Motivational Things To Send In The Group Chat

Ginger bread bathtub

A friend once asked me for a sign

That the universe loved us.

I told her I had taken a bath today.

The water was green and the perfect temperature

The sky was darkening and the light was on

The room smelled like the ginger bread I had brought from the kitchen

Mixed with the eucalyptus of my bath oil.

A song played

It reminded me of a home we moved out of when I was eight.

It reminded me of my nanny teaching me how to paint my nails when my parents left the house

I would sit on a bar stool

My toes would barely brush the ground.

Oh, the universe loves us

The bath water was the perfect temperature today.

oh, these blue-eyed boys, these firestorm boys with constellations in their teeth, these back alley boys with bloody knuckles and painted smirks, these snowfall boys with quiet rage and quieter hopes.

pity these blue-eyed boys gave mercy on these blue-eyed boys because the world will have no mercy for them and they are born with almost etched in their bones.

he almost loved him. he almost kissed him. he almost held him.

he almost followed him. he almost stopped him. he almost caught him.

he almost saved him. he almost made it. he almost came home.

he almost—      he almost—           they almost—

they almost had a chance.

I'm an intern and my job is to enter addresses from hand-written letters into the database and did you know that Joshua Neumann from Hermannstreet 4, Cologne, has a life too

Oh

He's a principal in a small town. I googled it.

A mid-50s couple donated 100 dollars to our cause and I said that's very generous of you and he shrugged and said is it really

Oh

I guess it isn't really. Not for us.

When I came back after New Year the woman I've been working a lot with saw me in the office kitchen and hugged me.

I googled a scrawled address to decipher it and the town was so pretty I'm going to go there on a day trip with some friends. By train. Like we did 2 years ago.

You know what I'm saying, you know it.

Blood family

I think that whoever, or whatever, created human kind

They really, really, really,

really

wanted to force the point across that we're meant to socialize on a broad scale. To interact.

And I don't mean that in an emotional, "I saw a stranger on the bus and suddenly I remembered what we're here for" way (I do those too, but not today). I mean it in the barest, most fascinatingly clinical way.

Blood family.

Blood connects you to the most ABSTRUSE kinds of people! They can be such, such fundamentally different people to who you are yourself. Would you have ANYTHING to do your uncle if he weren't blood? Your aunt? It gets real great when you get close to each other in age. Would you have anything to say to your cousin if you met them in school?

It's bizarre. It's fascinating. It's a small but ridiculous. We are born, we are forced to interact with people completely different from ourselves. You choose friends. You don't choose blood family.

It seems so... stoic. Clumsy, brutal. There is no way you can escape the horrid, lovely, interesting, deeply uncomfortable ties to society. Not your society, not the one you create for yourself with friends, but the general one. You are born forced to confront the fact that humanity is as varied as snowflakes, to use a clichéd metaphor.

Do with that what you will. It's a fact. Not a single person can escape it. You always grow up with some kind of family that you're forced to spend time with. An orphanage, a traditional family, a single parent maybe.

Connection. For better or for worse.

There are always sure to be more springs…

thinking about the people who vanished without a trace. The mutual who reblogged something as usual and never came back online. The friend on discord who just disappeared, and when you go to check on them their account is deleted and theres no other way to contact them

I look out of my window and hope you are okay, I wish you well and Im sorry I didn't get to say goodbye.

I hope we meet again someday but until then. Stay safe. Stay alive. Be well.

how many times can you live through the apocalypse?

when you were little there was this beach that was free to go to. you didn't really like it on account of the litter. at one point, a white bag caught around your ankle, and for a moment (fish child), you panicked about jellyfish. on the foam, the red-pink words read thank you, stacked on top of each other, tangled in the kelp.

they have a new program (three thousand american dollars) to send your dead relative to the moon. there is a lot of evidence that our local orbit is becoming ever-more dangerously populated with "micro" satellites - debris in a round miasma becoming a thick web above us. maybe angels cannot hear us through the pollution.

you used to picture deep space like a thick membrane, or a blanket. someone said to you once the universe has no edge and that fucked with you for a long time, trying to picture what shape infinity has. your coworker is writing a short story about ecological collapse, which she is submitting for a little side-money so she can survive the current economical collapse.

the birds haven't gone to sleep this winter. that is probably bad. something that actually freaks you out is the natural temperature of human bodies versus the survival temperature of certain fungi. there is a podcast called s-town, in which a man kills himself over climate anxiety. he was probably meant to seem sort of unhinged. it just seems like it is becoming increasingly clear he was being honest.

space is not empty, we have put our dead into the stars. at some point they will figure out how to put ads into our sleep. you need to pay for the greenlife subscription service to be able to save the world.

there is a lot of ways this poem ends. but you have been wearing the same jeans and shirts since you were, like, 18. it is a hard life, sometimes, watching the entire foundation crack. there was this one moment over the summer, where you were shaking with heat exhaustion and dehydration. you were offered a nestle water bottle.

for three thousand dollars, you can send your ashes into space.

instead, you wash out the peanut butter jar. you put the avocado-toothpick spiked seed ball into water (even though they never grow very far). you borrow what you do not want to buy. you pick up any litter you find. you do not have a lot of control, really. but where you do - if there is one thing you can do, you do it.

something about that. you need to believe that must be true for the rest of humanity. or maybe - you need to believe that to be true, or else there will not be a rest of humanity.

Sometimes I think I'm holding back out of habit. Like I should've broken a long time ago. What does that make my current state, hm?

bird riding rhinoceros