rothko

rothko, 22 days ago to random

Happy birthday@alice !!!

msquebanh, 24 days ago to random

Part of our #ParaDragonboating #PilotProgram #team members & us, with our #coach (holding new paddle). We train every Saturday morning, from #FairwayGorgePaddlingClub.

Today, we worked on more race stops, transitions & on improving team #paddling timing/synchronization.

I led a good warm-up before we started & was put into front near end of practice. Our coach is also training me on doing drumming/calling out paddle beats so I can go on multiple boats for races. Our first race is May 26th!

Me with 4 other female team mates & our coach (she is on far right, holding black paddle) on upper wharf at Fairway Gorge Paddling Club. The Gorge Waterway is behind us.

RickiTarr, 26 days ago to random

If you get mad when you see employees at a business you are patronizing laughing, enjoying each other's company, and goofing off, you're a dick. Empathize with people working a shitty underpaid job, and let them enjoy what little fun they get.

RickiTarr, 1 month ago to random

If you could have one new skill starting right now, what would it be?

RickiTarr, 1 month ago to random

Truly and honestly, I have a great time here, because you all make it great. You boost, you reply, you encourage, and inspire! It is crazy to me that I get to talk to people from all over the world every day. I get to be friends with people I'll probably never actually get to physically meet. I was born into a pre-internet world, and this still feels a little like a miracle to me.

RickiTarr, 1 month ago to random

What embarrasses you the most?

StillIRise1963, 1 month ago to random

I’m at the cardiologist with my dad, in the waiting room. NO MASKS to be seen anywhere except on us.

rothko, 1 month ago to random

so... we closed on a house in duluth today. here's me putting the finishing touches on the mailbox.

RickiTarr, 1 month ago to random

The truth is I've always been an old lady, I want to go to a bar at 4 in the afternoon, and listen to great music, but it can't be too loud, I want a couple good drinks, and leave before it gets too busy, so I can have dinner, and get back home. I need to have plenty of time to watch Godzilla movies in my PJ's, and snug before my first pre-bed nap.

RickiTarr, 1 month ago to random

Hello! I want to do a Spooky Picture Prompt! So, find a picture in your camera roll that would represent the phrase:

Last Picture on the Camera Roll

This should be spooky, but completely up to your own interpretation. Here's one from me, with weird eclipse light.

RickiTarr, 4 months ago to random

Sometimes it feels like I'm this animal that has all these weird emotions that my brain and body are just not evolved enough to handle. I'm doing the best I can, I just know more stuff than I have the capacity to reckon. Understanding my place in the Universe and knowing that it is both significant and completely insignificant at the same time, is the strangest feeling. Seriously, who put me in charge of my own meaning?!

rothko, 5 months ago to random

semiotics 101:

rothko, 5 months ago to random

done book clubs but never online. generally i never finish (or even start) the book and just go along for the socializing 😁

rothko, 6 months ago to random

so, #beigeparty , here i am in nowhere, minnesota, sitting death watch for my younger sister, martha. she's 48. triple-negative metastatic breast cancer, which came back two years ago even after a double mastectomy in 2018. she was at thanksgiving dinner with the family yesterday, weak but hanging in there. today her fiancé had trouble waking her up and called the hospice nurse after a while, who affirmed that yes, it looks like this is it. 1/n

rothko, 6 months ago to random

i am tired and vaguely cranky. is it bedtime yet?

rothko, 6 months ago to random

radio says wu-tang's debut was 30 years ago today. way to make me feel old, thanks.

rothko, 6 months ago to random

just reviewed my timeline and realized i'm one of those people who basically just boosts and doesn't really post anything original. not that that's a terrible thing necessarily, but when i look at someone else's profile and see that, i think "boring" and don't usually follow them.

which gives me pause.

mostly i just sit here replying to my fellow beige partiers. sometimes i dig the "social" part of "social media" more than the actual "media."

here, then, is a photo for the sake of posting some content. hah.

rothko, 6 months ago to random

for your random amusement:

rothko, 6 months ago to random

"To go into solitude, a [person] needs to retire as much from [their] chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a [person] would be alone, let [them] look at the stars.

[…]

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."

-- Emerson

rothko, 7 months ago to random

happy birthday to the fabulous @RickiTarr !!!

rothko, 7 months ago to Duluth

never dreamed i'd be back to lake superior before a year was up. last time i was in was 10/29/22 -- and suddenly i'm back again, for good this time. so much gratitude. 💙 #lakesuperior #duluth

53-second video of me wading into lake superior up to my shoulders

rothko, 7 months ago to random

rothko, 7 months ago to random

@RickiTarr so speaking of magic moments... there was a moment a few years back that inspired me to write a fan letter to bob mould. which was odd, but fucking perfect -- and later i got to deliver it by hand.

December 5, 2018

Bob —

I don’t really write fan mail. Never have. And I’m 47, so it’s kinda weird to be writing this now.

I am just a bit too young to have been around for Hüsker Dü. I was in junior high when you guys were big and in 1985 I lived in the middle of nowhere (southern Minnesota, ironically, just two hours south of where you guys were busy changing the face of rock and roll), listening to stuff like Styx and Night Ranger. Fortunately my tastes matured over the next couple years, and when I was a senior, someone lent me their copy of Workbook, which had just come out. I was utterly transfixed.

I went to college in St. Paul (Bethel, way up the street from Macalester) from 1990-94 and your first few solo albums made up my personal soundtrack through some really heavy shit. Lots of religious crisis, emerging bipolar disorder, etc. (I’ll spare you most of the agonizing details.) I think I went to see you play at First Avenue just about every time you played there during those years.

Later on, once you had formed Sugar, I was so excited to hear your songs again. Copper Blue was fucking gigantic and still is and always will be. Fast forward like 20 years after going through hell getting my undergrad degree in theology and then completely walking away from religion altogether... I have somehow ended up in seminary doing a Master’s in Spiritual Formation. (Gonna be a hospital chaplain if things go according to plan.) It’s been a bizarre journey already and I don’t know where it’s leading, but it just fits, y’know?

Anyway — all of this is to say that I finished the last class of my first semester tonight. It was this writing class on Wednesday evenings, taught by this mild-mannered yet secretly fierce woman who somehow got all of us writing from this super-deep place in each of us, very sneakily and surreptitiously leading us down the path to find our own authentic voices and claim their authority. Absolutely unreal. The stuff we shared with each other tonight was phenomenal. Super emotional and seriously transformative in major ways for each one of us.

After class, I got in the car, put my music on “shuffle,” and what comes on but “Hoover Dam.” As I picked up speed on I-35 in the late evening traffic, it was like the song had become the end credits of a movie rolling up the darkened screen as I drove home. And it was perfect. I have taken a huge risk by leaving my comfortable part-time barista job and starting school again after 25 years, and suddenly I’m already finished with my first semester, which has been amazing in so many ways. Driving home listening to “Hoover Dam,” thinking about that metaphor, being on the precipice, in this weird liminal space between my old life and the new one starting to form — and the song was absolutely the perfect song at the perfect time. It’s so ANTHEMIC.

I got to wondering about your way of songwriting and the stories you tell. Did you have to work at it much? Did it take lots of discipline? Did you tear up a thousand million drafts before you got it right? Or are you just a natural storyteller? Whatever the case, it clearly comes from somewhere real, somewhere true, and I am always drawn to authentic expression; I don’t have the time or the patience for anything that isn’t. It’s what I live for, real connection with others. And after all these years, I still feel a deep connection to your music. You and your songs are SO important to me.

Your live performances are something I rave about to all my friends. “Dude, Bob Mould’s coming to town and you have to see him, he’s amazing, he’s fucking unstoppable!” I’ve been in Austin, Texas since 2004 and I’ve seen you play at Mohawk a couple times; most recently at ACL Live when you did that solo electric show. Your energy is phenomenal — how the hell do you do it? I’m 47 and I can’t imagine putting on a show like that, not even once, and definitely not several times a month traveling all over the country and around the world. My usual bedtime is 9:30 these days.

I will wrap this up now — after my drive home blasting “Hoover Dam” with the movie credits from the first half of my life rolling up the screen, I just wanted to let you know what a perfect moment it was, and how much your music has meant to me over the years and still does today.

So thanks. For everything.

rothko, 8 months ago to random

i hope that the person who invented leafblowers is currently in hell being endlessly tortured by the sound of his own hideous invention