In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death.
Thomas Wolfe

[no picture]

(From the AP, found via BBC's Day in Pictures.)
(That the hippos are German is not really relevant to anything.)
(Unless of course that pumpkin is Jewish.)

You might think that this picture is all about the hippopotamus in the foreground, munching on a pumpkin, but you'd be wrong. While pumpkin-devouring hippo #1 is certainly eye-catching, the real star of this image is the smug and eager smile on the face of hippo #2, in the background. That is the smile of a hippo that sees a pumpkin on its way. You can almost picture it wiggling in pleasurable anticipation.
I can't explain or defend my love of this picture. I've been coming back to it all week.
Fun fact! The hippopotamus is not a close relative of other terrestrial even-toed ungulates, like you might think. Hippos are more closely related to cetaceans, which is to say that they are more like porpoises than like pigs. Though they are not actually all that much like either.

Also, I broke my foot. Specifically, the second metatarsal bone in my left foot. I have been limping for weeks, and have been trying to be a man about it, but since the fracture was confirmed this morning, I feel due for a little public complaining. Plus, remember that time that I showed you that totally bitchin' picture of a hippopotamus eating a pumpkin, and there was this other hippopotamus smiling in the background? Yeah, I mean, you kind of owed me for that.

Ow ow ow.

(*But not like a Scientologist.)

Remember Death To The Extremist?
( Let's kill math. )

Stars are again like a teary ballad, and at nights
dogs tune their cloven violins.
I do not let sorrow come,
I do not let it near.
A thousand feet of snow over my heart.
I mumble a lot to myself, in the street
I sing aloud.
Sometimes I see myself in passing, with a hat, perfect food
for winds, with some thought or other aslant.
I talk about death, when I mean life. I walk with my papers
in a mess, I don't own a single theory, only a swearing dog.
When I ask for liquor, I'm offered ice-cream,
I may be a Spaniard, with my hairline
low like this, indeed:
I may not be from these parts.
I sweat, trying to talk, once and a while
I tremble.
Almost more than for my death, I mourn for my birth.
And all I ask for
is a thousand feet of snow over my heart.
Sirkka Turkka
(Translation by Kirsti Simonsuuri)

What breaks your heart?

This is getting picked up everywhere, but allow me to direct your attention to reports that more than one percent of the adult population of the US is in prison. This is, as you may guess, a record, and is an increase not reflective of a similar rise in the crime rate, but of an increase in harsher sentencing (and stricter sentencing requirements). We're beating out China, both by proportion of the population and in raw numbers: in the US, we have 750 prisoners per 100,000 population, or 2.3 million people being held this year, where as China has 119 prisoners per 100,000 population, or 1.5 million people being held.
You can read more about it at BBC news, or download the report here.

OH, I GET IT. It's funny because men and women are DIFFERENT.

You're probably getting spammed with this message. I hope you are.
Go out and vote, please. It's easy and important, and you get a sticker and all. I don't care who or what you vote for, but Wikipedia can give you a brief glance at the candidates (if you've managed to miss them so far), and your preferred party (if you have one) will have endorsed a response to initiatives and other ballot items, and if all else fails, go with your gut and remember that you don't have to vote on everything for your ballot to count. You're allowed to be undecided on some things, just please consider whether you want to be undecided on all things, and whether you really, deep down, are.
Thanks.

This is the time of year, between the new year and my birthday, when I usually like to make a post talking about how last year was not so great but this next year should be--will be, really--amazing. Last year was mostly not so great, it's true, but it was amazing, too. It was amazing that a year could be so not great yet so unremarkable in its various lows and setbacks, and it was amazing that through all of that I was surrounded by so many kind and generous friends. My friends really are some of the very best people.
That's all I have to say about last year, anyway, and seeing as threats, pleading, wishing, and prayer have never done much for my future in past years, I'll just say that next year will probably happen, is already happening. I hope that we can all survive it. And if we can't, I hope it's beautiful, anyway.

Amazing fog.

From weatherunderground.com:

There's something on the tip of my tongue that isn't my tongue.
I feel abstract. I feel like my face is pulled sideways, and my foot is bruised--how did my foot get bruised? And I think maybe I want to cry, but that seems like wanting to be, I don't know, Tunisian--I guess I know where it is, I guess I could find it on a map, but I don't know how you get there, how you make yourself that thing, and it's kind of tiring to try. And I know maybe I'm being a little crazy, and I'm worrying about my teeth, I'm not sleeping, I think maybe my hands are someone else's, but these things are really real, not these worries maybe (maybe?), but the other ones--these are real life things and I should worry, I can't just go be crazy at them, they won't fix themselves. Like money and credit and home and who I like and who I don't like and how much I can stand and is a body an idea or a thing? And my father, but I can't get started on my father, even if Christmas really is all about family.
He isn't the point though, really at all.
I wish you were here to hold my hand, and if you were here I'd make you go, because I can't stand the mirror seeing me like this, much less another person mirror, or another person, or you anyway, understand? My foot is bruised and I'm being ridiculous, and I cleaned up a bit, but I'm still feeling bad about myself--still, I keep thinking: everything is all my fault, mine mine mine mine, it is mine only, my very own thing. Dearest thing.
Nothing is real life. Nothing is possible. Nothing is more than these times in which I cannot sleep, and the times when I can only sleep. What I have I eat, ashes or otherwise, and it's the only way, or the only one I know.
I meant to say something else here. It'll come back to me, maybe.

My apologies if you've tried to call me lately. My phone is dropping calls and failing to report voicemail and not logging and...well. It's not the most reliable way to reach me.
If you're needing to reach me, email is probably the way to go.

Josh showed me this marvelous thing.
You deserve marvelous things.

I wish I could show you this night. All stars and sky like the color of bruises, love-bruises, tied down on the trunks of fat palms, evergreens, and all the orange and gold and scarlet trees; this improbable forest lit with haloed street lamp light. And it smells of cold and some faint animal thing, and you run to breathe it in deeper, run til your heart fills your chest, scattering leaves and getting your sneakers wet, and it wounds you, love-wounds, because it's so much and so transient.
I don't know how to tell you. Too many words and no way to bottle them.
The night's like a secret, like something I'm getting away with. If you were here, you would know me, maybe, stirring like the leaves.

This is a true thing:
Things are desperate, things are dull. The more modest the exterior the more my mind is alive with fire; every defeat an agony, every pleasure too glorious, wrenching, sharp with revelry and regret. It undoes me.

This is a true thing:
One day last week there was an awful stranger in my house, and by and by I determined that she was me. So I went out, and she left too. When I came back, she wasn't there.

This is a true thing:
You will realize that you love me when you understand how I have moved time--by will alone!--to tell you again and again, in words beyond language, I have this one pure thing.
And when you love me, you'll take it, thank God. Take it and bury it deep.

This is a true thing:
It doesn't stop; I see it shine against my shut eyes when I try to fall asleep, all too much. School shootings, police states, still birds nailed to a wall, and beauty too--near stars, miracle cures, the smell of you. And it strangles my heart with all this sighing.
Don't. Stop. Don't stop.

This is a true thing:
Everyone lies all the time. Our first lies we tell ourselves, and these are the last we still believe.

You never escape your past; you never transcend it. However far you go, whoever you say you are, your history is there, filling your skin, where any thinking person can read it plainly. There isn't any healing, any triumph, any forgetting, any loss, though you may be distracted, or pretend, or lose your reason. Which maybe you ought to, set so against the impossible sum of your former selves, that everything piled up, exhausted, naked, terrible and cruel. Too many words and weaknesses; they overflow, spilled out across the future like an oil slick.

-

When I tell you how I'm feeling, it's like I'm presenting you with a severed finger or similar. No matter whether I allow you the opportunity to decline, I know that there is something untoward in the offer itself, besides which the object in question is both obscure and disturbing without the context of my person, and I am that diminished by the loss of it.