“Dreams Of A Furnace, The Warmth Of The Ember Flickering Upon The Brick Wall Covered In The Scrawls

September is a pretty month, with its pale blue skies overlaid with gold and rose, while hazy clouds of a darker grey float dreamily about the edges.

Frosted glass between rain and life

I run my hand through the same old withered branches,

Drenched in the same old tired rain,

Far away the sunset harbours the lost gold of

Odysseys gone by, and if the wind were to hide

Within it some unremembered glow from the land

Of unknown secrets, the evening will gently

Whisk away the covers of the coquette,

And reveal to us a maiden under the bent willow,

Sweet as the apples from the orchards where our dreams

Were buried. She will beckon for the children

To gather around the fire and tell them the story

Of Zerah and Zulamith, whilst we twist the

Slender branches of the cherry tree into a throne

Fit for the brides of heaven to recline on,

Place at the altar a wreath of dead roses,

And hope that the silent fragrance borne to the shore

Is enough for the sea to give up the child

She drew to her heart in death’s storm.

…

And dare I tag anyone? @pollosky-in-blue perhaps you’ll like the story?

The invisible ropes of twilight cling gently to the new dawn, the gates of heaven are barred. “Exile is sweet”, uttered the wind. “For whom?” “Everybody”, she answers with a smile. “Liberty”, she mused, “what is it…?”Hesitation. Tentative reply. “Freedom to call your spirit your own.” “And how is it to be obtained?” Silence. “ Answer me young woman, how is one to go about purchasing liberty?” Murmurs. “I do not think you can.”Wonder. “Nature”, she suddenly said, “The answer to be found in nature, is it not?” Uncertainty. “Perhaps” “Are fetters to be hailed?”, she presses. Quick answer. “No” Laughter. “Break them then” Perplexed. “You despise your chains, yet revere them. What is it that you want child?”, She teasingly asks, wounding her slender fingers around a flyaway rose. Exclaims in despair, “I don’t know.” Laughter again. “Nobody really does I suppose”, she said, more to herself than to anybody else. “Why do you seek freedom?” “Liberation of the mind and soul is the object of life.” “Very well,” she said, “Liberty you seek and Liberty you shall have”. And thus cast the ascending sun it’s first rays on the mischievous interrogator and the exiled one.

“Perhaps dawn is lovelier than twilight, allusive of the light that arises from darkness, the peaceful assurance that night does not last forever. Or the cold drawing away of the veil, the assertion that disturbance always mars the idyllic dream of nightfall.”

I’m reading a book on Fermi’s paradox and the author points out that even if we detected intelligent life on a planet somewhere, it wouldn’t solve the paradox—given the enormous scales of space and time involved, “Why are there just two planets harbouring intelligent life?” is as great a mystery as “Why is there just one?” Though, finding one other civilisation might solve the problem if they are more advanced than us (and able to communicate with us)—they might have a better idea of what the astrobiological landscape is like and just be able to explain to us why life isn’t more common or why we can’t detect it. The author quickly adds that this would feel like cheating. Being given the explanation rather than figuring it out ourselves. We don’t really want that, do we. I just love scientists. Imagine being a member of an older and more advanced alien civilisation thinking you’re doing these “human” creatures a great kindness by finally putting their minds at ease and explaining why they couldn’t find more signs of life out there—and having them react like “Oh!!…….. we wanted to find the answer ourselves :( ” I would be very charmed.

in the sixth months after graduating from college, with my very expensive degree from a good college, i ate nothing but bread. i worked at a bakery / cafe / restaurant and got half off one meal per shift but it was still too expensive even then. but at the end of every night we would throw out all the bread loaves that hadn’t sold, which was most of them, every night. we would fill up ten boxes to give away to a shelter and then we could take anything we could carry, and i couldn’t afford a half off deconstructed sandwich, but i could fill the cabinets of my apartment with bread. everyone who worked there was just like me, subsisting on discarded, overpriced bread. 

(when the managers’ backs were turned i was taught to leave the trashbags of bread behind the dumpster rather than inside it, because it was locked after everyone left to prevent people from stealing from it. we would say we were going out to stack chairs and instead stack prepackaged salads prepared that morning in the narrow space between wall and dumpster, but that’s not what this is about.)

we were working valentine’s day, a little bit miserable about it, because customers are somehow worse on a holiday about love, and even if we were single we didn’t want to be here, and most of us had people we’d rather be spending the day with, and the snappish, hardass manager was working that day, and everyone could not wait for the day to be over. 

we had a boxes of those bakery tissue sheets around and i was twisting it in my hands and i thought about how the first night my uncle spent with my aunt he had to get up early for work but didn’t want to wake her and the whole thing hadn’t been planned, exactly, so he (a roofer by trade and a golden glove boxer by sport) went into the kitchen and took some paper towels and twisted them between his big, scarred hands until it formed a sweeter shape and when my aunt work up it was to a paper towel rose on her pillow. 

so i used a couple sheets of bakery tissue to make a rose and walked up to my coworker who stared at me with a rictus smile and i gave it to her, trying not overthink if it was a weird thing to do. her smile slipped and she asked “you made this?” holding it carefully, like it wasn’t something her two year old son could have made with his pudgy hands, and i shrugged and got more milk from the back. 

then another coworker held the steamer too long when frothing milk, not on accident but because he was irritated, so i rolled another rose and tucked it in his apron pocket as i walked by. then it was just one more of us up front and it was nothing, thirty seconds of twisting paper to take the stack of cookies out of her hands and hand her a tissue paper rose, her lined face lifting into a grin as she proudly tucked it into the chest pocket of her shirt and i may as well have been standing in front of the ovens for how hot my face felt. 

it was such a silly thing to do, i felt ridiculous, giving away hastily constructed tissue paper roses on valentine’s day, clumsy artful garbage. then one of the servers walked by and noticed and so i made her one too, and then other servers came by, leaning over the glass, and complimenting the flowers with big eyes, and i laughed and made more, still not sure if it was sincere, but even if it wasn’t, i figured making them one and handing it over was better than saying no. 

then i went to the back again and the dishwasher yelled out “where’s mine? what about us?” and he was too sweet to ever be anything less than sincere, so someone kept an eye on the door to the manager’s office as i stood in the sweltering kitchen and rolled clumsy tissue paper roses, enough for everyone 

and by the time the day ended, everyone had one, everyone wore one, tucked in their shirt or their apron or stuck in their hair or taped to the top of their pen. everyone was a little less miserable, smiling like we were all on in on the joke, although i don’t think any of us knew the punchline 

this story doesn’t have a punchline either. i just sometimes think of how much better some crumpled tissue paper made things and think that it can be that easy, sometimes, if we’re sincere and don’t overthink it too much

When Mahmoud Darwish said, "A University degree, four books and hundereds of articles and I still make mistakes when reading. You wrote me 'good morning' and I read it as 'I love you'."

ok from what i can tell there have only been like 4 moderately widespread memes on this site in the past month or so (1. pokemon go meme 2. taylor swift copyright meme 3. “you gotta” 4. halsey lyrics on spongebob caps) which others have noted is a remarkably reduced rate of meme production for this trash site. 

while i think the fact that the majority of tumblr’s user base has gone back to school definitely contributes to The Great Meme Depression of 2015 (TGMD 2k15), it cannot be the only explanation. if it was we would see the same Meme Stagnation every year around the same time, which has not been the case. september 2014 gave us unavoidable site-wide phenomena such as madden gifferator, “what’s better than this? guys being dudes,” the rebirth of loss.jpg, steal her look, what are we?, etc. 

i propose that the rapid rate of meme production we grew accustomed to in 2014 and early 2015 deflated the staying power of individual memes. our hyper-awareness of memes and the fact that our metatextual analysis of said memes became a meme within itself (”memeology”) conditioned us into constant vigilance in our search for “the next meme.” i mean, for fuck’s sake, the first meme of 2014 was “what’s going to be the first meme of 2014?” and the last meme of 2014 was “is this the last meme of 2014?” with garbage pseudo-intellectual meta we sowed the seeds of our own destruction.

deflation of individual meme value led to an even more dramatic increase in meme production (for evidence, just look at how many memes the blog memedocumentation has explained. and of course, those are only 2015 memes. the fact that memedocumentation does not document pre-2015 memes is another fucking 2015 meme) this lead to an even heavier reliance on what could be referred to as Meme Credit–we were borrowing and resurrecting old memes like pepe and the aforementioned loss.jpg to satisfy the Meme Demand in the absence of concrete, original memes. we were destined to crash when that credit ran out and the vaults of the Meme Banks were emptied. 

even now as i reflect on how meme hyper-vigilance and overproduction has destroyed the meme economy, i cannot help but wonder “but what will be the next meme?”

only some kind of……….new deal………a New Meme Deal, if u will, can save us from this Great Meme Depression. in its absence we shall continue to suffer.