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Natal Stream
My experience is that being able to claim that you truly love a landscape means knowing and accepting the hazards and existential threats that come with living in its midst. Even if there weren’t a supervolcano in the mix, where I grew up is pretty damn volatile. It is also probably the only place I’ll ever get to love in any sort of complete, unconditional way.
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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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Wounds of the Anthropocene
The landscape tells us all kinds of stories about previous global die-offs. It also tells us how to live in reciprocal collaboration with other beings. And it also bears the wounds of the Anthropocene. If we operate with the understanding that the land is our classroom and our textbook, surely there are lessons for our shared recovery in even the wounds.
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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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Serotiny
Maybe I’ve been waking up on the right side of the bed lately, but I’m finding it easier to center the miracles in mundanity rather than the seeming inevitability of full-on ecocide for a change. And I guess it’s easy to feel a sense of solidarity with that stuff because it underscores the value of an ordinary life, and certainly makes me feel a sense of belonging just by virtue of being here to participate and bear witness to it all.
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Piss & Vinegar
There’s this thing that happens to me about once every few months where I get mistaken for service staff while I’m patronizing a restaurant or brewery. That it even occurred with some frequency through a pandemic — where I was only in such places once every few weeks, and generally only long enough to pick something up — suggests that it would happen even more often if I spent any more time in public. It’s probably something that’s been happening throughout my post-pubescent life, but I only started keeping track after a notable experience in 2018. Ever since then, I’ve been completely…
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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…
