The Battle Of The Frogs And Mice, From Up One Pair Of Stairs Of My Bookhouse By Willy Pogany (1920)

Tricycle Gang in Brooklyn, New York City (1930s)

thinking back to the time i realized i'd been practicing such scrupulous politeness abt [bodily feature i actively wasn't attracted to] that my bff had come away with the impression that i was, like, very actively into it, which was like. wow, wild to be so deeply misunderstood—

however it turns out that after putting an enormous amount of energy into Accepting that feature, well, now sometimes i am actively into it, so like. guess i'm the one who was wrong about me after all!

go away forever with me

so i pretty clearly fully broke my poster's instinct, lmao

i've been turning over the problem and i think it comes down to two things: (1) i don't do enough, so i don't have enough to report on; (2) i stopped wanting to weigh in on Discourse, partially bc a lot of it feels petty in the face of rising fascism but mostly bc i started feeling abashed abt having such predictabl(y wearisom)e hobby-horses (this concern can be boiled down to 'i probably shouldn't be Too Myself in case it annoys people,' which objectively is no way to live but subjectively is a tricky little eel trap to wriggle out of!)

and if one isn't creating unprompted content, and also isn't responding to the commonest sort of prompt—well. a content shortage becomes somewhat inevitable.

(there remains of course the other subset of personal content i didn't address in point (1) above, namely mining not projects but the (non)workings of one's own psyche for material; and obviously i used to engage in a great deal of that and find it satisfying! but at this point i'm sufficiently ashamed of the fundamental structure of both my life and my self to find the prospect of public dissection aversive—which may well mean the abscess needs lancing, but. ow.)

and then on top of all that there's the conceptual-stylistic problem that too often these days i'm working with such a clogged brain that wrangling my thoughts into even half-understandable order becomes. very hard. like even on a good day i tend to think and write in nested clauses, such that you have to be able to suspend a series of unfinished parentheses in your own mind for a little while and then circle back and connect the closures; and when my thinking gets muddier my writing too gets muddier, and i find myself floundering in syntactic quicksand that even i'm struggling to parse, only moments after having extruded it…

look, was this towel ““worth mending””? debatable. did i however have fun applying my silly little patches to the hole in it? yes. :)

"Fig. 44. Butterfly" from the Priscilla Irish Crochet Book No. 2" edited by Eliza A. Taylor

Owl Guitar Picks : acid-etched bronze.

unfortunately every time i contemplate perpetrating a text post i get a sentence or three into it only to experience agonies over the hideousness of my own prose styling

which is putting something of a crimp in this whole 'what if i started blogging again' experiment

This sheep tablet woven band might be the cutest thing I ever did. Probably because I don't do cute things often. But now I get the appeal.