Strand of the Day #1705
This weekend marks another return to Santa Cruz – the second run of this burgeoning tradition. This place may be an anchor for us, the core of the knot tying us all together. Pearce and I are here at Brittany’s house, which is amply guarded by faerie lights, and tomorrow evening Anna and Lauren will join us. Treats and adventure are sure to follow.
Today has stretched out so long that yesterday could have been a week ago. That’s a sign that the hours are weighty, and everything today – late breakfast, long coding, fearless climbing, lengthy chatting, comfort over an empty chip bag, bitter sci-fi and late-late toast – filled each moment well.
Looking forward to tomorrow.
rolling bassline
Game of the Day #1704
Alina introduced some friends to me over a game of A Game of Thrones, and for the next four hours we each set out to destroy everyone else. As head of House Tyrell of Highgarden, with a fleet of ships that lined the bottom half of the continent, I nearly took claim over the Seven Kingdoms. A minor slipup let Alina lay siege to my home, and I was forced to share rule with the saline Greyjoys.
Engrossed in the game as we were, most of our conversation was devoted to strategy or histrionic entreating for kindness. Jeff (center, of house Stark) had some literary lilt to his language, and seems quite the characters; the others yet remain mysterious. They are all friendly folk, though, and perhaps we will become better acquainted over future wars.
sad sack
Jitter of the Day #1703
I’m sorry to have only another mundane shot here, shaken by my bike trembling over root-torn pavement, but I’m still so hesitant to photograph people before I’ve grown to know them well.
Despite that, today was a rather good day, and for no particular reason I’m going to sleep feeling like things will go well presently.
like a mother’s morning dress
Flicker of the Day #1702
These ghosts have haunted the ceiling of the bedroom here since I was little, and I’ve wanted to capture them for a long time. Both are signs of strangers outside, but they come in two species: at night the gaze of passing headlights slips between the curtain and the window, and in daylight the reflected sun casts a fleeting image of our window frame. Accompanied by the whisper of tires on pavement, they felt somber and ominous to five-year-old me.
They’re very much like ghosts drifting through the neighborhood, passing each window in turn, peeking in to make sure that everyone is sleeping safely. That sensation seems deserving of a name, if not the lights themselves – small, incidental elements of the environment you grew up in that were just alien enough to seem sacred when you were young.
what keeps the planet spinning
Splash of the Day #1701
In my sleepy state of mind, this flower has started to look like a frozen splash, cast outward by the force of our forager’s impact. She’s a heavy weight, certainly – look close and you can see the pockets of pollen she carries, nearly full to bursting.
I sat in front of this flowerbed for some twenty minutes, trying to see the flowers as towering trees and then following a little wingless creature with my lens as he scrambled over furry leaves and under silken petals. The honey bees came later, floating gently above each flower in turn. It’s so easy to get lost in their tiny shapes and motions, especially when I’m trying to capture them; with a camera in hand I start to live on that small scale vicariously, can feel their segmented bodies curling around stems and their spindly limbs sifting through anthers.
Perhaps someday I should have a flower garden just to watch the creatures who see it as a forest.
it’s only that I still love you deeply
Pitch of the Day #1700
Jacob is well versed in the laws of storytelling, in the paths that stories take and how to best convey them, so we took some time this evening to go over bits and pieces of the world I’ve been thinking about for a few years. I’ve never taken the time to collect everything together into a cohesive story; it’s always just fantastical botany, sentimental laws of physics, flakes of myth – nothing approaching the form of a plot. With Jacob’s help I think I’ve moved the ideas forward a little bit; perhaps something will actually come of it.
All I have, really, is certain notions and sensations that I want to share, and I haven’t even figured out the best medium to do it in. A video game, a book, a text adventure, a comic… perhaps it will have to wait until we can bottle and publish distilled thought.
Sorry for the vague words here, but I’m falling asleep. Perhaps clearer thoughts will come in dreams.
lose yourself to dance
Haul of the Day #1699
It will be many years before I learn to photosynthesize, so I still need to maintain myself the traditional way. I’ll be made of this food soon, as I’m made of everything else I’ve eaten. If my identity is defined by the materials the compose my body, then you can trace me backwards through time in a descending tree of foodstuffs cast across the planet. I can be dismantled into bread bars and peanut butter, slivers of pineapple, endless tangles of spaghetti; the ions forming the action potentials in my brain can be collected and sorted, potassium packed into bananas, sodium stirred into canned lentil soup, calcium set into breakfast cereals.
Were I to photosynthesize, I would be built from the air itself, from your breath and the scattered remains of Edgar Allan Poe’s last gasp. I still am, in fact, though filtered first by countless plants.
I don’t much like cooking for just myself, so I easily settle for whatever’s simple and quick, but even the plainest foods are a curiosity when you attend to the fact that you’re eating a future piece of yourself.
