Pretty Little Death

Tag: photography

  • How do people stay un-tired?

    Because I am exhausted.

    We’re at the midpoint of this week and I’m already tired.

    It feels like we’re stuck on a hamster wheel and the thought that we are racing against each other while going around in 3D circles makes me giddy.

    Sometimes, I ask myself what the point is.

    The disenchantment is real. I sometimes find myself craving darkness and silence after a day at work.

    What is work and why do we have to work? Don’t give me the usual answers.

    I find myself going back in time and questioning whether our modern economic system is really a natural way for society to function.

    It is, after all, a human construct rather than an immutable law of nature.

    At times, it feels less like a system designed to serve humanity and more like one that concentrates wealth, power and control in the hands of a relatively small group, while the rest of us spend our lives chasing numbers.

    What is currency? Why does it have to exist? Can money ever truly and fairly compensate someone for their time, labour and service? Or is it simply a construct we have collectively agreed to believe in?

    If we removed currency from the equation and returned to a system of barter, perhaps the world would become a simpler place.

    Value would no longer be measured by numbers on a screen or pieces of paper, but by what we could genuinely offer one another.

    Sure, one might argue that this is a step backwards, a sign of becoming less civilised. But look at where we are now.

    On the grandest scale, the world is still consumed by war.

    Closer to home, within our own little ecosystems, we fight over things as trivial as status at work or the power to make decisions that rarely matter or create any meaningful positive change.

    What is the point of it all? And can we really call this progress or claim that society is moving in a positive direction?

  • Shut it.

    How do you tell someone to stop yelling at you? Do you yell back or do you go silent… do you simply walk away or do you throw water from your mug on their face?

    There’s no right answer, and it really depends on who’s yelling and who’s on the receiving end of that verbal noise pollution.

    It also depends on the situation’s potential to turn more violent.

    It’s never fair, especially to anyone who’s neurodivergent, to be on the receiving end of that yelling.

    Picture all that over-stimulation while being non-verbal… how unfair is it to be left defenseless, with a head full of thoughts, a heart full of pain and confusion?

    Whatever the disagreement, there are so many other ways to sort things out.

    Humans who are not speech-impaired and/or non-verbal can always talk things out.

    How lucky one must be to never battle being non-verbal and have every ability required to simply shout their point at someone else?

    Well, to such people, I’ll say one thing.

    Why should anyone be subjected to your abuse and have to turn into another version of a yelling you just to stop your negativity?

    Shut it.

  • Drainage Beauty / Beauty Drainage?

    From ten years ago.

    Captured this low-res image with an entry-level phone back in 2016, after I drunkenly fell next to an open trench drain and dropped my spectacles into it.

    I’m extremely shortsighted and had to use my phone camera, with the zoom and flash turned on to battle both myopia and the darkness of the night, to look for my glasses.

    That method somehow worked. I found my specs and, next to them, stood this beauty.

    (Sidebar: I was surely not sober because sober me would have left my specs there and flagged a cab home. I always have a collection of 20 or more pairs of specs. Besides, the drain was definitely filthy and filled with the possibility of having a brief and unpleasant meeting with rowdy rats and lurking lizards.)

    After seeing the plant in the drain from my phone screen, I asked aloud in my drunken stupor: “How can someone as beautiful as you be here, my love?”

    I remember this moment vividly because I snapped a photo, obviously… but I also remember this encounter because I felt upset, thinking about how the plant growing in the drain was very much like myself.

    Ten years on, I am no longer on the ground next to the drain.

    I Am The Plant.

    In the drain. Haha.