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Cloudy day, windy
Your boss' makin a loss
But I told you I'd never eaten this kind of ice cream before
And now I'm back for a second helping
First day it was sunny and I was in a good mood
Today I got no such excuse
The word "smile" is overused by corporate and music that's gentrification misspelled
So I'll commit the greatest rebellion of the industry:
You just looked at me.
Desperate claws in a sunny smile I've trained to be a good customer to the service
I ask you if I should take a cup or cone, your opinion
Well, it's my choice
But you can give me a little more in a cup.
I laugh too loud. Answer too loud. You're making money, I'm spending money.
'i hope to see you again, miss.'
That's not part of the script.
They don't say miss here.
I understand people that believe in a religion. Isn't every sunset that's partially hidden by an average day's clouds proof of the devine?
Oh my god I'm listening to California Dreamin' with headphones and. Did you know it's one of those songs that are hardcore spliced up between headphones. Like the female and male voices are mostly coming from seperate headphones.
This makes no difference except for a cool listening experience unless. Unless you take one headphone out.
Ohhh, there's still the faintest echo of the female voices in the male voices' headphone, but half the instruments are missing. It's haunting. It's majestic. It's Denny in a old rehearsal room. It's not really a designated space, it's the backroom of their bar. They jokingly used to call it the backstage area. It's wooden panels that were never glossy. It's Michelle and Cass on old stools with cheap cider. It's Denny alone. It's Denny's guitar, with John's handwriting on its side. It's an empty room that's not used to being empty. You know when rooms sound the most loud when there's supposed to be a hundred sounds and you know every one of them? You think you can hear it out of pure fate.
He can only play as many instruments as his hands can hold. But he plays them as well as ever. There's no tremble in his fingers. He can definitely hear Cass. He can almost see John. When he closes his eyes, he can believe they're through the door, in the bar. Hearing him play. Singing back to him.
California dreaming. On such a winter's day
Yesterday was a bad day, my apartment was too quiet. Too empty. There was nothing, nothing.
Then suddenly I was turning on lights and they were the perfect shade of yellow and the music from my little speaker hit me so hard I almost cried in the kitchen and those socks I bought kept my feet warm and my warmed-up tortellini were so good with the scrapes of my mom's pesto.
I listened to Billie Eilish and Hozier and The Neighborhood and suddenly they were just people.
Sometimes I lay in bed terrified that I'll stop feeling. Yesterday was not that day.
I'm an intern and my job is to enter addresses from hand-written letters into the database and did you know that Joshua Neumann from Hermannstreet 4, Cologne, has a life too
Oh
He's a principal in a small town. I googled it.
A mid-50s couple donated 100 dollars to our cause and I said that's very generous of you and he shrugged and said is it really
Oh
I guess it isn't really. Not for us.
When I came back after New Year the woman I've been working a lot with saw me in the office kitchen and hugged me.
I googled a scrawled address to decipher it and the town was so pretty I'm going to go there on a day trip with some friends. By train. Like we did 2 years ago.
You know what I'm saying, you know it.
I have a beautiful friend. Half a year younger than me, with almond eyes and skin maybe two to three shades darker than caramel. Dusty sunset. It reminds me of spices and the billowing fumes of a barista coffee machine.
She has Columbian heritage, with glossy, thick black hair and long eye lashes. Dark eyes, bright teeth. She laughs big, smiles wide. The slight figure of a doe. She gets excited about everything. She's naive. She's adorable. She wants to explore.
She's beautiful, everyone tells her. She's terrified.
My friend sees the eyes. Of course she does. They're not admiring. They're predatory. She wears who she is on her sleeve, and she's a wondering, easily amazed person. She wants to be happy. Oh, have you ever heard of a better rape victim.
She wants to kiss someone. She wants to be in a relationship, with cuddles and pinky finger promises. She wants to be desired.
We smile. We watch her drink. We make sure she gets home afterwards.
Beauty is a lot of things. But I'd wager to say that no matter if you've carefully cultivated it yourself, were born into it, want it, use it, hate it, are aware of it
Broken down, all social veneers and descriptors stripped away,
It attracts attention.
Oh, Silvia Plath was right.
Yes, I almost cried feeling cold air on my face in the morning
It made me so happy when I bought three different spices for my tea yesterday.
But please, don't make me find pleasure in the little things. I need those adventures.
I need love, and life. I need big moments with dresses on fire. I need to know that life is big magic, too. I need real tears of joy and explosions.
I know, you're talking of awe. But it feels like you're extending an aiding hand to stroke my hair.
To make a pastel colour not look so muted.
I want it all
I want the princess blue and the nutcracker red
Is that okay? I'd take both, thank you. Here's the change.
you know what, screw falling uncontrollably in love. Nah man. I want to meet your eyes across the room for the first time and start grinning. A slow, spreading smirk. I want to think 'oh, you bastard. I've been waiting for you. Hello.' and I want you to smirk back.
Sometimes hope feels like a hearth in your chest
It’s startling, an unexpected warmth
But when you turn to it,
Feel the glow on your face,
You may find it reflected in your heart
Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.
Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.
(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)
Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.
All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.
I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.
Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.
And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.
Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.
I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.
Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.
No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.
They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.
This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.
In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.
At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
I think the least we can do is remember them for it.