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Liberate, Deconstruct, Integrate, Repeat
It seems to me that the best way to keep jokes squarely within the territory of self-effacing rather than full-bore self-loathing is to make sure we roast the toxic crock of shit we’re all simmering in at least as much as we roast ourselves. That is, we should have no compunction about making jokes at the dominant culture’s expense.
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My Haunted Scarecrow Halfway House
How does one go about emerging from the haunted scarecrow halfway house? I’ve yet to find a self-help book on this topic and I suspect there isn’t one. Like everything else there isn’t a manual for, I’m inclined to believe it starts with an act of will and you learn the rest in your particular context as you go.
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Spinescent
I still have a scar on my left index finger from an off-target attempt to pick a ripe blackberry back in September. It makes me think that maybe there’s something to this blackberry brand of spinescence — leaving a mark on contact and bearing good fruit in season.
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The Strange and Unusual Afterlife of Self-forgiveness
For much of my life, my brain would do this thing where it would make a quick jump to thoughts of self-annihilation whenever I sensed abandonment. It seldom happens anymore, mostly because I have made a point in recent years to cull out vampiric friendships and be hyper-selective about who I trust. It also doesn’t hurt that I have reduced my level of expectations for human behavior to a misanthropic low. And I probably can’t discount the fact that, besides not really trusting anyone, I’m otherwise healthier overall than I’ve ever been. Even so, if I’m in A Mood®, I’ve…
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A Radical Mutuality
Last month, I resurrected my on-off relationship with horror genre to get acquainted with The Conjuring movies. These movies aren’t exactly hot off the press, but somehow they’ve only really been on the periphery of my awareness for about a year. And for whatever reason, watching them never rose to a level of urgency even though a lot of writers and podcasters whose taste I trust had only glowing things to say about them. Anyway, watching them was overdue and I rectified all of this at the beginning of April. I guess enough content I was interacting with around that…
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Grave to Cradle
A few months back, I got sucked into a reading streak about the legacy of extractive industries. It wasn’t exactly calculated. It all started in February when I finally broke into Kerri Arsenault’s Mill Town, a book I’d been wanting to get to since it came out in September. Then I broke into Jane Little Botkin’s Frank Little and the IWW, another book I’d been meaning to read after hearing it referenced and touted frequently throughout the first season of a podcast called Death in the West. While one is closer to memoir and the other is more like a…
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Healing in Public
I’ve recently had a streak of experiences that I can only describe as abnormally enjoyable sensory attacks. What’s stood out about each of them is how mundane the inciting stimuli have been. Two, for example, happened on the same day and were entirely because of coffee—at that, the same damn coffee I’ve been drinking every day for the better part of two years. For some unknown reason, there was a day early last week where it was like I was tasting my morning cup of pour-over for the first time ever. I think I even whispered a satisfied damn to…
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Belonging — with, not to
Something really wonderful graced the internet last month. It was this trail camera footage from December 4 of a wolverine spotted outside the northernmost developed area in Yellowstone: I don’t know more than any member of the public about the precise location of that trail camera. My final tour as an NPS seasonal in Yellowstone — when I might’ve learned such inside info from a coworker or old friend working among the wildlife biology ranks — was over six years ago, and all reporting on the trail camera system that captured the wolverine indicates the primary aim of that motion-activated surveillance…
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A1A Revisited
Around this time back in 2018, my friend Brenna and I took a trip to Florida. It was something we decided to do after she got an October 2017 email about a screaming deal on January flights in and out of Fort Lauderdale. Neither of us had been to Florida before and neither of us were doing great in the home stretch of 2017. In addition to being pals, we were coworkers and shared an office then. I recall possibly being squatted on the floor in our office and trying (with little success) to regulate my breathing to avert an…
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Born in a Bar
I visited Montana for the first time in over 13 months in September. Somehow, it’s the longest I’ve ever gone without setting foot in the state, and that despite living some 1,500 miles closer to a Montana border than any time in my adult life prior to 2019. I have a lot of feelings about traveling out of state on any non-essential terms these days. So, a September voyage to Montana was something that I had been wringing my hands about since June. I didn’t want to be a vector tracking in coastal cooties that the landlocked parts of the…
