a good, strong heart

just went on a bike ride through an old and established part of my childhood neighborhood into which i have never ventured before. the day is utterly amazingly beautiful - the sun makes every color look as vibrant as possible, and tinges every gently flickering leaf with a shimmering pale-yellow hue. everything looks to be moving, to be thriving, to be living.

two things came to mind as i rode past front, side and back yards that had become beautifully overgrown and overstuffed with both lush green foliage and dead golden leaves. i saw gardens and jungles of yards that were all dotted with things that could be considered rare eccentricities in my neighborhood, like archaic-looking chairs, trellises, topiaries and woven wood walkways that led one down charmingly dilapidated brick walkways. there were heart-shaped lawn sculptures and little, ornate white tables that seemed stages for little, ornate tea parties attended by fairies and dolls.

as i rode down those sunny streets i thought about what life really, truly was to me - how it can be that it just is, and all because of this very life i have yet lived.

-

one

life is a constant juggling of two truths. one of them is that to be alive means that there is the opportunity for an infinite amount of possibilities to occur. the other truth is that being alive means you will be faced with an infinite amount of reasons why the greater majority of those possibilities are physically impossible.

therefore, whatever is accomplished in your life will have been successful because you overcame the self-told reasons for why it would have been unsuccessful. you must talk yourself out of talking yourself out of acting, living, taking on challenge, pushing boundaries.

if only one could live solely in the world where there was nothing standing in the way of the infinity of our selves, our existence. is it possible?

two

the thing that i am really afraid of in life, above all else - the thing that causes me to close up, every time, in the face of the opening up of my self to the world - is that i can't bear to let the world see any truth about me that they could recognize through the physical functions of my body. to open up a view of my body to the world in the form of my voice, my body movements, and my facial expressions, is an act i seem to consistently avoid at all costs. it takes an enormous effort to sing in front of someone else without giggling and stopping halfway through, then trying to pretend like what they just saw wasn't really me and that they should just forget they saw it at all.

does anyone else do that? am i just shy, as i have always been told from birth?

i think i just am not confident in who i am, and i wish i knew how to fix it

Lilja 4-Ever

so chic, 'cause we're psychic

i have been listening to non-stop Oneohtrix Point Never's newest release:

Garden of Delete

i bite through it

i especially love to listen first to the song "Animals" and then finish  out the rest of the tracks chronologically. i like the second half more than the first, it seems. there is just something fascinating about the construction of these songs in particular, and how they maintain their structure even though there are so many other elements present whirling about and causing chaos elsewhere. the tracks are frequently pop-like, as many people have said, but the reason for this is because the fundamentals of OPN's sounds appeal to the basest of our desires. he exploits the strength of our emotions and non-emotions, and OPN makes these easily recognizable through sound.

these tracks are journeys from one's current position inward, as through a wormhole of ever-morphing sound structures. the image that i always end up conjuring while listening to OPN - GOD is a black background with pencil-thin lines, multitudinous in color, intersecting and intertwining in chaotic, unpredictable movements. this image of mine was inevitably inspired by the front cover. for some reason, this is also how i imagine a distant future to look.

the voices that emerge from his textures, however distorted, seem to reflect the lives and learned practices of modern humans. once-familiar sounds heard through a veil of sonic, almost alien distortion has always been something i found really interesting to listen to. i think the modern trend of using auto-tuned and electronically produced voices in tracks as legitimately as if they were created by singers in the studio is really awesome.

listen to "no good" off of this OPN album. it will blow your mind.

/

burial is another artist i love who does this, as in this track, a personal favorite of mine ;

"come down to us" / rival dealers, 2013