Tag: Forced Metaphor

Categories
Culture

Day 622 and Uneven Bars

I’m not very temperamentally even. I run hot and excited and passionate and I’ve got a mean streak a mile wide. I can only assume the reason I’m so popular with some men is they love a bitch. Everyone does.

It’s not the most appreciated trait in popular culture but it does seem to be the dominate preference of a lot of very intelligent people. At least these days plenty of people both conservative and progressive appreciate the necessity of a ball buster. It’s a status object too. We don’t trust men with weak wives. It makes them look weak.

But I’m not sure anyone thinks it’s a particular good thing for the majority of women to act forcefully. If you hold your ground it can bring out howls of ostentatious victimhood. Which if you point out, they quickly gender the tactic a dark feminine trait of less less powerful that they learned from you.

It’s a really stupid party trick that somehow works well past the age of reason. After about 21 you should have really learned men tell you are weak because they know you are powerful over them. But honestly I still get caught flat footed by it. It’s a fickle power to be wielded without assurance or trust. But it is still a power and it’s insulting women women don’t claim it.

Women deciding to dismiss the uneven hold of their power makes balancing power for everyone a bit of a mess. The default switches from human manufacturing got reset.

Gender essentialism is pretty deep. It’s very jarring for the literal minded mainstream of society in particular. And unfortunately for everyone the world is run by the mainstream and they are prone to revanchist sentiment. Just look at everyone simpering for monarchy. Even if you are above that sort of thing no you are not. And so the uneven bars of progress continue. If you aren’t a realist about it you might get screwed.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 604 and One Click

I’ve been procrastinating on two core projects for the fall. Both of which involve making a modest investment between $100 and $250 depending on how fancy I want to get. So it’s not a throwaway amount of money but it’s also not money I should be hesitating on.

I’ve been in my head about it for two or three weeks even though I regularly need to make decisions about much larger sums of money for projects with much longer time horizons. I finally got myself over the hump on clicking order after going over my plans with my husband Alex for an hour. Which we’d definitely bill at more than we spent.

PROJECT ONE: TEST APPLE ORCHARD

The first project is getting in a few apple saplings in a fall planting to test out where we want an orchard. It’s not a full orchard with a big wiz-bang multi-year permaculture plan. We literally just want to get in four to six dwarf trees in the soil as soon as possible as we’ve been told it’s feasible to do fall plantings of heartier Zone 4 varietals.

We did a soil sample and the results came back with very encouraging results. Our back pasture has excellent quality soil despite being compacted by horses.

A soil health assessment from Ward Laboratories.

And yet I struggled to make a purchase. I made a trip to the nursery. I fucked around on a bunch of websites. I ordered catalogs for next year’s spring plantings. Finally this afternoon we threw caution to the wind and bought six dwarfs from Stark Brothers. The total came to about $250 and if it all fails well I’m glad I spent the money on fruit trees instead of a disposable consumer good.

PROJECT 2: SEED STARTS

The second purchase was seed starter supplies for our winter hydroponic crops which we plan to cultivate in the barn. We got a LettuceGrow system early in the pandemic and absolutely loved the quality of greens we got out of it. We’d been able to buy starts (aka seeds that have sprouted and begun to grow) for it in Colorado but this winter I wanted to do my own growing from seeds up into starts.

The goal was to have constant rotation of red and green leaf lettuce along with romaine and kale by staggering seed tray starts. It would be easier and have fewer failure points if we did a new batch of seed starts once every couple of weeks for consistency and move them from one grow light seed tray to the LettuceGrow once it fully sprouted.

I had even less of an excuse here as one of my girlfriends did a massive seed start project this year from scratch and wrote up her entire shopping list and project guide complete with pictures. She did the hard work of translating various guides including one that I had even been involved with making from Josh Centers at Unprepared. He’s got a very thorough guide to starting a garden from seeds straight through to harvest which is worth paying for Substack for just that post.

Here were all of my friends and colleagues just out there doing the work. And I was too scared to experiment myself. Finally today we bought everything we needed from Amazon and purchased six or seven seed types from Johnny’s hydroponic collection. All told for everything it was $86 for a set up that should work for many seasons.

THE LESSON

While I’d never tell anyone to just go nuts putting shit in the ground without some research, I do think it’s possible to be too in your head about growing. I’ve been reading so much about fancy techniques like permaculture that I had neglected the most basic lesson of both startups and gardening. Execution is exponential. Just start doing something. Make it small. But you have to just start. Just plant. Just make things.

A bell curve with a smooth brain, a midwit and a Jedi. The midwit explains Sepp Holzer’s permaculture. The Jedi & the brain just plant.
Categories
Aesthetics

Day 596 and Easy Does It

Nice and easy does it every time. Or so says Frank Sinatra. Who I’ve got to be honest doesn’t seem like a dude who isn’t pushy. I’m extremely pushy so I get it. Taking things slow isn’t my vibe. But if he can take it slow maybe so can I.

I’m getting the urge to rush again as my body settles into Montana. The better I feel the more I test my boundaries. Today I stupidly sat in an uncomfortable chair when I fell into focus fugue on something I was rushing to get done.

The problem now of course is
To simply hold your horses
To rush would be a crime
‘Cause nice and easy does it every time

Frank Sinatra

I should have taken an extra beat and settled myself somewhere comfortable to work but I didn’t. I was rushing by all the stops along the way to finish my task. I still got it done but I wish I’d followed Sinatra’s good advice. Rushing was indeed a crime against my spine. Perhaps for the rest of the week I’ll just play on repeat in my head “nice and easy does it every time.”

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 585 and Rip Off the Trauma Bandaid

I hope I can capture even a fragment of my emotions as I am on the other side of several hours of post-moving therapy. And I am drained but also armed with more wisdom than when I started the effort.

Moving is obviously a traumatic experience for most people. Anyone who moved as a child has some memories of how the change revealed new aspects of who they are and what makes them feel safe. Parents worry about it a lot about moving and for good reason. I know my mother certainly did and she did her best to protect me.

But we know that life is chaotic. Any type of change is already in a dance with accelerating entropy. Expect your unfinished shit to get drawn into the accretion belt surrounding the event horizon of your fears. Black holes are scary because we know they will kill us unless we commit enough energy to the fight to escape.

Sometimes some parts of us don’t make it. They become lost to the nothing. The dark impenetrable inversion point where we are forced to face the powers of destruction within us. Of course, it’s natural to sacrifice some part of yourself to banish the demon we know to be who we are.

It’s actually shocking to realize that inside of you might be some kind of personal Kali ready to rend the apocalypse at your weak side. But then you try not to think of it too much right? You’d rather ignore your demons right. Don’t feed the wolf right? Feed the good they say.

I am here to tell you that the shadow exist even if it scares you. It’s pulling you in just like that black whole. You can fight it your whole life. And maybe you win. Maybe you have that kind of fuel.

But if you ignore that shadow you will be pulled in it no matter what. Wouldn’t you rather run the calculation on how to achieve escape velocity? It’s going to be expensive. But it’s better to know the costs of living.

Categories
Travel

Day 581 and Lost

I still can’t locate a few basics that are part of my every day routine. My razor is AWOL, the box with my night time cosmetics routine hasn’t been located, and I’m not entirely sure where most of my tee-shirts are located. I don’t think they are lost but they sure aren’t found yet.

I keep making amazing progress on adjusting to the new house and unpacking, only to find that I’ve actually got no idea where something crucial might be located. My ambition to get into a routine? It’s bumping up against the reality that I’m still basically lost.

And in my case I got literally lost on the drive back from the airport. I had full on meltdown as my phone wouldn’t connect to the CarPlay and some urgently late California driver cut me off which forced me onto a right turn only lane. This ended up putting me on a highway for an additional 20 miles of transportation. I found myself lost and hollering into the phone “I have no idea where I am” as I couldn’t get myself turned around or in roads I recognized.

Categories
Politics

Day 575 and Harm’s Way

I got put in a hotel room for the final days of packing up our Colorado townhouse. I’m useless at lifting heavy things right now. I find this to be vaguely insulting as I used to be an avid power lifter.

But I can’t dispute that the high cost of my energy makes it uneconomic to involve me in physical labor. My family and friends reasonably want to keep me out of harm’s way. My role in our groups is to be Tom Sawyer not the paint brush brigade. Or if you prefer a story with less moral grey area, I am the mouse Frederick from Leo Leoni’s classic tale about story tellers and community. I scan the horizon and organize people. It’s probably the original professional path for the disabled. We’d have gone instinct in a Darwinian view of simple capacity and yet here we remain.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to mitigation of tail risks recently as the person tasked with keeping our group out of harm’s way. The average prepper isn’t much more convinced that the world is ending than your average person. We simply think that probability being what it is, it is worth doing some work to stay out of harm’s way if you can. Complicated worlds have complicated risk profiles. Buying insurance is just doing the math.

Not everyone is convinced that moving to Montana is staying out of harm’s way. A marketing executive and Vice contributor recently wrote a viral essay about how people like him (and me) are walking into some kind of a Trumpian civil war. I am skeptical of this position having been raised in the mountain west that things are quite so dire in Montana. It’s not Idaho.

But I agree with the basic gist that culture wars are getting hot. But I’m also a native of the West and deserve to be there as much as anyone. I code just as much right wing as I do left wing. My plans are to integrate back into country living. I am all for good neighbors and church and building sustainable communities. But I am also virulently anti-MAGA as populism tends to go badly for diverse populations. And I believe the only way we keep anyone out of harm’s way is by simply resisting simple narratives and taking sides.

Categories
Travel

Day 573 and Great American Road Trip

I am about to set off on one of the great American pastimes. The drive from Boulder to Bozeman is not very long, only about 9 and a half hours, but it is a majestic drive that covers badlands and soaring mountains all along the Eisenhower interstate system.

The I-25 to I-80 route is one of the gems of the mountain west. It has corporate industrial hellholes, the haunting poverty of our reservations, and the entrance to Yellowstone Park. It’s as good a route as any to explore where we are as a country. Even when gas prices are high. Actually scratch that. Especially when gas prices are high.

We’ve done this drive a few times in both directions. We’ve got a routine for it. Heck we even have a specific McDonalds we stop at on the route. But we’ve never done it with friends and family. It’s generally been a simple married couple drive. There is less drama when it’s a duo and much more time for introspection. It’s either you driving or you recovering from the drive.

When we embark on this road trip this weekend, it’s going to involve a truck, several internet friends and my mother. It’s going to be a bit of a larger cast. In my fantasy version of events, it has all of the makings of a modern day Chevy Chase vehicle.

The kind of comedy that all Americans appreciate as a part of their birthright is the indignity and joy of the open road. When you add in vacations it’s a hoot. But a move? It’s a bit more pioneering in your mind. You see yourself in the fabric of life, narrative manifesting itself as intimate drama. Right before you step in piss at a gas station bathroom.

I frankly cannot wait for this glorious adventure. I am confident we will have pratfalls. I hope we do not have any actual calamity. At least not one that cannot be solved with a bit of wit, a truck and one’s parents. But expectations are just premeditated disappointment, so who knows where the road will take us. That is the magic of the great American road trip.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 559 and Stuck

I got stuck on the couch today. I’m not entirely sure why but I’m in the middle of a massive symptom flare. The pain is so acute and unrelenting that if I so much as sit up from bed I’ll get stuck in that position. I made the mistake of trying to eat lunch on the couch around noon and didn’t work up the capacity to get back into bed for over an hour.

This is becoming a theme on bad days. I’ll find myself upright for forty minutes completely unintentionally because moving, even to a more comfortable position laying down, is so painful I will put it off until I simply cannot remain upright anymore. It’s just that bad. Even the higher grade pain management isn’t doing shit. I’m just stuck in the pain until an even worse pain develops.

That’s probably a good metaphor for life. We will stay in an uncomfortable position until it’s so intolerable we simply must change. And I’d love to wax philosophic about that but I mostly mean it literally. If you’ve ever wondered how I got popular on Twitter, it’s simply because it’s the only thing I can do when I’m physically stuck in place by pain. I thank the internet Gods that this has been monetizable through investing or I don’t know what I would do.

You could almost surely correlate the number of tweets I send with the pain scale of my day. If I’ve tweeted more than 50 times on any given day it’s probably because I am over a 7 on the pain scale. It’s 2pm and I’ve tweeted 32 times today not including my DMs. I keep hopping the pain will abate enough that I can shower but it doesn’t show any signs of letting up today.

Frankly I’m just relieved it’s only my spinal pain and not anything else more exotic. Earlier this week I was dealing with being itchy and then I had a migraine that took 48 hours and several Imitrax to break. Regular old spinal pain is at least a recognizable and normal return to form. But until this nerve storm abates I’m stuck. At least until something worse comes along.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 548 and Shame

I’ve got a pit in my stomach. My throat has the constricted feeling of embarrassment that gets trapped in your gullet. I failed and lost money on something stupid. I tried to do a pleasant vacation sort of choice over a long weekend. A “nearby” Riviera town was supposedly within driving distance. I thought what could go wrong. Let’s go to the Ionian Sea! I briefly thought I could enjoy something like a regular person.

I said yes as everyone was so excited by the fresh air and the beaches. It will be healthy and fun! I was worried it would be without the basics I need to keep standing upright but I wanted to try anyway. Consistent air conditioning is really important to keeping the rest of my bodily system’s functioning. It’s a very Marie Antoinette need, but once my spine swells it can go very wrong very fast. Summers are hard for me.

My system begins to cascade within a pretty short window. About half a day. Eight hours without being able to lay flat for a break ended up fucking me up badly in this case. The “oh it’s close, just a three hour drive” ended up being a ten hour ordeal over badly maintained roads. I was sick to my stomach and in pain as we took hairpin turns and popped over potholes. I was in so much pain it was over a 10. It was “lose consciousness” levels of pain as my body knew I shouldn’t be awake for it. I was afraid it would get so bad I’d need a hospital. Instead I settled for opioids. Keeping out of the hospital was probably wise.

I hate needing those kind of drugs. The “your pain is a 10” drugs push me off the plane of reality by a few ecliptic degrees, and suddenly I can tolerate the pain and discomfort again. I understand how addicts get made now. It’s not real comfort. It’s synthetic but most people can’t tell just by watching. The fake relief looks real.

I’ve never felt tempted to take pain medicine recreationally. It’s usually only when a pain is too big for my reality that I tap out in defeat and take an opioid. It’s when reality crushes my soul as one variable starts to degrade the whole machine. I only use it to stave off collapse. And I was very close to collapse.

What is fucked up is that people like me off the axis of reality. The hazy hyper vibe’d unreal “reality” of encroaching nihilism is bop. Dystopia seems cool and consumable.

But it’s not an adventure for me. Living when sick is a daily dance with the devil who could use any chance encounter to end it all for you. The kind thing might be to stop fighting. But I rarely give up so I must enjoy the sticky Sisyphean crawl towards towards reality and the search for my own dignity.

I’m ashamed because I couldn’t make good decisions in that kind of pain. When the first hotel turned out to be a scam I happily laid down a card to stay till Monday at another hotel. Anything to get me relief. I just needed a safe cold place to heal.

It was a bad decision. The air conditioner didn’t work. I couldn’t get comfortable. I was sleeping in a dark sort of cold room as I couldn’t work up energy to go to the beach or even see the rest of the hotel. Not that it mattered as none of it was air conditioned anyway. I decided to go home after I had built up energy reserves back from sleeping for hours. I couldn’t tell you how long I passed out for but it might have been close to a whole day.

Alas I was again scammed for my efforts. The hotel clerk says no you paid for four days so you cannot get a refund even if you leave early. No refunds ever. No early checkout. No one cares if you are sick. Fuck her but I said hotel California for me. I was sick and needed safety.

I made some efforts to get receipts and documentation. I asked a receipt attesting that they wouldn’t let you cancel for any circumstance and that I was sick but it made no difference. Maybe I can take to the credit card or even the health insurance to show that I crashed. I’ll work it out on the backend.

I often wonder why I need special care. Surely I can try to do regular things like drive to the beach. But I couldn’t. I lost 48 hours to driving and bad air conditioning and pain. I didn’t have the health to stay at the beach. I needed to go back to the city with air conditioning.

I felt so stupid. I tried to fight to hold space that maybe I was a person that could do a vacation. That I was normal. And it was firmly corrected by reality. And then you think this is why I don’t go on vacation. The additional friction makes it a hell. It’s not a joy it’s a visit to hell.

I cut bait quickly this time.I’m ashamed at now much I must firmly maintain the no. No I don’t want to go to the beach. No I don’t have the energy got a full day road-trip. And definitely no on an empty stomach.

I feel like I’m not fun. That being friends with me is joyless because I can’t agree to fun things like a weekend at a beach. I find myself in tears having failed again at trying to do a nice normal fun thing. I ruined the weekend for myself and everyone around me.

Fun with me is being in a dark room. We watch television. Or maybe a movie. We make fun of a plot hole or bad casting. We sleep a lot. If we are at my home we do the chores. We keep up with the farm. There is no reason to turn consumption of recreation into a thing. It just hurts me. No cheap facsimile of an American vacation in a resort in a cheaper country.

That hideous example of colonial expectations of western domestic standards turn out to be required for a disabled woman. Air conditioning and short trips keep me alive. And at quite a cost. Since no one will refund me any of these damned scam hotels. I should have known better. It will probably take me a week or so to recover. And I’m so ashamed.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 546 and Evil Empire

Sometimes it pays to get a little distance. Sometimes a little distance makes you feel crazy and alone. I am not entirely sure where my mind and body will find themselves this week. But it will be distant.

I’m a bit off the beaten path of my usual life. I’m on a Mediterranean Sea I haven’t considered since I was studying Attic Greek. It’s hot and humid and the air conditioning can barely push back the natural heat. Fuck linen weather.

The car uses natural gas and some gas stations without underground tanks are struggling to fuel as it’s too hot to pump. The gas expands. You think you are pumping but it’s actually just air. That’s a first for me. A little bit of climate dystopia today.

I push off into rolling hills. There is probably some ancient tribe with greater claims to democracy than a thousand generations of my ancestors. It’s like driving though a Maxfield Parrish painting. It’s misty and ancient and old country all while I listen to eighties tunes. It’s Evil Empire somewhere sometime somehow. The sun never sets on Bakersfield California or under the Tuscan Sun. It’s enough to make you miss Reagan.