I didn’t sleep the night before my thesis was due. This is perhaps unsurprising to you. When it happened, it was unsurprising to me too, but it was also novel. I had never before worked through the night and not slept … Read More
“And yet, God introduces Adam and Eve. Around them, creatures dance and indulge and huddle and purge. Birds shit humans. Dying men fart birds. He treats euphoria and terror with the same technical perfection, blurring the line between a familiar Earth and an alien world”.
“You look Right into the mirror and recognize what you’d drawn, part by part. Then you blink and completely forget what you’d seen, where you’d been –– or rather, you can’t really tell whether you had ever seen anything in the first place.”
I don’t remember why I started listening to RadioNow 93.1, Indianapolis’ Top 40 radio station, but I know exactly when. I was nine, and it was the summer after third grade. Before this, I had basically stayed away from pop culture. I didn’t really get it, or like it, and there was a girl in my school who told me she was receiving shots to delay puberty because she had watched too much Britney Spears with her older siblings and it had somehow tricked her body into pressing “skip” over the last part of her pre-preteen years.
I fell in love with Lana Del Rey a week after I got my driver’s license. Sixteen and in the deeper throes of teenage angst, I’d taken to calling the suburban split-level I’d grown up in “my parents’ house” and spending as much time as possible out with my steady, if less than stable, high school boyfriend.
Although we are excited beyond comprehension, we are silent. The wings of a fan turn with purpose; we breathe in this moment while attempting to wrap our heads around the magnitude of a man who commands a room without words, commands a nation without recognition, commands respect without force.
Pacifism may sound nice, but it is a hard doctrine to maintain: I struggled for years to reconcile my peaceful intuitions with the idea that we live in a violent world, and sometimes aiding those who are suffering might involve lethal force against those inflicting suffering.
