To Love Another Person Is To See The Face Of God, a very lovely thrift find.
stop asking me wyd i’m literally always thinking about love and how it touches every aspect of the human experience
The notes on a recent post got me thinking
By nature, I’m a fan of having 2 beers and meeting strangers at a bar somewhere you’ve never been, which is a thing that we don’t do in 2023 between COVID and being afraid of one another because of the prevalence of gun violence and regular violence and misdirected road rage and the million other little deadly social erosions of the past 10 years or so.
You have got to let go of this idea that any place is a complete nothing-burger full of nothing-people.
You have to.
Its vitally important that you navigate that airport with a stranger in Denver and realize he’s got a tattoo of lyrics from your favorite song. To sing House of the Rising Sun with four people you’ve known for 2 hours (and somehow managed to get into the DNCs private bar with) in the back of an Uber in DC when it’s pissing rain and entirely too cold for your southern blood. It’s important to cooperate and solve problems together and go about it laughing and singing. We are silly little creatures that love a puzzle and a story.
It’s also important to flee a tornado in the back of a shitty red pickup at pride in Oklahoma City and feel the sky break wide-open against the lazy /tick-lok/ /tick-lok/ of the windshield wipers while racing down what once was Rte 66. Its important to know that in the face of creeping fascism that place, of all places, has entire gay neighborhoods. It’s important to wake up in an apartment high, high up in NYC and watch the sun through the buildings and boulevards and watch the glorious great goddamn of that impossible number of people all cooperating and all not. To say Hyoo-stun, that way, on purpose just to get a rise of your born and bred NY friend who does NOT think you’re funny but will make coffee for you.
You need to see a beach full of people cautiously approaching and flinching away from a floating, dead horseshoe crab on Tybee Island, Georgia the way any troupe of wild animals approaches an unknown alien thing. Cows in a field, fish in the ocean flinching from a diver. Little children squealing and wide eyed behind their parents legs. You need to be the person that walks out and picks it up and watches the rest of the crowd creep in to investigate.
I don’t get to travel a lot in the way that most people do, when I go to a place it’s usually because something bad has happened there, but I have found it universally true that most people just want to tell you a story or show you a picture on their phone of the craziest thing they’ve ever seen and they don’t particularly care who you are or what your accent is. Sometimes they do, and those people suck, but those people are not the majority.
Sometimes if you let an old redneck talk he’ll tell you everything you never wanted to know about forensic accounting. Sometimes you’ll meet someone in the middle of the biggest city in the US who knows everything about show pigs. I’ve been to the smallest Kansas towns and the biggest cities in the US and I’ve found none of them were full of nothing.
That's one of the things I love about my bus trips. Stressful and occasionally bordering on traumatizing though they are, I was on a bus home from two months in Pennsylvania and met a girl my age with a service dog who was going to a different part of Oklahoma and she immediately trusted me and we spent 95% of that trip together and then with another girl who was in the early months of pregnancy. We talked and sat and moved together until we had to split. I watched her dog for her while she went to the bathroom and he trusted me too.
I was crying on the bus another time because my headphones broke and I had no cash and an older woman started talking to me because of my punisher hat. She gave me a handful of crumpled ones to buy food before she left on her next bus because I had sat crying in Arkansas thinking I'd be stuck there for a full day.
My first bus trip, a handful of us became layover family after being stuck at the same layover cities for hours. In Philadelphia a black girl got on the bus and called someone saying 'Hey, are you X's mom? I just called to let you know I gave your son some sweats because the security guard was harassing him and I didn't want him to get in trouble' before she went to sleep. There was a guy in the seat behind me who was talking to his girlfriend about how much he loved her and wanted to start a family and how he and his sister were starting a restaurant that would donate food to the homeless and how his sister was the soul of it.
And beyond all of these people being from nowhere and going nowhere else, people get it into their heads that the place they live in doesn't have that camaraderie. My mom helped an old man who fell on the curb. I stayed by a car crash that happened in front of me to try and help. A cashier at Waffle House said to not worry about it when we were a few dollars short (that same WH had a waitress named Miss Purple who sang to everyone). A woman gave me a ride home after a day of volunteering in the hot sun and bought me a soda and gave a homeless man a care package and a prayer.
There is not one place on this planet that doesn't have love in it and that love is shown in the hands that help and the laughs you share.
I met another customer at the craft store trying to repair/remake his mom's favorite ornament and we figured it out together.
Our waitress the other day got married by accident and had the same name as me.
A stranger approached me at a gas station and said "Jesus wanted me to tell you that it will be okay. You're going to have a problem with your heart, but it will be fine." She was, uhh, she was right. It was a totally benign arrhythmia. She was also the first person I gave my new, trans, non-legal name to.
I wear queer and neurodivergent pride pins on my hat and SO MANY people have given me a "me too", whether whispered or out loud. (That is why I wear them.)
I once sat on a plane next to an elderly woman whose husband had died in a plane crash and wow her attitude was amazing and it was weirdly reassuring to have her there as I was trying not to have a panic attack because we were flying over Nevada and there was a huge thunderstorm under us with red lightning.
I had a really cool conversation with a random patron at an Egyptian burial exhibit about the artists who made the exquisite little miniature grave goods.
The white as milk Midwestern dude at the gas station spoke fluent Tagalog and was a fuckin low key philosophical genius.
I just love people. Their stories, these moments, all the stuff that makes up the web of our social relationships to each other.
Yeah the world is scary, I get spooked in public sometimes. But man, most of it really is just us sharing a wild fucking ride with absolute strangers who for the most part are pretty chill. Pets, kids, music, travel, there's just about always a way into someone's good conversational graces. I never get tired of it.
On a lighter + adjacent note i love dis tweet + these QRTs of it ^_^... literally...
and hilariously that is not why it is called that.
It is the circle of the bears cause of ursa major and ursa minor, and the circle without bears cause ya'know opposite part of the sky.
We lucked right into that one....
#so what you’re saying is#the stars dictate whether bears do or do not exist in places
team-bear-arms-deactivated20220
Astrology is real but only for predicting where bears will be
Bears do not travel to places they cannot see their gods
I lived and worked in a lighthouse at a previous job. There was a thick line painted in a circle around the shack where the fog signal was kept. The line represented how close you could get to the fog signal without experiencing physical harm in the form of eardrums shattering or worse.
Even in the house it was LOUD. Probably the loudest thing I have ever experienced but at a normal, predictable interval. You would begin to time your sentences with little pauses with the rest of the lighthouse crew so you would talk like this while making your………..HORN…………. tea and then carry on talking because you knew when it would go off. It rattled the walls and the dishes in our cabinet.
At least one girl had died there. They kept photos of her everywhere “in honor of her sacrifice” because she had decided to take the winter watch alone and died in a storm where bounders the size of mini vans had been lifted out of the ocean and left scattered across the island, to say nothing of the ice chunks. People weren’t allowed to be alone on the watch after that.
One day a dead moose washed up on shore and it took my entire crew all day but we managed to rig up a line to hang it up to dry because we thought having a moose skeleton in the house would really spice the living room up a bit. It did. Weird shit happens when six of you are left alone, like ALONE ALONE, no cell reception, no wifi, just a radio to contact the real world and not a lot of reason to do that. People don’t go on lighthouse jobs if they want to stay connected, I’ve found.
That said Id do it all again, I really do treasure those days
ghostingrose
Placing these one after another makes it look like he left got a lighthouse job and came back six months later to update the drive through employee