Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Bums with Gadgets

It's been over a year since I posted in this little blog I used to love so much.
When I first made this thing, I named it after the contents of my purse. (Anyone else carry an emergency candy stash in their purses?) I don't carry a purse anymore, just a backpack, and its contents are mostly books, jackets, sharpies, dog food; my ukulele is strapped to the outside. I've spent the last year hitchhiking around the country, hanging out with dirty homeless people, sleeping in random places, and enjoying the fuck out of myself.
This isn't to say I don't still love fashion; dressing up will always be a huge source of fun for me. But now I tend to wear the same outfits for weeks at a time; I only own one lipstick and one nail polish; and I dress more for practicality than aesthetic purposes.
I'm in a cheap motel in a town called Hempstead, Texas, now with my road dog and our puppies. Tomorrow we're heading toward Austin, where I'm hoping to run into an old friend. I'll be homeless for Christmas. But if it's anything like last Christmas, which I spent in a squat house in Chattanooga with three of my favorite people, I know it will be wonderful.
Happy holidays, people. I hope you spend them with loved ones.

Monday, August 27, 2012

The World Needs More Spinach

Wonderroot is one of my favorite places to see live music. Imagine dozens of punks crammed into a basement with no A/C. Imagine dancing so hard and getting so overheated you think you might just die. Imagine being inches away from the people making the music you love so much. It's incredible. (Also, you can take in your own booze without having to hide it!)

. Wicked Pretty

. Nona (The girl on guitar blew me away with how fucking cool she is. I really want to be in a band.)

. Burners (That kid in the brown shirt is such a badass guitar player.)

. Pedals on our Pirate Ships

. Hold Tight

. Ramshackle Glory

. Ramshackle Glory (Meeting Pat the Bunny was incredible. Words can't really express how much this guy means to me. I told him, "I've been a fan of yours since Johnny Hobo, and everything you've ever made means the world to me, and you just let me know that everything is going to be okay, so thank you." He shook my hand, and I walked away shaking and smiling.)

. Ramshackle Glory

. Redneck

. Redneck took this picture of me. He also said, "'Twin Peaks' . . . Oh, I get it! It's a joke about your boobs, right?" (Twin Peaks shirt from Threadless, DIY sleeveless hoodie, random necklaces.)

. The crowd during Ramshackle Glory's set.

Best fucking night of my entire fucking life.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Rockaway Beach

Disposable camera pictures taken in Acworth, GA.

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Willy; Kevin making sand angels; Christoph, Kevin, and Willy; Max and me (in a two-year old KMart bikini); Willy again; Lake Acworth.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Fire Flame Spitter

Here are some pictures I took a few months ago with a disposable camera. This weekend I took the camera to Walgreen's to get the film developed, and the machine broke in the process; my film was pretty much destroyed, but I'm kind of stoked about that. I love these crazy color effects and the split pictures. Sometimes accidents are for the best.


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Redneck giving me shooting lessons; my first time firing a shotgun; Wilbanks with the shotgun; Redneck with the shotgun; the back of Kolbas's head; my ex-boyfriend, Addison; Wilbanks at Mellow Mushroom in Rome, GA; Redneck at Mellow Mushroom; my face after I drink a Grateful Dead.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Cloudland Canyon

I live in Lafayette, GA, which is a tiny little city in the northwest part of the state. It might not be the most exciting place -- the population is less than 7,000 people, most of the land is inhabited by cows, and there are no liquor sales in the entire county (which means my roommates and I have to do like Stevo and Heroin Bob in SLC Punk and take a forty-minute road trip if we ever want liquor) -- but I truly love living here. Northwest Georgia is beautiful. One of my favorite places in the world is Cloudland Canyon State Park, which is in this town called Rising Fawn, GA. Cloudland Canyon has a two-mile hiking trail that leads down to a waterfall. Some of my roommates and I go to the waterfall whenever we feel the need to get away from home for a while.

Here are some pictures Willy and I took with my thrifted Ansco 1065 camera the first time I went to Cloudland Canyon with Willy and Brett. I didn't expect the pictures to come out all crazy like this (with the light and color effects), but I'm pleased with how they look.











Thursday, April 12, 2012

Hello Again

Fashion has been one of the farthest things from my mind lately. I still love clothes, but the reason I love clothes is because they allow me to become a new character every day. When I feel like being an angsty witch girl, I can dress like one; when I want to be the cute girl next door, I can dress the way I imagine the cute girl next door would dress (I've never had a cute girl live next door to me, unfortunately); and when I want to have adventures, I can dress like a grungy wastelander from Fallout. To me, fashion isn't necessarily about looking good because we all have different ideas about what "looking good" really means. Instead, I see fashion as a way to express myself, to express who I am every day (and who am I can sometimes change on a daily basis).

Spring makes me want to have adventures. A few years ago (2008, to be exact), I spent my spring taking road trips. I drove up to Asheville, NC, with three dresses, a pair of red Converse, a few packs of cigarettes, my camera, my acoustic guitar, and my copy of the Grateful Dead's American Beauty. Because I got lost on the drive to Asheville (due to the distracting beauty of North Georgia mountains), I was almost out of gas when I finally reached my destination, and I was unsure how I was going to get back home. But instead of stressing about money, I just walked around the city, took some pictures, wrote in my journal a bit, and played guitar on street corners. I ended up meeting a homeless college dropout named Marshall; he told me where to go to get food and shower, and he showed me his favorite places to sleep. Through him, I met two cool punks named Mission and Cory. We all went to the Swannanoa River together and swam and drank forties of Cobra and had a blast, just living entirely in the moment and not worrying about superficial bullshit like how we looked or how much money we didn't have. Mission suggested we go to Virginia Beach in Chevy Chase the Chevy Tracker (RIP, road dog -- you will always be my favorite car).  We spanged up the money for gas, and off we went, singing along to every track on American Beauty while smoking buy-one-get-one-free packs of Camel Filters and drinking cans of PBR.

Virginia Beach is beautiful. Mission and I played guitar on the boardwalk while Cory accompanied us on his banjo. We met beautiful Russian women who sang for us in return for us singing for them. We slept on the roof of an abandoned restaurant, and I woke up to the most astounding sunrise I've ever seen (I wish I could describe it to you, but words wouldn't do it justice).

A few months later, I took another trip from Georgia to North Carolina, but this time my destination was Charlotte. Charlotte didn't enchant me as much as Asheville (I don't believe any place ever will), but it was a nice place to spend some time. From there I travelled to New Jersey, where I met an internet friend and rode a train over to NYC. In NYC, my travel companion Jesse and I met a group of gutterpunks who shared their vodka and orange juice with us. Then we met some Latino gangbanger kids who bought us more vodka and cheap beer. We ate free chicken at KFC. We ended up on St. Mark's Ave, where we shared a forty with a girl who knew one of our friends from Atlanta. I marvelled about how small the world really was. We slept off the excessive booze on a sofa-bed graciously offered to us by a gay couple who were apartment-sitting. They made us tea and let us play the piano and electric guitar. In the morning I smoked a cigarette on the fire escape because I had always daydreamed about smoking cigarettes on a fire escape at an apartment in Greenwich Village.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is experiences mean more to me than clothes. Memories of conversations with people are more meaningful than memories of what I wore (though I do remember the outfit I wore in New York: checkered, slip on Vans with cut-off shorts and a blue shirt that cost $2.99 on the clearance rack at Heritage 1981 -- I also remember the way the sun faded that shirt, so it was three different shades of blue eventually, instead of just the one). Writing a fashion blog seems silly when there are so many more exciting things to dedicate my thoughts to. But sometimes it's good to focus on silly things; I mean, life is short, so we should enjoy the silly while we can, right? Those might be conflicting messages. The point I'm making is this blog has been quiet for some time, and during that time I have been doing some thinking and adventuring and prioritizing. I will keep updating this blog and reading fashion blogs, but my posts aren't going to be entirely fashion-focused anymore (because I am not entirely fashion-focused, and I want this part of the Internet to be an extension of myself).

Friday, February 24, 2012

Disposable Teens

Pictures of some of my roommates, some of their friends, Samus the cat, and me. Taken with a disposable camera.



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Rue 21 jacket and tights. Beavis and Butthead "Breaking the Law" shirt. Thrifted skirt and boots.