Sans Obscurities

and it's fucked up! because circumstances aligned that just as gen z grew up and lost their innocence, so too did the places they frequented fall into disrepair; what more poignant metaphor could you find for dead decadence than having the excesses of your childhood literally fall apart as you grew up? and its so interesting, because it''s not quite the same fear as the dark forest full of monsters that preceded the liminal spaces movement; humanity has long moved past being seriously threatened by packs of wolves or stray bears, and so the mythology around them stagnates. but that level of industrialization, the building of ever-bigger buildings, the stripping of human imperfection in favor of mass-production, the pervasive sense of not fitting into a world that was supposed to be promised to you? that has shaped the concept of a "liminal space" in a facinating way. i think that's why the liminal spaces movement is dominated by man-made locations- to the point where even when set outside, the focus is specifically on an artificial element of the landscape. the mass-production, the sameness of modern architecture- it's expressed by exaggerating it, stretching what would be in reality large but walkable buildings into expansive labyrinths with no rhyme or reason to their construction- which, of course, is the point; that instead of there being no reason for it's existence, like a dark forest, there is a theoretical purpose that these buildings are fulfilling- one that is entirely exclusive of you. it's an expression of decadence a level above dead rich people haunting their own hoarded wealth; a building built entirely for it's own sake, built until it encompasses the entire world, where humanity has been entirely excised. to a generation that now worries more about the seemingly unknowable whims of corporations, dead decadence no longer means old castles and dilapidated manors where one rich man lived and died- it means empty suburbs where no one lives, grungy shopping malls with every booth shuttered, playgrounds and arcades left to rot at the will of an ambiguous gestalt for reasons strange and opaque.

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.

No One Like You

now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"

Okay not really, but in a nudge away from "content machine" and toward "there are people on the other side of your monitor," I thought maybe we could do something similar.

If you want to play, reblog this and tell us your name, and 1-2 good/positive/kind facts about yourself, and say at least 1 nice thing about the person you reblogged this from.