There was something #beastly in the way they loved, sand in their hair, stars in their teeth. The hunger that keeps one alive and leaves ruins in its wake. Yet they fed it with glances, a mid-summer sun burning behind clouds in the dead of winter, a lost season forgetting its name.

#vss365

He expected scars. Instead he acquired composure. Each excess brightened him, as though sin were a cosmetic.

Society praised his discipline. Beneath the shine a careful #lacuna widened, precise as a surgeon’s incision, a tasteful gap where conscience had been.

He called it refinement.

#vss365

Oops… I meant foreboding.

What’s inspiring your word choices this month as the #vss365 “February First Fortnight Keeper of the Words”?

Indeed. Great words this month, thanks.

I read your comment three different ways. Uplifting (probably as it was intended, thanks). A neutral matter of fact, also cool.

But interestingly, it can be read as quite forbidding, like a subtitle to a horror movie with a title like “Final Edit”… 🤭

Thanks @nathanbrazil.bsky.social

… inspiration came today as I walked my two little dogs (aka owl treats) past a very large winged predator perched in the canopy of our little village.

www.hudsonforest.org/about

The great horned owl of Hudson Forest rules fifty acres, a crown kept amid encroaching developers. Houston humidity and harried humanity press close, lights humming without counsel. An ancient #ache nests beneath his breastbone. He remembers wanting more, and remembers when that passed.

#vss365

Proving here, perhaps, that cleverness is both situational and relative.

Nice… minibus in my veins. Fun image!

Well done.

… good because most insurrections fail. Very approachable prose.

Funny & clever!

Arjun recalled Prof. Norton’s thin pamphlet on poetry, taken from the man’s shelves at his death, books redistributed like effects. Poetry, Norton wrote, is prose under immense constraint. Meaning compressed, distilled. Listening to Max now, Arjun felt the echo. Constraint again.

“Meaning is not upstream,” Max continued coolly. “It is a byproduct. Act without attachment and purpose appears. Wait for certainty and you outsource your agency. I do not require belief, Arjun. Only motion.”

“You think purpose must be assigned,” Max’s voice over the earbud. “That is the error. Purpose emerges from constraint. You act because you are here, now, able. Outcomes are noise. Refuse action and you still choose. You just let entropy decide for you.”

She cut her thumb with a blade older than the station. #Blood welled, bright and indecently real.

“Max trades in statistics and forecasts,” she said. “We trade in consequences.”

In 0.3G the drop fell slowly, and Arjun noted how belief obeyed the same law.

#vss365

Clever!

Crows wheel in arched arcs high above the city, embattled, harrying the local red-tailed hawk. A #quiver of wings and talons, beaks and cries in the morning light. Unmade by the harassment, the larger bird feathers off to the edge of sight, unwelcome, hunting elsewhere.

#vss365

“F’d up” as in “good”, like the kids use that phrase. E.g “That concert was f’d up! I ended up with fourteen stitches and a chipped tooth from the dancing. I love that band!” Or…

I chased things and found only the mind watching.

I chased the mind and found only the world rising to meet it.

Call it a quiet #augury: seer and seen folding into each other, neither able to stand alone.

#vss365
#AlanWatts

At 22 I sat in my grandfather’s kitchen in Virginia. Between ships. He looked at his coffee and said, quiet as a man who’d lived it, ‘The only thing that matters is love.’ No lesson, no sermon. Just fact. I didn’t understand then. Now I do. It’s the whole deal.

Love is the closest we get to feeling like life isn’t a random accident. It’s the convergence of two stories that suddenly make a third one possible. There’s a kind of holy geometry in that.

Everything else in life is noise, scaffolding, invention.
All the rest of life are currents we swim in. But love is the water itself.

Love feels good because it is the one experience that dissolves the illusion of being alone.

You call that #suave?” she asked, smiling like she already knew the answer.

“If I’ve earned any at all,” I said, “it came from weather, not mirrors.”

She nodded, slow, like the line told her more about me than I meant to give away. Can’t figure dames, but they can sure figure me.

#vss365

Wonderful observation. Where then is the “Statistically Significant” point at which to cheer?

The X-bar runner?

Good questions… no answers as far as I can tell.

Perhaps it is that once we know it’s real, we know realness … or that nothing is real, and so we either restart the search or call off the search.

Or the keys turn out to have been in our hands all along; and yet we realize there are no keys.

Exactly… now go drink your coffee as if the axis of the whole universe revolves around the tilt of the cup in your grip.

@bethcgreenberg.com … please note, the situation appears even more complicated with pie.

This made me snorfle … like a snort chuckle laugh … totally spontaneously thanks to this brilliant little humor. Well done. Intended effect achieved at least once!

Well written, clever.

The last cookie… 🍪

I suppose it can only ever be given away.

Really well done … perfect.