ouroboros festival

I met two women from Bulgaria. One had a necklace with an infinity and a cross and her dress had swifts on it, one had a necklace of translucent brown and black crystals and a matching bracelet.
I'm great with written languages but not spoken languages so I couldn't tell if they were speaking French or German or what even though they're nothing alike.

Grace is taking a photography class and I think she was going to the sandcastle competition in Revere Beach.
Mary has the same exact bracelet Shannon has.

The building on the greenway had a spiral staircase and platform with a crowd of people each with red balloons, at the top, they were releasing a giant red balloon through a hole in the ceiling. At the other end of Figment was a yellow house sinking into the ground.

At Figment, we are all friends.

Andi, my lab partner in General Physics, was there, volunteering.

There was an inverted bicycle with wheels you could spin. They call the bike wheels summer and fall. One has colored glass, one has string and fabric.
The non-geodesic dome was there, lit up at the top.
I asked three people what they were doing in one of the tents with a toppled table and it wasn't open until Sunday so they were using it to take shelter from the rain.
There was a man with a kite made from scraps.
The Eldritch Portal was a hanging box of mirrors and lights, you could stick your head in the bubble and see yourself reflected. It looks even more amazing at night.
Dan said the hardest part was hanging the fucking thing.
There was an open drum circle.
There was an exhibition of large-scale animal portraits.
There was a community loom.
There was a wheel where you labeled yourself, the threads represent sexual identity and the spokes had education, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality and immigration status, religion, and one other category I can't remember, which turned out to be class.
You could write a postcard and it would be delivered at a random time in 2018.
The Temple of Light was just a renamed and relocated waiting room. It's a place for contemplation, inspiration, and hope in dark times. And dogs.
There was a wooden enclosure covered in one-way mirrors that you could walk in. It was within the ideal amount of allocated amount of space given to one refugee, which is pathetic. I mean, Tadmor Concentration Camp had more space before Isis blew it to shit. Hell, the ruins of Tadmur Concentration Camp probably have more space for people to live. Alas, I guess that's how the powers that be think things should be. After all, giving them a living space larger than an outhouse might encourage them to leave Syria.
Laetor's Ladder you would pull to invert the hanging squares. It wasn't meant to be done by one person.
There's a pillar of light, which has geometric patterns on the inside that are revealed by sunlight or lamplight, just not moonlight. Even if the sky were clear, Alaura said something about a new moon in Leo and therefore, no moon that night.
The Brightboard is where you could write or draw on a glass board lit from within and the colors would constantly change.
Don't STOP the Beat featured stop sign gongs, bucket drums, a xylophone, a set of tubes you could slap with the rubber soles from sandals or other objects, a set of pipes that lit up at night that you could smack with sticks, three tuning forks, set up around a giant mechanical metronome. It was here I met Alaina.
There was a game called Moop Scoop where you pick up marbles from a disc with your feet and put them in cups that you can hold with your hands. The other games involved building towers while wearing oversized gloves and picking up sticks without moving the other sticks. We get fingerlights or temporary tattoos for playing. Jen had trippy op-art earrings and tattoos of Belias' sigil, flowers, tree branches, a faery with denim shorts and dragonfly wings climbing her back.
There are five tuned tubes that you could hit with a mallet.
There's a sign that says Welcoming Immigrants Since 1630.
In my wildest dreams: i have ladybug wings. I ride on the back of dinosaurs. I'd own a lightsaber. I'd be mayor of a moon colony.

Mort says that all Morties become Ricks. We wished each other peace among worlds and then whispered to nearby people "I told them it means peace among worlds."
Mort had a shirt with a rainbow colored skull that is apparently part of some kind of mystery package thing, a pendant with a crowned skull.

Jess is a professional mermaid. she was wearing a top made from seashells that she said weighed five pounds, and she never counted how many purple beads on her necklaces. She has purple hair with hints of seafoam green, which was decorated with a starfish. She has a tattoo with a J.R.R. Tolkien quote along with his sigil on her arm, and on her leg, she has a tattoo of a flower and the words que sera sera. She said that I drew her last year when she was on crutches but I don't remember her. Maybe I only drew her face and upper body and didn't get her name.
She's never done her performance except as a burlesque.
Certain metals give her a purple and green rash and normally she likes being purple but not when there's a rash. Talc, we've learned, is a mineral made from magnesium, silicon, and oxygen. Silicon is a metalloid on the non-metal side of the line and oxygen is definitely a non-metal, and magnesium is an alkaline earth metal.
Hurdles and other track and field things are not Andrew's forte.
"what if the hoop is on fire?" Mort asked. Jess said she's done something like that.

I told the woman with a peacock tattoo and some Tina Belcher tattoos that I want to hear a Tina cover of Baby Got Back and I imagine it would go like this: "I like big butts and I can not lie. Oh, who am I kidding, I like all butts." Her shirt had Patty and Selma in scallopshell bikinis and towels, smoking and showing off their hairy legs, and it said "my body, my business."

Daisy has tattoos of a treble clef with the name LUKE on it in memoriam of a friend who died a few years back, of quotes on her arms and legs, of fruits in a basket, of a cat and of what I think is a raccoon. She was dancing with a hula hoop.
I told Daisy that I think that if you have good friends, you can get through anything.

Charlotte had a mask that covered her eyes and nose and had what looked like dreadlocks or jellyfish tentacles. Kara has spiral earrings and an earring made from pheasant feathers and says that I can spell her name with a C if I want to but I'll stick with the proper spelling. Ammon was named after an anarchist. He had hippie parents.
Raven has green and black hair and snake earrings. I'm regretting not telling her to take thy beak from out my heart and take thy form from off my door.

A woman has a tattoo of a stylized horned owl and people ask if the design on its chest is another owl's face.
Her friend thinks all birds are stupid.

Alaura is of the sign of the Darkening Cloud, and we're both Exodus moons and her mercury is either Mateus or Adramelech, because I brought up how Mercury and Venus are closer to the Sun than the Earth is and so they never really stray from the sun, and her rising sign is Mateus.
She has a tattoo of an emblem of the cosmos made from triangles, whatever that was called, with the moon in different phases around it, and some schemata of things, and the pattern on her top was way too complicated op art to draw properly. She has blue hair. She knows what time she was born.
Alyssa is of the sign of the Corrupt.
I told her she probably doesn't know what it's like to be thirty-three or sixty-ten unless she's Merlin the Magician or unless time is borked somehow. Orange. From sun to sky.

Claire has an orange and black butterfly wing encased in glass hanging around her neck.

Alaina is from somewhere in Michigan which is on a lake but not the lake. She says most of Michigan is either woodland or farmland, not grassland like I'd think it was. I dunno, I've never been west of Florida. Or Monticello, which is a lot deeper in Virginia than I thought it was. Or whatever.

Natan was balancing a ball no his head and wore a shirt that depicted not a real pizza place but characters from an indie game called Five Nights At Freddy's, which was apparently created because some people found the kid-friendly animal characters in his earlier game to be inadvertently creepy.

Chelsea has a blonde mohawk.
There was a man with a rainbow mohawk and someone of unknown or ambiguous gender identity with rainbow hair.

In between the troupes of heavily tattooed belly dancers was a troupe of performers called Circumference Circus.
Courtney danced with sticks, and threw one of the sticks up into the air and somersaulted a few times before it landed.
After the show she said that she got all the things right that she was really hoping to get right. This was her first performance in six years. I was like "really?" when she told me she was thirty and she said I'm her new best friend.
Maria the Space Dolphin is her stage name. Her real name is just Maria. She has a yin-yang pendant and another more abstract pendant.
Jess uses hula hoops in her performance.
One of them had a Stormtrooper on her t-shirt and a pendant that looked like it was designed by H.R. Giger, only a bit more abstract. She has a tattoo on her elbow.
There were six dancers with striped socks with balls inside. One of the dancers was dressed as My Neighbor Totoro. One of the dancers did a Pac-Man themed performance in which she ate a powdered donut power pill.
Sterling has blue hair and dances with swords. On Sterling's ankle is a Triforce or maybe the Blacktron emblem.

One man had bat wings and one woman had wire ram horns on her head.

It was Emily's birthday so we all had rainbow cupcakes with blue crystalline sprinkles and black spherical sprinkles on them. Julia, on the other hand, has had many birthdays fall on AP exams or college finals, which I think makes her a Walker of the Wheel or maybe possibly Death Seraph.
Julia was wearing one of those firefly pendants that Caitlin was wearing last year.
Julia thinks that if you eat blueberries and raspberries together, it tastes like blue raspberry
If you eat strawberries and pineapples at the same time, they taste really good.
She asked me if they tasted like mangoes. They don't. They just taste like awesome.
Mangos are awesome when they're sliced but I hate eating whole mangoes because that shit gets stuck between my teeth.

Kerry has a cat-ear headband and light-up crown, star earrings and a five-taloned pendant, neon rainbow mesh gloves and spiked bracelets.

Someone's tattoo was obviously a moth because it had feathery antennae.

Despite what Siam Bistro's sign says, I'm pretty sure they're not open on weekends. Most of the places I encountered on my long walk to City Hall Plaza were closed for the weekend and stated so, occasionally there was a place that didn't list their hours and one place looked like it was either closed or being renovated.
It looks like Lisa and Lex got Chinese food from South Station, while I got a wrap with stuffed grape leaves from Falafel King and a blue raspberry lemonade from 7-11.
I don't think that it counts as the five second rule if it falls on a table.
Lex has a tattoo of Tiresias the seer, who was blinded but given the ability to see the future (one story has an argument between Hera and Zeus about which sex has the better orgasm and Tiresas says "woman!" and Zeus punishes him for his insolence but then Hera gives him the gift of prophecy as compensation) and who was transformed into a woman for seven years (one story has him seeing two snakes copulating on the side of the road and then beating the shit out of them with his walking stick), of the word τέλος, which means "end" or "purpose" or "result," and of αλήθεια, which means truth, as in alethiometer. She has a transgender flag stud earring and purple in her hair. So I thought that Tiresias was Janus and I don't think there's a Greek equivalent of Janus no matter how much Roman mythology is lifted wholesale from the Greeks. Lisa has dreadlocks the color of flames and her friend tattooed her with some kind of humanoid creature she liked, a jellyfish, and some flames, and she says she'd really like to get it finished one day. She says that someone at the DMV told her that tattoos cause cancer and she's like "okay."

Sonali is a quarter Indian and is surprised I recognized her name as Indian. Specifically, it's Bengali and means golden. I think she was planning to go to Chinatown to eat and she's from San Francisco and not somewhere like San Bernadino or Visalia or Bakersfield or whatever so they probably have Malay food back there too. She says it's easy to tell the differences between written languages in India because they all use different scripts. I told her about the women from Bulgaria and I said that my friend is ambiguously in Europe because I don't follow her online and have to rely on someone else and that she's ambiguously my friend because she was being rather icy the last few times I talked to her and I don't know if it's my fault.
I told her I was trying to find Sarah and she knew who I was talking about.
Dongryeong is from Korea and and has a green braid and a green beard.
We were playing with these bolas.

Sarah made a silver dress that she spray-painted with a circuit pattern and had a phone display images of the time warp from Chrono Trigger, a pop-tart cat, the green code from the Matrix, the Hypnotoad, and a few other things, and there were some lights on it including lights on the back that were set off when something brushes against them and lights on the bottom that gave her a color-shifting shadow. She wanted to add more wires and cords sticking out of body parts and maybe a cybernetic arm for good measure.
I told her she looks like the Borg assimilated the Faery Queen. Someone told her she looks like a princess. A kid drew a picture of poptart cat for her and she stuck it in her bodice.
She doesn't play anything with Emperor Norton's Stationary Marching Band but she does get to be their standard-bearer, which is also cool. She certainly thinks so.
I asked if she was Sarah with an H or just Sara with an A and she's like "well, there are A's in there," and "at least you didn't ask where the H was."
She's played a little bit of Chrono Cross and loves the music and loves the art.
a woman I met who dances with Amy Kucharik was there. I think her name started with a K. I feel like I'm better at remembering shapes and patterns because she said she was wearing that exact dress when I met her last Artbeat and for some reason I remembered that it was black and white, not green and black and gold.

Jessica, not to be confused with Jess, is of the sign of the Wroth and has the sigil tattooed on her hand. Her friend was wearing a hat with a steampunk octopus on it.


I tried to draw Caitlin and Marissa but it was spitting rain and I didn't know if it would just continue to occasionally spit rain or eventually downpour. Somebody described it as raining so lightly that the rain would fall between people.
Caitlin took a picture of me making art and I took a picture for them of them hitting the drum.

Keira says that I'm the only one who spelled her name correctly and a lot of people try to spell it K-i-a-r-a or something like that. I think Ren is short for Lauren.
I asked Keira if she's ever been to the Museum of Science and she's like "of course I have" but the reason I asked is because I was just talking to Caitlin and Marissa who are just visiting Boston and I spent a lot of the day with Alaina, who is here for a few months for work.
she said there's a similar sculpture by the same guy at the children's museum.
I think there's one at the airport too.
I brought up the kinetic sculptures at the MIT Museum and the ones that stuck out in his mind were the bicycle chain that oiled itself and the gear that turned once every 13,700,000,000 years.
Keira's amazed by how long someone's hair was and doesn't think she could ever get her hair that long and wouldn't like it because it's so heavy anyway.
She said I need an umbrella and I said that maybe there should be these things like the little lamps you clip onto a book when you want to read in dark places except an umbrella. It would be like something from a Dr. Seuss book.

When you mistake someone's shirt for tattoos, the lighting is less than adequate for portraiture. Alaina said she'd like to see something half in light and half in darkness.
There was one pendulum that drew lines in sand and there was one pendulum that swung above a board covered in glow in the dark paint, and there was a ultraviolet flashlight attached to the pendulum and so the paint would briefly phosphoresce.
Alaina made this cool grooved cross pattern because the sand was piled too high.
I told her that at least Boston has a lot of nice-looking buildings that I'd probably never notice and she told me that you never really notice architecture when you live somewhere, and I think that's true. I took a class on architecture in college in which we really focused on Boston.

A woman had the eyeball scene from Un Chien Andalou tattooed on her arm.

A woman has a green alien cat in a flying saucer tattooed on her arm. It wasn't what she wanted but the artist drew it on her with magic marker just to see how the design looked and she said "fuck it, I'm getting this instead." I'm paraphrasing but she did use either "fuck" or "shit."

The Naked Bike Ride came by. Someone said she saw more penises tonight than she has in her entire life.

The disco ball at the dance party had a flamingo pool toy attached to it.
Occasionally a fell wind would blow, reeking of the sea and death.

This guy had a pole with rainbow lights and a woman looking at it said she could look at it all night.

Taylor has the Greek word for family (οικογένεια) tattooed on her. She can't really read Greek but she is Greek, Italian, and Native American. She has been to Hungary and knows a bit of Hungarian, enough to count to ten. She's heard of Blade Runner but hasn't seen it.
I can read Greek but I can't understand it.

I was the second person in 48 hours to recognize a guy's tattoo as a l'Cie brand and by the looks of it, he's dangerously close to becoming a cie'th, which I'm actually kind of impressed by. He's partial to IX and XII himself and I agree with that. I'm also the third person in like ever to recognize Dan's shirt as the carpet pattern in the Overlook Hotel's hallways.

Kitty has pale hair and a pendant of crystals that fluoresce green and remembers me from last year. She's not Kitty Zen.

I met an Ivy. Lots of people with floral names.
A woman has a hexagram pendant and a more abstract or natural pendant.

I was expecting to enter South Station at 10 and get to Braintree by 11. When I got to the platform, the train arrived and so I got to Braintree at 10:30. I'm glad I met Haylee and Kate, at least. Kate was dealing with a death in the family and she told me my art made her feel better and that she was sorry for not being social. I told Haylee that I like to keep my sketchbook in roughly chronological order so I was trying to fill in the white space. They were at a jazz concert by her friend, whose name I can not remember. Ashley would appreciate that.
A woman with blue hair and a shirt that said "some people are like clouds: when they go away, it's a beautiful day" was eating an entire pizza on the train. This isn't the first time I saw that happen.

burning question: what do the words "open daily 24 hours" mean to you?
Julia said "uh, always open?" but the public bathrooms were closed. At least I could go to South Station. And I didn't have to actually cross the street, which is wonderful. And I met a doge with labradore coloring.