it must be... but what?

fragments of ever-shifting perspectives...


"Order and stability are the most transient of states."

—attributed to Paiute people of the Owens Valley, California


“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”

—Marcus Aurelius


"I have always wanted to be part of a culture which walks through the wild world as if it were of it, which doesn't talk of carbon or biodiversity or profit or growth but talks and lives as if this way of speaking were the poisonous bullshit that it so obviously is."

—Paul Kingsnorth, Savage Gods


Cadillac Desert is a tale of water and the "reclamation of the West"

did it need reclaiming, one wonders? nevertheless, as an inhabitant, i benefit. why are folks offended at the thought we are all hypocrites? (i'm reminded of electric monks)

if one looks up reclamation, one finds it described thus:

  • the process of claiming something back or of reasserting a right
  • the cultivation of waste land or land formerly under water

might the desert creatures or plants have felt otherwise? nevertheless, the west was entirely transformed by a series of grand engineering projects.

those rivers though, in 1869... tumultuous, free-flowing:

"Beyond Flaming Gorge the landscape opened up into Brown’s Park, but soon the river gathered imperceptible momentum and the canyon ramparts closed around them like a pair of jaws. A maelstrom followed. Huge scissoring waves leaped between naked boulders; the river plunged into devouring holes."

"O. G. Howland, who nearly lost his life in Disaster Falls, wrote haughtily that 'a calm, smooth stream is a horror we all detest now.'”

"The country grew drier and more desolate. Fantastic mesas loomed in the distance, banded like shells. The Grand Mesa, to the east, the largest mesa in the world, rose to eleven thousand feet from desert badlands into an alpine landscape of forests and lakes. Wind-eroded shiprocks loomed over the rubblized beds of prehistoric seas. Battlements of sandstone rose in the distance like ruins of empire. Deep in uncharted territory the Colorado River, then known as the Grand, rushed in quietly from the northeast, carrying the snowmelt of Longs Peak and most of western Colorado. The river’s volume had now doubled, but still it remained quite placid. Was it conceivable that they were near the end of its run? Powell was tempted to believe so, but knew better. There were four thousand feet of elevation loss ahead."

—Marc Reisner's recounting of journal entries from an exploratory trip in 1869, when John Wesley Powell and a handful of others first ventured forth on the Green River


“Things themselves don’t hurt or hinder us. Nor do other people. How we view these things is another matter. It is our attitudes and reactions that give us trouble.”

—Epictetus, The Art of Living


"A picture held us captive."

—Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations


The Case Against Civilization, The New Yorker


"I live in this one, and I cannot escape it because it is all around me and it is in me and I will carry it, like a dormant virus, as long as I live."

—Paul Kingsnorth, Savage Gods


"Electric monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe... The new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, and had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to 16 entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors."

—Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency


"The story – there are many variants – is that Haldane was asked by a theologian what he could deduce about the nature of the Creator from a lifelong study of His Creation. Haldane’s response: 'An inordinate fondness for beetles.'”

—quoted by Simon Barnes in Ten Million Aliens


watch for the word unprecedented these days, i see it more and more.

by the way, it's not a good sign that we're wrapping certain trees in aluminum foil to protect them from wildfire ('important' trees in human eyes... don't get me started).

it's a bit like trucking salmon upriver and dropping them off, whenever less water flow along dammed rivers makes it impossible for them to reach their spawning grounds.


"I saw that the momentum of the human machine - all its cogs and wheels, its production and consumption, the way it turned nature into money and called the process growth - was not going to be turned around now. Most people didn't want it to be; they were enjoying it."

—Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist


"We spend so much time and effort trying to make life better for ourselves. The least we can do is make life possible for this bee."

—Clay Bolt, on his search for the critically endangered rusty-patched bumble bee


ever more feral with each passing year


"I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own."

—Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations


"Whenever I feel reluctant to throw out some work, I recall that life is pointless, and nothing we do even exists if the power goes out."

David Gilbertson


“This planet [Earth] has or had a problem. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole, it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

“It is of course perfectly natural to assume that everyone else is having a far more exciting time than you. Human beings, for instance, have a phrase that describes this phenomenon, ‘The other man’s grass is always greener.’ The Shaltanac race of Broopkidren 13 had a similar phrase, but since their planet is somewhat eccentric, botanically speaking, the best they could manage was, ‘The other Shaltanac's joopleberry shrub is always a more mauvy shade of pinky-russet.’ And so the expression soon fell into disuse, and the Shaltanacs had little option but to become terribly happy and contented with their lot, much to the surprise of everyone else in the Galaxy who had not realized that the best way not to be unhappy is not to have a word for it.”

—Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


one definition of a good life... the most interesting set of stories possible.


How Your Cat is Making You Crazy, on Jaroslav Flegr for The Atlantic


i'd never eat my emerging beetle friend


“To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.”

—Aldous Huxley


"But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing someone we know" is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him, and in the total picture of him which we compose in our minds those notions have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice as if it were no more than a transparent envelope, that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is these notions which we recognise and to which we listen."

—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time


such green life, one may hardly step anywhere


The Intelligent Plant, by Michael Pollan for The New Yorker


“In studying the biology of a plant, I can deaden myself to the real plant. I can see it as its Latin name and know things about its genetics and genus and species and evolutionary environment and medicinal and chemical properties and ecological niches it inhabits and creates…and in doing so, have less attention on the utter uniqueness of this life in front of me, the infinity about it I will never know, and as such, have missed the opportunity to really see it. But if instead, I take my knowledge of the complexity of cellular metabolism and evolution and the connection of the plant with all the other plants I can see around me through the ecology of the mycorrhiza and soil microbiome and its gas exchange with me to know we are literally made of the stuff of each other and have porous boundaries…and I consider all of that complexity and integrity and beauty and order and wildness and intelligence…and remember that all that information isn’t even a measurable fraction of all that is actually going on…and use the knowledge to prime an even deeper wonder and respect and reverence and awe…then the practice of knowledge and the practice of the Tao are dancing. Our knowledge becomes more well-founded and less certain at the same time.”

—Daniel Schmachtenberger


orchid bees... you simply must see them if you never have

#lovebees #ecuador


battalions of spider plants

#random


points of salience

#anythingbutrandom


how to avoid buying a lamp

#xkcd #onlinereviews


structuredprocrastination.com

#procrastination


my affinity for collapsing structures may yet land me in trouble

#lowfidelity #bandon #oregon


looking upon this site hitherto (scrolling down), i'm struck afresh by the warmth of my early recollections of technology.

but as comforting as it can be to gaze upon long-gone technologies, let me call out two i don't miss: internet explorer 6, and netscape navigator 4.

i almost think that anyone who shares close acquaintance with creating websites for those browsers shares something, perhaps akin to that which one might come to have in common with someone with whom one shared a room at an old-school mental asylum.

#ie6 #nn4


(one in 7.7 billion)

i am many, as it were, even to myself, and most certainly over time. you may know me by some of these slices. not all slices are internally consistent, nor do they cohere with other slices necessarily. and yet i am nothing if i am not, or have not been at one time, all of these things.

#identity


maintain an area where you can drop pieces cut from your current writing. you may or may not ever come back to these, but simply having a 'safe' place in which to store them frees your mind to make bold cuts and to pursue all the thoughts... in this way, writing becomes the vehicle of thought, rather than simply a transcription of half-thoughts or even preconceptions.

#writing


speaking of maybe, or maybe not, coming back to things, i was reminded of an odd habit of mine long back. i often failed to develop the photographs i'd taken (you know, from rolls of film, that kind of long ago). i would defend this oddity by suggesting it was the act of photography itself that had the value, the photographs themselves being neither here nor there, or more precisely, not requiring physical instantiation.

#photography


a small strap wrench is essential in life. i never travel far without mine.

#lifehacks


i have a story about eels to share. i'm now in need of an eel simply to get access to a button refusing eels.

how did i get here? is this the shape of software support these days? i feel like rather than address problems and causes, i'm frequently cajoled with some semblance of humor into accepting exactly that which i was most avidly attempting to avoid when i began the process.

in this particular case (i won't name names), they're even resorting to bribery... they're offering me $20 in eel credits.

#eels


i remember hypercard. i built my first game with it. i wish i still had it (both the game, and hypercard itself! why don't things like these get saved? digital formats are not the forever they once were promised to be. and some apps—and services, for that matter—once gone, leave forever a marked lack in one's life).

i was somewhere at or over the age of 10 at the time... when i began playing with hypercard, that is. playing hypercard games. stringing together elements, seemingly effortlessly. i remember creating my game, fragments thereof at least: a magic potion, with a vapor above it that i vaguely recall agonizing over.

the sheer delight, coupled with simplicity—the relatively effortless new ability to create potion vapor animations in my own choose-your-own-adventure game (cards in stacks... an apt visual metaphor)—left the warmest of impressions on me, and set a tone that would be continued as i dabbled in the internet of those days (my college years, fall '95 to spring '99... cyberspace, brightly colored, pixelated, blinking, animated, wild and free).

that was a time when you might actually draw pixel by pixel... i remember doing so, constructing elaborate illustrations. one, a swallowtail butterfly based on a photo (a modest first project). another, a bright pink and blue-hued serpent twisted around a sword. the others? lost, i fear, to unrecognizable formats (once again, data is fleeting).

no antialiasing back then... semi-transparent pixels were such a dream

relatively much later, i remember making this on a powerbook 1400cs (at the time, the latest in a chain of macs... though i'd begun with an apple IIe). i remember photoshop overheating my laptop at times (causing unplanned shutdowns). so i'd have to save often, and preventatively turn the machine off for 15 minutes or so (cuing off whether my legs really were burning dangerously so). was that photoshop v4, i wonder? yes, it was, i just looked it up. code name: big electric cat, released november 1996.

#apple #system6 #hypercard #resedit #photoshop4 #telnet


greetings 2019, i see you here. a marker in time. occasionally beers have marked years for me, so that i can say, for example, that blue moon tastes like 2010, or leffe, 2002. i wonder if 2019 will taste of leinenkugel's sunset wheat?

#hello


these fragments begin nowhere in particular, and similarly go on in that fashion.
to be perused idly, as a collection of meandering interludes, like life.