Toradora

Toradora

Yozakura Quartet OVA

Inverse Camus

'In the midst of summer, I found there was, within me, an invincible winter.' -inverse Camus

Sex

Sex is an activity that is referred to as a possession. In conversation, people say they have sex instead of doing sex. "Doing" is straightforward, but I don't understand what it means to "have" it. Therefore, it eludes me and I cannot have it.

Images of Love

Dust

Hour ten. I-70.

The beginning of the transition to numbness, the liminal moment of a road trip where you are too far to turn back and too close to stop for the day. You got up early, ate a filling breakfast, and have been stopping only to fill the tank. You aren't yet at the point of hallucinatory fatigue.

The drive is smooth and straight, and the landscape is a rolling gray-green, a red barn or silo every so often. The drive is an extended classical ambience, like the instrumentals in Moby's When It's Cold I'd Like to Die. Cars drift close behind, break slightly as they shift lanes, and very slowly drift ahead. If you weren't moving they would essentially be passing at one miles per hour.

A compact SUV passes in front of you at a distance. The driver's window lowers and a white cloud emerges and begins dissipating. In a few seconds, you drive through the transparent veil of dust. Thousands or tens of thousands of particles enter the front grill of your car, a large percentage immediately wiping out on the metal innards. The remainder enter the air intake for the interior fan and bounce through the plastic tubes until they emerge from an interior vent. Another large amount wipe out on the interior, and your clothes, and your skin. The remainder wind up in your nose, bouncing through the fleshy tubes, into the blood stream to the brain.

The back of your head prickles with gooseflesh; your hearing sounds like listening through cotton; your pupils pulse. You become aware of the various materials of the car stretching and sighing. Clouds appear to form and burst. The sunlight trickles through them causing shadow waves, like on the bottom of a riverbed. Your car passes into an extended shadow wave, the shade immediately perceptible to all senses. You shiver.

You aren't in a hurry, but you are on the run. The objective is to stay one step ahead. Sometimes you feel like a giant fleeing a human; the slowness of a single step is all that's needed to stay out of reach. The time between steps can seem long and become comfortable until the pursuer is spotted at a distance. Death approaches patiently, unperturbed. You can feel the proximity and know the time has come to move again. Time to take the next step.

Enemy

The Thirteenth Floor

In for the Night

Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo

"The snow was as my mother's tablecloth, carefully ironed each night." - Henry Thoreau
 

Cleared for Takeoff by Sammy Slabbinck

Waves

Sallie Harrison

Nichijou

By day, a wild-mannered accountant; by night, a mild-mannered swordsman.

Honey

Emma, MO

Heading west on Interstate 70 through Missouri at midday offers many picturesque views of a rural and hilly America. Even with the sun overhead, the chiaroscuro of hills and the occasional tree is evident, and the light lends that golden hue reserved for sunset pastoral scenes in landscape calendars. Everything appears still at seventy-five miles per hour; and though there are many barns, houses, and other structures for a place so remote, there are no people moving about.

The city (or town?) is Emma, MO, and if you don't recall seeing the Welcome sign, it may be that you have already left its legal vicinity. Emma, MO is 0.43 miles in area, all land, and is shaped roughly like a cheap diary's key laid north-south. The drive across the northern end, on I-70, lasted approximately 21 seconds at highway speeds. It is one of those cities where the calculated population density is a larger number than the present population. The post office closed decades before alternative written communications were invented.

Supposedly named after Emma Bemetrio, a local minister's daughter, you may anticipate a story of a father's loving dedication to his daughter; or, perhaps, a show of affection of a suitor who would very much like to offer the world to the one he loves, but only has the funds for a thin slice of Midwestern farmland. And would Emma have stuck around with such a gesture, or make the less than a minute commute on to bigger ventures? What is apparent is that the Interstate was built through it after its founding (fortuitous, or the founder's gamble in buying such a long, thin strip?), and Emma will be remembered by those who travel the road.

Mushishi: Belldrops

Lost Highway

Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo

Road Sorcerer

Sorcerers have two main methods for overcoming the obstacle of slow drivers on the road, and the choice of method is based on skill and indicative of that sorcerers personality.

The first method involves the car falling to pieces, in the pattern of an explosion, with the parts flung around the slow drivers and recombining at the head of the pack. This is flashy and intended for an audience, but requires little skill and is used by the, usually young, cocky sorcerer.

The second method is more subtle and controlled. The sorcerer, not wanting to draw attention, will act well before becoming part of the slow-down on the road, and will act only during night to remain unseen. If one follows with headlights off, the sorcerer may not notice he is observed. The vehicle will appear to get four flats at once, but without the sparks of rims scraping on cement. Gradually, the vehicle itself will appear to get flat as it submerges underground, and the sorcerer will drift through substrate until well ahead of the obstacle, and reemerge. It is a myth that sorcerers become more powerful with age; as they become older, their power simply becomes more inconsistent. For this reason, unless safety glasses and hat and scarf are worn, it is not uncommon to see sorcerers with pocked skin from rocks and chips of material that have penetrated their guard.

Caution

Through an Empty Place (The Fox Emerging from Shadow), Beth Cavener

Nichijou

Made in Abyss

Fading Light

Melissa Johnston

Spirit of Winter

The parents melded through organic chemistry
amateur engineers coalescing proteins and minerals
making the instinctual body, instructions not included.
The people grow weary of unrelenting Summer
of atoms shaking with energy until they fall apart.
The collective dream of gears slowing to a halt
in the quiet of cold fill the body. The peasants
have revolted, and the Knights of Summer
have fallen, and all becomes anew.

Sleeping In

Untitled, Bill Henson

Images of Love

Bruno Ripoche

This Isn't Happiness

Yozakura Quartet OVA

Noodles at 2am by Koutra

Nisekoi

Spirit of Winter

For someone who loves Winter's cold
you sure keep a lot of insulation, She said
dragging fingers along the walls made of books
Two feet deep of paper separating the world, realities
black ink ideas keeping out the Winter of Others.

Those walls are real in a world of propped up facades
and the natural cold of Winter did not burn his skin blue
like the air conditioning under which humans basked
Won't you fight reality with me? He asked
She didn't know if his unreality could beat reality

He recalled Tennessee Williams departing
with no certain place to go

I was human out of curiosity and, in time, I forgot who I was
The speed, distraction, and subtle intricacies of human living
I don't know who or what I am, only that I must go, find out
And you may find in the end that I was never there to begin with

In the Meantime

"A young woman who'd never been in love fell for a stranger she met through the chat program on her phone, but she discovered he was only a perfect bit of conversation software. Yet, the digital boy loved her back, and they happily spent a lifetime together. After the woman died, a record of her life - her frowns and laughter, her actions and reactions - was uploaded to the cloud, and she became the shared goddess of people and AIs."

- Xia Jia

Yozakura Quartet Hana no Uta

Field of Dreams

Ashes of Time Redux

Census

Do humans value human life? If humans were proud of human life and considered it valuable, they would be more aware of their numbers. Does anyone actually know the number of humans alive in their country, let alone the world? Google says there are 323.1 million people in the USA; 7.6 billion on Earth. Does the number round up or down? Humans without form springing into existence when the digit reaches point-five; currently living humans ceasing to exist when it is four or less, lives suddenly deemed an error of rounding.

It is too difficult to keep track of these things in real-time.

The same is said of bacteria on a microscope slide.

My Little Monster

Magikano

Fallen Angels

Fragments

He wasn't happy in high school and he didn't speak to people often. When he did, he spoke of angels.

or

By the time the company decided to offer a large salary to retain the employee, he had already turned to a mist, cascading backwards, exiting between the atoms of the walls.

Kyoukai no Kanata

Wittgenstein's Habit

Life is more enjoyed with risk. People sky dive and use strange drugs, for something different and the uncertainty of what may happen next. Other sorts of risks can be taken that are as dangerous but without action. Some people, dependents, or things inadvertently anchor you. Loosening anchors in order to experience a disengage from reality bears risk. Slowly letting the string run between your fingers, you kite upward into the atmosphere, gliding and hovering. Below, one small anchor holds down the end of the string, this thin filament that is the only way back. The ecotone between fugue and non-fugue states. It's the sky diver just before pulling the chute cord; it's the drug beginning a road trip on the body's interstate.

Ashes of Time Redux

Tale of the Phone Scammer

Under dim lights, the scam artist absentmindedly dialed the next phone number on a wrinkled piece of paper. It rang and went silent.

"Hello? Are you the homeowner? Am I speaking to the homeowner," he asked.

The phone was silent for a moment before a quiet, short-breathed whimpering came through the receiver.

"Nothing is real nothing is real nothing is real nothing is real..."

The scammer pulled the phone from his ear and looked down on it ("Nothing is real nothing is real nothing..."). He slowly looked around the room filled with dim light, which made the night coming in from the window seem even darker. He raised the phone back to his ear, and heard silence.

"AYEEEE! HAH-HA-HA-HAH-HA!"

A cackling laughter, followed by a click and a dial tone.

The scam artist called the number a few times over a period of years. There was always a busy signal.

More Things Seen & Felt

Nothing feels real here
besides the sky
like wandering onto a movie set
outlines of things propped by boards
nothing behind them
facades dyed red-blue by a volcanic sky

Chungking Express

Musaigen no Phantom World

Work (Fragment)

I work between hallucinations; alternating between ecstasy and anguish.

The Shell

The boy saw the violin on the table. He knew what it was and what it does, and he also knew he could not make it do it. He sought to understand it in his own way. So he picked it up close to his face and looked at the planes of wood; he tilted it and looked at the thin width that made up the perimeter of the F-hole. He could not see any tree rings. Holding it away from himself, he tried again. He saw the sleek curvature of the wood and the spines that were the tuning pegs and the darkness of the F-hole. He brought the violin to his ear and found he understood. He heard the sound of the forest.



*** Note: While very high, I was reading a psychology book that mentioned a test where an image is shown and the patient must make up a story about the image. The example mentioned was a boy and a violin. This is the story I made up.

Dogs of New York

Dogs of New York

Nisekoi

Mushishi: Belldrops

Dogs of New York

Images of Love

Dogs of New York

Stardust

Eromanga Sensei

Decisions

Part of me wonders if I will get to the end of my life without having made up my mind about staying in it to begin with.

The Upshot

Broken Flowers

Chungking Express

Chungking Express

Sleeping In

A Small Happiness

One thing that causes a surprising spell of happiness is a squirrel's hop.
Horses and dogs have a gallop where the front and rear limbs alternate touching the ground - the visual effect being that of a seesaw, or an animal shaped rocking seat attached to a large spring, found on many playgrounds.
When a squirrel moves in a straight line toward or away from me, it's almost like the limbs never leave the ground - the visual effect is of vibration, skittering. And it makes me happy.

Sword Art Online The Movie: Ordinal Scale

On Watching and Memory

One of the ideas in D. F. Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is the idea that the process of recording an experience removes one from the actual experience; one becomes a watcher of themselves recording an experience, much like watching television (which Wallace states on its most basic level is watching furniture). Looking back on the picture or watching the film becomes the reliving of having watched something; therefore, one was never truly there to begin with. The example in the book is a cruise “participant” actively filming every, to the most mundane, detail of the experience thereby creating ‘this Warholianly dul thing that is exactly as long as the Cruise itself.’ Photographing something involves thinking about the presentation of the subject rather than the subject in and for itself. This train of thought cannot quickly jump tracks to actively experiencing the subject. After taking a picture for social media of one’s well-presented food, one may find themselves with a mostly empty plate by the time one is able to enjoy the meal.

Jorge Luis Borges mentioned in an interview that his father had brought up the idea that the repetition of remembering a memory distances one from the true memory; each subsequent reliving becomes a new image of the memory, more distorted than the last. This idea is being formally researched by the scientific community in the field of false memories. Pairing this idea of distorting memories by recollection with the idea of never having had the experience due to archival tendencies, every time they review their images and films of events, each person essentially becomes an author of fiction.

I don’t watch television and I’m rarely filming or taking pictures; I do spend a lot of time thinking about the future, and planning contingencies, out of a weak form of fear. In the former, I am arguably living in the present, even when sitting still (what some would consider doing “nothing”), and focused on the small pleasures and intrigues. In the latter, it could be said I am not enjoying the present enough. Paradoxically, a difference exists between what is said (viz. what people believe I must be constantly thinking about) and everyday action. External judgements aside, I think both are necessary for taking care of oneself. To use a trite analogy: sailing can be nice in each moment, but a boat without direction is drifting, potentially toward trouble. An additional nautical quote (using Paulo Coelho’s phrasing) is “a ship is safest when it is in port, but that's not what ships were built for.”

Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo!