Saturn

A flow of fuckery

I created a new section within my newsletter for more experimental and, dare I say, whimsical writing and art, called Artificial Artistry. If you’re like “Lirpa, I did not sign up for this emo shit,” you can select to unsubscribe from this section specifically in your subscription settings and keep the personal stories and social commentary!

This one is a mix of old and new personal writing and photography.¹

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Life stages are funny. The transition between your 20s and 30s feels monumental for your entire life preceding it until it happens. It nearly universally feels like saying goodbye to your youth while there's still only a two behind your age and then it feels like a beginning.

You turn 30 and you realize you actually like it a lot better than the youthful ignorance you thought you'd mourn, that you were afraid to mourn. Other people seem to like you better, too. You like yourself better, maybe.

Things are coming together.

Everything is better in your thirties.

Your twenties still haunt though and so one minute you want to live downtown surrounded by the bustle of a city, people everywhere, never alone. Next you want a chicken farm surrounded by trees and no one.

What does that?

You're not cut out for a place like this
Bigger in geography, smaller in mind

Where the transplants are wary and 
the locals unkind

such a stuck-up thing to say
Outsized importance everywhere
even in here in my mind now today

Different flowers bloom and the dirt is a different color but it's home now, might as well make the best of it, but is it, though? Is it home? Where — no — what is home? Once you leave for the first time?

Who are you now?

Who cares?

Maybe the new year brings new fears. Every year there's hope but hope never arrives alone; hope is borne of fear and fear is what keeps you running.

Hope keeps you 
alive. 

Anger keeps you 
alive. 

Longing keeps you 
alive. 

Despair keeps you 
alive. 

No one knows what the last page of the book will say but you strive to write it yourself, don't you?

Don't you? 
Why wouldn't you? 

Write it down, write it down, write it down, and it doesn't have to end. It never has to end.

Saturn returned just in time, 
uprooted at twenty nine, 
landed on my feet just fine
even I don't know if I'm lying

Kind of floundered, let's be real

twenty thirteen was quite a year and 
twenty twenty five
is already here

It’s cold everywhere. Now, it’s cold everywhere. Cold outside, cold inside, cold in the car, cold in the office, cold between my ears and my coffee is cold.

I’m sweating.

The opposite of the frog in the kettle, you aren’t being boiled to death unawares; you’re slowly chilled until you forget what warm feels like

Like a fish in the ocean you don’t even know you’re frozen

Where do we come from? What if we stayed there? What if we left?

Who do we become?

How far back must one go to feel at home?

Another decade will speed along, bleeding into another unrecognizable era, and what will you do with it? What?

What will you do with it

What will return

two thousand four —

i tried on the diamond ring you gave me 
it looked so ridiculous on my hand 
i don’t think I’m meant to display the affections 
of any particular man

twenty thirteen —

Try to imagine, that song, that feeling almost forgotten, creeping back; a smell. That fragrance that you remember, that you associate to that specific time. Some are easy — spring, or winter. The smell of the impending cold, the snow, the freezing air that you may or may not enjoy but it’s coming anyway and there is always something, someone, associated with that odor of cold, of rushed and brisk walks from here to there, wherever you need to go, trying to get someplace warm as quickly as possible and stay in the cold air only as long as absolutely necessary.

Others aren’t so subtle and those are the ones that sneak up on you in the worst way. The smell of popcorn reminds you, brings you back to the carefree days of being a 15 year old working in a movie theater, going into a photo lab to develop last year’s Christmas pictures, and smelling the chemicals used to create the prints you will set aside to collect dust for another year, being brought back to the photo lab where you’d develop your own when you were younger, more ambitious, more creative and a little more snobbish.

You’re not such an elitist anymore but you wish you could be. The scent of a cologne or perfume from a passing stranger that you haven’t smelled since you were with that one person, the good and bad experiences of that one person coming back with no warning, advancing on you like a tsunami that you didn’t see coming but now that you have, you can’t run from it’s path. Maybe you don’t have a choice. It’s right there, coming at you; there’s nowhere to run. Maybe there is, but you don’t want to move.

You’re entranced; remembering, wanting to relive everything all over again; reliving pain creates a passionate disposition if only for a few fleeting moments and you long for that feeling of helpless drowning in your own madness from time to time.

2005

It’s nice, isn’t it.

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1. All photos are taken by me except the one of the burnt-down Hexagon bar in Minneapolis, which was taken by Tony Webster. And the ones of me that aren’t selfies or in front of a mirror.