Old Barn by Devon

Photo credit: Double-O Devon

The Three Rabbit Brothers

Gil Jin-seop, 1947

Via 50 Watts

A Woman Photographs Her Doll

Early morning in the Caffe. Wagner is playing. Ceiling fans are whirring in unison. Someone is behind the counter, prepping sandwich ingredients. A blond woman whose face shows early signs of panicked attempts at enforced ostensible youth is here with her daughter, whose perfectly symmetrical face, long, lush flaxen hair and gleaming white Chiclet teeth all glow in unabashed, vacuous glory as her mother pauses every eighty or ninety seconds to snap a photo of her saucy progeny, the latter grinning a ghoulish sunbeam of stupid with every flash. I smell generation upon generation of, by definition, empty vicarious living. If these two are any indication, that’s the key to oblivious bliss, kids.

Photo by Nadja Robot

Turquoise Fashionista

See also Meet the Lady or if not, Death and the Maiden

Awkward Turtle Sightings [Erasuristesque]

AWKWARD TURTLE SIGHTINGS

[ENYA, BRUNO SCHULZ and a BOWL OF UDON NOODLES IN BROTH sit in lawn chairs in a blind near a forest lake, each gracefully squinting through binoculars. ENYA wears a muumuu with a pattern of little bleeding snowmen on it. BRUNO SCHULZ is entirely naked, save for a spiked collar and a Donald Duck cummerbund. The BOWL OF UDON NOODLES IN BROTH is, in secret, not wearing any underpants. With one hand holding up her binoculars, ENYA uses her free hand to expertly shell pistachios and dismissively feeds them to BRUNO SCHULZ, who chews each one with slow, steamy relish. The BOWL OF UDON NOODLES IN BROTH sweats uncomfortably.]

ENYA

There’s one.

BRUNO SCHULZ

Hm, Love?

ENYA

Apalone spinifera. Large. Beautiful neck.

BRUNO SCHULZ

I see.

ENYA

No.

BRUNO SCHULZ

No. But I trust you.

ENYA

Also, graptemys flavimaculata.

BRUNO SCHULZ

Oh?

ENYA

You don’t trust me?

BRUNO SCHULZ

With my candied life, Comely Master.

ENYA

Hm. Chelus fimbriatus.

BRUNO SCHULZ

With my candied life.

ENYA

Do you love me, or do you love your fear of losing me?

BRUNO SCHULZ

It’s all that you’re not that makes me love you. It’s a love of omission.

ENYA

Deirochelys reticularia.

BOWL OF UDON IN BROTH

And though we are not now that force that in days of yore moved mountains and carved paths for rivers, that which we are, we are; one tender, noble and childishly thieving spirit, weakened but polished by time, given texture and character by its careful patina, and relenting not in our artfully futile, ceaseless reaching for the bright blossoms in our night skies, burning atomic furnaces, the only objects we know we can’t harm.

For Old Time's Sake

We got this clock at a garage sale. It was just deliciously strange and stupid and pointless. It was just a plastic clock, with ordinary clockwise-turning hands, a red oblong box with blue buttons on top and a face filled with gold star-style stars. In two little windows were words on those little plastic flip cards, like numbers on those old not-quite-digital clocks. If you pressed the blue button above the window, you could change each word to spell different two-word phrases, like “Tug Ugly” or “Eat Girl”, or whatever.

We amused ourselves by absent-mindedly changing it from time to time. For five years, it sat on the shelf above our toilet, its words in a state of flux, but never making a sound, until the strike of midnight on the New Year, 2012. It sent out a weird little bleeting alarm, like we’d never heard. We’d certainly never set it, couldn’t find a way to set it. It stopped when we pressed the blue button we’d never before noticed above the clockface.

No one there that night remembered changing the words to read, “Fish Milk.”

Visual:

woodcum