Sexy Anonymous

I once had a weird relationship with the alternative weekly magazines in Seattle.  I read them front to back every week, including the advertisements and personal ads at the end.  It’s a compulsion and a procrastination thing; better that than doing my school work.  Because of this habit, I’d sometimes show up in the letters sections, embarrassing myself.  I got to know the personalities of the writers.  I spent more time in the shared world they created than they did.  The Alt Weekly Cinematic Universe, before those were a thing.

So.  I was feelin lonesome and adventurous one time and submitted a kinky personal ad.  They give you a number where you can check messages for responses to it, and I promptly lost the number and forgot about it for weeks.  A few years later, I randomly met an old friend on Broadway and she said she recognized my personal ad from the way I wrote it.

Now is it possible I’m such an eccentric writer that I could be clocked and remembered in this way, or did I actually share with her the fantasy I was describing, back when we were hanging out, singing along to Pepper in her jalopy, or watching horrible hentai on VHS, or seeing the news reveal of the Heaven’s Gate Cult in the wee hours of the morning, thinking of the same nike slogan everybody else thought of simultaneously?  Just do it?  I must have told her about the fantasy.  Shame I lost track of the ad and missed my chance to live it.  I’m sure that the very specific person I described was out there for me somewhere, and ready to rock.

My last girlfriend ever was hot to trot.  Different lady, different topic, but adjacent.  We had killer foreplay, tho I flamed out when it was time to bone down.  Reasons.  The important thing here is the foreplay.  I did something to her kinda random and specific that she liked a lot.  There was a section in one of those alt weeklies where people sent anonymous requests for sex advice, and I recognized myself in this.  She, or somebody with the same experience, wrote a letter asking “how do I get the nerve to ask new partners for this specific kind of foreplay?”

Was it her?  I don’t know.  But since I graduated from art school, I have not returned to this habit.  The reading, not the foreplay.  Well, that specific thing surely would not work on my husband, so not that either.

Those papers got cheaper and worse, with more ads and less content as the years wore on.  I don’t even know what they’re like now.  At least one of them still exists, but what does it even have to offer anymore?  That world is behind me now, ink stained pulp sheets drifting through wind-swept gutters.

Have I mentioned these things before?  At some point you will have read the entire contents of my brain.  The repetition will set in, and then it’s over for me.

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Minphis Don’t Play

U might not be aware, but several US cities have rap scenes with a lot of local pride.  One particularly infamous local rap scene which intrigues people to this day: Memphis, Tennessee.  Or as people with that accent call it, “Minphis.”  When I say “Minphis don’t play,” I’m quoting a random loudmouth I overheard on the bus a very long time ago.  As I recall, he also claimed that city invented pimping, for what that invention is worth.  I’ll accept this as truth.  Moving on…

I’ve mentioned the biggest success story from the Memphis scene a few times, The Triple Six Mafia.  And what did that success bring them?  A great number of Memphis rappers, famous or otherwise, are dead from drugs or violence.  Bad times, but maybe that has something to do with the intrigue.  For some reason, hipsters out for the “realest” music have latched onto the Memphis scene as Tha Source.

Why I am I fucking with it?  Isn’t rap homophobic and misogynistic and glorifying of violence and irresponsible use of chemical recreation?  True.  Some of it is worse than others.  Well, Memphis tapes are about as bad as any.  Call it a problematic fave.  I won’t justify it to you and you don’t have to justify yours to me.  I’m not the world’s biggest Memphis rap fan, but hipsterism hath perked up my ears to it.

I think it’s funny because this could just as easily been any city and any genre.  In my hometown of Auburn, Washington, we had a number of punk bands with moderate local success.  Some of them put music on CD, cassette, even vinyl.  Where are those albums now?  Will they ever receive this kind of love?  I really would like to see all the art of the world given that respect, no matter how pathetic or retrograde or disposable.

I’d love to see the internet become a true archive of the whole breadth of human experience, and of art, which was the cry of some nowhere people against the void – I matter right now.  Hear me make music about it.  But we can’t.  You literally can not find everything on the internet.  Even very recently created art has been lost forever.  As everything ultimately will be, so it’s not a cosmically big deal.  But it is kind of sad.

We don’t even have all the Memphis tapes – and mysteries abound.  Check out this blog post wherein a guy was researching the strange story of how one rap dude released some tapes with his voice pitch shifted, playing a lady rap persona seemingly inspired by an ex, and never copping to it.  Why did he do it?  Maybe we shouldn’t push the question, knowing one possible explanation is being trans, and you don’t want to push people out of a closet – especially now.  But that doesn’t seem likely to be the case here.  It’s just kind of funny seeing a guy named Skinny Pimp release a Chipmunk-styled song called Where the Big Dicks At?, then duck when people ask him about it later.

Maybe Minphis do play, after all.

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Life List: Barn Owl

Barn owls are one of those species with “global distribution,” where one could consider the barn owls of Europe to be the same species as the ones in Texas and Kinshasa and Kwangtung.  Are they tho?  I’m sure there are “cryptic” species hidden within that range, noteworthy subspecies, etc.  They are the most visible members of their branch of owlkind, the Tytonidae.  Tytonids are less likely to have feather “ears” than “true owl” strigids, and generally look like “shy guys” from mario brothers.

I’ve personally seen one in a zoo and one in the wild.  I used to walk back and forth across Auburn in the middle of the night, often between two and four AM.  Once – I think this was when I was living in the adjacent tiny town of Pacific – I was walking the Interurban Trail and saw a ghost white headless-looking thing float above the trail, from the trees on one side to the trees on the other.  A fleeting glimpse, but enough to – in conjunction with range information – positively ID the suspect.

My dad used to know this shitty neonazi who dabbled in “vulture culture” before that term was coined.  Barn owls are not infrequently hit by cars, and this dude randomly hit barn owls twice within a pretty short time on the exact same stretch of road.  He preserved the bodies in some way, I don’t recall – skeletonizing or taxidermy, whatever.  I never actually saw them.  When this particular neonazi hadn’t fully turned but was beginning his descent, he gave my dad his Dead Kennedys tape, and that’s how I came to receive my first hardcore punk rock album, In God We Trust, Inc. (prior to this i only had dead milkmen CDs).  I guess as the punk became nazi, he felt the need to fuck off.

When I was in junior high, we got to dissect owl pellets.  Some may have come from barn owls; impossible for us to know.  But it was super cool and interesting.  I don’t normally like anything to do with excretions – piss, shit, vomit – but dry owl pellets seem rather sterile.  Bleached white by stomach acid, they are little blocks of compressed fur and bone that came out the front end of the bird, so they didn’t have to waste digestive resources on the hard bits.  Pick apart a little block of fur and find interesting tiny bones.  The skulls of those rodents looked so cool to baby Bébé.

Anyway, being a massively successful species, they provide some hope to me for the biosphere.  Whatever we do to this world, barn owls will probably pull through.  Shine on, you funky ghosts.  Keep eating rodents and puking up the cool parts.  I’m down.

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Lostwave

You might not be aware, but there is a whole internet subculture bent to the task of investigating cultural obscurae.  Presented with an image or a snippet of audio or a video clip, they try to find the origin.  This is not always possible, because despite idealistic dreaming and much human effort, you literally can not find everything on the internet.  Much of humanity’s artistic and intellectual output, even from the internet age, has been lost forever, or was never recorded in the first place.

With regards to music, they call this “lostwave,” a genre defined by what you don’t know about it, and nothing else.  There were a number of lostwave songs that people had just about given up hope on having their origins revealed, when recently they came to light.  Check out the reddit community to see a lot of interesting stories of independent research, and observe some odd bits of culture that were nearly lost forever.

I just want to talk about one such story briefly.  A guy posted a clip of a song and asked if anybody could identify it, then the poster disappeared.  I forget what reason he gave, for why he had a clip but didn’t know the origin of said clip.  Speculation was intense, the mystery lasted a few years.  But at last, it was revealed to be a studio song used in the pornographic film Angels of Passion.  You can find that moustache-tacular porn its entirety online, if you are so inclined.  I skimmed it.  Anyway, the guys that made the song published a remaster on yewchoob, so we can all check out this porn quality jam together…

The best part of this little tale is that you can tell from the clip the original poster had presented that it was carefully cut around the moans and groans of 1980s style fucken.  He knew where he got it, set people up to get pink-faced about it, and bounced forever.  Good one, man.

The song shows up at about 1 hr 7 min 30 sec into the porno, depending on which copy you’ve found, probably.

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Life List: Anna’s Hummingbird

Anna’s hummingbird is pretty much the only hummingbird you will see in great stretches of its range.  You don’t even have to look it up or carefully scrutinize blurry photographs, or lure them with a feeder and bust out the field guide.  If you see a hummingbird in Seattle, it’s a fuckin’ anna’s, with a very outside chance of the very different and unmistakable rufous hummingbird.  I’ve never seen the latter, I’ve seen tons of the former.

The reason it’s often the only hummingbird in town is that it has had an incredible expansion of its historic range, moving farther north than any other hummingbird alive.  Some people in my household claim to have seen them in Alaska years ago; that paper I linked only mentions them breeding as far north as British Columbia.  I’ve personally watched as an Anna’s had a snowflake land on its head, proportionally the size of a fancy hat.  When we lived in the U District, somebody in the courtyard of our apartment building, right on The Ave, had a feeder, and the lil guys would perch in a small tree there in easy view of anybody coming and going.  They persist all year, doing their thing.

It’s hard for me to believe this is all on the back of feeders and flower gardens, but that must be the case.  If so, when the humans go bye-bye, so do the birds.  Hopefully they’ll find a good place to be when the biosphere comes to grips with us, and with the size of their population, they’ve got better odds than a lot of hummingbird species.

Their main song is a quiet grindy sound, but it has an amazing power to carry over great distance.  I’ve heard the call, then looked to see them in trees up to a hundred feet from where I was standing.  Learn it and listen for it whenever you’re around feeders or blooming flowers – especially fuchsias and other deep pink things.  You might just hear it in places you didn’t expect.  It carries much more effectively than the humming of their wingbeats.

I could write more about how wild and freaky hummingbirds are, but it’s pretty common knowledge and I don’t have much time.  But I’m glad this particular species is keeping us company, in places where other hummingbirds fear to tread.

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Bad Arterfinger

One of my favorite albums ever is Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger.  Musically, quite excellent.  Some of the B sides are fairly B sides-ish, but the majority of the album lives up to the band’s name.  It creates a garden of sounds that carry you emotionally exactly where you want to be.  Break your rusty cages and run, little grungers.

I don’t want to piss on Chris Cornell’s grave.  From what little I know of him, he seemed like a lovely guy.  I hope any people who feel suicidal find some way out from under it and don’t follow after the late lamented grunge icons.  Please take this critical look at his music in the same way you would if he was still with us – just art criticism, not an attempt to besmirch anyone’s character.

There is a politically conservative streak in this album that I don’t love, and it’s hard to know without deeper research into the man’s life whether or not it was even intended.  If it was intended, that sucks.  I hate finding out some art I enjoyed was the bellicosity of my political opposites.  If it was not intended, it was a failure of artistic aim.

This album predates our polarized times.  The ’90s were kinda polarized, just nothing on where we are now.  Call it the halfway point; getting the strong impression from where we stand now that Reagan was the real “beginning of the end” for liberty in the US.  Back in the ’90s, conservative jokes about political correctness were laughed at by most liberals.  Feminists were dismissed as too shrill, but with a chuckle instead of a two hour youtube diatribe and gun polishing.  Causes of social progress were not in better shape than they are now, in terms of their acceptance by society at large (obviously it’s worse in the halls of power now, and increased awareness of the existence of trans people means increased hostility to us from haters).  If Chris Cornell had any conservative inclinations, he also had lyrics sympathetic to class struggle, native rights, and environmentalism.  There would not have been an obvious contradiction in that, to the average thoughtless amurrican joe circa 1991.

A common feature in the genre of grunge was nonsense lyrics, meant to evoke a feeling more than to say anything real.  It’s possible then that any political meaning to the words was “vibes” and not a well-considered expression of intent, though that read gets pretty dubious on some tracks.  Nonetheless, it would be right to say there is a lot grunge nonsense on the album.  What is Rusty Cage even about?  A jailbreak?  A revolution?  Atheism?  I dunno, but I do like “god’s eyes in my headlights.”

The big questionable tracks are Slaves & Bulldozers and Jesus Christ Pose.  The former is the better song – truly one of the all-time greatest tracks in the history of heavy rock – and the more overtly problematic.  What does Cornell mean when he invokes slavery, as he does on other tracks and other albums?  What does he think about black people?  I don’t know.  The refrain of this song is that the singer feels he is being mocked, manipulated, and exploited by those who are seeking sympathy, culminating with “bleed your heart out / there’s no more rides for free / bleed your heart out / I said what’s in it for me?”  Remember the phrase “bleeding heart liberals”?  Talk about moochers on social programs?  Welfare queens?

If he’s expressing a conservative feeling in earnest, how far does it go?  Does he think tha blacks have gotten too uppity?  That welfare and food stamps are reparations for slavery that are undeserved?  If he isn’t expressing a conservative feeling, is he doing a character?  Is he writing from the imagined viewpoint of a conservative, to illustrate how they are bad dudes?  If so, the problem is that the song is too fucking good!  The singer is lofting with righteous fury, tearing the world down with his voice.  Giving that quality to the performance ennobles the words that are being sung, which means that if he was doing a character, this was fundamentally bad art.

Cornell defeated his own point.  You don’t listen to Kill the Poor by The Dead Kennedys and wonder if Jello Biafra really wants to kill the poor.  That’s good art.  It communicates itself.  You don’t listen to Gin and Juice and wonder if Snoop Dogg is actually satirizing the gangster lifestyle.  He likes that shit and is letting you know.

That is assuming he wasn’t earnestly banging on about how the real problem is poor people, which is a contradiction to Limo Wreck on the next album.  That album has a song called The Day I Tried to Live which seems to be about doing all the wrong things sociopolitically and realizing you suck, again, through a heavy filter of grunge nonsense.  Back to Slaves & Bulldozers tho, tl;dr:  bad beliefs or bad art, on a good song.  That’s a shame.

Jesus Christ Pose is more broadly problematic.  There Cornell describes somebody loudly pretending to be a victim, and how he doesn’t care and wants to see them gone.  My husband says it sounds a lot like he’s complaining about an ex-girlfriend.  True, but how much political conservativism is just a reaction to hating “bitches”?  Women are not mentioned, so you could see this as a stretch, but it is a very common complaint from the “male” side of bad relationships.

The song isn’t wrong about this – some people do moan loudly about their struggles in order to manipulate, even abuse others.  See complaining about people at work to your nine year old child, see convincing your lady you couldn’t help but hit her because you have it sooo bad.  But this is very comparable to a concept in Laveyan Satanism of the “psychic vampire” who must be violently repudiated and shut down.  As spelled out in The Satanic Bible, you can see that point of view.  You know people who take and take with their bitching and moaning, slowly draining your emotional resources and never giving anything back.  However.  It is no coincidence that large parts of the book were copied almost verbatim from an antisemitic, eugenicist, white supremacist screed called Might is Right.

Even if some people are bottomless holes of need and will never be able to give back to the world what they take from it, those people did not ask to be born.  They were forced into the world by the recklessness of breeders, and don’t deserve to die in misery because of it.  And most needy people are not like that at all!  Here is the sleight of hand pulled by The Satanic Bible in making that point of view seem reasonable – say that it’s cool to help people in need as you can, dismiss people who need a lot as psychic vampires, and then allow you, the reader, to decide how much help is too much.  If you’re a callous greedy shit, anything at all is too much.

Jesus Christ Pose is about somebody whining they are being martyred, and about how they can fuck off with that shit.  Maybe it is inspired by the kind of person who really should fuck off with that shit, but who’s to say?  Legitimate beefs have been written off with such attitudes, especially by conservatives.

Anyway, call this a nitpick.  I’m going to lean into the idea it’s grunge nonsense and doesn’t mean anything while I continue to listen to the album, but this does take it down a notch for me.  Off topic, some of my fave songs on there are Face Pollution and Drawing Flies.  That’s all.

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Life List: Spotted Towhee

What’s that thing you spotted at the treeline?  Is spotted towhee, comrade.

Some articles out there will copy-paste the idea that spotted towhees are timid and hide from people, but I don’t think it’s actually true.  One time my husband nearly stepped on a spotted towhee while we were walking to the bus stop.  We had an amazing view of it.  Black hood and back, rusty blood red eyeball and flank, pale grey belly.  Larger than chickadees, more the typical size range of emberizid sparrows.  And of course, they have a lil’ spatter of pretty white spots.

They might just seem easy to miss because they favor thick, short trees – especially evergreen pines.  However, even in those trees, they aren’t too hard to spot, because they like to perch near the top.  One time I went to the beach at Dash Point and a towhee begged for food from us.  On another PNW beach, out on one the islands, I came across a bunch of short pines with a bunch of towhees in them – more than I’d ever seen before.

Spotted towhees are perching birds, which are united in having a very long backward-facing toe called the hallux.  They use this to grip tree branches.  Small passerines like this sometimes feed on the ground by poking through leaf litter, making little backward hops.  The hallux pushes the leaves apart, and they grab any grubs they see after the sweeping move.  My husband pointed one out to me that was doing this.  Since then I’ve also seen another species do it – I think dark-eyed juncos?

It makes me think of James Brown.  Jump back, wanna kiss myself.  Ungh!

But yes.  Spotted towhees.  Cute.  Common.  They screech like a little pterodactyl.  Sometimes they make a “cellphone” call similar to a dark-eyed junco.  Keep an ear out and you’re more likely to see them.  And enjoy.

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EDIT:  Forgot to mention, dark-eyed juncos have varied color over their range, but in the PNW, their colors are oddly similar to a spotted towhee.  They both have a cellphone call, and it makes me wonder, are our local juncos impersonating towhees?  This would be similar to how downy woodpeckers look like hairy woodpeckers, which has been postulated to help them benefit from the reputation of or avoid aggression from the larger birds.  Juncos being smaller than towhees, and locally more similar to them than elsewhere, the samey call…

If I had time to science it, I would attempt to observe if juncos make the cellphone call while doing anything else junco-ish, or while acting territorial.  Also whether juncos in other regions without the “oregon” markings make that call.  Or whether they look similar to other birds in their respective areas.  That kind of shit.

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Republican Senators Wassup

Hey republican senators, I know most of you don’t like having to worship the floppy anal orifice of gibbering shitgibbon.  Maybe you’re a fascist, maybe you’re so greedy you’d see the world in flames and everything beautiful dead and too poisoned to rot, if you could save a nickel on taxes.  Maybe you want all women in chains, all queers and nonconformists and foreigners flayed and immolated on main street.  But do you want your personal hitler to be quite this embarrassing?  Quite this disastrously incompetent?  Quite this obviously weak, insecure, tiny handed, and internationally humiliating?

Anyway, March 15th is a very special day.  Since we’re all into violent historical reenactment now, you have the opportunity to do something very funny today.  Consider it!  Blame it on antifa.  Everyone will believe you.  I’ll back you up.  C’mon, you know you want to.  Treat yo’ selves.

🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️

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Homemade-ish Vegetarian Pizza

Pi day post?

Pizza Hut had been serving us adequately for a minute, but when it was time to cash in the free large pizza, there was something seriously wrong with it.  Like the pineapples had been shipped in antifreeze, I don’t fucking know.  It’s not like me to throw out leftover pizza but that wasn’t cool.  I used to work at that Pizza Hut.  Top Ten Anime Betrayals, in the parlance of our times.

So we decided to do a homemade pizza to make up for it.  Since I was a young adult and first able to customize my toppings, I’ve favored pepperoni, black olive, and pineapple.  We did this.  It turned out quite nice.  I would have preferred real pepperoni, but the fake kind weren’t too offensive.  I wonder that there might be a way to get them crispier, like pan fried for a moment?  But let’s just describe this recipe as it happened.  First draft was good enough.

Ingredients
Wad of uncooked pizza dough from WinCo deli area, idk, like a pound?
Pinch of flour.
Half a bottle of Botticelli brand Vodka Spaghetti Sauce.
Shredded mozzarella cheese, maybe 12 to 15 ounces.
Maybe a third of a bag of Trader Joes Vegan Pepperoni.
One small can of black olives, two-ish ounces.
A lil less than half a small can of pineapple chunks, three-ish ounces.
Maybe a tablespoon or two of mayonnaise.
Trader Joes Aglio Olio seasoning.
Garlic Salt.

Tools
Oven.
Very broad cookie sheet or pizza sheet.
Ladle, any material.
Smallish spoon.
Oven mitt or two depending on if you’re strong enough to one hand it.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  I got that instruction off the pizza dough package and it worked well.

I put a lil flour on the cooking sheet, probably cold have done a bit more.  This helps it come off the sheet without sticking, and I did lose a wee bit of crust on there.  When stretching the dough, ideally the side facing down will have just enough flour to easily come free, but not enough to be noticeable on the end product.

Stretch that dough.  Spin it, roll it, smush it with your hands, but be mindful to aim for an even thickness, avoid areas too thin.  Make it thinner than you might imagine; it will puff up.  I didn’t know if I was making it too thin, but it ended up being just right, flattened to about one foot diameter.

Pizza sauce.  Any tomato sauce is probably fine.  I think this is usually marinara, and that might have come off more classically pizza-ish than my vodka sauce, but I’d sweeten marinara a bit.  I find it too bitter sometimes.  The biggest risk of a pizza is that our natural tendency is to plop all ingredients in the middle, then smooth them out – resulting in a thicker pile at the center, which is the most likely spot to not cook thoroughly.  Doughy pizza fucking sucks.  The sauce is the first ingredient where you want to think about this, but the same principle applies to all layers:  Try to distribute all toppings evenly, but let them be thinnest in the middle.  Use the bottom of a ladle to push it around.

Mozzarella.  Buy shredded if you don’t want to be cooking for hours and hours.  I made this whole recipe in maybe a lil over a half hour; shredding would have added several minutes.  On that even distribution principle, I’d pour it in kind of a donut shape, breaking it up as I drop it onto the pizza with one hand.  Same as before, have some in the middle but not as thick.  Regarding mozzarella, you know practically no franchise pizza place uses pure mozz anymore?  They all used to have mozzarella, so now when you taste a slice with a reasonably thick amount of the stuff, it’s nostalgia city.  It’s not the most remarkable taste, but it feels gourmet when the most recent pie you had before this one was botched fast food.  So good I had to write about it.  Use mozzarella or don’t even bother.

Vegan pepperoni.  Leave some space between them to put on your other ingredients.  The pepperoni should be reasonably clear on top of each slice, for reasons I’ll get to later, so don’t bury them.

Sliced black olives.  Like the shredding, it ain’t worth it to do your own slicing.  Pat them dry with paper towel, or a thin non- terry cloth dish towel if you wanna be environmentally conscious but not leave lint all over your pizza.  Distribute between the pepperonis.

Pineapple chunks.  I was hoping to get the thinner slices like they have on most fast food pizza, but most of the cans have thick chunks.  Do avoid crushed.  The big rings could get sloppy too.  I took the thick chunks and sliced them into thirds, so they’d have a similar thickness to the olives and not come off more dominant in the final taste.  Even more important than the olives to dry these.  A lot of fluid on the pizza risks doughiness, and this flavor is better in little bursts rather than suffusing the whole with a vague fruitiness.

Mayonnaise!  Vegan pepperoni are de-vegan’d but much improved by wiping a thin bit of mayo on top of each slice!  More convincingly pepperoni-oid, tastes more tolerable.  I also put a thin bit of mayo all around the outside of the crust, to help seasonings adhere to it, and make it richer.  This isn’t mayo as thick white condiment; it’s mayo as a more easily controlled and thin layer of cooking oil.  Again, bottom of a ladle is a good tool, but for tighter control I used the bottom of a spoon.

Sprinkle the aglio olio on the pizza’s topping area.

Sprinkle the garlic salt on the outer crust only.

I forgot to, but putting a very thin amount of mozz on top could help hold it all together.

Cook for twenty minutes.  Outer crust should be golden brown, the center might look squishy but that’s the melted cheese.  If you did everything right, it should not be doughy.  Serve immediately.  Might burn an incautious mouth, but the outer crust in particular gets less nice fast when it cools.

It’s a shame this takes so much work, but it will taste great.  It makes Pizza Hut look like grotty scumbags slingin’ reheated garbage out of the back of a rusty white van in rural Arkansas.  They have a pizza oven; I don’t.  They should be able to make something so much better, but crapitalism gotta max that profit at the expense of quality, every time.

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Life List: Canada Jay

I had no idea what I was seeing.  I had no idea when the day began that I’d be up a mountain, getting snowed on in October.  But it was a good time.  Canada jays are Perisoreus jays, which I think are more closely related to Eurasian magpies than to American jays?  I dunno.  I’m no scholar about this stuff.  It’s all google if I feel up to it.  But on my honeymoon, we randomly went up to a lookout at Hurricane Ridge, in the Olympic National Rainforest, and saw these birds.  Never before or since.

They’re bold.  I heard that they are so used to getting food from humans that you can hand feed them, and I regret not trying that while I was up there.  They seemed bold enough.  I saw one buzz within three feet of another hiker.  It took me a while to work out the ID.  I certainly hadn’t expected them to be corvids.  They seem a bit smaller than other jays, which themselves are smaller than crows.  Maybe about robin sized?  Mostly grey-white, a little bit of black around the back of the head and more on the wings.  Dark grey beak, dark button eyes.  Nice.

Based on where we were, this was most likely the “obscurus” subspecies, which sounds cool, whether or not it’s actually at all interesting.  It isn’t.  Pay it no nevermind.  To me, this bird will remain associated with my honeymoon, like ravens, like red-tailed hawk cries, like peacocks in the road.  Much more personally interesting, even if that doesn’t transmit to y’all.

I have to imagine that somebody in my readership has much more experience with them.  Holler at ya dogg.  I’d be interested to know more about them.

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