Life List: Sooty Grouse

I’m in love with some chickens.  Sooty grouse are a pretty generic pheasanty-type bird.  I think a pheasant is a grouse if it spends most of its time being brown, but I could be wrong.  Chickeny overall look but with cryptic brown coloration (males get fancy in mating season) and no wacky head ornaments.  I believe chickens cluck to let each other know where they are in the underbrush; these guys made a soft woob woob noise instead.

The thing is, despite being game birds, these ones had no fear of people.  They weren’t as obviously hoping for treats as the canada jays, but might have been fed by some scofflaw in the past.  They walked in and out of plain sight, right next to the path – in snatching distance.  Their calls were sweet and their eyes big and cute.  It was a very nice encounter.

This was on a recent trip to Mt. Rainier, where we fucked up pretty badly at estimating our abilities, got wreck’d.  I kept saying “when you need it to have ended an hour ago but it’s still going.”  In the last couple miles we were basically being chased over the rough-hewn terrain by multiple species of mosquito.  They got our asses.  It was not worth it.

But it was almost worth it.  In addition to the sooty grouse family, we saw canada jays and two types of chipmunk, all close enough to get a pretty good look, and a lot of wildflowers and natural majesty – like looking at Rainier’s peak from the lower slopes.  The animals were close enough it was like being in a zoo without bars.  Oh, and we had to stop the car for an elk, which was a lot more impressive in size than the usual white-tailed deer.  But still…

I ain’t doing that again anytime soon.

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Hey Greydies

Some time ago I saw a lady with sort of purple-grey-blue skin, likely argyria.  Maybe she was exposed to silver as part of an industrial job, or pollution in an area she had lived, or because she had whack-ass beliefs and was drinking that shit for medical woo.  I saw her a few times in the Crown Hill neighborhood of Seattle, and a few years after that at a malwart in Federal Way.  Had to be the same lady, tho it’s not like I had her face memorized.  How many people in her demographic have that color in my neck of the world?  This time she was decked out in clothes that advertised her fealty to shitler, so I’m thinking it was the medical woo.

I’ve seen some other grey ladies.  One time when I was working in that same malwart, very early in the morning a short old white lady bought something at my counter.  She was probably done up for church, but she was so fashionable looking.  She was in a suit jacket and dress, with a blouse and pearls and silver jewelry on her wrists and fingers, all silver-grey like her hair, but in different sheens and patterns to strike a balance of contrast and harmony.  I don’t remember what her face looked like, just that fashion, which is probably the kind of impression most old ladies are hoping to leave on people.  So cool.

More recently I saw a pretty dark-skinned black woman with perfectly formed thin locs in a striking blend of black white and grey, like shining rocks in a river.  Her skin was kind of grey, so what one would call ashy?  That’s usually bad news, but for some reason it was more an even tone over her limbs, rather than whitish stuff some people get in areas of thicker skin.  Maybe it was a temporary effect from some kind of lotion; it didn’t look unhealthy.  Still, that was another grey lady, and I believe she was wearing grey as well.

Hey greydies.  Sorry to notice you.  I know a lot of ladies would rather not be noticed.  Just to say, that’s a legit color.  Ya cool, except maybe that first fool.  Have a nice day.

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the muddy burner

i had cause to think of my sister recently, briefly during the podcast, but apparently that was enough to invite her daemond into my sleeping mind.  i had to rush to work this morning so i don’t remember much, but she was definitely there.  the environment and setup was a bit like my vvitch dream, with my sister being part of a dubious feminist collective living across the way in a muddy ruin.  they would occasionally go out on raids to harass or harm tools of the patriarchy.

my dad and my husband and i were there, standing in judgement.  are you witches sure those people deserved to get bewitched?  only one of them was left behind on the latest run – not my sister – and the leftover lady said they got their marching orders from the goddess.  i poked around in the moss and mud and i found an old-fashioned cellphone.

remember when flip phones were a thing?  there were even cheaper phones available that had no fold.  what should those be called?  stick phones?  i had one for a pretty long time.  here it was, face down in the grime.  wiping it off, i saw it was just the same as the one i used to have.  in real life, my husband and i had the same kind, bought at the same time.  in the dream, my sister had been included in this package deal, and i knew this one was hers.

she had kept it going, bought the minutes, somehow dodged the sunsetting of 3g cell tower capability, and was surreptitiously using it to give the witches their targets.  that’s no goddess you’re following.

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Ya Talk Too Much

When I was a kid in the ’80s, the children in the halls and on school buses would chant song lyrics, especially raps.  Janet Jackson, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, and Run DMC all had their time, sometimes with alternative lyrics, like the “batman smells” versions.  This song was especially popular.

The place I heard it the most was in the mouths of other babes four decades ago, and I’m only seeing the video for the first time now.  I love the use of white people in this video.  It’s like these guys are the sensible cool mans in a world of weird posers and art freaks.  They gots my number.

In more ways than one.  In the latest FtB Poddish Sortacast, I spoke way too much.  I had proposed the topic so it was kinda my time to rampage, but still, rude.  Nonetheless, I thought I did a great job elucidating my perception of the world and the shituation we’re in.  This is not a good video to watch if you’re one of the people my doomerism policy is designed to protect, so don’t watch it if you’re one of them.  Anybody else, have at it.

Am I foolin myself, or did I come off like a big ol’ smartypants?  I lost the bead a few times, but when I was on, I was on.

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Tha Bomb

I had a dream I was looking for a place to use the bathroom and walked in on Tom Petty while he was about to pee.  I said, “Sorry bud, that’s just typical of public restrooms,” and he said, “It’s just typical of dreams.  You should know that you’re dreaming.”  I realized then that Tom looked a lot older than he did in this dream, before he died.  Instead of waking up, I dreamed that I woke up, and the dream moved along to something else.

I walked in on a mafia goon and his rough-hewn girlfriend.  They had been shooting heroin and having freaky sex, tho I didn’t catch them in flagrante, exactly.  They had strange bandages over the inside of one arm and over their left eyes.  Like clear tape holding down yellow strips and a bit of filthy gauze.  They were paranoid that I would rat them out to his father the don, but I assured them I was no snitch.

My perspective shifted and I was somebody else, who was hanging out with the mob dude.  I watched him having the previous me blown up with a suitcase bomb, and asked if it bothered him that he killed an innocent man.  Of course it did not.  I had a newspaper with a pic of gavin newscum on an article asking why he’s so soft on organized crime.  I told the mob guy that I think that the governor is on the take.  Maybe not from his family, but one of the others.  He didn’t have anything to say about that.

You’d think with all the mafia dreams I have that I must watch a lot of those movies.  I don’t.  I have no idea why this comes up all the time, much like my subconscious racism against the Irish.  Weird shit.

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Pathetic Little Bluesmen

I’ve had a few posts over time that touch on the subject of Dark Sexual Majesty™, which is the thing some blues men do – later co-opted by hard rock and rap – where they claim to have outrageous sexual powers, with overtones of supernatural evil.  See “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man,” “I’m the One” (Danzig), “I’m the One” (DJ Khaled et al), “I’m the One” (Van Halen), “I’m the One” (Van Halen covered by 4 Non Blondes), and “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” for a few.  There might have been a few jokes in there, watch out.  Point stands, because I say it does, justified only by my own satanic powers of Dark Sexual Majesty™.

But here’s the thing.  We know these boasts are untrue, because they include impossible things.  A little exaggeration to heighten the feeling of exultation?  Or does it undercut the entire theme?  Is it possible the whole thing is meant to be ironic affect, hinting thereby that the singers in question are ineffectual lovers?  Losers who cannot get with tha babes, get sand kicked in their face on the beach?

Of course not, but the idea crossed my mind and I thought it was worth a laugh.  One solitary laugh.

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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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