This is a picture of a corner of my living room.
The sun is shining. Being in the southern half of the sky, it’s not as hot as it could be.
I took the day off sick because of course I did. I’m considering what sort of things I can do for the good people of the world who need stuff to put in their heads. Might prepare some content for the queue if I can. Much love, y’all.
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Had a lil honeymoonesque thing recently, went to a rental cabin in Port Angeles and drove to some sights in the area over a few days. First day we went to a little waterfall which was pretty cool, tho the nearest terlet was on some Silent Hill shit. The second waterfall was an unexpectedly long hike, which wore us out something fierce, but it was cool to be in the middle of some natural nature.
Second day we went to see a mountain view, where all you had to do is pull over, get out, and look. Simple enough. But then we were like, since we’re on this road, maybe let’s go all the way, and ended up a mile above sea level, walking up another steep path with need of frequent breaks.
I guess the environment would still be considered subalpine because trees could grow, though they were weirdly-shaped in order to survive. Lot of short branches. The grasses and shrubs were weirder too. My home boy who had come along to do the driving noticed strawberry plants and lupines that were not the sort of thing we expected. Saw some canada jays which wikipedia suggests would be the “obscurus” subspecies, vamping for treats but receiving none. We’d left the trail mix in the car.
The trail had no handrails, and a few feet and a slip could easily lead to death. The area is renowned for unpredictable weather and high winds, but wasn’t too bad. I mean, I’m here, so I must not have been blown off a mountaintop. Surprised my husband was willing to climb that high, given that he has a low key fear of heights that can even hit him looking at google satellite view.
Point is, it was very beautiful. I’d post photos but it’s slightly less easy than posting words, and they don’t do the thing justice anyway. They’re so flattening. When you’re up there and you can see how far down it all is, when fast-moving clouds are sliding along the mountainside below you, random shafts of sun hitting snow-flocked jagged peaks, and those beautiful golden shrubs and grasses, the long feathery moss on the trees, I dunno.
I’m not in favor of mountain climbing generally. That’s what got Julian Sands. But if you can drive most of the way and then just hike up a few hundred feet of steep path, well, go ahead. Less than an hour later, we went from having random snow sprayed in our face to having warm sun, down at a little park on the shore. Good times.
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Had a dream that I was a security guard again. Some kind of mayhem had transpired in Seattle in the night, wherein a gun had been discharged in public. We were all under suspicion, but one specific guy had done it, and copped to it before we got into real trouble. Even so, there was so much going on that I wasn’t aware of his confession until it had already transpired, and was running around trying to sort out defense evidence along with my home boy Clark. Some seagulls had been killed, and during the course of events I found their bodies floating in water, gelatinized and translucent…
St. George can fuck right off. St. Patrick with him. In this house we dig the subjects of herpetology, reptile and amphibian. Sadly, in their season we can barely hear the frogs from our cul-de-sac, most of the time my boyfriend can’t hear them above his tinnitus. Also, though I know garter snakes are common in the area, I haven’t seen any since we moved in a year ago. Certainly, I never expected to see a lizard. I haven’t seen one since I was last in Kansas, half a continent away.
Now, like Charly on the other side of the planet, I’ve seen a drab brown lizard in my yard. People further south could surely not give a shit. Even in this state, east of the mountains in the plains, they would not be impressed. Floridians whose houses are low key infested with invasive wall-crawlers would tell me to take my happiness to hell. But no, this is cool and special.
There is an invasive creeping wood sorrel of the purple-leaved variety growing from a crack in the sidewalk between ours and our neighbors’ doors, which are right next to each other. My boyfriend was stepping out to check on the sunflowers he’s growing, when he noticed a movement in the sorrel. As the surprised beasty moved, his mind ran through possible identities – slug? snake? – before realizing it was a lizard. He called me outside in time to see it, though if I’d gone for a camera, I would have missed it.
We did not have an amazingly good look at it, but enough to be confident it was a brown lizard about seven inches in length (18 cm) with no obvious markings. Based on the area where we saw it, range maps, comparisons of different boring brown lizards, we are moderately sure it’s a northern alligator lizard, northwestern subspecies. I don’t know shit about lizards and presumed, wrongly, that I’d never see one on this side of the state, at least not here in the very developed suburbs.
It eats crickets, and I’ve noticed the crickets are less noisy this year. Lizard population increasing? Or did I just see lizard on the move because insect decline got them being more bold in searching for prey? They also eat slugs, and I hope they do.
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i’ve been occasionally percolating on a ttrpg of my own design and, being a very appearance-oriented character designer, i’ve been thinking of ways to formalize / systematize one’s relationship with subcultures that could influence a character’s clothing style – gothery, metalness, alternateeve…
this sorta stuff gets mixed up with occultism, alchemy, pseudoscience, so all that is to say, i’m figuring out which of the four humors punk rock would express.
i think on this, laying back in my bed, and catch myself snoring. this is a preview of my life at the nursing home. could be worse.
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I have the degenerative disc disease. Not crippling most of the time, so far, but the first of those three Ds promises that by the time I’m able to retire, I won’t have the spine to enjoy it much. Meanwhile, I avoid catastrophically throwing out my back (again) by strategically deploying my spine points. Kinda like spoons, but specific to spines. I can feel out when my fortitude is getting iffy and stop doing things.
So we’re out at garage sales and thrift stores and garden centers for a day, and walking slowly is worse for my back than walking quickly, so keeping my lovin’ man company as he shops drains the spinals. At the last stop I decided to stay in the car. Two of four windows were cracked and I put up the foldy silver dealy to reduce heat coming through the windshield, I put a hoodie on the lil hook thing over the back seat window on the sun side to also block some. But the sun burned off what was left of the overcast morning and the air began to boil.
I finished slowly nursing a cold drink. I almost fell asleep and woke up again. I wanted to be able to rest my eyes so I put on Radiohead’s Amnesiac and stopped looking at my phone. Jumped in the river, what did I see? Black-eyed angels swam with me. I ran out of drink and started melting the ice cubes in the cup over my head and arms. This just felt like spinning plates. I ran out of ice cubes about the time I ran out of Radiohead.
I locked the doors, got out, and lo, there was a dumpster near, for the empty cup. When I tossed the cup, I found myself able to see around a wall and lo, there was a port-a-potty. I had to drain the lizard, so I stepped inside. Warm, but not as warm as the car, and far from the nastiest port-a-potty I’d used.
As I started to go, I saw inside the urinal a little organic bit of matter lurking, pale brown like a bramble under summer sun. But no, I had a good idea that this was a spider, and it quickly emerged to confirm the theory. My vision is deteriorating, so too close and too far I can’t see well, but this guy was in the sweet spot where I might have been able to count the eyeballs. Not the biggest spider but far from the tiniest, adroitly trooping as it circumnavigated the pissing zone. Would it jump on my junk? Would the story get worse?
No. I left in peace. There was a low-key moment of stress when I noticed the door’s plastic inside latch was half torn away. Somebody else’s problem.
After all that, I rolled around the corner to see my man coming out of the place with a cart full of plant life. Good timing all around.
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I spent most of my 20s working in fast food, and as I was pushing 30, at Jack in the Box specifically. Fast food, like being a security guard, is work you can get without a high school diploma. Poorly compensated, but the people who do it for a living get by living close to the ground. We have rotating casts of roommates and romantic partners, pooling resources in endless strings of makeshift households. We’re modern hunter-gatherers, unable to survive health problems or any of the crises that money would buy some amount of prevention.
But it’s cool. Nobody deserves to be insecure about food, shelter, medicine, etc etc, but it’s kinda funny being a sheisty fuckup among sheisty fuckups. Office drama doesn’t hit the same as the soap opera of a workplace where people aren’t distracted by cerebral activities. When you aren’t worrying about TPS reports, you have all the mental freedom to live in demented fantasies and romances. I was on the loserly end, so fantasies all the way, and that was good for me. I couldn’t afford to do it forever, but I got to do a lot of drawing and dreaming, conceiving of creative things that might bear fruit many years later.
Fast food workers are characters. Like, in a movie, they’d never be played by the star; they’d be played by character actors. Stanky weirdos with funny faces, sultry sirens with scars and piercings, people on a path to homeless-flavored mental illness, druggies in between freakouts, and of course, hard-working family people with zero economic privilege, like immigrants and children of broken homes. I guess a few of those could have described me.
So in the Jack-in-the-Box scenario I am about to unfold, I was the stanky weirdo working the front counter, while hard-working family woman was having an idle conversation with a sultry (very short and chubby) siren at the window. It was a slow moment, all was quiet in the universe, and I could hear that chat well, tho I was not involved with it.
Siren says, “Yeah, this guy I’m with is real nice and all, but I just can’t stay with him. His dick isn’t big enough.” “What do you mean?,” asked family woman. “When I have sex, it just doesn’t hit the same unless I feel full inside.” Anyway, I must have pulled some kind of embarrassing face, because family woman felt the need to say at me that size doesn’t matter. She even came over to me, offered some other kind of nicety. Maybe it wasn’t my face that was the matter; maybe she just sensed my small dick energy.
I don’t think I was offended at the time. Pretty sure I found it amusing, and I still do. But at this point, the funniest thing about it is wondering just what made me look like I needed my vienna sausage consoled. Also, that some people are just so quick to nurture that this is their first instinct. And that by going out of her way to offer that comfort, she specifically let me know she thinks I’m packing a triple-A battery.
So funny.
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On the bus to Seattle along I-5, I saw a large raptor-style nest atop a relatively short cellphone tower. Next to that, whether it was the nest’s builder or not, I beheld the majestical symbol of Jesus’s United States, the bald-ass eagle.
As far as I recall from nature specials and a bit of observation, big hawks and eagles like to build huge nests on tops of trees, especially when they are blunted off or expansive enough to support such a structure. Cell towers have a broad flat top and are often quite tall, so they appeal to that instinct. I once saw nesting ospreys in the tower across from the walmart where I used to work.
My hope is that this doesn’t mess up the birds too much, and that, understanding this reality, cell companies would build the towers to deal with birdy presence – safe places for urine and feces to fall, engineering to reduce fire risk from giant amateur weaving projects next to the high voltage, etc. If I had to guess what actually happens, it’s probably nest destruction where legally allowed.
Good luck to the beasts, as ever.
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Got my prescription for middle-aged baby’s first bifocals almost a year ago and before that rx slips even further into the past, I figured I’d take a day off and get it done. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I would get this done easily. At length I would get my bifocals; this is a point definitively settled — but the very definitiveness with which it is resolved precludes…. Eh, sorry. What was I saying?
The HOA is having the driveways in the cul-de-sac re-slimed with black goo, so my chauffeur was unavailable – unwilling to drive across the lawn to escape. Sigh. I walked a short way to the bus stop before the day could get as hot as it planned to be, stood with my head in the shadow of the sign and waited about five minutes. Coulda been worse. Can’t do one of these posts without mentioning birds. I think steller’s jays* were tusslin’ with some other kind of bird up in the treetops, hard to see.
The bus snaked through Auburn to the station, which is also a train platform, and there I had to wait maybe twenty minutes to catch the next one. While I waited a thirtyish Islander guy tried to vape and was told to take it across the street by the security guard. A West African lady with four kids came to catch the bus and the little boy was dragged away from where he was trying to watch the train. I’d just been standing in the same spot watching the train a moment before he got there. Some people just wanna watch the wheels spin. I saw a few more Africans walking by, a short but attractive couple in very clean clothes. The man’s shirt said he was the proud dad of a US marine, but I swear he did not look old enough to have a kid in the military. Is the Corps taking twelve-year-olds now?
I make these racial identifications to illustrate the color of the world, but it would be foolish to say you can tell just by looking at somebody. Nigerians look very different from Somalians on average, but it’s all a grade, with outliers this way and that. The Islander I would not have been able to tell from a Mexican, except that he had some Polynesian pride apparel on. Gotta have those turtles and surfboards. Anyway, this is to add an unwritten question mark after any racial descriptor you hear from me.
I got off the bus and had to trek across the Mall-Formerly-Known-as-The-Supermall’s endless parking lot to get to a walmart. I told the lady I need glasses, she asked if I had a prescription, I asked if I could e-mail a pdf and she said no, I had to print it, referred me to Electronics, and I swear I spent a full hour at the kiosk trying different shit to get it to recognize my files. After every type of connection failed, I resorted to google Photos, which has to be tricked into importing pngs. While I was at it, I found out my google Photos account had nothing in it but pictures of a walmart bathroom from when I worked at one in a neighboring city. Did I take them because of amusing graffiti, too small to notice in thumbnail? Not curious enough to open the files.
I finished hacking the planet to place my order and it told me to come back in an hour. I knew better. I waited five minutes, watched them print behind the counter, just walked into that employee-only area and snatched them. Who would stop me, in the perpetually understaffed late crapitalist megaretailer? Nobody saw a thing, but some security cameras which may or may not have even been watched by a human in that moment.
I get to the front. “I need glasses.” “Insurance?” I whipped out this card I’ve been paying for five years but never used. She compared it against a big list in scribbly cursive. I think she was Persian. No dice, so she went to somebody else. They were going back and forth until another lady – a blonde with some flavor of German accent – told me they do not take that insurance.
You’re probably starting to get why I took a whole day off to do this.
I hadn’t eaten, so time to go into The Artist Formerly Known as The Supermall of The Great Northwest Where My Brother Got Perma-banned From Incredible Universe on Opening Day for Hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del on a Locked Up Computer, there to ingest buttery little hotdogs in bread twists, or as we call them in jesus’s chosen nation, pigs in a blanket. While I ate, I watched kittens wrestling in a storefront and looked at my insurance’s website to find acceptable providers. I could take two buses to get to another part of Auburn or one bus to get to Federal Way.
Out to the bus again, the day now over 80 degrees, and me without a hat. I’d just missed the bus, had to wait a half hour, but the shadows were still kinda livable, with a cool breeze blowing. A skinny East African youth (American accent, may have been born here) asked me about the time, then laid out a tale of woe. He missed the bus earlier because he fell asleep listening to a podcast, and when he woke up it was so much hotter, really unpleasant. I helped him figure out which side of the road to be on, and he floated off to hang out with a less loquacious friend.
He wanted to get to the Federal Way Transit Center, and I wanted to go a little way past that. He fell sleep again behind me on the bus, his big sneakers kept sliding under the seat and bumping me in the heels. I don’t know why some young AMAB people are, for a brief season of their lives, practically narcoleptic, and then never again. My boyfriend knew a white kid who, without chemical assistance, fell asleep on the bus so hard that they called the cops to rouse him. We got to the FWTC and his quiet friend tried to wake him, but then gave up and left him sleeping there. I was distracted and didn’t think much of it, but as we kept going past his intended destination, I realized that maybe I should be waking him up.
I was too indecisive or shy and left him dreaming his way to the Twin Lakes Park & Ride. The first place I went had fancy brand names on most of their frames and I got a set priced at $367. My insurance was covering like $45. I should never have paid for that shit, not one fucken dime. I told the tattooed hipster lady I was off to do a lil comparison shopping.
On the way to the bargain place that always advertises two for one deals, dumping sweat, I stopped at the daiso and bought an apple soda from a kid named Kieran. It tasted like pears, somehow on a grade to cold vegetable soup, and cost three dollars.
I picked out two different frames I liked, anticipating the bogo deal, and found out it couldn’t apply for reasons. Getting only one pair, max benefit of my insurance, etc? $364. At least the frames were a little cuter than the ones at the designer place, so I said fuck it, bought the things, and was done with it. Well, they won’t be ready for pickup for a few weeks.
I was done trooping through the heat so I tried to arrange a ride back home and was delayed by miscommunication and foolery until the thick of rush hour, and it took forever to get home. One of my cohabitants was cooking some peppers and asked me to tend them while she visited with her sister, who had just dropped me off. I found a bisected produce sticker floating in the vegetable oil, and a few slices with the kind of creepy brown texture I would’ve pared off into the trash. I ended up cooking dinner in its entirety – yakisoba with a mix of frozen and fresh veg, some kinda peanut sauce, just whatever ingredients had been left out. I don’t even like that type of shit. Yum.
But they’re coming. The cute bifocals. Should be here in time for August’s Podish Sortacast. See if anybody can even tell the difference.
*That a thousand organisms are named after every colonizer is a fallacy. Species Georg (Steller) is an outlier and should not have been counted. Memes aside, I hope there’s progress being made on that project to decolonize bird names. Let me know when the new names drop.
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PS: Don’t miss Centennial Hills Part Five, posted a few hours before this.