my sister took this when we lived together in berkeley

i just spent ten days traveling with chalk talk through little rock and nashville and asheville and charlotte and charleston and augusta and atlanta and athens and savannah, which totaled 1,700+ miles. then in a single night i drove 600 harrowing miles north from savannah to get back to virginia, which is where i am now. today it rained hard as hell and i stayed inside and felt pretty sad about everything and i kind of wish i were dead. i’ll be here for a few weeks, so i figure i’ll finally finish writing the dozens of posts i’ve been chipping away at since i left berlin in august. on my birthday i’m going to take a bus up to new york city for a few days and see my friends. and then i’ll go back to california to get back to berlin, what with the airline not allowing me to change the departure airport for my international flight (for some reason). well, whatever. here’s a picture of me looking like a disgusting creep just now. seeya~

sorry, soldier: that love’s gonna have to come off

nurse, i trust you . . . go ahead and put on the song that makes you lonely

. . . But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain” (i.e. even while living) “in the congregation of the dead”. Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me.

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

my favorite passage from moby-dick