Parenthetical Girls - "Sympathy For Spastics"

You need to hang up your rain coat after you get home from walking in the rain. If you don't, it will develop an odourous thin slime in the folds and places where it rubs together.

I was walking in the rain, and it was cold, and outside were all the talkings of the world, the constant chatter of idealess and idealist and defeatist prattle. The words and slogans and ideas slid somehow under my stepping feet, before I could lay the next one down, and I would stumble, splashing my pant leg. They would slide like chunks of firewood, soggy and full of spiders, beneath my armpits, inside my clothes. Little ones would go up my fingernails. The sound of the rain was so loud, it rapped against the sides of my vinyl hood, and it seemed like it was trying to beat me at something. Beat me at a competition that, while ongoing and inescapable, I wasn't aware I had entered, nor aware of any of the rules, goals, or how many others were involved. And most certainly I was beaten, despite a desperate attempt to cheat my way out, once I realized I was losing. I stole ideas from wherever I saw fit, I stole them right out of the mouths of friends, the minds of thinkers whose taste and quality matched the things I wished I had. I joined the chatter, ignored the things repeated and the lack of firm foundation. I grasped, cold-knuckled at whatever would hold my weight, and climbed as high as I could, thinking I could turn the rain off at its source. But climbing and overstepping was simply that, the route of a maze that wasn't the finish, and I found myself standing high atop a pile of meaningless ends, meanless old friends. So when I got home, I didn't hang up my rain coat, I simply threw it in a heap, and now there is an odourous thin slime in the folds and places where it rubbed together. [buy]

Kourosh Yaghmaei - "Ghad Boland"

I would describe this: WEDDING AS WARNING. [buy Back From the Brink]

(photo by Alek Gruszczynski)