@kumakurkuma

“Ice Cave” by Georgia O’Keeffe and a photograph of an ice cave.

The Fugitive Kind (1960) dir. by Sidney Lumet

it can be tempting to live your life like a prequel. to live as if you’re setting up your own story.and once you lose the weight, once you have the money, once you graduate school, once you’re in a real relationship, once, once, once. then finally, you’ll begin to live, and everything you do up until that point is some kind of half-life, some unimportant foreword you can skip. don’t do this. inhabit your life completely. sink fully into the wealth of your existence. the power to manifest is in the fearless owning of who you are, so that you can shape where you’re going.

I just read an essay about how one of the worst things a women can do publicly is eat (especially alone), because it shows that women have desires that benefit them (and only them) personally, which is viewed as selfish. So the act of women eating in horror movies (sometimes cannibalistically ala raw) is either empowering or horrifying depending on the audience it’s presented to. 

anyway just read There’s Nothing Scarier Than a Hungry Woman I was losing my mind over it at work

when kafka said “all the love in the world is useless when there is total lack of understanding” and when richard siken said “if you love me, you don’t love me in a way I understand.”

anne carson

when anaïs nin said “i dont want worship. i want understanding”

sorry what

That header photo doesn’t do the dragon justice. (For shame!). Here’s NASA’s own photo:

(Source [Because NASA is funded by taxpayer money, all their images are public domain, BTW])

THE TIME HAS COME

he is here 

Reblogging for THE ART HOLY SHIT

Dragon is cool yeah but “hole in the sun” ?????

The “hole in the Sun” is a dramatic way of saying “sunspot”. Still, cool.

Ava Gardner in The Killers (1946)

im crying

Do you know how many dogs I’ve met that get scared or anxious around men because in their previous home men hit them? A lot, and they are very protective of the women who have adopted them now.

Men who are violent towards women are often violent towards animals as well. They think we’re all chattel. If a man wants you to choose between your dog or cat or him, dump the guy. Those animals will love you for the rest of your life, loyal and true.

Actually, I have something to add.

The other day I saw a story where a woman was asking why her dogs had suddenly started growling at her boyfriend whenever he was in the same room as her son.

And my immediate thought was ‘that boyfriend has hurt the kid somehow.’

Spoilers: that was exactly the case.

Trust ur dogs when they say something is off.

The first time my sister came to visit, via plane, after I got my dog, pupper growled at her and wouldn’t go near her for the first day. Next visit was by car (two day drive)and pupper LOVED my sister. They snuggled and played and none of us could figure out why the change. We thought maybe the scent of my sisters cat had lingered on her clothes, making that first visit a rough one. Whereas when she came by car, the scent had had time to wear off. Well that was partially true…

Fast forward about six months when I went north to visit my family. My sister walked into my parents’ house and pupper ran to greet my sister. Stopped dead in her tracks and started growling and barking. Hackles raised, full protection mode. My sisters husband had just walked in behind her.

My precious puppy wanted NOTHING to do with him. She barked, growled, ran away, and sat between him and my sister. Y'all my dog had spent maybe a weekend a half around my sister but protected her like this was her flesh and blood.

Eventually, my sister filed for divorce on grounds of “Extreme and repeated mental, emotional, and sexual abuse.” Divorce was final in less than a month because her claims were substantiated.

Trust the dog, honey. They KNOW.

I’ve never owned dogs, but I used to work with horses (which are a lot like big dogs).

There was this one horse I worked with named Tonto. He was a doll. He followed me like a puppy, snuck treats out of my pocket, he was the sweetest thing. We were practically inseparable.

A guy I was considering dating came to visit me one day, and Tonto wanted NOTHING to do with him. Normally well behaved, he shoved himself between us and would NOT let this guy near me. He was stomping, acting really aggressive, and tried to bite the guy. This horse was practically dragging me back toward the barn. At that moment, despite being like, 17, I knew something was up, and ultimately things didn’t pan out for guy and me.

A year later I found out he had lied about his age (he said he was 18 but he was actually 27) he was arrested for sexually assaulting an 11 year old girl.

TRUST THE ANIMALS.

ALWAYS TRUST THE BABS

Animals recognize predators.

The reply with the mastiff gets me every single time. I’m not a dog person but my god, they are Good Animals.

Monica Bellucci in Malèna. 🌹

Kind of gives you chills .

Good Lord, how delicious! I wanna do that! The next time I’m in a cathedral, I’m doing it. 

As she stood inside an ancient and empty church in Montefrío, Spain, Malinda Kathleen Reese belted out one of the best Christmas carols of all time-“O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and the end result was just heavenly.

I’m obsessed with this because A. Victorian Christmas Carols B. European Cathedrals C. It’s gorgeous and fuckin choristers are my favorite

me @ any point in every day

I saw a post talking about how Terry Pratchett only wrote 400 words a day, how that goal helped him write literally dozens of books before he died. So I reduced my own daily word goal. I went down from 1,000 to 200. With that 800-word wall taken down, I’ve been writing more. “I won’t get on tumblr/watch TV/draw/read until I hit my word goal” used to be something I said as self-restraint. And when I inevitably couldn’t cough up four pages in one sitting, I felt like garbage, and the pleasurable hobbies I had planned on felt like I was cheating myself when I just gave up. Now it’s something I say because I just have to finish this scene, just have to round out this conversation, can’t stop now, because I’m enjoying myself, I’m having an amazing time writing. Something that hasn’t been true of my original works since middle school. 

And sometimes I think, “Well, two hundred is technically less than four hundred.” And I have to stop myself, because - I am writing half as much as Terry Pratchett. Terry fucking Pratchett, who not only published regularly up until his death, but published books that were consistently good. 

And this has also been an immense help as a writer with ADHD, because I don’t feel bad when I take a break from writing - two hundred words works up quick, after all. If I take a break at 150, I have a whole day to write 50 more words, and I’ve rarely written less than 200 words and not felt the need to keep writing because I need to tie up a loose end anyways. 

Yes, sometimes, I do not produce a single thing worth keeping in those two hundred words. But it’s much easier to edit two hundred words of bad writing than it is to edit no writing at all.

A first-hand account (originally from a Salon.com message board circa 1999) of a woman whose two primitive-type dogs – a Basenji and a New Guinea Singing Dog – found an elk carcass, holed up inside it, and refused to leave it.

An assorted list of my favorite excerpts:

It’s brilliant, and I am so glad it exists on the internet. 

@why-animals-do-the-thing please tell me I can laugh at this

Yes, yes you can. Sometimes living with dogs is not graceful - this is a great example. 

I hadn’t read this one in YEARS! Still hilarious!

Since reading old message board archive format is more than most people want to wade through, here is 1) just the main story without message board clutter and 2) her letter of validation, in a format easier to read.  I have eliminated the comment thread which, while funny, is nowhere near this funny - you can read it at the link above.

AnneV -  Okay - I know how to take meat away from a dog. How do I take a dog away from meat? This is not, unfortunately, a joke.

AmyC -  Um, can you give us a few more specifics here?

AnneV -  They’re inside of it. They crawled inside, and now I have a giant incredibly heavy piece of carcass in my yard, with 2 dogs inside of it, and they are NOT getting bored of it and coming out. One of them is snoring. I have company arriving in three hours, and my current plan is to 1. put up a tent over said carcass and 2. hang thousands of fly strips inside it. This has been going on since about 6:40 this morning.

AmyC -  Oh. My. God. What sort of carcass is big enough to hold a couple of dogs inside? Given the situation, I’m afraid you’re not going to be create enough of a diversion to get the dogs out of the carrion, unless they like greeting company as much as they like rolling around in dead stuff. Which seems unlikely. Can you turn a hose on the festivities?

Ase Innes-Ker -  I’m sorry Anne. I know this is a problem (and it would have driven me crazy), but it is also incredibly funny.

AnneV -  Elk. Elk are very big this year, because of the rain and good grazing and so forth. They aren’t rolling. They are alternately napping and eating. They each have a ribcage. Other dogs are working on them from the outside. It’s all way too primal in my yard right now. We tried the hose trick. At someone elses house, which is where they climbed in and began to refuse to come out. Many hours ago. I think that the hose mostly helps keep them cool and dislodges little moist snacks for them. hose failed. My new hope is that if they all continue to eat at this rate, they will be finished before the houseguests arrive. The very urban houseguests. Oh, god - I know it’s funny. It’s appalling, and funny, and completely entirely representative of life with dogs.

Kristen R. -  I’m so glad I read this thread, dogless as I am. Dogs in elk. Dogs in elk.

AnneV -  It’s like that childrens book out there - dogs in elk, dogs on elk, dogs around elk, dogs outside elk. And there is some elk inside of, as well as on, each dog at this point.

Elizabeth K -  Anne, aren’t you in Arizona or Nevada? There are elk there? I’m so confused! We definately need to see pics of Gus Pong and Jake in the elk carcass.

AnneV -  I am in New Mexico, but there are elk in both arizona and nevada, yes. There are elk all over the da*n place. They don’t look out very often. If you stand the ribcage on end they scramble to the top and look out, all red. Otherwise, you kinda have to get in there a little bit yourself to really see them. So I think there will not be pictures.

CoseyMo - “all red;” I’m not sure the deeper horror of all this was fully borne in upon me till I saw that little phrase.

AnneV - Well, you know, the Basenji (that would be Jake) is a desert dog, naturally, and infamous for it’s aversion to water. And then, Gus Pong (who is coming to us, live, unamplified and with a terrific reverb which is making me a little dizzy) really doesn’t mind water, but hates to be cold. Or soapy. And both of them can really run. Sprints of up to 35 mph have been clocked. So. If ever they come out, catching them and returning them to a condition where they can be considered house pets is not going to be, shall we say, pleasant.

CoseyMo - What if you stand the ribcage on end, wait for them to look out, grab them when they do and pull?

AnneV - They wedge their toes between the ribs. And scream. We tried that before we brought the elk home from the mountain with dogs inside. Jake nearly took my friends arm off. He’s already short a toe, so he cherishes the 15 that remain.

Linda Hewitt - Have you thought about calling your friendly vet and paying him to come pick up the dogs, elk and letting the dogs stay at the vets overnight. If anyone would know what to do, it would be your vet. It might cost some money, but it would solve the immediate crisis. Keep us posted.

ChristiPeters - Yikes! My sympathy! When I lived in New Mexico, my best friend’s dog (the escape artist) was continually bringing home road kill. When there was no road kill convenient, he would visit the neighbor’s house. Said neighbor slaughtered his own beef. The dog found all kinds of impossibly gross toys in the neighbor’s trash pit. I have always had medium to large dogs. The smallest dog I ever had was a mutt from the SPCA who matured out at just above knee high and about 55 pounds. Our current dog (daughter’s choice) is a Pomeranian. A very small Pomeranian. She’s 8 months old now and not quite 4 pounds. I’m afraid I’ll break her.

Lori Shiraishi - Bet you could fit a whole lot of Pomeranians in that there elk carcass! Anne - my condolences on what must be an unbelievable situation!

AnneV - I did call my vet. He laughed until he was gagging and breathless. He says a lot of things, which can be summed as *what did you expect?* and *no, there is no such thing as too much elk meat for a dog.* He is planning to stop over and take a look on his way home. Thanks, Lori. I am almost surrendered to the absurdity of it.

Lori Shiraishi - “He is planning to stop over and take a look on his way home.” So he can fall down laughing in person?

AnneV - Basically, yeah. That would be about it.

AmyC - “No, there is no such thing as too much elk meat for a dog.“ Oh, sweet lo*d, Anne. You have my deepest sympathies in this, perhaps the most peculiar of the Gus Pong Adventures. You are truly a woman of superhuman patience. wait – you carried the carcass down from the mountains with the dogs inside?

AnneV - “The carcass down from the mountains with the dogs inside?” no, well, sort of. My part in the whole thing was to get really stressed about a meeting that I had to go to, and say *yeah, ok, whatever* when it was suggested that the ribcages, since we couldn’t get the dogs out of them and the dogs couldn’t be left there, be brought to my house. Because, you know - I just thought they would get bored of it sooner or later. But it appears to be later, in the misty uncertain future, that they will get bored. Now, they are still interested. And very loud, one singing, one snoring.

Lori Shiraishi - “And very loud, one singing, one snoring.” wow. I can’t even begin to imagine the acoustics involved with singing from the inside of an elk.

AnneV - reverb. lots and lots of reverb.

AnneV - I’ll tell you the thing that is causing me to lose it again and again, and then I have to go back outside and stay there for a while. After the meeting, I said to my (extraordinary) boss, “look, I’ve gotta go home for the rest of the day, I think. Jake and Gus Pong are inside some elk ribcages, and my dad is coming tonight, so I’ve got to get them out somehow.” And he said, pale and huge-eyed, “Annie, how did you explain the elk to the clients?” The poor, poor man thought I had the carcasses brought to work with me. For some reason, I find this deeply funny. (weekend pause)

AnneV - So what we did was put the ribcages (containing dogs) on tarps and drag them around to the side yard, where I figured they would at least be harder to see, and then opened my bedroom window so that the dogs could let me know when they were ready to be plunged into a de-elking solution and let in the house. Then I went to the airport. Came home, no visible elk, no visible dogs. Peeked around the shrubs, and there they were, still in the elk. By this time, they had gnawed out some little portholes between some of the ribs, and you got the occasional very frightening glimpse of something moving around in there if you watched long enough. After a lot of agonizing, I went to bed. I closed the back door, made sure my window was open, talked to the dogs out of it until I as sure they knew it was open, and then I fell asleep. Sometimes, sleep is a mistake, no matter how tired you are. And especially if you are very very tired, and some of your dogs are outside, inside some elks. Because when you are that tired, you sleep through bumping kind of noises, or you kind of think that it’s just the house guests. It wasn’t the house guests. It was my dogs, having an attack of teamwork unprecedented in our domestic history. When I finally woke all the way up, it was to a horrible vision. Somehow, 3 dogs with a combined weight of about 90 pounds, managed to hoist one of the ribcages (the meatier one, of course) up 3 feet to rest on top of the swamp cooler outside the window, and push out the screen. What woke me was Gus Pong, howling in frustration from inside the ribcage, very close to my head, combined with feverish little grunts from Jake, who was standing on the nightstand, bracing himself against the curtains with remarkably bloody little feet. Here are some things I have learned, this Rosh Hashanah weekend: 1. almond milk removes elk blood from curtains and pillowcases, 2. We can all exercise superhuman strength when it comes to getting elk carcasses out of our yard, 3. The sight of elk ribcages hurtling over the fence really frightens the nice deputy sheriff who lives across the street, and 4. the dogs can pop the screens out of the windows, without damaging them, from either side.

AnneV - What I am is really grateful that they didn’t actually get the damn thing in the window, which is clearly the direction they were going in. And that the nice deputy didn’t arrest me for terrifying her with elk parts before dawn.

AmyC - Imagine waking up with a gnawed elk carcass in your bed, like a real-life “Godfather” with an all-dog cast.

AnneV - There is not enough almond milk in the world to solve an event of that kind.

.

Authentication:

The Validity of the Dogs in Elk Story

From http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~solan/dogsinelk/validity.htm

[Rob]: Since publishing the pumpkin version of the Dogs in Elk story, I’ve received dozens of e-mails from people curious about the story’s validity. I’ve also received e-mail from AnneVerchick, owner of the “real” dogs in elk.

I’ve never seen the dogs myself, and I’ve as yet to see a picture of the actual event, but here are some snippets of what Annie had to say. She sent me this 10/28/99:

Hi, Rob - This is AnneVerchick, owner of the dogs in elk. The pumpkin carving is lovely, and, on a smaller, more vegetative scale, really pretty faithful to what was one of the messier experiences of my recent life.

Thanks, and take care. Annie

.

After a couple of e-mail volleys, I finally mustered up the nerve to ask Annie to attest to the validity of the story. She wrote back:

Rob,

Sure, I can attest. I mean, I can tell you that it really did happen. I can ask a couple of people who stopped by to admire the whole scene to get in touch with you, or give you their email addresses and phone numbers.

Does that help at all? I think that it’s easy for me to lose track of how atypical my dog experiences are, in some ways, because like everyone else, what I compare the world to is my experience.

The thing about the dogs in elk thing is this - with the dogs I have, especially Gus Pong, who is a New Guinea Singing Dog, and a complete freak of primitive dogdom, dogs in elk is in some ways a fairly minor event, in that it involved fewer people than usual. Sharing a house with a very primitive, deeply attached and wildly inspired animal has led me into all sorts of situations I never anticipated as a pet owner.

How dogs in elk began is a little odd, without considerable history - ignore now, if you’re not interested. Gus Pong is a New Guinea Singing Dog - currently, they are classified as a subspecies of Dingo, but what they look like is a cross between a German Shepherd and a Shiba Inu. And he is an incredibly fussy eater. In the highlands, they live as semi-pariah dogs in the villages, and their primary use is for hunting. So, after being unable to find a commercial dog food that he would eat at all, I contacted local game processors and butchers. I lucked out. I found a really nice guy who was willing to give me (since game can’t be sold) trim and bones, which turned out to be something Gus Pong (and my other two dogs, Jake and Stella) thought was just fine. You can see, I am sure, where this is going. They had a rich texan come in, and shoot his tags, and not want the meat. So they did a really rough field dress, and called and asked if I wanted to come pick up about 100 lbs of slabcut elk and so forth. I said sure, and mistakenly put Jake and Gus in the car before driving up. Well, they got out of the car (One of slider windows was cracked, which I didn’t realize) and you know the rest.

The original chain of posts begins here: http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx?14@@.ee90352/1317 which is in TableTalk, a forum at Salon, an ezine that added a webcrossing forum to it. That’s why I am so astonished that it made it all over the web - and really all over. My mother has gotten multiple copies from friends, asking if my dogs are *really* that out of control.

Take care, and let me know if you’d like to speak to someone other than me who was there.

Annie

Here is the final illustration of the Managarm wolves for those of you who have been following me on instagram/ Facebook (I tend to ask many questions to my followers there) 🤗🤩 Thank you again for helping me with this. It will be available on my shop soon. (sorry for the double post, i kinda messed up the other one XD )