Circular reasoning coffee (Taken with instagram)
Circular reasoning coffee (Taken with instagram)
Photographer Lee Jeffries worked as a sports photographer before having a chance encounter one day with a young homeless girl on a London street. After stealthily photographing the girl huddled in her sleeping bag, Jeffries decided to approach and talk with her rather than disappear with the photograph. That day changed his perception about the homeless, and he then decided to make them the subject of his photography. Jeffries makes portraits of homeless people he meets in Europe and in the US, and makes it a point to get to know them before asking to create the portraits. His photographs are gritty, honest, and haunting.
So intense, but so, so beautiful.
I love it.
Tue(day)2
He walked outside that day. Slowly, trodding through the wet earth, which seemed constantly to try swallowing his boots. Or, he mused, himself. There was an air of silence about, but not of pure silence. A peace, separate from the tires throwing up water, from the shrill breeze, from the steady tapping of rain, snap-snapping, on metal roofs, old cars, flimsy, single-pane windows. The streets beneath the sky were empty, as far as he knew. And so too was he alone with the litter of stray cats, which, it turns out are not all different from ordinary house cats at all. They stretched and meowed just the same. They even purred and rubbed along his leg like their old cat Joliah once did. He fed them bits of stale bread; crumbs leftover from an empty pocket.
Tue(day)
Outside, the rain drizzled against dilapidated shingles, dog ears on fences, old toys abandoned in the mud. He looked out of a fogged window to the alley. The stray cats huddled in their usual spot beneath a cardboard box to the east. They shivered gently but appeared soothed, if not by the gentle pitter-patter of the rain, then by their own proximity. The winds parted gently, whistling as they moved along the trees. He whistled gently, swaying his own head as he watched the raindrops fall from the leaves. To the west, she looked out into the windswept street, abandoned, with nothing to do. She prepared a tea to sip on as she squat upon her chair, looking out into the Tuesday rain.
Self-Destruction
Think happiness, but not of how happy you are.
Quantify a feeling and you will only drive yourself mad; chasing more of something you have enough of.
Happiness is thing-less.
Small things.
You rose to meet me. You lifted yourself up, with much effort, in order to tell me ______ .
And when you said it your lashes licked my cheek; your tears wet the floor.
I walked away and remembered what you said before: it’s a great favor not to look back.
And I never did look back that day, as I walked slowly down the street.
I looked forward, I looked ahead.
I looked elsewhere, I found what I was looking for—that we weren’t.
I lived on.
Yet, just as a storm clears, revealing a distant landscape, I looked back at you.
My eyes had never closed to you, they never turned away.
The winds blew our petals to the floor. I watered them; unrequited futility.
To not look back, was good advice.
tumblrbot asked: WHERE WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO VISIT ON YOUR PLANET?
Your eyeball hole. And then Tibet.
Voltaire once stated that, when faced by the collapse of all values and the death of God, the only thing left for us to do is to cultivate our garden.
Pinterest?
It’s gaining some momentum.. According to my Facebook feed, anyways. Oh some testing of the waters may be in store.
Optimism
April is a girl. She doesn’t do much with her days. She has a job and a dog and cat that play. They get a long well with one another and she gets along well with them. She works at a bakery. She bakes breads mainly. Sometimes she’ll bake the odd cake or something similar. Mostly it’s menial day to day work that she doesn’t really disagree with. She might even tell you that she likes what she does. She works hard at her job and spends her hours caring for the ingredients that make up the cakes.
She doesn’t have that many friends, but of the few she has they are caring towards her and help her with any troubles she might have. One time when she got a flat tire, she asked her friend Frandra what to do because she had never changed a tire before. Frandra brought over her boyfriend and they both helped her to change the tire.
Lately, April feels a little different. She wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t for one of her coworkers pointing it out. She said, April, you seem a little tired lately, is everything all right? And April immediately replied, yes! Everything’s good. Maybe I just didn’t get enough sleep the other night. She went to bed a little bit earlier that night, hugging Timothy and Frederick, her cat and dog, as they all drifted off to sleep. As the days passed April felt exactly the same. And she seemed exactly the same to others. She felt as though less energy was at her expense, and as a result took more and more breaks. She had trouble focusing on her work and felt sometimes careless. Careless was how she would have named it but it was more along the lines of not caring. She started not to care about her job so much. It suddenly didn’t feel a part of her any longer.
She did what she had done for the last few years. She got the work done and went home and then came back the next morning with the same tired eyes, the same slow gait along the sidewalk, through the door, and the same cheerless hellos to the people at the bakery that greeted her. She was not depressed. She wouldn’t ever have called herself a depressed person. She felt as though she was missing something from her routine. She took up hobbies that week ranging from running to painting, but only the former and the latter interested her. She began working harder so that she could leave work earlier to start a new painting. She woke up earlier so that she could run longer and even timed herself to keep track of her progress.
Several weeks passed. She had a handful of paintings, none of which were great, but each showed a noticeable improvement and attempted something different. She ran more comfortably now and her legs didn’t burn as painfully as when she first started. Also, Frederick, her dog, was always excited to go running. She talked to her friend a little less, but still went out to see them every so often. Her coworkers noticed a subtle change in the stride of her step and the ends of her smile reached a little further than they had before. She talked little about her hobbies but stuck to them as sure as she went to work every morning. Her friends bought a few of her paintings which made her very happy.
Months passed and a local group put together a marathon that attracted a large crowd of runners. She entered the race and finished 257th. A small golden medal was given to her which she hung up on her wall. Soon, it was accompanied by many other medals, and a few trophies even followed soon after. Years went by and she was soon invited to display her paintings in gallery events. She happily sold away some of her precious works. Her older works were even displayed, the ones that she considered very ordinary, but they all sold regardless. It made her quite happy.
Decades flew by. She still entered marathons, but received less trophies than complimentary medals. She had far more people that looked up to her than before, they admired her for entering at an age where most women would be watching from the sidelines. Though her times decreased as she aged, she stuck the the routine runnings every morning, still logging her times and her distances as she had done in the past, out of habit. If one were to make a graph of her speeds against her age it would show a simple bell curve, with the peak when she was of the age of 34 years. It slowly went downhill after that. Her bones and muscles ached more, requiring far more stretching than she had ever needed in the past. Her painting however took on a new light at 35 years old. If you were to view her works painted in younger years, compared to those of her later years, you would say of that painter that she must have seen the world in a different light. She used far less bright colors. Her oranges and reds and yellows seemed to be replaced by deep violets, thin lines of blue, clouds of black and grey and white with the occasional small burst of subdued orange peel. April wouldn’t have noticed it. When asked once if she thought her style was changing she simply replied that styles always change, and she wouldn’t be surprised if hers was changing. It happens, she said.
April continued on with her routines. Until one day, during a winter morning run she slipped on an ice slick, falling oddly and twisting her ankle out of place. An ambulance was called by another runner who, coincidentally, knew her from marathons they had run in together. His name was Larry, and he placed 243rd last year. The doctor told her she would be fine, but she needed to go easy on herself, you aren’t young anymore and you need to give your body proper rest, he said to her. After one year she still couldn’t run like she did before. After only a few minutes of jogging, pains would stab deeply into her heel. She walked instead.
She focused more on painting. April became quite obsessed with trying new things. Her studio grew and grew in size. She now had several canvases standing on easels at one time, all only partially completed and seeming to involve completely different topics. She trashed or destroyed many of them. It was not long after her birthday that she began to notice her eyesight was in decline. She couldn’t see faces as she had before. Her eye doctor later told her that she suffered from a common disorder, they could help her, but she may not see the same ever again. She slowly became used to the blurry, scratched things in front of her. She despaired in front of her canvases at first. But days went on and soon she often sat looking outside into the blurry backyards of her far-away neighbors. At their swingsets. At their children. At their pets. Other times, she simply sat alone, in silence the of her home, looking up at old pictures of Timothy and Frederick.
