langer:

photophobia:

Thorn-tree in barbed-wire: symmetry between our works and nature’s.

See here’s the thing about Mills: he can’t actually be real.

I’ve been reading his blog for well over a year now and exchanging emails with him on a regular basis during that time, but I’m still not convinced he is who he says he is. He attains to levels of exhaustive depth and sheer awesomeness that simply can’t be realized outside of fiction. Mills, inveterate student of psychology that he is, would no doubt find it interesting to learn that his persona seems impossibly singular, a subject incapable of being the sole creation of any one man. There are times when I wonder if “Mills” isn’t code for a collaborative of social scientists pulling the strings behind the scenes of the internet’s best hair.

His weekdays are spent as a subversive, hurling Molotov blog posts at his corporate overlords from an executive chair in his finely windowed sixth floor office, masterfully alt-tabbing between spreadsheet camouflage and the Tumblr dashboard at his heavy oak desk adorned with a miniature bust of V.I. Lenin, taunting those superiors oblivious to the symbolism.

His nights are contemplative, even peacemaking: Popper could never comfortably sit in the same room as Plato before Mills.

But it’s his weekends that add the greatest intrigue to this character: each Sunday afternoon his Flickr stream comes alive with new photographic evidence of an outdoorsman’s adventures in the deep South. One gets glimpses of mythical southern forests, manly men with loyal dogs, abandoned rustic cabins housing relics of another time. It’s as if every one of his weekends is a William Faulkner short story with horses replaced by mud-splattered 4x4s.

And when this weekend warrior returns home, the dried blood of an unfortunate black bear still stuck under his fingernails, he sits down to write a blog post about love.

No, this man can’t be real.