Wonderblood

Greece Photo Diary Part I

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 07:19:00 -0500

We went to Greece. It was the best. We both decided that the Greek island vacation is probably the most superior vacation either of us have been on. Why so, you ask? It is beautiful, cheap, and the weather is stunning. The sun is so bright, and yet it is not altogether hot, and the nights are cool. We stayed on Rhodes, in Kolymbia, at breezy little hotel with pinball machines that gave sex toys for prizes. Yes, I know, awesome. The beaches are, as perhaps you can see, freaking amazing. The water was cold but by day three we began to wonder if we were getting used to it or if the sea had warmed up.

One of the many innumerable reasons my man charms me is because he is always smiling. These pictures are from our first day at the beach, before we got tan. We walked up a Grecian hill and an old German woman showed us a path down to the water. This beach was probably the worst beach we went to. Can you believe that? This beach was the worst one? With it’s crystalline waters and fine pebbly sand? Intoxicating. Below I am marveling at how J’s hair begins to separate into beautiful strands as it dries.

The we went to a little restaurant and Johnny made friends with the old Greek men there, who gave us free food and lots of ouzo, and invited us back for dinner the next night. I think we could not understand each other terribly well but they were very hospitable and wanted J to take pictures of them, which he did. Out behind their restaurant was a bathroom, and a truck with chickens under it.

Then we went to Lindos, which is has a medieval castle built over its acropolis. This day we did not go to the top, but later we did. This day, we just went to the beach, which we were told was one of the best on the island. We rented a little sun bed, which seems to be what everyone does, and it was divine, and we swiftly decided that was the only way to roll on the Greek vacay — a sun bed and some wine and some sweet sweet loving. It was like we were at a freaking Club Med! Does that exist anymore?

Johnny, who is somewhat hyper (in the best way, of course), couldn’t laze about on the sun beds like me so he went all over the beach taking pictures. I love to see him in the water doing what he loves. He seems so happy and full of life, it makes me happy and full of life too, which is the best medicine. Later, I walked up on the pier and took some photos of children snorkeling. Next time I think we will snorkel, too — this time there just seemed so much to see that we couldn’t find time for it all.

Johnny took this great photo of me, which I like because it looks like I’m some kind of yoga guru with great posture. But I am not. But I am happy with my bod and my general health. We have been eating lots of egg protein and fresh veg, and I swear to you my muscle tone has never been better.

Here is Lindos acropolis as seen from around a bend, between two flowers. It is quite desertlike on this side of Rhodes, but we discovered the other side is a bit more lush, with forests and rockier, windier beaches.

My Thoughts on the Internet: A Horror Out of Time

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 06:34:00 -0500

Because I have been working on my novel and trying trying trying to to get to a certain point before I go back to the US and my schedule realigns itself with the cosmic ugh that is my own endlessly boring mediocrity, I have not had it much in me to do anything on the internet beyond trolling reddit (am I using that word correctly—“trolling?” I think I am not), and even still I find that the internet demeans me more each day. Even still I believe the instant gratification called up by the invisible and constant rain of WiFi continues to lash my weak will like a cat-o-nine tails wielded by a most sadistic lover. I am crying but he does not stop. I wish deeply that I could communicate to you the various ways in which the internet ruins my life on a daily basis, and why I yet still am not quite ready to leave it entirely, because I am weak, because I am a person — like, I imagine, many of you — who is caught in some hellish middle ground: I was not entirely raised on the internet, I existed before its ubiquity, and because of that I feel, as do many of my peers and elders, a certain gut instinct that faster is better, more knowledge is better, and I believe (O! In spite of myself!) in the total ability of science and technology to make my life better.

But more and more I know in my heart that this isn’t true. We are living too fast for ourselves, my dear friends. We are living out of time. We are, as Lovecraft might say, the colour out of space — we have grown large but we are inedible; our knowledge makes us no better, no smarter, and no calmer. What the ubiquity of instant gratification has done to us is all around — witness it in the young man’s addiction to porn and his inability to become aroused when making love to a real live college girl, witness it in the anxiety we feel when separated from our phones with their GPSs (there was a time, and not so very long ago, when to travel required some modicum of forethought, even if it was just the printing of maps from the internet). I could list numerous other examples, and over the last weeks and months, I have had many discussions with my fiancé regarding a kind of internet death pact.

Let me explain. A few weeks ago, all I wanted to watch was a documentary on voluntary castration that I saw on television maybe ten years ago. I didn’t remember the name of the documentary, but I remembered a few of the people in it and what channel it originally aired on, etc. Now, I am used to searching for and finding things on the internet — I am pretty okay at it, in fact; I used it to once to figure out how to install an emulator on my computer and play Castlevania, etc, which isn’t a huge deal but it’s not entirely as simple as using google to figure out how tall a giraffe is on average. But no matter how much we searched, we could not find a way to watch this particular documentary online, not even for money. We determined the name of it and who directed it, but there was no way we could find to watch it, at least not without dedicating our entire night to the task. At which point, my fiancé was like, “That’s it, it’s over now, we have conquered the internet. We are officially ahead of it.” We began to marvel at the larger psychological consequences of our failure — the internet, in effect, offers us the appearance of all the expanded glory of the world, without making that glory in the least bit possible. Using the internet, we have the potential to see and know everything, almost everything, from how to build a bomb to Lauren-from-high-school’s new baby’s weight at birth, but to actually know all these things is in reality an impossibility of the human condition, e.g. we are not programmed to know so much, about so much, and thus we cannot actually process the things we learn in this manner in any meaningful way. In effect, the potential for knowing all this knowledge makes us incredibly unhappy, because we also deeply understand that we cannot know it all. Knowledge exists all around us, on the internet, it hums and vibrates around us tantalizingly but it is after all fleeting, because it is zipping around us like mosquitoes in a cloud, stinging us here and there, and afterward we are left not with an aggregation of knowledge, but with a body full of itching red bumps that remind us of what we can never be, hold, achieve, or remember.

Recently too I have been fascinated by the “No-Fap” movement, in which men recognize their addiction to the over-stimuli of online porn and make a commitment not to masturbate, in order to hopefully, over time (usually 90 days) normalize their sexual impulses and ultimately be able to have fulfilling sexual encounters with real women. I am intrigued, however, because I’m beginning believe this overstimulation addiction isn’t just do to with porn but that it has everything to do with why the internet is inherently addictive in and of itself, and how it appears to be making many many people, not just me, extremely unhappy.

I am not sure that technology and science make things better. I am not sure of that at all. I long for the courage to limit my internet-time to two or three hours a week, at some location not my house, where I go to complete my correspondence—like a studio or a counting house. I deeply long for the strength of will to use my phone as a phone and nothing else. For the amount of longform reading and the length of time I used spend at the study of things that fascinated me has drastically, drastically changed, even over the last four years, and I am unhappy with the fallout regarding this change — I have many more ‘mosquito-bites’ which I suppose represent topical and irritating knowledge (a crackpot guru nearly died from breathitarianism, or whatever, which is just ‘eating air!’ Maybe men’s preference for younger women is directly to blame for menopause, etc etc ad infinitim)! And so the idea of entering into an internet death pact is hugely appealing to me, because I am too weak to do it alone.

But how to give it up? Thoughts? Thoughts?

A beautiful abandoned school (?) on Rhodes, Greece.

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 03:26:35 -0500

A beautiful abandoned school (?) on Rhodes, Greece.

We are in Greece now.

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 13:41:39 -0500

We are in Greece now.

My lover eats a döner box from the same train-station on...

Wed, 22 May 2013 10:02:56 -0500

My lover eats a döner box from the same train-station on different days.

Berlin swans, late April 2013.

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:56:48 -0500

Berlin swans, late April 2013.

A year-a-half’s worth of catch-up photos here.

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 06:30:36 -0600

A year-a-half’s worth of catch-up photos here.

I’m going to be working mainly on and posting at my other...

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 10:39:00 -0600

I’m going to be working mainly on and posting at my other blog while I’m in Berlin — maybe not fashion-y stuff since I own no clothes anymore but maybe so if it ever warms up/I get money etc. But I will be posting words, photos, art and probably wearing the same fig-colored coat again and again and again for the next two months there at Song of the Exile, which as a blogname is now more appropriate than I could’ve ever imagined it would be when I first cribbed it from Kiana Davenport, who wrote a book I didn’t actually like but couldn’t stop thinking about and I still think about it, especially now that I am in Germany which is like a whole country dedicated to the horrorisms WWII, but I don’t think that is a terribly PC thing to say but nevertheless it feels true. Please visit my blog there and add it to your lists and comment and love and I will comment and return your love and manifold kindnesses!

Berlin Mitte, lovelocks, and my loooover whom I want to look at...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 12:16:17 -0600

Berlin Mitte, lovelocks, and my loooover whom I want to look at constantly.

Here John has been rained on and is unable to go into the camera...

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 06:18:00 -0600

Here John has been rained on and is unable to go into the camera store, as it is closed Wednesdays. Also, a bicycle outside our apartment, a bicycle store, and a wet piece of paper on the ground.

Today I learned that doing my hair in Berlin is dumb, because it...

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 12:50:55 -0600

Today I learned that doing my hair in Berlin is dumb, because it will get destroyed. It was also fifty-three degrees American, and glorious, and isn’t my man glorious as well? It is sometimes hard for me to contain my joy at him. To continue, today, I curled my hair, and I promise promise it looked really pretty when we went out, but by the last stop it was this humidified mess, and that’s okay too because it is lovely here and I don’t really mind the rain at all. I am also always really surprised at how big my purses look in photographs, because when I buy them I try to be conscious of that very body-dwarfing quality and yet whenever I see photos of myself and purses I see I am as-always dwarfed by them. It would help to be bigger, and I think also to have bigger hair, which is a goal toward which I am continually working, but also a goal that my likewise continual aging will probably thwart at some point, either distant or not.

These are pictures from our neighborhood in Berlin. It is, I...

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 05:21:00 -0600

These are pictures from our neighborhood in Berlin. It is, I think, so pretty because everything is pastel. Last night we walked around and wanted deeply to go into every little bar and it was quiet from the snow and not even that cold (relative).

I finally finally got to Berlin after driving seven hours and...

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 08:28:00 -0600

In Berlin.

At the Holocaust Memorial.

Coming out of the U-Bahn.

Lots of graffiti.

John in front of our apartment door.

I finally finally got to Berlin after driving seven hours and selling my car and taking five planes and freezing my ass off in sub-zero NYC while drinking $2 margaritas five minutes from my sister’s office in Manhattan and then walking another seven minutes back to her sweet new pad in Manhattan where I had to wear ear-plugs to sleep but then discovered many of my sleeping troubles might be sound-related, note-to-self, and then I went to Berlin, where my boyfriend met me at the airport with yellow flowers and took me back to our lovely apartment with a graffitied door, and where it was sunny for two days straight, and where it is snowing today, and where there are delicious fancy cheeses for 89 cents and also maybe my very favorite thing about Europe, which is the pear purée juice everywhere, OMG, I want to drink it every day, hot and cold, morning and night, undiluted and diluted with both water and alcohol. And our apartment is five stories up and facing away from the street so it is peaceful and quiet, and I have never lived so high up, or so far away from home, and so far it is nice, and very different, and very exciting.

Some NYC PICKTURES.

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 15:10:48 -0600

Some NYC PICKTURES.

These are some pictures John took last week in Chicago, when the...

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 11:34:41 -0600

These are some pictures John took last week in Chicago, when the camera fogged up when we entered the greenhouse. I think they are really lovely.

Today I am beginning my journey to Germany. I got up early, bid a tearful goodbye to all my coats...

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 09:47:00 -0600

Today I am beginning my journey to Germany. I got up early, bid a tearful goodbye to all my coats except one, and made crushing shoe selections — no heels, two boots, two flats, and I watered the plants that are not mine but that I have been barely keeping alive because apparently I am not very good at taking care of plants but my boyfriend is. Today I drive to Indiana, tomorrow to NYC, and then Wednesday to Germany via the Reykjavik and Copenhagen airports (my first time to Iceland, even if it is only the airport). Spent yesterday imagining all the places we will go in Europe. So lucky and excited and nervous and happy la la la la la fa fa fa.

Chicago, outerwear, cold, ice scraping.

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 11:28:00 -0600

Chicago, outerwear, cold, ice scraping.

At the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago. I went with my...

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 14:31:04 -0600

At the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago. I went with my lover to see the flowers in the winter and we noticed that only lovers were there.

"Language, after all, isn’t a spontaneous effusion of the self like vomit or urine. Language is..."

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 10:24:19 -0600

“Language, after all, isn’t a spontaneous effusion of the self like vomit or urine. Language is social; it’s a form of communication. Descartes can insist, “Cogito, ergo sum,” but before that “Cogito,” there was some other person who taught little Descartes his Latin. Rather than “I think therefore I am,” it would be more accurate to say, “Somebody else speaks, therefore I am,” or, better, “Somebody else spoke first, therefore I can speak as well.””

- Actually, Don’t Write Like You’re Dead by Noah Berlatsky in The Atlantic.

My to-do list before I move to Berlin has many terrifying things on it, like “re-title...

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 14:33:00 -0600

My to-do list before I move to Berlin has many terrifying things on it, like “re-title car” and “new brake-pads” and “pay bills” and “recycle empty wine bottles” and “take dog back to Minnesota.” And then because of a death in John’s family, all of everything has to be sped up by a week because he is flying back to the U.S. and we are going to Indiana to be with his relatives. This morning we discovered that also my vehicle registration has expired so really I shouldn’t be driving anywhere anyway, when right now I have to drive all over creation to get everything done I need to get done, so I have rent a car, but I have no credit card in my own name, ack, terror, as I have wished not for my real name to be etched in plastic but that is because I am conspiracy theorist probably but also because I resist real life at every turn maybe, I don’t know.

But then I went out into the world to start getting shit done, and now I re-titled my car, and got plates, and have an appointment to get new brake-pads and am getting an oil change as I write this, and tonight I will see about the car rental, and though this terrible bureaucratic chicanery is one of my worst nightmares and I feel alone sometimes because I think I am the only person in the world who isn’t into Downtown Abby anymore, and I am leaving America and I love America, I know I can say it will all be all right, because even though I cannot see at this moment that everything will get done, I know it will, because it has to, and I know that it is possible to do all this and more and even more after that.