James Janner🇺🇸🇺🇦

Playback, my first novella, is now available worldwide on Amazon, in paperback and Kindle. a.co/d/cKKMICK

@zydesu @Pergament_F Renews us for? 🍻📚📚📚

@Pergament_F Solitude renews us.

I am simply the kind of person who cannot sit by the sea drinking coffee without turning the entire moment into an argument between Proust, seagulls, and civilizational melancholy. That is just the situation. Nature is very weird… Sun kisses us. Frost bites us. Wind blows us. Heat strokes us. :) Calm evening

@Pergament_F All the more reason to eat that cake before finishing the coffee. ☕🌹📚📚📚

I am sitting in the local restaurant by the beach, drinking my afternoon coffee with that peculiar slowness which the sea imposes upon a person almost violently, as though the very air along the shore gradually dismantles the internal mechanism of anxiety and transforms even a Tuesday into a small Black Sea celebration of idleness. Outside it is warm in that soft and slightly indulgent way characteristic of coastal towns, where people never seem entirely convinced that labor is humanity’s highest virtue. Cats are sunbathing on the stones with the philosophical self-satisfaction of creatures that long ago understood how absurd human haste truly is. Seagulls are screaming with such dramatic fury over a fish head as though they are not fighting over leftover mackerel, but over the inheritance of the Roman Empire itself. And the people are watching this maritime theater with the lazy pleasure of an audience instinctively aware that the true meaning of life has probably never been located inside offices. And while I sip my coffee and laugh to myself, I begin wondering how P. G. Wodehouse and Marcel Proust would describe this scene, which is probably a reliable symptom that one reads far too much literature and spends far too little time engaged in practical activities. Wodehouse would undoubtedly transform the entire situation into an exquisite comedy of civilized absurdity. In his eyes the seagulls would resemble two slightly drunken British aristocrats prepared to kill one another over the final kidney at breakfast in a provincial club, while the cats would possess that cold and contemptuous dignity of aunts who for years have considered all humanity a vast organizational mistake. And I myself would probably be described as a man who originally stepped out for one peaceful coffee, but gradually found himself trapped in a complex moral and metaphysical crisis caused by excessive quantities of sunlight, sea air, and observation of seagulls. Then Proust arrives, of course, and suddenly the atmosphere grows heavy with aristocratic sensitivity and an almost painful attention to detail. For him the warmth of the afternoon would not simply be weather, but a psychological condition; the sea would not merely murmur, but would remind one of something lost long before it had ever truly been possessed. A single seagull landing beside the table would probably awaken the memory of some long-dead duchess, the scent of salt upon a woman’s gloves during the summer of 1894, a dinner at which nobody had been genuinely happy although the crystal and silver had gleamed flawlessly. And perhaps this is precisely the difference between the English and the French soul. The Englishman sees absurdity and laughs. The Frenchman sees beauty and begins suffering elegantly. And I simply sit there between them with my coffee, watching cats defeat philosophy and seagulls humiliate dignity, thinking that perhaps civilization is not yet entirely lost if an ordinary Tuesday by the sea is still capable of making a person think about literature instead of work.

@JackLinFLL It will always be a trash mountain. But at 112 feet tall it is nice for sunset photography.

@JamesJanner Some of the hill is made of trash I put there! I can't stop calling it the dump hill because of that!

The Everglades fire from up on the dump hill. Was expecting a much better pic tbh. As you can see #flwx will probably put an end to it tonight.

@Pergament_F I would love to develop the connective tissue to bring together philosophy and the construction of that tallest building. To help people make the connections between physical reality and the philosophical reality. Good morning. ☕🌞🌹📚📚📚📚

I live permanently in my world and sometimes I make forays into reality. Calm evening

@JackLinFLL Yes!

This would have been a fire sunset night if we didn't have the fire!

A moment ago, an hour before sunset. Florida seasonal wildfire smoke. Unedited.

Post a picture YOU took. Just a pic. No description.

Last night.

@valkerie777 OMG! I am definitely getting out of bed 😍☕🌹

Good morning from #Florida #sunrise #beachlife

@ShamashAran Very nice to wake up to! ☕🌞🌹

She still checked the locks three times before bed. Not because Texas was dangerous. Quite the opposite, really. The neighborhood was quiet enough that the silence was comforting, but it also made her uneasy. No sirens screaming through the night. No drug dealers arguing in parking lots at three in the morning. No helicopters washing blue light across stained apartment walls. Just sprinklers ticking in the dark and the distant hum of highway traffic. Normal people sounds. See, that was the problem. What most people see as normal still felt temporary. Monica stood barefoot in the kitchen of the little house outside Fort Worth, staring at the refrigerator like it might vanish if she blinked too long. The fridge was covered in magnets she bought herself because nobody could tell her not to . A stupid ceramic cactus in neon colors. A Buc-ee's beaver grinning like a lunatic. Her niece's report card clipped beside an electric bill she had paid three days early. Paid. early. EARLY. The thought still gave her a strange, private thrill. At fifty-two years old, she still sometimes stood in grocery stores staring at full carts in disbelief. Steak. Fruit that wasn't bruised. Real coffee. Name-brand cereal. She could buy these things now without calculating what she could skip eating later. Sometimes she wanted to grab strangers by the shoulders and scream, You have no idea how hard this was!! But people didn't like hearing that kind of thing. They liked the cleaned-up version better. The version where survivors became polished and wise instead of twitchy and exhausted. The version where the little girl inside you stopped shaking. That little girl still woke her up sometimes. Eight years old. Pink nightgown with faded stars on it. Standing frozen in a dark hallway while her father's footsteps creaked across rotten floorboards. People always imagined trauma like explosions and fire. Like screaming. But some of the worst moments in her childhood had been quiet enough to hear the refrigerator humming. Her mother had tried. God, she had tried. Monica would defend that woman until the day she died. Her mother had worked double shifts while hiding bruises beneath long sleeves in July heat. She had scraped together enough money to keep food in the apartment. She'd sat with Monica during nightmares, rubbing circles into her back while pretending not to know why her daughter screamed in her sleep. Her mother had been drowning too. People judged poor women too easily, Monica thought. Especially women trapped with violent men. Everybody wanted them to become action heroes overnight. Grab the kids and flee dramatically into the night. Life wasn't a movie. Sometimes escape took years. Sometimes your bravery looked like surviving until payday. Her father finally left after Monica turned eight. By then the damage was already rooted deep inside her like rust in pipes. Most people would think that'd bring relief. But no. Then, the drugs came. First weed. Then pills. Then anything she could eat, snort, or inject. Anything that turned memory fuzzy around the edges. Anything that let her sleep. The ghetto swallowed girls like her every day. Everybody knew one. Skinny shoulders, dead eyes. Too-smart mouths hiding frightened little kids underneath. Girls who learned early that painkillers worked faster than therapy and cost less. By twenty-three, Monica had overdosed twice. The second time, she woke in a county hospital with charcoal on her lips and her mother asleep in a plastic chair beside her. Her mother looked old. That was what finally broke her. Not the hospital. Not almost dying. Her mother's face. Her mother was a woman who had spent her entire life fighting monsters and losing inches of herself every year doing it. Monica remembered staring at the fluorescent lights overhead thinking: If I die, then everything she suffered for dies too. Not everyone climbs out after that realization. She knew that. Some people sink too deep. But somehow she clawed upward inch by inch. Rehab. Relapses. Meetings in church basements smelling like burnt coffee. Waitressing jobs. God, you have NO IDEA how bad life is unless your're a waitress in a restaurant barely holding it together. Panic attacks in bathroom stalls. Three straight years where she measured success entirely by whether she woke up sober. She had a wild idea one afternoon. She'd leave. She heard about Texas. It was everything she thought she hated. Everything she loved tore her apart. Texas had not saved her. She hated when people talked that way about places. No state could save you. But Texas had given her room. Room to breathe. Room to become someone new before the old neighborhood could drag her back under by the ankle. She found work managing inventory for a plumbing supply warehouse. Not glamorous, but steady. Honest. Predictable. Predictable was holy to her. Her boss liked her because she showed up early and didn't steal shit. He had no idea those were skills earned through blood and terror. The first time she got a tax refund larger than three digits, she cried in her car. When her credit score crossed 700, she took a screenshot. Her mother had been dead for 3 years, but she wanted her to see that screen more than anything. The first time she signed a lease without needing a roomate, she sat alone in the empty living room on folding chairs and laughed until she started sobbing. Because nobody understood. Success feeels different when you come from hell. Middle-class people talked about stability like it was ordinary. To Monica, stability felt like balancing on top of a hurricane. Even now, years later, fear stalked her quietly. What if she lost her job? What if she got injured? What if one bad month started the avalanche? What if the old life was her real life and this was only some temporary clerical error the universe would eventually correct? Sometimes she woke before dawn absolutely convinced she was back in THAT apartment. Back in that heat and mold, her neighbors shouting. Wondering if the gunshots would coem next. Then she would hear the air conditioner humming softly. She felt the clean sheets against her skin. She felt his skin against hers. He didn't understand, and she loved him for that more than he could ever know. She could smell coffee from the timer she set the night before. And slowly, carefully, reality would settle back into place. One Saturday morning she stood in her backyard holding a garden hose while the sun climbed over the fence. Tiny tomatoes hung from plants she had grown herself. Her own yard. Her own tomatoes. It was such a stupid thing to be proud of. And yet pride filled her chest so fiercely it almost hurt. The pride of a woman who had crawled through broken glass for every inch of peace she possessed. She thought about the girl she used to be: frightened, angry, poisoned with shame that had never felt right to her. That little girl would never have believed this life was possible. Maybe Monica still didn't fully believe it either. But the tomatoes were real. The paid bills were real. The quiet was real. The woman standing barefoot in morning sunlight was real. And maybe healing was not becoming fearless. Maybe healing was being terrified every day and building a life anyway. Her husband joined her outside. He put his arm around her and she cried a little inside.

@JackLinFLL Yes, and the person in charge of recording the temperature readings probably looked forward to a cold one in the mid afternoon. 🍻🌴🌞

I bet Key West in 1873 was seriously bad ass

@JackLinFLL It's those outliers in the store with shoulder MANPADs that mess it up for the rest of us.

So there is a new sign up at my Publix. I never once saw anyone open carrying in there anyway so I wonder what prompted this.

@slimplimsoll I would at least steam the milk a bit, you know, give it a head.

If I had a penis, I’d totally stick it in a glass of milk to see if it would drink.

@slimplimsoll Now no sleep for me. I mean even less than before.

Everyone can safely have a crush on me because I’m old and fat and sexy, but basically don’t care about anything.

@Pergament_F Casting a long shadow is a noble pursuit, as is imagining it whilst still alive.

"When you pass through the bazaar, stop by the Yeni Mosque. Around the entire grounds there is a high wall. Inside, beneath enormous trees, lie graves whose occupants no one remembers anymore. The people say that this mosque was once, before the coming of the Turks, a church dedicated to Saint Catherine. They believe that even now, in one of its corners, there is a sacristy which no force on earth can open. And if you look more closely at the stones of that ancient wall, you will see that they come from Roman ruins and tombstones. On the stone built into the mosque enclosure you can still quite clearly read the calm and orderly Roman letters of a fragmentary inscription: ‘Marco Flavio optimo.’ And deep beneath them, in the invisible foundations, there are great blocks of red granite, remnants of a far older cult -once a sanctuary of the god Mithras. Upon one of those stones there is an almost erased relief depicting the young god of light, running as he slays a gigantic boar. And who knows what else lies hidden in the depths beneath those foundations. Who knows whose labors are buried there, and what traces have been erased forever. And this is only on one small patch of land, in this remote little town. Where, then, are all the countless other great settlements of the world?" Ivo Andrić, "Consular Times: The Travnik Chronicle" Sometimes the greatest truth about humanity does not lie in what we have built, but in the layers of oblivion buried beneath our own foundations. Upon the ruins of one god rises a church, upon the church a mosque, and beneath it all remains the silent memory of time- something that never completely disappears. History is not a straight line, but a deep wound in the earth where every age buries the one before it, without ever truly destroying it. And perhaps this is the destiny of man: to live upon the shadows of others, until he himself slowly becomes a shadow for those who come after him.

@ShamashAran You have a point, dear cat lady. Casablanca was a romantic story for guys and it has done rather well.

I'm going to make a humble suggestion, if you can stomach even thinking about it. Write a romance series for guys. I know. I know. Stay with me here. If you do it right, guys will love it.

@ShamashAran To make cutting-edge social media posts?

Why the fuck does a knife need internet connectivity

@themaddierune Congratulations! Your heart speaks with resonant insight. What you are saying means a lot to me, a guy who bought his first house a year ago, at the tender age of 69. 🏡 🌴🌞🌹

I’m literally shaking. After a decade of saving and four years in a mobile tiny home, I’m officially buying my first REAL home at 34. It’s a little brick ranch in a coastal southern town. It feels like my whole life is beginning again. It feels like a second chance after years of trauma, addiction, and hurting people I loved. It feels like every dream I whispered to myself in the dark is finally stepping into the sun. It feels like the life I thought I’d lost is walking back up the driveway to meet me, whispering in my ear: hello you, I was lost for a long time, but I’m back and I missed you. And my children are finally getting a forever place to grow up and come back to. I used to think I ruined everything and there was no hope. I used to think I was disqualified from all good things because of my mistakes. If you need a sign to keep going, this is it. It’s not too late for you. It’s never too late to start again. Please don’t give up on yourself.