Softlylovingsstuff

in the club editing my own writing on the notes app

Homage To Andrea Kiss 2

10x10 cm. oil on paper

Nickie Zimov

legrillonrose@gmail.com

direct: instagram

“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”

—

Johann Hari,

Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?

(via bigfatsun)

Children, like adults, were caught up in war fever after hostilities broke out in August 1914. Many wanted to join the Army, including nine-year-old Alfie Knight from Dublin. Alfie wrote this letter to Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener, volunteering as a front-line despatch rider. In a reply sent by his private secretary, Lord Kitchener thanked Alfie for his offer, but explained that he was 'not yet quite old enough to go to the front'. 

Interstate 84 diary 70

Ruins of Kamieniec Castle in Odrzykoń (1837) by Adam Gorczyński

several people shared this on twitter so I'm going to post it here. absolutely astounding couple of sentences

here’s an updated photo of my jellycat collection! from left to right: fuddlewuddle puppy, jollipop cat, bashful zingy bunny, bashful tangerine bunny, gibbles monster, amuseable peanut, ricky rain frog, ginger kitten caboodle, bashful raccoon, dexter dragon, cozy crew whale, and little fox.

what are three thousand things you associate with me