there’s a beach by the cabin we have rented and we walk it together.
“ska vi gå till stranden?” he asks in the morning when we wake up in the white sheets and wood panelled bedroom. his hair is tousled and he smiles through the copper and hay coloured strands that make their place along his jaw. he has the same impossible hair that boys tend to have – where it feels so soft and silky. all my hair masks and oils and i could never.
we take cigarettes in our backpacks and morning coffee in our bellies. the day is gray and overcast, but beautiful. we find a large walking stick and use it along our way.
we explore the rocks and the tide pools. there’s moss and lichen, old trees and driftwood.
he finds a feather amongst the worn rocks, “look,” he says.
between two delicate fingers he holds a small feather to me. it is a wisp of black like campfire smoke caught impossibly in the hand of my new lover. he offers it like a sacred gift or a chapel offering, with reverence. i take the feather and notice the white circles. it’s from a loon.
i’ve never seen a feather from one before, even as a confirmed feather collector / bird enjoyer. i’ve only ever seen loons from afar or sweaty in my palm one the gold coloured one dollar coins of canadian currency. we call them “loonies”. i’ve heard them, too – the haunting call.
i’m touched by the gesture. he knows i like feathers, knows i like birds.
i ask him to bring me feathers from sweden and he brings me silver feather earrings.
he knows i like jewelry, too.
he laughs and looks out at the lake. the feather is in my hand, gently grasped like a breakable gift.
i study him. he’s beautiful, totally doesn’t know it or see it, but he is. he smiles a lot, laughing easily, and he’s all of these tiny things i wish i could be. he offers so much grace to people, he is objective, deeply logical, and incredibly swedish, this boy from the north.
he gives me feathers and labradorite and snail shells and chocolate and the kind of love that drives someone across the world just to walk on a beach and smoke cigarettes and look at feathers and bones.
i think about how i used to cut myself wide open for people, friends and lovers both, who wouldn’t cross the street for me, let alone board planes or look for feathers on overcast mornings.
he doesn’t ask for me to love him, but i do anyways.
i dance in the cabin later, to old pop music, singing into an antique hairbrush. he watches me, laughing.
holy sweet lord, i miss handycams. like the concept, the tech, the shitty low quality footage, the bulkiness that would necessitate a duffel bag sized purse that smelled like cotton candy body spray and was filled with glitter and receipts for some reason with a few dubious pills scattered at the bottom. is this relatable to anyone else?
i know people my age like to clown on gen z etc for their love of some of the uglier aspects of the 1990s and 2000s (i mean yeah ok i kinda laughed too when everyone brought back butterfly hair clips but they kind of fuck and i bought some too ok), but i gotta say, i kinda miss the era of stomp clap, mumford and his many sons, soft grunge tumblr blogs, everything being pastel for a lil bit there, wildfox baggy beach jumpers, jeffrey campbell shoes i couldn’t afford, american apparel and other clothing that was actually made of cotton, everyone discovering EDM, avicii (who helped everyone discover EDM), sleaze culture, moustache tattoos on fingers, those inexplicable owl and or octopus necklaces, girls wearing shorts over top of tights, and everyone riding a fixed gear bicycle for some reason. i dunno man, it was a simpler time, and i wish we could go back sometimes.
i’ve been kinda thinking about this lately, especially with the creation of this blog as it exists now. what the fuck is a substack? i don’t wanna monetize content on substack or try to get followers on the social media platform formerly known as twitter – i wanna have a weird lil blog i stayed up all night learning how to code for while watching requiem for a dream on vhs so i could have cool .gifs of fairies and dolphins and spinning pentacles.
no, i don’t wanna have to use the 5-3-1 rule on instagram, i wanna dump 400 terribly lit grainy ass photos on my myspace to my party friends so we can try to piece together the previous weekend’s rave like those weird true crime people on reddit and youtube do now.
i suggest we all just say fuck it and slide off the snakeskin constraints of the internet, and what’s fashionable, and society, and just start living like the feral creatures with ipods and walkmans that we were meant to be. oh sick guys, she’s got a pink discman, and bro it’s got 30 second anti skip, ohhh, shiit. i just wanna go back to listening to strange polish witch house and taking photos of my bruises and crucifixes and sewing edgy shit on thrift store dresses and put crystals and religious medals on all the zipper pulls of my hoodies (oh wait, this is just my to do list for this upcoming saturday nvm)
ok! anyways! this poet (beautiful & talented ethel cain fan i follow on insta named jace) posted some footage of his on his acct and tagged it as #flipvideo. i loved the vibe so bad, i tracked down this old fuck ass flip video camera on ebay (in pink no less because obviously) and i got it in the mail today and it was like being hit in the face with a sledgehammer of nostalgia. like for real it felt like i drank a sugar free redbull jaeger bomb (sick btw) and stayed out all night at something called “totally boss fridays” watching girls with headbands (?) bump shitty stepped on cocaine from guys with spray tans in those slatted glasses and shitty super deep v neck shirts that made everyone look really european (read douchey).
apparently that american apparel documentary on netflix really messed with my mind, idk. look, the hoodies were comfortable ok?
i vaguely remember having one of these flip video cameras and possibly chucking it into a lake during a forest rave. i cannot be certain and that’s none of your goddamn business and i’ll thank you to stay out of my personal affairs.
the flip video camera is from 2006 – almost 20 years old (im old gandalf) and it’s so simple. it plugged directly into my shitty macbook air from 2017 and works like a charm – there’s no apps or cords or shit i need to download. it’s slightly better than old ass webcam quality but i love it. anyways im gonna take a bunch of haunted video footage with it, so that’s exciting and possibly horrifying. i also feel like it needs a way cooler little phone strap thingie on it. remember back in the day when we had razrs and you could put phone charms on them and some of them would light up when the phone rang? we used to be a proper country.
remember when japanese horror movies would come out constantly about haunted phones? they try to make that stuff now with haunted zoom call movies and it just doesn’t hit the same ya know?
i want a ghost coming at me with a nokia flip phone covered in hello kitty stickers, i dont accept zoom invites.
anyways, holy fuck i love the internet. i just wish it wasn’t like four apps controlled by psychopaths.
i just wish we all had weird journals (dead/live i don’t give a shit) and tumblrs and myspace pages. like don’t text me, i wanna go onto your little website thingie and read about how you fought with your friends and isn’t she a bitch and also i do like those song lyrics you posted, and that cool scan from a japanese fashion magazine.
do you wanna add me on nexopia or meet for buck a beer night? (true story my city had buck a beer night at this local divebar and the owner went around and bought the ends of kegs and mixed it all together and threw in a couple bottles of white wine just for fun and everyone would get horrifyingly wasted and eat hot dogs from the hot dog guy that would be set up outside. the city had to step in though because everyone got so fucked up fall down shitfaced wasted and kept stabbing each other, so they put in mandatory minimum drink prices. squares.)
also i would apologize for the vacillating shift in tone from sadgirlposting and depressing photomaxxing to deranged paranoid online rants about old technology and nostalgia on this blog, but i’m not sorry.
i used to try and try to squeeze myself into the boxes of aesthetic and vibes. if i could just lose more weight to be a spoopy insta goth girl, if i could just have more tattoos and a less autistic face, or was taller and had those legs that look like deer legs that look super cool in converse shoes like the girls on tumblr, or if everything in my room could be gothic lolita, or i could be a cool horror blogger influencer. maybe i could be cool with more bloodmilk or ovate or antiques, or vhs tapes, or learn to play the guitar or stream video games and on and on and on and the thing is, it’s not healthy all this desire, all this want. samsara, we meet again. i know you, avarice, oh how i know you.
i just wanna be, messy and weird and wild. the girl who took too many psychedelics and cries easily about birds and boys and that girl who died, and lord huron, and needs a big pink stanley cup full of water at all times and is proud of my second hand free people jacket, and my stupid job, and feels passionately about kodak gold 200, and really wants to go to a rave again, and wants to just… be.
so i just am, and i feel the rose coloured glasses of nostalgia and i take the pieces of myself that i miss from my past lives and weave them back together just as i put myself back together. what the fuck is reparentification anyways?
all of this because of an old camera i bought on ebay from 2006 (in pink because obviously)
i see an osprey today as i’m drove to go get a hearing test because i’ve been dealing with tinnitus and pain following a particularly nasty bilateral ear infection.
god, i love birds.
i see him sitting up high on a streetlight and he’s watching the drivers below. i wonder what brought him away from the river, his home full of fish. i wonder what brings him away from the nest today. i call him, “baby!”, as i drive by.
i call all the birds and animals i see in my travels, “baby”. “hi baby!” i shout and i want to pet them all and even if i can’t pet them, i want to just watch them, because they are beautiful to me.
i got lost on a phone call talking about how i love that moment when i’ve been watching a hawk for a while – they usually sit up high on the poles of this trail looking into a big gully, and they scan and scan with their sharp eyes looking for a little mousey or some poor little bird, and then there’s this moment, and i swear it’s this breathtaking heart stopping, feeling your breath in your asshole kind of moment when the hawk pushes off the pole, spread his wings, and for a moment is this weightless suspended image of nature’s most beautiful killing machine, and then he dives and god, it’s like in that moment you feel like you’re seeing something so so beyond yourself, like god himself is talking to you.
truly, i feel in such a close proximity to god in those moments. my own entrance, for even the briefest of moments to the divine theatre of life. such a gift to see something so perfect.
i always end up teary eyed and with a dry throat.
seeing the osprey is no different – this big beautiful creature looking a little lost sitting on the streetlight. did he see me as i saw him?
i want to know what he knows.
what does it feel like to dive towards the water? to snatch a fish in flight?
what does it feel like to take something in your claws and tear it into pieces?
holy. fuck. i. love. animals.
i google osprey waiting around for my hearing test to see what’s causing my tinnitus.
i sit in the space age 1950s soviet union ass looking ass sound booth and press the button and repeat the words and the whole time i’m thinking about feathers and claws and eggs and nests.
i want to ask the nice lady who tests my hearing what her favourite bird is, but i don’t, because that’s probably fucking weird. but she tells me my hearing is fine. i said all the words and heard all the sounds and i still have tinnitus and it still hurts.
but i got to see the osprey.
the hearing clinic is right by a thrift shop i like so i go inside and find a vintage sterling silver navajo made turquoise ring for $12 and i feel really really lucky.
turquoise is sacred to native people – representing good luck and protection.
my father used to wear a turquoise ring, when he was young and still had all his hair and wore bellbottoms and had mutton chops. he had this big buckskin jacket with fringe, too.
my dad talked to the birds, too. he liked to admire them, just as i do.
i think about the osprey, and turquoise rings, and my father and tinnitus.
it tries to snow on the drive home.
i’m emotional today. i don’t know if it’s because i will menstruate this week, or because of the osprey, or because of the cold weather.
i regret not asking the hearing test lady what her favourite kind of bird is.
i’ve gone back to digitizing random vhs tapes i find all along my travels.
i pulled this particular tape of bible study with joyce meyer from the shelves of this religious thrift shop i often find myself in and thought i would digitize it for my youtube channel.
on and off, for several years now, i digitize random vintage tapes i happen to find interesting and put them onto youtube for people to enjoy. it’s interesting to me how people find my videos and the comments they leave. some of my uploads have triggered a lot of nostalgia for people, similar to the nostalgia triggered for me in finding and watching these old tapes. like old memories from a bygone era.
i won’t comment on the contents of this particular tape. i know some people aren’t fans of christianity. i was raised in a home where televangelists played regularly on the tv, right alongside jerry springer and the young and the restless. for me, tapes like this one feel a little bit like home, though i remain ambivalent on if this is a good thing or not.
anyways enjoy and let this severe looking lady in a cunty pantsuit read the bible to you, or turn it into drops for EDM songs i dunno.
truly though, she seems kinda cool as hell – she said on her website that jesus once had a party and gave everyone nose piercings?
hospital vespers 