Latest Posts by softlylovingsstuff - Page 3

"May thy riot gear chip and shatter"

Seen inside the occupied Portland State University library, where student protesters are preparing for a police raid

It seemed to me that I had dreamt about her once, when I was a boy or a teenager: a dream with the scent of orange trees in blossom.

– Agustín Cadena, from “Murillo Park,” Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic (Small Beer Press, 2011)

Every time I do something dramatic or extravagant I think to myself “this is for Lord Byron” or “Oscar Wilde would’ve loved this”. And I think it’s incredible sexy of me to do so. Conversely every time I get tipsy I think “it’s what Dorian Gray would’ve wanted”. Which is less sexy and more a moralistic problem but it’s whatever.

saw u in a dream and wanted to stay with u forever and ever so i didn’t wake up until noon the next day

“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)

you can be a dickhead to me but my whimsy will always haunt your narrative

I feel like this at all times

currently suffocating under the immense weight of knowing that i will never write something as good as dune 😁😁

Dune: Part Two, dir. by Denis Villeneuve // A Panathenaic amphora (Greece (Attica), ca. 365BC - 360BC) (x)

Carl Bretzke, Highway 1, Oil on aluminum

you kept making yourself the victim

Carol Ann Duffy, from "December"; Rapture

Soul Mates

I don’t know how you are so familiar to me—or why it feels less like I am getting to know you and more as though I am remembering who you are. How every smile, every whisper brings me closer to the impossible conclusion that I have known you before, I have loved you before—in another time, a different place, some other existence.

— Lang Leav

― Albert Camus, Notebooks: 1935-1951

stop asking me wyd i’m literally always thinking about love and how it touches every aspect of the human experience

"Cliffhanger"

Abandoned villa, Chemin du Raidillon, Saint-Pierre-en-Port, France

John Sloan - Turning out the Light (1905)

- Evelyn Waugh, from Brideshead Revisited (1945)

missing him hour

yiyun li the book of goose \\ julie myerson sleepwalking

kofi

“Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.”

— Orson Rega  

in the club editing my own writing on the notes app

Mary Oliver, from “The Summer Day.”

being human is terrifying

“I took comfort in the illusion that I could go back [to my hometown]. But I’d been around long enough to know history is sealed and unchangeable. You can move on, with a heart stronger in the places it’s been broken, create new love. You can hammer pain and trauma into a righteous sword and use it in defense of life, love, human grace and God’s blessing. But nobody gets a do-over. Nobody gets to go back and there’s only one road out. Ahead, into the dark.”

— Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run (via readingcities)

[looks for you in everything] [finds you there]

The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1920–1923

memory landscapes

drypoint needle

Lingering on It