I was going to skip Halloween this year but realized today that I could get a cheesehead hat (modeled here), strap some snakes to it and go as (wait for it) GORGON-ZOLA.

“The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves.”

- Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (via thebegats)

jennydeluxe:

‘‘You know, when I started to experience the difference — or even have my race be highlighted — it was mostly when I would do business deals.’’ Business deals. Meaning that everyone’s cool with a young black woman singing, dancing, partying and looking hot, but that when it comes time to negotiate, to broker a deal, she is suddenly made aware of her blackness. ‘‘And, you know, that never ends, by the way. It’s still a thing” 

– Rihanna, for T magazine

vinylfromthevault:

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Wax Dummy

Ass shaking

tinglealley:

Orphaned baby bat. (Via.)

Somehow neither of them ended up biting the other.

We are pretty much back to normal.
.

“

Charles Saatchi owns your famous piece “My Bed,” an unmade bed with the detritus of a bad few months of depression in 1998. How does the bed get installed when it travels?

I install it. Everything is in sealed containers, and it’s all labeled, like a crime scene. I did it in Frankfurt last year. I hadn’t seen it since 2008. I was thinking, with the cigarettes, that’s so weird because I don’t smoke anymore. I haven’t had sex for years, and there’s this condom. God, there’s a tampon, and I haven’t had a period for years. There’s my ex-boyfriend’s marijuana, I would never be with anyone who smokes marijuana now; there’s a whiskey bottle, and I don’t drink spirits. I get inside and pull the covers over me and then fold them back to look natural. I can actually smell the past. When I touched the condoms, I thought, Oh, I really loved that person who wore that condom. It’s a strange feeling, a good feeling. This ghost of me was still there.

“Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled with leather novels and chai tea. They talk about their ‘morning ritual’ and how they ‘dress for writing’ and the cabin in Big Sur where they go to ‘be alone’ - blah blah blah. No one tells the truth about writing a book. Authors pretend their stories were always shiny and perfect and just waiting to be written. The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not. Even I have lied about writing. I have told people that writing this book has been like brushing away dirt from a fossil. What a load of shit. It has been like hacking away at a freezer with a screwdriver.”

- Amy Poehler , Yes, Please (via jasmined)

Yesterday our puppy Carmella started acted strangely after lunch. Lethargic, then twitchy and then, and this was awful, she toppled over. I picked her up and in two minutes we were in the car driving towards the vets. We live on the east side of town, the vet is on the north side. We got off the interstate and sat at a traffic light. I was saying the puppy’s name, she wasn’t responding (bad sign). But then she would look up at the window when I cracked it (good sign). The twenty minutes went like that. Good sign, bad sign, good sign, bad sign. Our last dog, Lucy, died in the car on the way to the vet’s last October; and I still hate to drive by this particular intersection where we were stuck in 4 o'clock traffic when she started to have a seizure and I was saying her name, over and over, and Lowell said, “Is she still with us?” in a falsely calm voice, because the poor fucker, he was the one having to drive, and so I think for both of us yesterday being at this particular intersection had a layer of awful re-enactment. (And it is weird to be sitting in the car and having animal drama happening in your car and wondering do the other drivers realize? And what drama do they have going on that I don’t realize about them – stuff with their kids, or worries about their parents, or friends, or their health– and oh my god all these cars and all these people sitting in them in just this quarter-mile patch of earth what about all over this entire baked over-trafficked earth.)

At the vet, there was someone waiting and we rushed to the back and a SWAT team of techs in blue descended on her. This too happened with Lucy, and I now hate that back room too. Carmella was still twitching and wobbling and couldn’t walk on her back legs, and kept wagging her tail apologetically about it, and the techs did their thing to help her as Lowell and I stood by, answering questions. “No she wasn’t in a garage unsupervised. No, no switches in food. She’s always on a leash. I don’t think she ate anything on the walk this morning but you never know. She’s very quick.” Etc. etc. etc.

She’s still at the vet’s this morning. Right now I’m waiting to hear how she did during the night. She was pretty good when I left at 8 last night. No longer wobbling, wagging her tail (good sign), but doped to the gills so not really herself either (neutral sign). The vet found her presenting symptoms perplexing and that’s why she wanted to keep her there overnight. She might have something wrong with her GI tract, or she might have eaten something toxic. Or (my private medical diagnosis): I loved her too much and too publicly and caused this illness to descend on her. Either/ or!

Here is the story I keep thinking of. We had left the vets for a bit so Lowell could get back to work (which haha good we’re not even thinking about the bill yet except it’s there like a ruinous $$$ cloud on the horizon) and I could get a sweater and a book to go camp by Carmella’s crate. She was holding steady; the techs said not to worry about leaving but I was of course worried that something would happen when we weren’t there. Lowell made me promise not to speed on the return and I didn’t but I still made the trip in record time, like a witch on a fucking broomstick, and I think if any of us have any powers to move things in the universe, I used up my full allotment for this year and the next to synchronize traffic in Asheville, North Carolina, at 4 o'clock on Sept. 15 so that I could get back to my sick dog lickety split.

So I was flying along, scared and distraught, and listening to the radio and the shitstorm of news and misery, and I passed a street that made me remember the 88 squirrels. The 88 squirrels happened four years ago, after Hurricane Irene, before Sandy. Our cat had brought a baby rabbit to the back porch. (The cat is now also deceased, was loved as besottedly as the dogs, but I think she’d rather you know that she was a really, really good hunter.) The baby rabbit was still alive. It had a slight nick in the neck but that was it. No other injuries I could see. We put it in a crate in our bedroom to recover itself and then planned to set it loose to hop back to its burrow with a tale to tell once it was feeling better. But every time I went to check on it, it seemed worse. Like a bundle of baby bunny misery.

I started calling around and found a website with a list of volunteer wildlife helpers who take in sick animals. I called the first name on the list.

The woman who answered the phone was older, judging by her voice. I explained about the baby rabbit. The woman said that it was getting worse because cat saliva is poisonous to rabbits. Even a small cut can be fatal unless the rabbit gets a certain kind of medicine. I asked if I could bring the rabbit to her.

“I don’t know,” she said. She sounded reluctant. “I’m very tired.” (My memory of this conversation is inexact but this was the gist.)

She seemed to consider. “You see, the rabbit’s going to need the medicine every two hours and I’m not sure I have the energy to stay up tonight… I’ve been taking care of a lot of squirrels lately.”

She explained. After Hurricane Irene, as people had been digging through the wreckage of houses on the North Carolina coast, they’d found a couple hundred injured squirrels and there had been an operation—I remember she used the word “operation"—to bring these injured squirrels to Asheville for treatment. She had taken in 88 of them. 88!!!!! Eighty-seven had gotten better and been released back into the wild. Now she was down to the last one, who had a broken leg. And she was tired, you know, after taking care of 88 squirrels for a month, and wanted to rest.

She asked me a couple questions about the rabbit – how big, etc. – and as we talked she seemed to change her mind, as if she couldn’t help herself, and said to bring it to her after all. It turned out that she lived only a few blocks from us, on a street a couple turns away that I didn’t know was there. When I got to her house her husband, maybe in his 70s, was walking around their yard picking clover to feed the rabbit. He was very nice and looked content, like he was the kind of guy who liked receiving directions to go pick clover. Though what do I know! There was a big shiny truck in his carport.

I was curious about the house – what it would be like after 88 squirrels had been camped there, and the chief thing I can tell you is that you would NOT HAVE BEEN ABLE TO TELL. No smells. Everything very home-y and neat. It was like a lot of the houses in the ‘80s: deep carpeting, La-Z Boys, flowered upholstery. Pictures of the grandkids on every table.

The woman, small and wearing a wildlife-related t-shirt, took the rabbit, administered the first dose of medicine, and then gently placed it in a container she had prepared with a heating pad in the bottom. She asked if I wanted to see the one remaining squirrel of the 88 and of course I did.

She took the squirrel from another container, the same type of plastic storage bin in which she’d placed the rabbit. She let me hold it. It had a wee little white cast on its back leg. Its tail was curled along its belly. It looked up at me. I looked down at it. I have never thought much about squirrels one way or the other, but all of a sudden I could see the squirrel-ness of the squirrel and the way it mattered that it existed.

Then we left. It was a little awkward because I felt like I should pay for the rabbit’s treatment??? But she said no, she gets funding from somewhere. I didn’t get to ask the questions that later occurred to me, like WHERE DID YOU RELEASE THE OTHER 87 SQUIRRELS and IS THAT WHY OUR NEIGHBORHOOD HAS SO MANY OF THEM???? And the question I would never ask but IS IT AWFUL FOR YOU WHEN YOU SEE A SQUIRREL DEAD IN THE ROAD OR…. IS THAT JUST A FACT OF LIFE YOU’VE COME TO ACCEPT.

I have since lapsed back into not caring so much about squirrels either way, But I still think about the 88 squirrels and the kindness of this woman and all the people who took part in this weird, odd operation to portage two hundred of them across the state for rehabilitation and treatment. And about the people who while going through the hurricane debris, with all the houses like matchsticks, would come across an injured squirrel and have the wherewithal to go about saving it. It’s not that I wish this didn’t happen for the squirrels; it’s that I wish it happened more for other people, other things, all over the place (I could give a long list right here; you could too), BUT still. I’m happy it happened for the squirrels, and I think about them and this woman often and it’s comforting when you feel like the world is a miserable, awful, chaotic place to know that somewhere there’s a squirrel-portaging operation going on. You just don’t know about it until you do.

azealiabanks:

gendeerfluid:

nowhites:

micdotcom:

Watch: ‘The Today Show’ cut off Janelle Monáe in the middle of a vital message about Black Lives Matter

and that right there is America for you.

honestly what kinda dystopian shit

Crackers Will ALWAYS be Crackers.

Carrie Fisher on Star Wars.

vinylfromthevault:

billboard:

Billboard Cover Sneak Peek: 5 Ways Duran Duran Has Proved the Haters Wrong

“lead singer Simon Le Bon paid attention to how the sun fell on his face, Taylor remains slender, and Rhodes refers to blue jeans as “woefully pedestrian.”

sufferaseachange:

4gifs:

Raised by collies, this lamb thinks she is a dog. [video]

finally my essence has been captured. i renounce all other GPOYs.

picadorbookroom:

A stunning portrait of Hilary Mantel by Sally Soames, circa 1992. 

[via]

gwendabond:

barbarastanwyck:

Gloria Swanson practicing yoga in her apartment, 1954

cc tinglealley

lastnightsreading:

Donna Tartt at Congregation Beth Elohim, 10/29/13

“It is spring! We are going to die!”

- Louise Glück, from Poems 1962-2012
(via violentwavesofemotion)