peach yogurt, 03.17.20

taglist + transcript under the cut (ask to be added/removed):

Peach Yogurt

after Frank O’Hara

i want peach yogurt. i want forgiveness and cubed fruit on the table and for someone to hold my hands. i want to look at the stars without a telescope and make up my own constellations, 8pm but still warm outside, lying in the grass with love running towards me until my body forgets it is a body. no more past-tense verbs, no more perpetually closed windows, no more stamping my feet against the tile. i am going to make scrambled eggs in the morning and i won’t mind that they don’t taste good. i am going to believe that there is no one alive who is luckier than me. at dinnertime, i sit on the porch making promises to myself while the sounds of cooking drift through the screen door: the whistle of the kettle, the click-click of the stove as the gas hisses to life. a glass of mango juice sweats in my palm and i tell it that i am grateful, for spilled strawberry milkshakes and the warbler in the back garden that never stops singing and my heart behind my front teeth. i tell it that i am done aiming low, that a year from now i will be the guttural, back-of-the-throat scream you make when the rollercoaster finally drops. i pluck an eyelash off my cheek and wish for spring to take up residence in my lungs. i wish for small kindnesses, more peach yogurt, more sunday mornings, more sitting on the kitchen counter with my feet dangling off the edge. i wish for the world to be so kind to me that i come undone.

>walking home from a party late one evening >several guys were following me, as my drunk ass managed to piss them off by existing >try to walk faster, to no avail, as I’m drunk as shit >catch me in some random student neighbourhood >oh shit, my ass is about to be beaten >still in talking phase >lights flick on in a house >three guys in full musketeer garb walk out >leader is some blond guy with a beard, eyepatch, and some weird-ass accent >“What sort of ruffians would be accosting someone outside our residence? Stand and deliver!” >guys start yelling at them to fuck off, that I deserved to get my ass beaten >“Very well, then. Draw steel, you blackguard!” >all three of them draw rapiers on their belts >guys run >“I know not why those foul men sought your harm, but come and tell us the tale, stranger!” >spend remainder of evening drinking mulled wine with lunatics >bunch of Swedish re-enactors live there >blond guy is actually missing an eye; lost it in an machine shop accident >stagger home completely drunk with a hat

I had no idea people like that existed. Or had the money to rent a house.

in addition to two comments reading “FUCKING EPIC” and “THIS A THOUSAND TIMES THIS” op elaborated further in another post:

Holy shit, is this still being posted?

I figure I owe /tg/ a bit of an update on these guys.

Their leader, O he of one eye and little common sense, nearly had his visa revoked for these kinds of shenanigans. One too many arrests meant that his right to stay in the country was contested, and he had to go to court to defend himself and prevent his visa from being revoked.

I was his ride to court, and had to testify to the board that he shouldn’t be deported for lack of common sense or social normality.

His defense? A written speech, about three pages long, about the rights of man, the education he has received here, and the opportunities for a one-eyed machinist. The spirit of his crimes were all in defense of people who would otherwise suffer. For other witnesses, he had some of the random people he’d helped out, including one memorable point where a woman, nearly on the verge of tears, pointed out how he’d taken on a guy threatening to rape her and carrying a knife by whipping out a fencing saber, disarming him, and mocking him in his thick Swedish accent so that the girl could call the cops. Something like a dozen people all showed up, explaining how this dude, despite his eccentricities, made the country better.

You know how back in the pre-Internet days, it was nearly impossible to watch a TV series in its entirety because the local affiliate stations would deliberately air the episodes all out of order, then do some sort of statistical sorcery to figure out which particular episodes gave the advertisers the best return for their dollar and just run those ten or twelve specific episodes in an endless semi-randomised rotation, and that was why every time you channel-surfed across a particular show it always seemed to be the same damn episode?

Only I had never chosen those songs. They were just the random few to pop up the first time I shuffled everything, and they started playing more and more frequently as this horribly short-sighted algorithm fed itself bad data, until I was so annoyed at those few songs that I stopped listening entirely.

Anyway a few years later Facebook did the exact same thing with my friends list, siphoning me off from seeing most of my feed because OBVIOUSLY I interacted with them the most, therefore they must be my besties. But really they were just the only people showing up for me to interact with in the first place, until I was down to just a few people I never really talked to from high school, a college prof, and my racist uncle I kept calling out.

And shortly after that, YouTube followed suit, replacing “Subscriptions” with “Recommended” as the default category, and trying to find “things I liked” when it was really just whatever three channels I’d watched last, whatever unrelated viral vid it wanted to push that week, and weird perennials like Whose Line clips or lockpick reviews or YTPs that seem to hibernate for months at a time then return like locusts.

i’m obsessed with this painting called tomato king and i’m even more obsessed with the man who drew it. his name is stuart dunkel and he is a classical oboeist and he also paints tiny little oil paintings of mice living their best lives. he looks like this.

And dreidels, apparently

Here is the link to needanabortion.org.

The silence of the Supreme Court has just effectively allowed Texas to overturn Roe vs Wade.