I think a lot about pain. The pain I feel. The pain others feel. The pain I see vs the pain they see.
I often ask myself whether I am doing enough with the time I have. Where am I unfocused?
Is it the pain that I am distracted by or am I making up excuses not to work. When I know I should work a few more hours, and I’m just too tired to keep my head up.
I swear I’m going to blog everyday.
one day
So my friend L sent me this.
To which I reply:
If you know me. Then you know that I have a soft spot for awkward white girls.
Caroline Polachek, if you’re out there – holla atcha boy!
For the first minute-fiddy, my confusion is well founded. Ms. Polachek does a sort of line-dancesqe heel-toe shuffle while performing what would have to be a cross-between full body American Sign Language and some type of United Methodist praise dance. That or she is channeling Brit Marling of OA fame. Either way it’s delightfully strange.
Then it gets WAY better. A quick CG glint of the eye, and our Hades dwelling heroine convulses and begins spewing a green ectoplasmic mist, grows Krakin like tendrils from the back of her head then dolly zoom out and we’re in a Disneyfied underworld.
What the mother fuck?!?!
All this to say…
I’m in love.
If you’re looking for an even trippier adventure please check out Door.
It occurred to me last night, that there must be a way to search within Google’s archive of results, words / phrases and their use over time – frequency of occurrence down to when it first entered the record. While I didn’t find exactly what I wanted, I found the Google Ngram Viewer.
My morbid preoccupation with the existential abyss that is life on earth and penchant for apocalyptic thinking in general, I endeavored to see what patterns if any we could glean from the archive.
This dumb experiment turned out to be super interesting. I’d originally wanted to search for references to the so called Opioid Crisis, and dig into how Pharma was marketing to doctors as the new crop of opioids were being developed.
In broads strokes, the whole 19th century seemed pretty fuuuuuucked up. Things started to chill out in the early 20th century. Now on the eve of the 21st century there is slow but steady increase in hysteria around the end of the world. The WWI spike in the Armageddon chart is dope.
Granted, this is far from a scientific study – obviously certain words and their usage have their moments based on a multitude of influences [for instance my word choice is obviously indicative of a particular Christian upbringing] but it is interesting to think about.
The “Dooms Day” chart is by far the most interesting. It ebbs and flows, like clockwork every 10 years or so…
more to come….
