Tolu Oloruntoba

aha!

I like him very much already.

It can be very unpleasant to experience and hard to explain. In retrospect, it was one of the clearer signs that I had a divergent brain.

😂 see also: misophonia

I can’t prove it but Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is about a snoring companion.

Congratulations! I hope you ate the cupcake with a sporck.

💯 I think they are related concerns.

Here's Why We're So Obsessed With Zombies - Electric Literature What are we really talking about when we tell stories about the living dead?

As @peterbcounter.com says in this excellent essay, “People we don’t know might as well be bad weather. They might as well be zombies.” electricliterature.com/our-zombies-...

I still need to read John Green’s EVERYTHING IS TUBERCULOSIS, but I’m ready right now for the sequel: EVERYTHING IS BIGOTRY.

I hope you’ll still do it for us sad / mad bastards. Thank you for your service. 🫡

“We don’t know what they want
We don’t know why they are here."

Whenever I watch alien invasion movies like War Machine, I chuckle in my knowledge that they are about immigrants (see also, Lovecraft). Gives the movies a certain je ne sais quoi.

the amount of ourselves we put into these books makes the economics quite tragic. I feel you. It’s not right.

I’d even accept fewer rocks if they allowed this payment method.

it’s so exhausting. Sending you strength, dopamine, and good vibes.

Accounts Payable processes are inaccessible! Not everyone can do the work AND send an invoice lol.

I fear they didn’t think this all the way through.

Literary orgs are begging: "Please send us an invoice, we want to pay you" (and I could use the money!). Best I can do is be unable to do it for the next 6 months. I know their accountants hate to see me coming. I’m the reason they can’t close their books.

One way to avoid having too many tax slips to manage at tax time is to never invoice for the work you did all year.

(The ADHD tax is awesome. Why do you ask?)

I’m glad you got some detox in. Unplugging my brain from the TL drip has done me a world of good.

Poetry is what you do after what’s been done to you.

Shamelessly retconning Tooth Fairy lore when my 5 y-o loses her tooth in school.

squirming all the time in the spotlight. Also helping our local economies by keeping therapists employed. 😀

I do fear that it gets tedious for those around me, especially in settings where projecting competence (or at least not projecting the opposite) is important.

lol don’t encourage me. 😂

I am one of those for whom “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is a horror story. I am so scared I’ll be the one in those new clothes, and never realize it.

I know I need to rein in my self-deprecation. Sometimes I’m introducing myself at work and I say I am a senior project manager, then add “of some sort.” Always trying to bring myself down a few notches. I would never treat anyone else this way.

thanks so much for sharing this. I didn’t know it had gone up!

Stag photographed with wire wrapped around antlers by Tolu Oloruntoba Your modern crown of green fence does make you larger than you were. I too, would like to wear my confinement as antlerpiece, to have discovered the rutting of the green of forest and the eternity of hydrocarbons, to be thus followed by worshipful watchers as I anoint and lift up the twisted child that must inherit all earth. Eido. Lo. Ecce! Note: Poem title is from Bullock, C. (2024, October 1I). Stag photographed with wire wrapped around antlers. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg901kj2neo

"Stag photographed with wire wrapped around antlers” by the incomparable Tolu Oloruntoba @tolu.ca for today’s Poetry Pause @canadianpoets.bsky.social

wow you were on the proper frontlines! I was just sending emails and having Zoom meetings.