Dawn

.....and everyone lived happily ever after :)

“Please stop writing! The very next thing you write will actually happen!”

"tragedies: the love was there"

I bought a nice storage box at an estate sale without looking inside, and it was full of 8mm home videos.

It should be the start of a horror movie, and it kind of is, in the way that we see the past.

The films were made by a young, rural father throughout the 40s-50s filming in excessive and loving detail his baby son and homely but sweet-looking wife. The things that he chose to film belie this idea of “traditional family values” and masculinity, especially in the American and Canadian West (it’s unclear what side of the border they were living on.)

This young man was trying creative and artistic ideas with his hobby (his camera), like filming his wife doing her hair through the mirror, lots of landscapes, and flowers growing in their tiny garden.

The thing that struck me so much was the complete adoration of his family, in a way that might not be “50s Dad-Husband.” He’s spending hours of film taking care of and documenting teaching his son to garden. He sets up the camera to film himself and his wife laughing while doing the dishes. He gives her a gag gift of an apron for Christmas and she throws it at him while laughing. Her real present was a pair of hiking boots, which she is adorably delighted by.

This family was working poor, with a tiny rural house, and the home films capture warts and all. Instead of “Leave It To Beaver” dynamics, we have a family who should embody what people think of as the worst (or best) of 50s families, but absolutely do not.

The 50s weren’t the glossy advertising version that conservatives want to “return to”. This family was poor, and the camera was clearly the one hobby that the husband allowed himself. The young parents are delighted but exhausted. They are sharing housework. The homely but adorable young mother has terribly crooked teeth and wears overalls in the garden. Dinner parties include a surprisingly diverse group of friends.

I think the estate sale was after the death of the (now elderly) little boy in the films.

We can’t go back to an era that didn’t exist in the way that we assume it did. Even the 50s were full of complex and interesting people who weren’t just Suzy Homemakers and Pipe-smoking Fathers.

My point is that history is more complicated than we think. We can’t go back to a world that only existed in advertisements, and there were people living and loving each other throughout history.

I was struck by how much this young father loved his family and was so invested in his child and partner. He wouldn’t fit into any “traditional masculinity” molds, but he was delighted by his camera and capturing the things important to him. I’m so glad that I got to see his life through his eyes.

hi. do you see my vision?

~~PROPERTY OF RAY SMITH~~

Memories are the foundation of what we base our perception of reality and even our own selves off of, and those memories ultimately make up who we are and how we interact with our external world. Recently, I feel that I've been forgetting many of mine. You always expect that when you forget something like a major memory, you can feel that something is missing. I've learned that often times you don't even notice you're forgetting something until something comes up to suggest that you should know what it is, but you simply don't.

Like waking up in a bedroom you don't recognise after a night out of drinking. You can remember going out to the bar with your friends, you can remember talking and laughing, and you remember this person you didn't know coming and talking to you. You know you keep drinking with them, but you don't actually remember much past that point. You can assume you slept with whoever you were talking to before your memory runs a blank, but you don't know for certain.

Next comes what I tend to think of as the most terrifying part of the process.

Later in the day you talk to the friends you went out with again, and they fill in some blanks for you. You now know you actually went to a hotel with someone else who wore an outfit absolutely blindingly neon orange, definitely not the person you remember talking to. You look through your phone, checking your camera roll and texts. You see a couple videos of yourself very drunkenly dancing with your friends and someone wearing neon orange, but there's always too much movement and poor lighting for you to recognize a their face. You also see some texts from an unknown number talking about how wild last night was, and how they are they ran into you. Based on all the information you collected, you assume this unknown number is the person who was wearing neon orange, the two of went back to the hotel and slept together, and they left before you woke up.

When you retell this story in the future you say that you were talking to this really cool person who you got bored of after 10 minutes before your friends, being the saviors they are, dragged you away from them and you all started dancing. It didn't take long after that for this really attractive person with admittedly bad clothing taste started dancing with you. One thing lead to another and you ended up sleeping with them in the hotel, giving them your number before they left.

The actual events of that night looked more like this: The person you remember talking to got wine spilt on them and left the bar in a huff. Shortly after your friends dragged you up and you all started dancing. Next, you see your brothers ex in the bar, and drag them up to start dancing too (you had always liked this ex). The two of you leave the bar together and stumble drunkenly through downtown as you talk about your brother. By pure bad luck your brother spots the two of you while driving, pulls over, astounded to see the two of you together. His ex says they have a hotel room booked, and your brother agrees to give his ex a ride there, and offer's you his couch to sleep on. By the time you get to the hotel your brother and the ex don't seem to be very broken up anymore. The ex gives you the room key, and you stay in their hotel room while your brother and the ex meant to go back to your brother's place first, but don't quite make it that far. The text you receive the next morning from an unknown number is your brother, who's number you never saved out of spite.

The human ability to completely forget memories without a trace and rewrite memories scares me more than death; more than life.

I am no author, but I need to get this written down. I don't want to forget who I am.

grinch and onceler french-kissing passionately

i think i’ve sewn my heart a little too tightly onto my sleeve

donald trump is guilty on 34 counts due to a specific legal loophole! google donald trump rule 34 for more

Reblog if you also think Toph shouldn’t have been a cop.

I want to see how “unpopular” this opinion really is outside cop-worshipping Reddit.