Life List: House Sparrow

You ever find a young bird in a fallen nest, in some terrible place?  Like wtf were the parents thinking, to nest there?  Then you insist on taking it home, to save it, and your mom sez, “ya shouldn’t,” but you don’t listen, so… back yard funeral?  Classic experience.  My siblings and I did that shit circa 1985, I think.  House sparrow not-quite fledgling, just down on the sidewalk below a sheer forty foot ivy-strangled brick wall.

What nonsense location had the nest been?  In a snarl of ivy?  On the ledge where the crows and falcons could see it from a mile away?  Surely a stiff breeze was all it took.  Rock doves nest in some foolish spots, but I do think they have a better instinct for seeking shelter from wind, if nothing else.  I once saw a baby pigeon so close to the ground I could have snatched it.  Maybe one of these days when I’m ready to have a weirder pet.

But house sparrows.  That’s another species that does not belong here, very invasive in North America.  Unlike starlings, I don’t believe they’ve invaded wild environments too badly, maintaining their population among human structures.  I’ll accept that.  Probably less of a problem for this part of the world than white people.  I understand they’re not doing so well in the old world, and wonder what ridiculous invaders could be messing up their homelands.  House finches from California?  Mynahs?  Grey squirrels?  Shit has gotten pretty jacked up.

I did a mixed media four panel set of bird portraits, and I believe the only one that sold was the sparrow.  A hot thirty-five bucks for me.  Woo.  Selling art is some bullshit.

I really don’t have much to say about house sparrows.  They’re The Sparrow that ya boy Karl of Linne had in mind when he named the passerines.  Iconic in their drabness.  “His eye is on the sparrow” is supposed to be cool not because sparrows are smol and he protects the weak, but because nobody gives a shit about a sparrow, so he’s loving the unloved.  Right?  Anybody familiar with bullshitology wanna comment on that one?

I once saw a mother sparrow with like four juveniles chasing her around and begging for food, so I stopped to watch.  They looked exactly the same to my eye, except for behavior.  The juveniles lowered their bodies and cocked their heads back, made some kind of noise I no longer recall.  Such a scene is always funny and sad.  Those bums are harassing their poor mom until she manages to shake them off.  But that’s what remains of those tiny helpless creatures she cared for so deeply a few weeks ago – a gang of big jerks.  Flip that perspective.  Those jerks didn’t ask to be born.  They were thrust into existence filled with a howling need that could never be fulfilled, and never will be.  Hunger.  There once was warmth and a mouth that feeds, but the writing is on the wall.  You’re about to be on your own.

Humans and sparrows have altricial young.  They are helpless and bald and creepy, like me when I get too old to take care of myself lol.  But srsly, we have the same path through youth, from the cradle to the boot out the front door.  There are variations in the experience for us and for them.  Some humans have lifelong relationships with their parents.  Not so much with me.  Am I the sparrow that has me feeling poetic?

It’s as funny as it is sad, and the one quality ameliorates the other.  I’m not too bothered about it.  Just feels like something.  That’s all.

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Me and Sadako McGee

I’m so close to the bottom of the well (get it get it) on my daily posting it’s fuckin’ wild.  I get the feelin’ the way PZ and Mano work is by reading their news and social media, and commenting on anything that seems worthy of comment.  I don’t follow news or social media on purpose.  FtB is the condensed version run thru the filter of people who share my principles.  Good enough.  Could I just do posts reacting to what they’re posting?  Blogly shadow puppetry?  Nay.  I don’t even feel like making a two sentence comment under most of their articles, no offense intended.

As much writing a chapter a day of novels was a frenzied dash, at least it gave me something to work with.  On the other hand, I seriously doubt I have the sauce to write fiction every day.  I imagine what I would write and immediately it all seems so high effort.  Even cheeky nonsense involves craft, way more than you might expect.

What would Groucho Marx do?  If I recall he was a well known epistler.  That’s like blogging but involves ponies and shotguns, I’ve heard.

Recently I’ve been watching The Dead Milkmen‘s vloggish thing on yewchoob, called Big Questions with the Dead Milkmen, and getting a mental picture of their lives.  Those guys had a hit almost everyone over forty has heard, in “Punk Rock Girl,” but they never stopped needing day jobs for at least part of the year.  The lead singer is at an age where some emeffs are retired and he still has an office job of some kind.  Royalties for the artists ≠ living high on the hogg 4 lyfe.  What hope do the rest of us non-fame-adjacent slobs have, of escape from tha Grind?  We all know PZ should be retired by now for health reasons, but can’t due to financial concerns.  Work sucks.  Everything fucking sucks.

Chill, me.  Chill.

That’s a bit off topic, but maybe it is a better topic for discussion.  Being a “creator.”  I’ve long wanted to put it all together as an artist, to assemble the palace of my perfected works, to accomplish whatever bare minimum level of public self-expression that would feel like “enough” when it’s bucket kicking time.  But to what extent is the public element necessary?  Should I be building an aluminum foil throne room in a storage unit or composing ten-thousand page novels about sentient tornadoes that will be found in shoeboxes after I’m floating out the crematorium pipe?

The world is glutted with motherfuckers.  There are a million bajillion artists clamoring for attention, a great howl reaching up into the unfathomable cold.  To be one more vainglorious mausoleum builder, this feels just pitiful.  Uncool, and you know I want to be cool.

But still, it gets me, thinking about how I have to toil most of my life at things I don’t want to do, while my imagination burns with things I’d prefer to be working on.  And the certainty that if society wasn’t a giant pyramid scheme to keep business nazis in boats, if I literally had to plow fields, I would have vastly more free time to pursue my craft?  That’s a ten thousand degree knife thru my braincase.

Chill me.  Chill.

Anyway, if the daily posting train comes sputtering to a stop very soon, do not be surprised, nor concerned.  I’m as well as anyone can be, given the current circumstances of the world.  Thanks for reading this foolery as long as you have, and even if I return to erratic and much less frequent posting, I will most likely be here until FtB itself is pushing up daisies.

See you around!

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Life List: American Kestrel

Charly recently posted a kestrel pic from his very own home.  I once posted much shittier pics of a falcon on my front lawn.  That wasn’t a kestrel, but I have seen one before, at least once.  We have a different species in the US tho, the american kestrel.  They are smaller, which makes them cuter.  I don’t make the rules.  Sorry europe.

Most days I’m not seeing much nature.  Even when I go out of my way to see nature, it’s usually not much better than what I’d see in the mall parking lot.  The occasion when I saw the kestrel was very different.  I was on a birding trip with my dad and/or my brother; I don’t remember for sure who was there.  Paying more attention to birds than people, and an early leg of the journey had us by these marshy fields in southern Washington state.  They were so full of birds it felt like a strange dream.

Maybe my memory of the occasion is distorted.  By now it’s mostly a memory of a memory.  But in what I do retain, it’s delicious monster salad – creatures everywhere, feasting on nature’s goods.  Herons, egrets, a marsh harrier, surely some geese and ducks I don’t remember, red-winged blackbirds, corvids, and this little bird – sitting on a traffic sign.

There was a photo of a kestrel that did the rounds on social media briefly several years ago, where it was holding a grasshopper like a foot-long sub sandwich.  People wondered after the beast.  Its eyes were so huge, its beak so small, just a cartoon of a bird of prey.  Unlike every hawk or eagle I can think of, male american kestrels have some blue feathers.  Their patterning is very bold, despite being rendered in desaturate primary colors plus black and white.  Incidentally, that’s one of my favorite palettes.  My personal website used to have much the same color selection.

This is the part of the article where I use something about the bird’s name or description as a springboard for talking some unrelated rubbish… no, I won’t be doing that tonight.  I wake up for work in a lil over eight hours.  No way I get a full eight tonight.  I’ll do my best just the same…

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

The Corporate War is Here

The rich have always controlled civilization, one way or another.  Who those rich are and what that wealth looks like have changed a lot over time, but the anprims are right about this much:  civilization itself seems to exist solely to promote inequality.  I’m not meaning to invalidate all the volumes that have been written proposing ways societies should guarantee rights and safety to their denizens, just to say that such ideas are aspirational, and in practice I don’t know if we’ve ever quite made the grade.

My homeland is now dominated by open fascists, who still have the gall to refuse that name, to call themselves by other cutesy little nicknames like “conservative” or “republican.”  Whatever.  Not here to talk about that.  I’m trying to express my perception of power in this country and in the world, and what that power is going to do, so that we can be as emotionally prepared for it as possible.

Wealth feeds itself endlessly, like a virus.  It can’t stop devouring any society in which it exists, until that society is utterly destroyed.  The billionaire class ate and ate until they became so powerful they functionally ran the world, but didn’t seem to realize this until now.  They did understand a lot of their specific powers – pay any politician any amount of money to get laws to hand you even larger sums, assassinate your worst opposition and pay for the dirty tricks to keep any investigation from getting far, have friends in DC sic the CIA on leftist movements in South America, etc etc etc.  But I think shitler’s public alliance with apartheid junior really shows they didn’t understand what that power meant until now – because you can see them desperately scrambling to define the borders of their fiefdoms.  Something busted this flywheel.

America falling under control of the most corrupt businessman since Ea-Nasir has opened up the battlefield.  Through lobbying and cutthroat financial maneuvers the corpos have been building their power, like the modernization of armies in the run-up to World War I, packing the powder keg for purposes they didn’t fully comprehend, and now it’s all-out war for the top spots.  Apartheid junior is the first billionaire to directly control government agencies with no authority except his bank account, and now everybody else realizes they need to get a piece of that action.  Who will win?  What will their victory look like?

I know shitler won’t be around for it.  We all know that.  But he was crucial in making this possible, so the corpos have to be very careful how they handle his exit from the stage.  If I was them, I’d make him die from “natural causes” fuckin’ immediately, before history has fully vindicated his naysayers, so more competent tools can control the damage, spin his hagiography to my brand’s advantage.  If he lives long enough for the world to be completely fucked apart in a way that unambiguously points to him as the cause, the damage to business interests will be huge.

If beezus, murdrock, et al are thinking along those same lines, his days may be very short indeed.  Then it’s beardo mccouchfuck as bribe recipient in chief, and mfsk will find himself suddenly faced with a lot more competition for that access.  This will not look like it used to.  There was a kind of detente or gentlemen’s agreement between corpos that what was good for one was good for all.  Deregulate deregulate deregulate, and poison the earth to grow your filthy lucre.  The peace is over.  It’s time for Shadowrun.

Or should I say Cyberpunk?  I’m referring to the old TTRPGs where transnational megacorporations were no longer content with mergers and acquisitions, but paid goons to slice throats in the night.  Cyberpunk by R Talsorian Games was the first, but its name is too easy to confuse with the genre writ large.  I’m gonna stick with Shadowrun.

Shadowrun was a successor to Cyberpunk in the same genre, but with added fantasy elements – elves and magic alongside “chrome” and “street samurai.”  Within that world, shadowrunning was doing the illegal bidding of corporations as a mercenary.  Such a mercenary would be called a shadowrunner, which is a cool name.  I’ve already made reference to this game in another post.

Anyway, shadowrunners IRL.  Cool name, bad people.  Were those Boeing whistleblowers whacked?  Who killed Daphne Caruana Galizia?  Expect more of this, and more overt.  Amazon security will, at some point, turn live ammunition on Amazon employees, and get away with it.  Any news you read that makes a business look bad, you can trust it was only able to be published because it benefited a competitor who owned the media platform on which it appeared.

I’m pretty confident in my lil thesis here, but still haven’t come close to my first aim – prepare myself for what’s next – because there are so many possibilities my head is spinning.  First order of business will be taking over different aspects of government or political regions, like cities or states.  Texas, a subsidiary of Exxon-Mobil.  Social Security – Goldman Sachs.  How much say will the congress or even the president have in altering these contracts, when resistance will be met with dioxin poisoning, blackmail, even mass murder?

No idea.  Used to be medicine and caregiving were the growth jobs, but crapitalist medicine and fascist corporate influence has hospitals closing left right and center, the remaining staff massively overworked.  The new growth industry will be shadowrunning.  Learn to hack with artificial intelligence.  Amass blackmail dossiers.  Join private security trained by alums of CIA death squads.

That’s as far as I can go with this for now.  Might revisit in the future.

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VOTE VOTE VOTE

this is a bonus post; for regular content see the previous &/or next buttons.

washington state midterms rolled right up on me.  not good.  there are reasons in the US why voting early can be a good idea.  i missed that boat.  but it’s not too late to vote!  ballots have to be postmarked no later than the 5th.  if you have to change your voter registration status or information and forgot past the mail deadline, you can do it in person on election night, but go early.  polling places close right at 8:00 pm.

another useful thing for last minute voters:  voter’s guides.  it’s good to have at least two you can check against each other.  there’s a guide for progressive voters online.  not sure who runs it or how they pick their endorsements, but you don’t have to take their word for anything.  they spell out their reasoning, list other endorsements, and line up well compared to other sources – at least for elections in my area.  useful enough for me, especially since my other main source does not make endorsements for municipalities outside of seattle.  you can also read what the candidates say about themselves in the official voter’s guide.  since that is often carefully worded to not offend voters on the opposite side of the political divide, it can be tricky to parse.  in that situation, look to who’s endorsing them for clues.

anyway, as slim as hope is these days, you’d be an asshole to throw away the tiny tiny say you have in things.  if enough of us get our asses in gear, we can make a difference.  it’s real.  my trailer park town had a city council that moved to ensure abortion access would be available here, right after roe v wade fell.  that’s because more decent people than asswipes voted here, at that time.

do what you can, and VOTE VOTE VOTE.

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Brainjackin: Francis Bacon Good

All cultures are an instance in a continuum of cultures stretching into the past and future as far in each direction as the term culture can be used to describe what was or will be happening there, and they flow into and out of each other geographically as well.  Parisian urban culture circa 2025 is not the same thing as Parisian urban culture circa 2022 (to the extent you can even draw a line around what constitutes Parisian urban culture).  Close, but not exactly, and the more years pass, the more different those instances become.

Why did I feel the need to open this article with that pretentious shit?  It’s preface to say that art students from one decade to the next will be enamored of different artists from their own past and present, but you can point to any given class and say “those guys sure loved (Artist X).”  Back when the fascist Futurists were saying they hate Goya, you could feel, in that hate, just how popular Goya must have been with the art students around them.  They were being contrarian, and what they chose to be contra must have been well-loved.

I’m told that in the late 80s – early 90s, Francis Bacon was huge with art schoolies.  I’ve seen some evidence of that in the works of my college professors and of my older cousin Dave.  What was going on there, with that moment of Bacon Love?

This artiste du jour thing may be less true of the 21st century, where culture has become much more balkanized.  Can’t think of specific artists that reigned over the schools my husband and I attended.  At the commercially oriented one where we met, possibly the biggest artistic influence was Jhonen Vasquez, but there were lots of people that were not on that page.  My husband also attended a fine art school in the same city, with a lot more rich kids.  What were they into?  I’d term it “contemporary urban art” – the kind of shit you’d see in Juxtapoz and High Fructose magazines – and again, I can’t think of one specific artist with outsized influence.

Shit, where was I going with this?

Fuckin’ Francis Bacon.  Not that one, this one.  I never would have become familiar with his art if not for my husband.  Not because my husband was in art school when I was in high school, but because he has always sought out intellectual enrichment, even as a child, and started learning about fine art way before he actually reached college.  That guy downloaded Eraserhead on a 14.4 modem before I bought my first computer.  (To be clear, we didn’t know each other until later, when he was an adult.  I’m not that creepy lol.)

So my husband knew the works of Francis Bacon.  I might have glossed over them in magazines and textbooks on rare occasions in the years before we met, but the memories never stuck.  His work did not fascinate me, because while I am attracted to goths, I am not quite a goth myself.  Flash-forward to the early days of our relationship, 2005-2006.  We were sharing the things we love, and I was properly introduced to this great artist.

Francis Bacon – seriously stop thinking of that one right fucking now – was an Expressionist in a time of Postmodernists.  Maybe not philosophically – I’m much less familiar with his words than with his visual creations – but in practice, he painted emotion with intensity and a Symbolist nod to the classic.  This was how the original late 19th century Expressionists worked.

If you see the writhing horror of his art, you might imagine it was painted with an torrent of quick brutal strokes.  My husband has seen one of these works in person and says this is clearly not the case.  His canvas is evenly covered.  Someone who attacks the canvas like a method actor will leave exposed little white dots of fabric, or have thick impasto with dubious structural integrity.  Mr. Bacon had a furious vision of his subject matter, but a controlled hand in rendering it.

This might be the only time some of you see his work, so I should choose something to put the best foot forward… eh, my work alarm goes off in seven and a half hours, so this’ll have to do.  His most famous painting, after a Velázquez pope portrait:

Scream all you want, man; no one here gets out alive.

I came into this article imagining I could find lovely hi-res pics of his work all over the internet and was sorely disappointed.  The availability of such things on my bookshelves was misleading.  Maybe someday I’ll upload some pics from the art books we have.

Anyway, if you need an perfect visual representation of your pain, and haven’t found the one artist who will make you feel understood, give this boy a look.  Francis Bacon good.

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The Convenient Fiction of the Self?

When I look inside myself I see nothing there.  I don’t do it often.  Even as I compose this, I’m giving my inner “self” a sidelong glance at best.  The reason I can’t usually achieve such a moment of clarity is that my life is too busy and filled with distractions and duties, which are external things.  In those times there’s an assumption of selfhood that makes everything easy.  I like this, I don’t like this, I must do this, I can’t do that.  The more accurate version would be “this moment’s instance of the various senses and processes of this pile of organs is compelled toward this or away from that.”

This is how “I’ve” thought of “myself” for some time now (alright no more quotes), but it’s not completely accurate.  This article is an attempt at refining the idea.  Yeah, I’m making it up as I go.  We’ll see how that turns out.

Within that pile of organs and processes aforementioned, there is one function that could be reasonably termed a self.  It is a program constructed over a lifetime of experiences and ideas.  What is it?  An idea of entity, of unity – that all the mess that comprises this body and mind are a singular being with inherent properties of desire, distaste, will / agency, etc.  Functionally this is true, which is why I don’t see too egregious of a contradiction in using personal pronouns (possibly more often than I should).  Factually, I don’t think it is true.

It’s the word “inherent” up there.  Every desire or distaste and the will that chooses how to act on them, these are separable from the concept of entity, aren’t they?  Simple artificial intelligences are told how to react to stimulus ahead of the stimulus being encountered.  If this happens, then do that.  We don’t think of those AIs as having a self, and we’re right.  But who’s to say we have a self either?  Let’s say my desire and distaste are like the roomba’s instructions to move toward this and away from that, and my will is the roomba’s programmed way of acting on those inputs.  Where is the entity in this analogy?

I got meat like a roomba has plastic.  That is a singular locus where all the sensations and imperatives that comprise me reside.  That’s an observable self, and meets a reasonably basic definition of such.  My problem is self as the ghost in the machine.  I ain’t feelin’ it.  Yes, one of the programs within me habitually acts the role of the self, constructs a narrative of entity out of disparate extremely destructible and mutable elements, but it seems so fake…

I don’t know if, in the course of writing this, I’ve gotten any closer to pinning my problem.  Let me keep trying for a minute…

Naw.  I’m running out of sauce for daily posting.  Certainly, I’m out of queue.  Let’s just see how much longer the pile of organs can keep this baloney rollin’…

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Some Dream Girls

Had a dream this morning I wanted to remember but failed to write down.  All that remains is some broad strokes that don’t sound all that interesting.  But still, this dream had characters, and characters are worth noting if you’re a writer.  I might need those at some point.

There were two young white ladies, one blonde and one with medium brown hair, driving somewhere.  I was in the back seat, along for this ride.  There was an exchange between them where the blonde was feigning incompetence to get the brown-haired girl to do something for her, but I knew it was an act because we were in the blonde’s car, and it was modified like the millennium falcon – her own handiwork.

Very vague, not very useful, but it puts me in mind of a few things.  One, I like millennium falcons, even if idgaf re: space shooters™ anymore.  The car was a drab grey four door sedan, kinda 1980s lookin, with an almost 1960s style interior.  Everything was grey and the area under the dash was exposed, her modifications visible there – extra gizmos.  We were on bench seats.  A millennium falcon, to me, is a junky badass of a vehicle that is also, at least sometimes, your home.  It’s a fantasy -winnebagos are a bad fuckin’ idea- but I like this in the realm of imagination.

Two, I like wacky ladies.  They were probably directly inspired by my drive-by impressions of the sitcom characters from 2 Broke Girls, and I remember little about them, but it could be a seed of something more elaborate.  I’m thinking of Stella Star from Starcrash – a very successful adventurer while also being a goofy fool – hans olo if he dressed like vampirella.  Like the anime girls from Gunsmith Cats maybe.  I dunno.  It’s a seed.

That’s all.  A quick note to my future self.

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ERposting

composing this in “hall bed” at emergency room, drankin saline solution thru stigmata.  was weak all day and slightly short of breath.

not lookin forward to the bill.  the way the insurance tango works i might not know the final tally for months, or might find out in a week.  that is to say, i might come to y’all with hat in hand again at some point in that time frame.

fun how so few people here wear masks.  minimizing my household’s exposure to crud by having no company in here.

i’ve queued this post so if it goes live with nothing after this point, you can assume i’m dead or otherwise unavailable.  be concerned if the rest of my queue starts rolling out one day at a time, posts with titles but no text other than a hasty note to myself or a keysmash.

i’m sure it won’t be like that, but this is a weird one for me, and who knows?  will it be better for them to discover nothing or for them to find out i have something annoying or expensive to treat?

will i contract covid in here?  will the visit be worse for my health than muddling thru without help?

will check in later…

nothing!  they found nothing.  i don’t think they ran the most expensive tests so i’ll probably be coo.  just gotta get up the gumption to stop smoking my sick leave.

yeah, back home, had dinner, feel better – if a bit frail.  what will i feel like tomorrow morning?  stay tuned lol.

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Life List: Common Pheasant

I’ve surely seen these before, in a zoo collection filling out a mixed flock of more exotic poultry.  The common pheasant is what you think of when you hear “pheasant” – green head, white ring neck, weird red lappets on the face around their eyes, spots and stripes in a motley of earth tones, long sweeping tail.  That’s the male, females more drab as usual.  I don’t remember a specific instance of seeing them alive.  They’re not from here, introduced as they were around the world.  There’s a different introduced species of fowl one sees far more often, despite it being more showy and likely having smaller numbers globally: peafowl.

Pheasants were put on this continent to shoot.  Whatever, colonizers.  Now they’re here, out in fields, doing whatever it is that a chickenish wild creature does.  I can only remember seeing them in the wild one time.  It was some kind of game farm, or game farm adjacent plot of land where the unwise go to look at birds.  On the way in, we passed a ditch with a pile of dead birds, submerged in yellowish murky water.

At first I thought they were hawks.  It was hard to make out individual details, but they were stripey and not too small.  My brother was with me and considered calling the authorities – killing hawks is not allowed, right?  But we figured it out.  Shot for the sake of shooting, and left to rot.

I don’t get the pleasure of killing.  Seems like the behavior of sick creeps.  One might point out that predatory animals get a pass, right?  It’s how they live.  Alright, but their behavior does little to dissuade me from the idea that hunters are sick creeps.  The most intelligent predatory animals are legendary for their cruelty – for playing with their food.  Cannibalism, particularly of cubs, is widespread within Carnivora.

The conduct of white hunters in particular is doing their reputation no favors.  Every time you look up a hoofed animal no matter how tiny, meatless, or rare, you will see a white man posing next to a dead one.  I swear, I saw a pic of a mouse deer where the proud hunter was posing over it with the tiny peashooter he had used.  Famous politicians who hunt have also been puppy murderers, or blast from helicopters, or use assault rifles.  Losers.  Get a spear and put your ass on the line like a real hunter.

But I do eat meat, and when the soup goes down, you will see me hunting as well.  You will not see me making a game of it or smiling.  I guess it’s no big deal if it ain’t endangered species.  You’re not doing anything a dog wouldn’t do, and we’re all supposed to like dogs, right?  Fine.  I’m not going to say no.  Especially since you assholes killed all the wolves and somebody has to keep the deer numbers down.

But pheasants.  They look alright.  And they probably taste like chicken.

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