Radio Silence

Good evening everyone and welcome to Radio Silence, where dreams run thin and blood runs thick!

Who knows why he had to start it with something so macabre sounding. But Jane got it. She hadn’t dreamt in months. Just nights of tea and Radio Silence, days of listless wait. Some sleep in between, deep and empty.

She’d have sworn it wasn’t an obsession, if she’d had anyone to swear it to.

This witching hour we’ll be listening to half cracked codes and grocery lists, in case any of your needed further briefing, to be followed by a reading of The Iliad from a Sandal’s Point of View by Elmer. And the usual music, of course. 

The tea kettle whistled. Jane stared at the folds in her unmade bed, hands resting on her knees as if not knowing what to do. By the time the rising shriek finally registered half of Lucius’s vague warning to Frank about the arrival of the enemy and his wife’s betrayal had already been read. A lazy Vigenère cypher. The key was MARLENE; clearly the broken heart pulled rank on the imminent danger.

I wish she’d stare less blankly.

Along with a handful of others she listens, absorbed by the soothing voice of the host, projected from a channel that technically doesn’t exist. Not a word of politics, sports, news. Just useless things new and old that reached their brains like the nothing else would, or would want to. And at the same time closed them off, took their time, their sleep. The listeners burn through their kettles, stand under long-cold showers. Radio Silence feeds on the rampant minds of its mute listeners. And yet they strive in their fullness, they forget meals but run on excess thought. At least, that’s my theory. They’d probably tell you otherwise, if they wanted to.

…electrical tape, blueberries, ramen. 

A musical intermezzo from The Worst of the 1290’s (the Bland Love Ballads and Uninspired Lutenists edition), and it’s on to Elmer’s Iliad.

Watercolor portraits

 

 

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Vaguely inspired by a younger Practical Frost from Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself

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Inspired by Silvia Pelissero’s “Miss Universe” (below)

watercolor

recent explorations

doodles

specifically the intricate doodles of a certain Peter

whose videos are made even better by the very calm undertone of his voice throughout

then there’s Mr Juan Rivera, not the baseball player or the explorer or the wrestler. the doodler of fantastic doodles.

he draws a great suspicious cow

one stroke art

yes, it has been around since forever, but that doesn’t make it any less amazing. like bread. or the camera lucida. or even the nopetopus.

graphics

if you combine a bookseller, charity, kafka’s metamorphosis and a some talented people that go by The Buck Team, here’s what you get

and then a rather creepy but nonetheless good video by Bo Mathorne

lastly but not leastly,

acting

oh gosh

i’m sorry

I just walked into a magical world 

of interconnected bright screens

and beautiful and terrible

and frankly quite moronic things

and on these tiny squares appeared a page

nothing but pictures and text

yet they kind of evoked more guilt

and annoyance

than pictures and text have any right to

so here i am

writing the reasonless guilt away 

with text shoved into the confinement of a columns

otherwise known as poetry but really

an excuse to not say what you mean but meaning what you say

anyway, procrastination and laziness. that’s all. 

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WARNING- this is a rant. But the name of the blog should be warning enough.

I have concluded that staring at a screen for long periods of time listening to anything from Smetana to Blondie to Eddie Izzard isn’t so bad, while still being really quite bad. I can’t always tell whether the benefit of relaxing listening to things I like and laughing and seeing things I like outweighs the disadvantages of my brain sort of lulling into uselessness. Not to forget procrastination. I could benefit from it occasionally, my life like most every other one isn’t constantly peaceful, we’ve managed to build a challenging and stressful society around ourselves and it’s funny because otherwise it could be depressing and that’s the last thing anyone needs. Not challenging in a good way, challenging in a bureaucratic dumb way that somehow we’ve convinced ourselves we need to avoid anarchy and consequential chaos. And maybe the chaos would be consequential only because we’ve been so pampered with desperately extreme order that we wouldn’t know how to regulate our actions and be directly responsible for their outcomes. We don’t like being chained up, we feel self-righteous indignation and rebelliousness, but maybe we should take a beginners course on how to be free without, I don’t know, killing each other off. You’re free and you can do what you damn well want but one would hope that you’d use freedom for happiness. I bet humans are the only idiots who, when given freedom, would so easily create a dystopia. Not all humans, but some who can corrupt all the rest, not necessarily into being bad, but into doing things that would hardly make people happy even for good reasons. Kind of makes existence rhetorical, if you consider that you exist to be happy, or to feel something anyway, because happiness isn’t the only good emotion, they’re all good to have around in measure. Wow this is really getting an existential rant-y ring to it, but if you’re reading this, stay with me, maybe try and think about it, ’cause the least I hope to do is make someone think just a little. If things were as they should, freedom->happiness, but they’re not, so freedom->dystopia, so we’re lazy and we’ve apparently all decided why bother try for an alternative result from freedom.

Alright, here’s my highway of thought. Maybe it’s too easy to rant about society and existence though. I should try ranting about cookies sometime.