We Weren’t Abandoning You

There’s a notion, fueled by some careless rhetoric from blue state types, that we don’t care about helping protect the oppressed in red states.  As I reflect on that in this moment, we really weren’t.  Absolutely not.  The very fact we were trying to make sure the federal government was blue on top was specifically an effort to protect your rights.  It helps us as well, but it helped you a lot more – because that federal power was necessary to impose your rights on hateful state governments that argued prejudice is a state’s right.

State’s rights is the cry of those who do not have as much political power as they’d prefer, for their faction.  I find myself singing it from the rafters now, and that is, low key, an abandonment of you now.  Sorry about that.  I do hope that whatever rights we manage to protect in blue states, we can use those to help red state refugees when they need it.  I know Canada doesn’t want you.  They are absolute shits about USians trying to move north.  Not sure if Mexico would take US refugees, but I can think of some big reasons why they wouldn’t.

Point is, we weren’t abandoning you, back in the halcyon days of anytime before now.  But it might look more like we are now, as we scramble to secure our states’ rights to protect human rights from the fascist death machine.  I hope you won’t look poorly upon us for that, and I hope it benefits you as well, in some way, some day.

I’m too tired to find a better place to end this post.  May these motherfuckers devour themselves and vanish from the Earth in a puff of smoke.  May we all live to see a better tomorrow.

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Getting Terrorized

If it seems like I’m not taking the current political situation seriously, that isn’t true.  I feel it.  It hurts.  It’s wretched.  I wish I could fix it, undertake some sort of violence that would set the world right.  I feel bad, for at least some amount of time, every day.  Feels worst in the lead-up to going into work on Monday – Sunday night, Monday before dawn.  Composing this on a Sunday, back on the 2nd.

But there are some facts that are very important to keep in mind.  Most of us are going to be able to live the rest of our lives just fine, whatever hardships this may add.  We can prepare ourselves in various practical ways for a lot of bad things, but not all of them.  Worrying is not preparing; it’s just hurting yourself.  I know, you can’t avoid it completely.  I sure can’t either.  But we have to minimize its impact on our lives.

Frankly, if we don’t, the terrorists win – to borrow a cheesy slogan from the post 9-11 era.  The fascists love it when we think about them all the time, when we show fear, even when we show anger.  Were you ever bullied?  Same deal.  I don’t love living in fear of what the bastards will do next, but I really don’t love the fact they can crank their hogs to the signs of my fear.

We have to oppose them.  I do think almost all the methods we were using before still have a place in practice now.  We might have to add some new tricks.  Keep up the good work, when and how and if you can.  And if you can’t?  Do your best to survive and thrive.  Anything you can do to make your life as good as it can be, that does matter.  It is a victory in this larger war, on one small but very important battlefield.

Meanwhile, what can we do to ease our worries?  I’m still trying to find things that work for me.  Obviously, I’ve been throwing myself into creativity, and plan to continue that as much as possible.  Even so, tonight I find myself feeling kinda ill, my viscera trembling like a fall leaf.  Keep in mind I wrote this days ago, so reassurance belated and probably unnecessary when you read it.

At least I have a posse.  I have a blue state behind me, I have a union, I have my comrades here.  It doesn’t feel real some days, but other times, it really helps me.  I know a lot of you don’t have all of those reassurances.  But you do have a comrade in me, for what I’m worth.  Let’s keep this life going, together.

Drop suggestions for ways to feel better, even if they only work a little bit.  Add ’em all up, that’s something.  See you later!

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RIP David Lynch, Properly

I was very busy when David Lynch died, and only had time for a lazy link and a cheap thought on the matter , but his art stands tall in my world, and deserves much more thought.  What bothers me is that I cannot properly verbalize it.

Which is weird for two reasons.  One is that I can usually express my feelings with close to perfect accuracy.  I know myself well.  Whether that’s because I’m wise or because I’m simple-minded is a matter for debate (don’t debate it or I’ll punch you in the kidney).  The other reason is that I “get” David Lynch, where many, many other people do not.

Like when I’m watching Blue Velvet or Eraserhead or Lost Highway or whatever, I am feeling exactly what he intended me to feel.  I’m under his spell.  Yet most people who watch those movies just don’t feel it, and are dismissive about the fact it went by them.  Totally blithe, like, “eh, whatever, too weird, didn’t like, moving on…”

I’m not saying that you can’t have different opinions from me on your enjoyment of those films or interpretations of them.  I can imagine the person that does “get” them the way I do, and doesn’t like what they’re getting.  But I’ve never fucking met that person.  People just tell on themselves and stroll.  That’s fine, but if you didn’t get it, I don’t care to fucking hear about it.

This surreal narrative art is important to me.  I think it deserves to be understood, and if you know that isn’t you, don’t even talk about it.  Fine…  Quick aside, I’m a very self-aware person, and can’t help but think of ways I could be perceived as hypocritical or foolish in my statements.  On this one, the analogy that jumped out at me is of a catholic apologist saying he isn’t interested in atheist arguments because they ignore the splendor and majesty of faith.  Whatever, I’m running with it…

Well, another aside on that:  I just recently said I look at everything critically and stan nothing, and some might see my lack of interest in hearing from haters as stanning.  No, I can see flaws aplenty in David Lynch’s work, and am quite confident he did some dirt in his life.  I’d rather not hear about it, but if one insisted on showing up with receipts, I’d believe them.  Still, at the moment, please don’t.

So as much as I get it, I can’t explain it.  I can talk about some aspects of it, and I will, but the most genuinely important thing about David Lynch’s oeuvre is the hardest to describe.  I can think of reductive clichés and movie review jargon, a little art school lingo, but maybe it’s nonverbal.  In that last article I linked to, I also said that I am “very aware of artifice.”


One track of my brain can play pretend and take things as they are, the other is always seeing the construction of things, both concrete (that’s where they cut between the actor and the stunt double, this is wires, etc.) and abstract (especially writing tropes, but manipulation in general).  David Lynch movies don’t shut that down completely, but they’re better able to turn down the volume on it.  That helps me experience the “magic of cinema” more fully.

I can’t put my finger on what he was doing.  Is it as simple as being earnest?  Alien concept to my jaded ass.  I’ve tried, actually, to isolate the elements, come up with a formula, so that I could try to write something that hits the same.  Looking back on those attempts, they seem so superficial and weak.  Now I’m disadvantaged in making Lynchian narrative art, because I don’t have the medium of cinema.  If I had no other hobbies and obligations eating my time, I could probably make surreal shorts with free video editing software, but it’s a huge time commitment.  But I still believe it should be possible.  The writing of Leonora Carrington is a different flavor of surreal but has similar power.

I can feel it, “get it,” but I can’t explain it.  Can’t understand it?  Maybe the understanding is aspirational.  I move toward it, it moves toward me, sometimes we touch and sometimes we miss.  Another disadvantage I may have is not being autistic enough.  r/evilautism had love for the guy, who met a lot of the criteria, but was able to go through life being himself.  He didn’t “mask” the autism as many do; they called him an “unmasked king.”  He just explained whatever weird shit he was up to matter-of-factly and kept it going to the end.

I’m going to hint at how his movies express that condition, but I don’t want to say anything too declarative, lest I get something wrong.  Far from an expert.  David Lynch movies feature a lot of “humans as monsters” not in some cynical misanthropic way, but just literally “I don’t get some humans and they’re scary.”  Some characters are monster 100% of the time, some are human 100%, some mode switch to express a crucial feeling or theme?  Or does service to the theme emerge from characters following a natural arc, like it’s successful as a byproduct rather than intent?  I don’t know.  Another thing is strongly evoking dissociation, with worlds made out of Edward Hopper-style liminal spaces and overbearing sensations.  To whatever extent I experience these feelings, it doesn’t rise to the level of a diagnosable condition legit way of being.

The entertainment I’m most drawn to in life is basic bitch power fantasies, like action heroes flying through the air and beating what bothers them.  Maybe he just stands as far from that as possible, and the contradistinction elevates him.  Of course, mumblecore movies about hipsters getting divorced is far from Tsui Hark, but that doesn’t hit the same.  There is something of melodrama in his stories, which is why the recurring soap opera bits in the first season of Twin Peaks (“An Invitation to Love”) were so cool.  They were an admission that Twin Peaks is a melodrama, but the contrast with the fakeness of the soapworld suggested the main events were another layer of reality.

One thing a lot of people don’t know is that “surreal” doesn’t mean unreal.  It means “more than real,” which is so apt.  When you’re getting it, it feels profound the way dreams do.  It cuts through the layers of narrative we use to interpret reality, make everything safe enough to proceed in life, as if we know anything.

Maybe it’s all smoke and mirrors; it just worked better on me than caring about whatever The DoD’s Pentagon’s Disney’s M&M Mars’s Marvel’s The Avengers™ were up to.  But it felt real, and still does.  Estoy llorando.

As to what I meant by “you can take David Lynch out of the world, but you can’t make it any less Lynchian” is that the world is a melodrama of monsters and people and people turning into monsters and vice versa, played out chiefly in anxious enclaves of manufactured reality dotting an utterly alien landscape of liminal spaces and broken wilderness.  We’re all smoking cigarettes nervously under the flickering streetlamps of life.

Anyway, not at all satisfied with my efforts on this.  Enjoy a monkey.

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Destroy Pop Culture?

FtB’s Abbey St. Brendan wrote about the outing of Neil Gaiman as a cruel sex criminal, from the perspective of someone who has had a lot of affection for his and others’ contributions to the constellation of pop culture – from the perspective of a fan.  I’ve never fully held the fan point of view, and less so now than when I was young.  Even when I’m looking at a piece of pop media I greatly enjoy, it’s from a critical perspective – if not an especially incisive or thoughtful one.  I’m just very aware of artifice, and stan nothing.

And so watching somebody else deal with these repeated failings of famous purveyors of narrative art, not being someone who ever was fully on board with that art, again set me navel-gazing about my anti-fandom instincts.  Why do I get to be immune to this brand of hurt, and could or should that benefit be extended to others?  It feels more significant with Gaiman, because he was, in a sense, the last man standing of big fantasy authors.  There may be other people making books -especially for kids- who are making more dollars, moving more ink, but his cultural stature was top tier.  Whedon, JKR, and Gaiman were the big ones of this young millennium, inspiring the most fan content, the most devotion.  Bing, bang, boom.

I still haven’t quite hit the nail on the head of what makes me uncomfortable with fandom itself.  I could put all sorts of aphorisms to it (“I’m not a joiner” etc.), but none of them fully express it.  Maybe it’ll come to me while I’m on the john seven years from now, and if FtB still exists, you’ll find out.  In the meantime, the simple version is that I’m more of a cultural outsider than the typical “geek” – been isolated in my own dreams and the weird shit my husband shares with me for decades now, and anything outside that is dabbling at best.

Like when I last had cable and I would watch kung fu movies on El Rey.  I never did put posters of kung fu boys up on the wall, never cosplayed as the master of the flying guillotine, never rewrote Five Deadly Venoms to where my author insert gets to bone down with the Venom Mob.  (Shit, maybe I’m missing out…)

I don’t communicate with people who share unreserved excitement for the same things, and I think that communication is key.  My husband and I like a lot of the same things, but the things we love the most are just slightly out of sync, never quite the same stuff.  So neither of us has the shared excitement that is foundational to true fandom mindset.  I’m deffos more normcore than that goth bastid, but still not truly a fan of anything anybody else is a fan of.  (am i the only person on this blog network who does not see the appeal in terry pratchett?)  And so I find these affections easy to discard.

Back to the point: Seeing people go through this ordeal reminded me of a time when I saw somebody viscerally upset by the idea of dispensing with fan culture.  During some kind of discourse, an iconoclast suggested we should truly commit to elevating the indie by refusing to follow the big properties, and this fan felt personally hurt by it in a way that surprised me.  I then realized there is an inherent value in large shared fandoms, and pop culture in general, and it is something they share with religion and folklore going back to before Gilgamesh.

When we are given a narrow selection of cultural content, elevated through whatever means to be the only shit we’re allowed to look at, we are all on the same page.  It’s common culture, a bond that can be shared among all who experience it.  I’m about to get into what I hate about it, but this is, I think what feels needful about it.  The fan culture defender above was given a glimpse of a world without touchstones, where a million microfandoms are scattered like bricks from the Tower of Babel – a world where everyone is alone in what they love, and what they live for.

I don’t have a good answer for what to use to replace that, if art radicals were able to magically abolish pop culture, but I’m going to make the case for just that.  We should destroy pop culture.

Firstly, I’m going to define my terms.  By pop culture I mean art that has been elevated to the commercial mass market, be it fiction or music, video games or cinema or visual art.  If millions of people can pay money to experience it, if there’s an oligarchy of business creeps speculating on it, if there is a brain drain in the legal profession of your country as all law students flock to the lucrative field of intellectual property, if there are a million starving artists facing verbal, physical, and sexual abuse in order to be a part of it, it might be pop culture.

Pop culture can be very entertaining.  It can even have artistic merit.  Kurt Cobain was once on the cover of Rolling Stone in a white T-shirt with the sharpie-penned slogan, “corporate rock still sucks.”  But does it?  I don’t know.  I still love Guns ‘n’ Roses, get a goofy kick out of Def Leppard and Queensryche.  Major labels.  Shit, The Butthole Surfers were on Capitol Records, right?  What is it to suck?  Suck can be found everywhere from MTV to podunk night club, as can genius.  And of course, pop culture has the benefit of being a shared experience, in the way indie art cannot achieve.

But the pop culture machine is evil, and the best way to break that evil would be to just walk away from it all.  For the moment at least, the internet has a lot of avenues for pursuing obscure art.  You don’t have to special order a magazine from Norway to find out about the latest metal bands.  You don’t have to listen to the only radio station that reaches Tierra del Fuego.  You don’t have to watch any TV show that’s been produced in the last thirty years, and can still have a lifetime of TV to watch.  Sometimes it’ll take some work, but you can make it happen.  And if more people walk away from pop culture, the alternative avenues will increase.

How is the pop culture machine evil?  Abbey touched on it in her article, even if it wasn’t her intention.  She mentions that getting one’s art published means you passed a gauntlet of gatekeeping, with schmoozing and playing the game – a game that serves the privileged, that rewards questionable practices.  I say like everything under capitalism, it’s driven by a greed that can never be sated, which corrupts or harms everything it touches – including the art itself.

Auteurs are elevated and surrounded by lawyers and agents and media leeches, people who shovel drugs and sycophancy and manipulation upon them, play their egos until – even if they started as a decent person – they turn into creeps.  The movie Swimming With Sharks was a fantasia that arguably justified the cruelty as the cost of Hollywood magic™ – or the opposite intent, you know how hipsters be – but it gives you an idea of what the gauntlet can look like.  You want to make art, expect the legalized slavery of internships, expect abuse, and forget a livable wage.  The “casting couch” of sex abuse isn’t just for actors, though it hits them the hardest.  After Dr. Luke faced allegations of sex abuse from Ke$ha, how many women in the industry were still willing to work with him, hoping to squeak out another hit, ride the fame rocket into the ground?

Even the union jobs got people living like migrant workers, working multiple jobs just to afford splitting the rent with multiple roommates.  People in the higher tiers have reason to see the newbies as competition to be suppressed.  In the field of publishing, there have been multiple scandals involving “mean girls clubs” of established authors meeting in internet backrooms to shit on and plot against newer authors.  Everybody hates everybody and everybody is out for blood.  The sausage of pop culture art is made out of people.

People say organize, unionize, organize, like that can make a real difference in the arts.  It can’t because the magic of reaching pop status – of even secondhand fame – lures a bottomless well of replacements into the grinder.  There is no amount of unionization that can barricade the World War Z flow of zombie scabs.  I haven’t even mentioned nepotism yet.  You get the idea.

The human cost is the worst aspect of mass media art, but intellectual property law, corrupted to hell by media oligarchy lobbyists, has caused irreparable damage to history.  How many movies, novels, songs have been lost forever, rotted in the vaults of dragon kings?  Or sued out of existence because unreasonable boundaries drawn up by Disney and the RIAA?  Current events have poor artists clamoring for expansions of copyright law, which is like Palestinians clamoring for Israel to get more bombs.

And everything corporations do just gets worse with time, in rolling boom-bust cycles.  See what Disney is doing with its multi-billion dollar franchises.  Waste of fuckin’ time.  The only good thing about it is watching them lose money.  And also, for me, to watch the corporate art I used to find diverting twisted, at last, into a form repellent enough that I can look away, in full confidence that I am missing nothing of value.

I’ve mentioned before that I want to see art emerge from the shadow of commerce.  This will probably never happen until commerce itself eats the world, but I view it as something to aspire toward.  Anybody that can make art for free should.  Maybe I’ll have the gumption to do that someday, but for the moment I’m too economically insecure to throw away a lottery ticket chance of commercial success, no matter how slim.  Some things I do will be for free, like the first draft of Josefina and Blasfemia vs The Wall of Ice, or Centennial Hills.  But I hope you don’t think me too hypocritical in charging for some things.  We (artists) are all hobos rattling tin cans on the street corner, at the end of the day – or bourgie sellouts propping up the abusive system that lets a few token successes man the ramparts.

But one beautiful day, let it come, maybe we’ll all say “fuck that noise” and leave corporate media in the dust, to chase better dreams.  Maybe we can destroy pop culture.

–

Add:  It occurs to me some may see this as saying artists should not be paid.  I only mean that insofar as I think nobody should be paid for any kind of labor, or everybody should be paid enough to live on and that’s it.  The idea is you work every angle until you get the magic golden ticket, that this proves you are better or more deserving than those that suffer in poverty?  I used to be more OK with it, but it’s the fuckin’ lottery that’s been sold to us as a way to let lich lords destroy everything that’s good in the world for ugly, ugly gold.  I don’t know shit about fuck, but I do know I hate competition for resources, for affection, for life itself.  Clearly civilization is on its slow hideous way out, and when it goes, I hope survivors will learn to base the next world on cooperation instead.

RIP David Lynch

I’ll probably post a bit about this within a few weeks, specifically what space David Lynch occupied in my heart and imagination, but the short version of my initial eulogy: You can take David Lynch out of the world, but you can’t make the world less Lynchian.

Meanwhile, enjoy an article about his support for transgender people.  I’m gonna let others do the heavy lifting and get back to my writing challenge.  Anyone who would join me, read this article.

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Life List: California Quail

My husband is poor folks like me, but a lil’ less so.  No homeless shelters, but there were shitty apartments and shotgun shacks.  As a child he used to live on this one narrow little street in Fife, close enough to major roads for major road noise, across the street from a scrubby field of bullshit.  There were rats, the floor was uneven enough to watch a dropped pen roll away from you.  But unlike an apartment, you get your own garden space, which is nice for people like him.

For as long as it lasts, because nothing lasts for the poors.  I dearly hope this condo is end-game for us, but if life goes one way instead of another, a mortgage default, and we’ll be lucky to not land in the streets.  Everything up to this was an endless string of shoddy apartments jacking rent through the roof, jobs changing cities, shit forcing us to move every few years, up and down the I-5 corridor.  The shotgun shack of his childhood was given up, and apartment life resumed.

His mother has always been a nervous driver, and prefers familiar back roads to busy thoroughfares, so she’d drive past the old house unnecessarily every time we drove back from Tacoma to Federal Way.  I ended up seeing the house a few times, until it was bulldozed by some new owner to do some kind of bullshit.  Probably the demolition was the right thing, but the moments leading up to such an event are like The Pit and the Pendulum for wildlife.  Interesting flora and fauna grew there in the absence of human occupation, and now they are dead and paved over.

Very near that house, on that stretch of road, is the only place I can ever remember seeing a california quail in the wild.  California quails are named after the state where i was born, and they are cute as hell.  That wacky flipped-over plume on the head is iconic.  As I recall it now, I used to have a quail among my stuffed animals.  I don’t remember what I named it, but I thought of it as being a girl – even though it had male markings.  Trans rights!

Drop all your cool quail stories in the comment section.  This post needs more birds!

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AI is Better Company

pinning this post in case anyone wants to know the low-hanging fruit of how to cancel me, so you can get it over with and fuck off.  pro-AI, not entertaining your need for ideological purity on this one.

***

This post has been a while coming, because I feel really important about this, and don’t want to fuck it up.  If I can keep from getting too heated about the topic, this’ll be the last post I do on AI for the foreseeable.  I don’t love fighting.  I know that within this article I do not treat people with opposing views generously, but I’m still gonna ask them to have at least this much generosity with me:  Don’t even leave a comment on this one.  I will find it either tedious or upsetting.  I’m saying this stuff to give voice to a rarely expressed opinion, and to support people who may find it agreeable.  I’m not saying it to further a big debate, especially when the disagreeable are never going to be swayed.  Do you hate all AIs 4eva?  Don’t even read this.  Moving on…

The sneering fire-breathing demonization rained down upon people who dare to use AI was my primary motivation for defending it – I’m defending the people who want to use it, not the machines themselves.  Not everybody is plugged into the leftosphere groupthink, and when Harvey Dontknow finds out he can use AI to make a picture of his waifu, his “crime” is not equivalent to child murders.

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Life List: Eurasian Collared Dove

I tend to be lumpy on some of these bird posts.  Taxonomy is the practice and study of putting names to things in nature that do not truly have hard boundaries – deciding what does and doesn’t constitute a genus, species, etc.  Because law is involved in conservation and law requires extremely specific language, how one practices taxonomy can make a big difference in the survival of a given population of organisms.

This is worsened by the triage mode for ecology, that the interests of all life on earth are secondary to human greed, so we have to decide what are acceptable losses to that greed.  Feels like a trolley thing.  Trolley will eat everybody and everything, but if you define this one creature as being special enough that the trolley will allow it to exist as an inbred population in petting zoos, it may be spared.  Maybe we’re extremely past due to dismantle trolleys.

Wait, I was going to explain lumpy.  Lumping is deciding two populations of an organism are not distinct enough to be categorized as separate species.  Splitting is deciding that a given population of organisms has sub-groups distinct enough they should be regarded as separate species.  This happens at other –more obsolete– Linnaean ranks as well.  Where it applies to my posts is that I’m tending to mention more than one species in a go, and as we see with my last post, this can group them by species in a way the animals don’t necessarily deserve.  I named my post for glaucous-winged gulls, but will olympic and western gulls get an equal treatment at any point?  Unlikely.

Today I split, and let a related species stand apart.  I gave feral domestic pigeons a post; now I bring you a wild cousin of theirs that has also become an invasive species in North America – the eurasian collared dove.  As part of the human-induced global biotic interchange, they are surely a problem for some precious local species they out-compete.  I don’t know enough to say who that is, but they don’t seem very numerous, and they’re shy around humans.  I hear them far more than I see them, and I don’t hear them very often.

Eurasian collared doves look and sound similar to mourning doves, but don’t have spots, and they have a black semi-collar around the back of the neck.  They even have white tail feather tips accentuated by a band of black, just like mourning doves.  We don’t get mourning on this side of the state, so it’s nice to get something similar.  In my experience, they spend most of their time very high up in trees, coming down to the ground or low bushes to feed, when nobody is paying too close of attention.  They sing like the world’s most pathetic incels, and the sad cooing has a remarkable ability to carry over distance, and penetrate the weatherproofing of my condo – reach me while I’m washing dishes.  I love the sound.

I first saw them at my workplace’s old location, in the beautiful suburban fields with sparse tall trees.  They were pretty close, but I didn’t get a very good look before they fled to the treetops.  Since then, I’ve tracked their call to the tallest trees near my home.  They’re around.

Honestly, I don’t have much to say about them, for lack of direct experience with them.  They’re new to me.  Feel free to drop your hot ECD goss in the comments.

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Life List: Squirrel?

I’ve mentioned before that when I hear a bird call I don’t recognize, it often turns out to be an american robin.  They don’t get enough credit for the variety of their vocalizations, I think.  Other times, an unfamiliar call will turn out to be a damn squirrel.

American grey squirrels have gone invasive in Europe.  Sorry about that.  Prehistorically, as continents have come together and pulled apart and come together again, there have been “biotic interchanges,” which initially result in massive reductions of biodiversity.  That is to say, many native organisms go extinct in the face of invasion.  I don’t remember the mechanism for it – why some alien species become overly successful – but it’s a sad affair, for people who like to see the world populated with unique and interesting creatures.  Right now?  Humanity has created the biggest biotic interchange since Pangaea, in addition to all the other ways we’re causing an extinction level event.

So Death to Squirrels?  I don’t know.  Ecology is all triage now, in an endless war, with no support from anybody with the resources or authority to make a real difference.  Fascist amxrika just voted “fuck it, burn the world to ashes,” so we’re left with the usual acting locally, but thinking globally?  All I’m thinking is this:  If nothing is ever done about any of this ever, what will nature do about it?  Because something will live through it all, especially if we don’t…

Eh, that was totally not what I meant to be talking about.  Squirrels, amirite?  They’re remarkable creatures.  So powerful, so well-adapted, so cute.  They live fast, they die young, but while they’re around?  Squeakin and sneakin and shriekin.  They get that nut, whether you want them to or not.

I don’t know a lot about them, but here are a few things…

Douglas’s Squirrel:  There’s a smaller species of squirrel that tends to stay in more densely forested places than your greys.  They have a dark stripe on the side and a less prodigious tail, charcoal on top, apricot orange underneath, but otherwise look very similar to a grey.  I don’t know much about them, didn’t even imagine we had all that many squirrel species locally, until I saw these ones in the West Hylebos Wetlands Park in Federal Way.  My husband thought he was seeing baby squirrels in the trees, but when we got a better look, they were clearly small-size adults.  One got pissed off at us and yelled from the walkway railing.

Flying Squirrels:  Supposedly we have flying squirrels here, ghostly colored things with huge dark eyes, capable of gliding really long distances between trees.  I’m guessing they’re high canopy adapted and might not live outside of old growth forests, but if they were around?  I’d never see one unless it fell out of a tree dead and I happened to see it in the moment before any number of beasts gobbled it up.

Black Squirrels?:  Driving from where I live up toward Canada, right as you get close to the border, you’ll see more black squirrels in people’s yards.  A morph of grey squirrels, or of a different species?  I think I’ve seen the answer before, but not curious enough to look it up again.  Just noteworthy to me because 99% of the squirrels we see are very samey here.

Chipmunks:  One reason I pushed for a honeymoon in the Olympic National Park was a childhood memory of going there with YMCA summer camp and seeing a chipmunk.  Only time I’d seen one in my life, in a quiet moment when all the other kids were off hootin’ and hollerin’ somewhere else.  Chipmunks are just another squirrel, but the stripes are cool.  The Olympic Peninsula has its own species.  We did see some, up on Hurricane Ridge, but I suspect these were not the unique local boys.  I dunno.

Cracked-out Squirrels:  There’s a tiny urban park in Seattle, near the homeless shelters and such, near the junction of Pioneer Square, the International District, and Downtown.  Last I saw it, there’d be a hundred plus homeless people resting there at all hours of the day.  My husband used to work across the street from it, and one time, passing through on the way to a bus, he had a squirrel charge him like it was going to attack.  On squirrel crack?  We don’t know.

Squirrels vs. Woodpeckers:  Northern flickers are the most common woodpecker in squirrel territory, and we’ve seen them squabble.  It’s mostly verbal, and the squeaky barking of the squirrels is what led ultimately to this post.

Dead in a gutter:  One time my home boy Bad-Moustache-Having Guy had a big-ass iguana that got out all the time.  It liked to climb trees.  One time it went missing for months, before it turned up dead in a neighbor’s rain gutter.  I didn’t see it, but I have to imagine it was sun-bleached and mummified.  One time my husband saw a squirrel sprawled out, utterly inert, near the gutter on a rooftop.  The squirrel remained there for hours, presumably sad and dead.  Then it randomly got up and took off.  Funny to imagine one having a lazy sunday, basking on a rooftop, but apparently this is a thing.  On some cold days you can see them resting on tree branches near the trunk, tail curled over their back.

Anyway, as noteworthy inhabitants of the predominantly birdy realm, they get a bird post.

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Time to Form a Third Party?

More than usual, I’m amenable to hearing arguments in favor of abandoning the dems for a third party. If it was done on a large enough scale and fast enough, it could end-run the two-party stranglehold. If you do it on election eve 2028, bad timing. If you got way better than Green numbers well in advance, with a sufficiently bad-ass campaign, it might not be that hard to make a better showing than Harris, next time out. Her numbers were that miserable. These are radical times; radical things may happen.

I don’t have much to say on this right at the moment, and I know the conversation could get acrimonious, but if you can keep it civil, please speak your piece below. As much as I’m “vote dem or die” when there is no viable alternative in sight, it feels more possible than it has in a while that we could all just dust those fools off and do something else.

With dems acting the way they are now, we can be fairly assured of ten to forty years of fascist rule. If they changed their tune tomorrow I’d be open to hearing it, but they’ve been signaling a right-wing turn. What if we had somebody else, another party that wasn’t a fucking piss-take?

I will immediately return to “vote dem or die” if we get closer without a crushing success in building a replacement, so this is idle fancy. But get fancy with me for a minute.

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