"gossamer in a basalt world"

"Our lives are plants, creating leaves and flowers that fall away and are lost forever.  I suppose that writing this account on these leaves will make little difference; words are gossamer in a basalt world.  Still I am glad I did it.  Soon we will descend to the ninth planet, and in this interregnum I feel completely cast loose, on the edge of a new world, a new life; stripped of all habits, opinions and expectations, I tremble like a blade of grass in the open air.  The old life swirls in my mind like rock jasmine blooms down a canyon stream, and I wonder what will live on into my new existence, for even my unsheathing feels like a dream to me now, fragmentary, delirious, unreal.  Still, spun into gossamer these parts of a world may remain within my ken: what we feel most, we remember best.  The weak link is."

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Icehenge

Reefer Madness

Bellingham, Washington.

I don't partake of the icky any longer, and haven't in about 20 years or so.  But pot shops are a part of life out here in Bellingham and at some point I should probably take the trouble to actually walk inside of one.

Also, I love the unearned confidence of his sign on the right -- "EST. 2021" indeed.

Stay golden, pony-boy.

"the inertia of blind wanderings"

"Think of our own life-lines or life-times as being such a vegetable thing, abundantly flowering and putting forth seedpods of what we are, so that moments ripen and fall to earth, bursting with new plantings of ourselves in us -- and these, subject to mutations, radioactive alterations and misunderstandings of our original form, puns, cross-messages of the first code we come from -- and so we go to birth, to the leaping aliveness of a new beginning from the inertia of the blind wanderings of the plant we are in our going to seed."

-- Robert Duncan, "The Pod of Adam"

"not even on other planets"

"But that was the kind of thing that happened when exploring unknown territory, when struggling through the mountains of terra incognita for the first time.  It was the kind of experience that humanity would never have again, not even on other planets.  Of course there were wilderness adventure tours these days being dropped in Alaska or Mongolia or the Himalayas without maps or compasses or GPS or radio, to try to reproduce that experience.  But no mater how they tried, Val did not believe what they were doing was really the same.  It was impossible to regain that mental state, of wanting to know and not knowing."

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

Hiya

Light posting for a bit.  We're dealing with some health issues in the family.  Life is never easy.

America

Ukrainians are dying for their freedom. Russian protestors are being locked up for who knows how long.

But really, a maskless dude driving around with a Let's Go Brandon! flag could teach them so much more.

— Piccoli Cherubini James (@wetcasements) February 25, 2022

"can you blame someone else?"

 From Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica, which is not the book I expected -- in a very good way.

"derelict conveyor"

 

Cherry Point, Washington.  If you look on Google Maps you'll see "derelict conveyor."  Here it is.  Worth one trip, at least.

What I Thunk

The first half of Licorice Pizza was great.  The second half, and it all falls apart.

Essentially, I just don't buy into the main love story.

It almost works, but it doesn't work.

Relevant To My Current Job!

I'm finding that the world of pets and animals is filled with a lot of good intentions that can go wrong, eventually -- to wit, service animals.  It's very complicated, to say the least!

"While pets inarguably provide emotional support simply by being themselves, they are not trained to help someone with a disability navigate life, or taught how to behave appropriately in public. And since anyone can get an ESA certificate – all it requires is a note from a doctor, though buying them online is easily done – good dogs and bad dogs, sweet dogs and aggressive dogs all qualify for the title.

The problem became so severe that in December 2020, the Department of Transportation (DoT) stiffened their rules to allow only trained service dogs on planes, stating that it no longer considered an emotional support animal to be a service animal.

Dishonest pet owners were not deterred. Instead of declaring their animal to be an emotional support animal, they now fully lie and call it a service dog."

If every dog is a support animal or an Emotional Support Animal, then no dog is either.

It's come up a few times at work and I'm sure it will again, usually in the context of "My animal couldn't have attacked another animal or person because it's an E.S.A.!"  It can become a shield, basically, and a far cry from what it's supposed to accomplish in the first place.

Mic Drop

Wordle 240 2/6

🟩⬜⬜🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩@Harvard @Yale @Stanford @KenyonCollege

— Piccoli Cherubini James (@wetcasements) February 15, 2022

I mean, I've never claimed that I'm not a genius either.