He's Back

I feared that this day would come. The day I would learn what had happened after I hit that wild turkey. Now, years after running afoul of (OK, afowl into) the feathery one, the memory rarely visited and suffering a loneliness akin to that which inhabits most nursing home rooms, it all came back. Five years? Something like that. Three kilomiles? Yep. Singling me out among the largest of south Puget sound crowds? Uh huh.

The turkey never forgets. Where the good seeds are, when the tasty bugs emerge, what other creature has started a blood feud by wasting a wattly relative. [Oddly, from a human perspective, turkeys do not hate hunters, being firm believers that killing for food is all right with the Creator.] Kill a turkey and walk away, and all his brethren hold the grudge. Hurt a turkey and don't finish the job, and it will dedicate the all of its remaining life to hunting you down and killing you.


The turkey I ran into back in the oughts was probably trying to kill himself, but that does not mitigate things, and probably just makes it worse. All of the Meleagris genus are proud by nature, and are loathe to admit to the kind of weakness that would lead one to erase itself. Ergo suicide by automobile, which is rarely provable, and with the least bit of luck appears to be an accident. 

When I hit that one, it disappeared, no carcass, no blood. When his cousins found him later, he made up a story about an evil human, not just heedless as their kind usually are, who had actually sped up to hit him. At once, they all vowed to find me and kill me. Or peck at my balls. Or wake me up at all hours with their incessant inane gobbling. Something, they all agreed, something must be done to avenge this callous act of assault on the galliform brotherhood.


I had no specific knowledge of this, but of course suspected it. I chickened out (to use a phrase invented by turkeys, it just so happens) before wandering too far off the road to search for the broken bird, uncomfortable at facing it and its ilk on their turf, and satisfied myself replacing certainty with hope. After so long, with so many miles between me and the scene of the accident (I almost wrote 'scene of the crime' there), the hope had grown like moss over the incident, engulfing, obscuring and softening it. Invisibilizing it.


But not erasing it. Not altering its fundamental reality. Not precluding the opposite reaction to the action (damn you, thermodynamics). And so the other day, as I sat watching the Procession of the Species, I came eye to beady eye with consequence.


The Procession is a parade in which Olympians dress up like some species, real or approximate or even imagined. I've written about it since starting this blog (hit the Procession keyword below if you don't believe me, or are in the mood for more strangeness). But the eerily accurate rendition of Meleagris gallopavo gave me pause right away. Nobody is that meticulous, that un-whimsical. Even more than with the slime mold from last post, I immediately suspected that this was no costume, but a species camouflaged as a human in an animal costume. 


And sure enough, he stared me down soon after rounding the corner. An onyx eye, a black bead that doesn't look like it could focus so intently on one point, boring into my soul, accusing me, promising vengeance. And the sucker was humongous. A lot of pounds and a lot of years have passed in turkey time, but I recognized the look, the visage I'd last seen slamming into my windshield. There was an instant where I could sense some discomfort--I am the one who knows his suicidal shame--but before I could stare back, it was gone, replaced by a cold glare.


The crowd heard "Ahhhh-gobgob-gobble-ubble-ubble-ubble." I knew the call was directed at me, "I'mmmm gonna-gonna kill you you motherfucker." Not then, not in front of the crowd. He was just letting me know he was in town, making me see that he'd been working out, getting buffed out and ready to do more than peck ineffectually. 


Looking into that turkey's eye, I could see that the bird I'd seen back at Reedy Creek, so empty of gusto and so full of le nausee, ennui, and various other francophonic malaises, had been unalterably changed. If only to wreak vengeance, this bird now has a reason to live.

And I have reason to hide.

Procession of the Species Olympia Slime Mold

The search strings people cast to hook this blog can be interesting. I am an actual big brother, and my sister, fervid researcher of late antiquity, taught me the tech to look at "stats" like that, to peek into you all's URL and country of origin and see how many people are looking. But the best thing is seeing a good search string.


Most are boring. I'll be honest, most have to do with heatilators, because at any given time there are more than zero out of all humanity who yearn for knowledge on the finest innovation of 20th Century American green design. If you are here because you want to learn more about a heatilator, heatalator, or heat-ya-later, then scroll on down to the keywords at the end of this post and find what you need, because this hear post is about to tack wildly away.


As search terms are wont to do, when viewed as a narrative that dribbles in phrase by phrase by word. Yesterday's strings were a treat, finding that some poor people yearning to know who sat behind the queen at the royal wedding followed their string here. If you are still here because of that, check out yesterday's post, or better yet: forget about it. The wedding's over, and was boring and irrelevant anyway, compared to what you're about to here.


Someone entered the title of this post into google, and ran across my post about slime mold in Olympia, which is one of those accidental webifact discoveries that people unearth while not-quite-finding what they're looking for. Which in this case was this year's slime mold, which I think is what the photo above is. The photo in my slime mold post shows a fruiting body reminiscent of this costume, which I like a lot. My favorite slime mold costume (I've seen hundreds, of course, as most educated people have) was from the first Procession of the Species I ever saw, a guy covered in yellow balloons, lying on a skateboard, oozing his way along the entire route. I'm a sucker for slime mold costumes, and love both of these.


Or are they costumes? I assumed there were people in there, but maybe not. The northwest, evolutionary incubator for all things wet and not too demanding of photons, may have created something special. Your run of the mill slime can coalesce, move as a body, and optimize the timing of its fruiting--what about that special slime who punctures the equilibrium of eons and mutates radically?


A slime the size of a large mammal. Mold molds itself as well as any plastic, and could easily form perambulatory stuctures reminiscent of human legs. My guess is that it cannot talk (though it is surely highly intelligent), and therefore creates the intricate costume we think we see, that it may be a painfully shy creature who craves social contact but most of the time just tries to blend into the wallpaper, baseboards, tiles,...ruefully listening as the humans laugh and dogtails wag. Or maybe I'm just a chauvanist, expecting that slime mold would even want to be like a human, the slimiest of species. Maybe it loves who it is, "I'm slime, sublime, get used to it."


Regardless of why, the fact that it appears during Spring on the very day of the Procession bespeaks an awareness, a synchronicity of some kind with our kind. That it always exhibits the fruiting bodies on this day is also interesting. At the very least, it's a much better show than other states of slime being (unless you happen to have time lapse vision and it's on the move, making even the blob form interesting). I suspect there is more to it, though. I think  that it is sporing spectators, spawning on a downtown crowd unparalleled in size any other day in Olympia. 


Why? Probably as part of a long-term scheme to evolve into an organ of the mammalian brain. Fearmongers out there think this is because slime mold wants to take us over, render our bodies zombified in the service of slime, like when Keanu ran that giant battle robot thingy in the Matrix. I recognize that as the Fox-fed bignorance that it is, and believe that the idea is just to extend it's unicell self beyond the limitations of the body, to evolve some cognitive complexity on its part, and push the host's brain toward a greater awareness and love of slime mold. 


Yeah, of cours, I dunno why I ever thought of it before: the spores are part of slime mold's strategy toward evolutionary transcendence, bringing all us other creatures into it's essential one-ness. All these years of religious dead ends, and it turns out that what we were looking for all along was to be absorbed by an evolutionary paradox, melding complexity and unicellarity, feeling the slime love. I think it's working already.

Bwahahahaha!

Today, some people ended up at this blog by googling "who sat behind the queen?"

How on earth? Must've been pretty drunk, I thought, to have ended up at Mojourner Truth. I am not entertainment news, nobody outside of a select few know I exist. Someone must have clicked through to page 8 of results, I thought. But no, there I was on page one today. 

So, sole British web-surfer who ended up here, I hope you eventually found your answer. And to the rest of you, stop trusting programs to serve up good information. And stop obsessing over royals. They don't give tuppence about you.

I can sign off now, happy in the knowledge that a few people were led astray, that the human mind still provides better direction than algorithms.

Decomposite Sketch

Remember wanted posters with sketches of criminals, composites drawn from multiple observations filtered by memory? The Unabomber in a hooded sweatshirt and aviator sunglasses, his face telling you that he was a young middle-age white guy, if not much more. One day soon (or a few years ago, if you live in a major western city), there will be cameras everywhere, and no work for the person who sat and listened to witnesses describe hair, jawlines, noses, and scars. The idea of a composite will live on, as computers merge the traffic camera shot of a pedestrian with the Quickie Mart shot of his face and the cell-photo of the crime in progress.

Composites allow their makers and users to triangulate, to approach from various angles, to interpolate and make a sensible whole. A composited composition like the movie Ran can even let the audience appreciate, maybe negotiate. Most of the time, though, composites are presented as a single true thing, more easily approached than the incomplete components, more readily read than the manifold individual accounts.

Archaeologists deal in decomposite sketches. Something once whole, broken and mostly decayed, informed maybe by a faded historic account or tenuous analogy to something alive. Culture fragmented then mended, extrapolated from the durable leavings of people long gone. Black greasy dirt telling tales of people who cooked and ate, walked about barefoot, their waste and dander of their life becoming soil. Hiding in that matrix, clues: tiny frags of volcanic rock brought from elsewhere and used to oblivion (almost), chemical traces where once were plants and meat, motes of charcoal preserving cellular structure from which ancient forests may be regrown in the mind's eye.


From the soil, artifacts, and ecofacts, we draw our decomposite sketches. With any luck, we may be able to conjure forth a good story of a people long since gone or changed. In a good site, the decay is not so complete that all the nutrients feeding this process have been leached away. In a good site, decomposition has left us archaeological compost, from which sprout theories and culture histories.

Likewise with gardening, I am a decompositer. Plants that are whole and even thriving, but which offer no food, aroma, materials, or beauty--they get whacked. Chopped up and composted to feed something better. Same for prunings and dead annuals and the windfall of leaves, flowers, catkins and cones that drop to my soil--all the disarticulated organics sacrificed to the earth deity.


Why the relentless chopping, burning, carnage? Because more than anything else, I grow soil. What grew before must be decomposed to make what grows next come forth, whole and expanding.
 

My Dirty Secret

Been reading this blog? Or maybe you know me?

Then you may have some ideas of the cartography of my character. Lopsided to the left, borders with the Right and rich fortified. A river of scorn and ire draining a vast watershed of political and economic opinion. Shifting sands and a wandering north pole. Lands of yore and fakelore. Criss-crossed by narrow roads. Occasional lyric naturescapes. Ponds most caustic. Winds that blow on and on without going anywhere, circling back again and again. Rocky harsh frontiers, unwelcoming.


Not long ago, someone spotted a discontinuity, a hint of some unexpected geology underlying the public lands that are this blog. It was in the form of a reference to Marie Antoinette's garden a topic that seems awfully girly and Francophilic to be showing up in these parts.


 
But I am not afraid to love incongruously. Long ago, in the grips of surging testosterone and flagging confidence, it was important to maintain consistency. To stick with the caustic wit without letting down my guard. To steer clear of anything mainstream. To listen not to hippie stuff or new wave fluff, but to be hardcore. 


Then I learned to live for myself instead of an image, and to revel in the land, not the map. 


So I admit to you that this weekend I reveled in the goofy spectacle of Olympia's best parade, the Procession of the Species. This photo is part of that, a troupe of mandolin, banjo, and guitar-playing butterflies singing about caterpillars and love. Punk me would have turned away from this spectacle of hippidiculousness, maybe. But now, I love it. Just some people having fun, celebrating life. I cannot remember their song (simple as it was), but bask in the REMemory, lyrics of "Shiny Happy People" running through my mind in a holey loop.

Post 200

Now, the 200th post of Mojourner Truth. Nothing to say really, except that the pace has picked up. Post 100 came about 2 years after starting the blog, and it took just under a year to spew forth the second hundred. Not quite a third of the way through 2011, and already as many posts as in all of 2009.

More ain't better. It's just compulsive writing, and while there are some good sentences, paragraphs, and even posts, it's a scattershot. Some people gestate thoughtfully, nurture their ideas so that what they write comes out beautiful. I'm more like coral, spewing voluminously into the current, most of it spilled seed. Some posts are just notes so I won't forget something, others are germs of ideas I may come back to later, and a bunch are just blathering. There are enough now that the spewage can be categorized somewhat: backroads, environment, culture, politics, nostalgia...all those keyword tags I so laboriously added to the back catalog in the past year or so.

For the benefit of myself. Readership here is tiny. You are part of an exclusive club, like 21st century lepers, or vegetarian Uzbeks. Most people have better things to do, and I salute your willingness to waste time here, to procrastinate, to soak up irrelevant opinions and useless observations, to overlook the typoz. 

Bis spater...

I Sat in Front of the King

A couple of days after my encounter with a queen in Wenatchee, eating lunch in Twisp, I sat in front of the king, an older gentleman who, every 4 minutes would make a pronouncement:

"I'm gonna pick up 3-4 more horses." No reason given.
"I ought to buy a few hundred head of cattle. Seems like the fish and wildlife Department won't even talk to ya about leases till you have a herd."
"The job those boys did on the fence,...I might ask 'em out to do the whole property."

Basically, listing things he would acquire in that odd monarchic tendency toward bucolic nostalgia. Like Marie Antoinette playing  milkmaid in Petit Hameau, a rustic Swiss-ish village she had built at Versailles. Do they ever really blend in? Heck no, but the rich spend a lot of money locally in their quest to feel like farmers, which is the modern capitalist version of the Prince and the Pauper, and acceptable to the peasantry.

Sometimes it works out well. The locals, or at least a family or two who do the king's dirty work, may get the run of the place during the 90% of the time when isn't around. Suppliers of feed and fencing, gear and luxury goods, have a new customer who not only pays on time, but can be counted on to spend extra if the seller so much as hints that some other guy is doing similar things. The king must win at the game of competitive consumption. 

But then, the king ain't from here, and he don't exactly understand some of the balances he is upsetting, the social and environmental  laws he's breaking. He overpays the young guy (who everybody knows is an idiot) while the dad (who everybody knows can fix anything and needs the work to stay off the bottle) remains silent and grows bitter. He fences off open range, brings in questionable stock, and when he grows bored (or scared) of nature goes on a building spree that bulldozes the old Indian village, paves the single best field in the valley, and pollutes the night sky with floodlights.

With any luck, the king gains a new fascination and moves on before he does too much damage. Without it, he falls so deeply in love with the place that it becomes his court away from court, and other nobles follow, inflating land prices and making it impossible to farm or ranch any more, ruining that which drew him there in the first place.  The occasional king is smart enough to notice and regret this irony, but most don't even recognize what happened.

I Sat Behind the Queen

At long last, I found a great place to eat in Wenatchee.

Not brewpubs being available (I am on the periphery of wine country, in apple country actually, a place wishing cider culture had arisen from the pomme, as fine vinophilia had from the grape, or at least brazen bierkultur had hopped up angrily from the wort, challenging the winers to a fight), I go for the place with local food and almost local micro-brews.


As is the case most times I have et at restaurants, I walk in and say, "Just one." Lonely, maybe, but that's work. I get to have what I want, do not have to cut anything for tiny companions, and perdiem covers it. Usually.

At the next table, her back to me, is the queen. Maybe if I'd paid attention, I would've deduced that from the poofed-up mid-50's frosted (not gray!) short cut hair, the patrician back-fat spilling over her bra-strap, the dictating to her consort. Said husband kept quiet mostly, other than  blowing his nose (medieval queen, perhaps, not offended at all), mostly just nodding, exuding pre-verbal solicitousness.


As queens are wont to do, she pretended to seek the server's advice. Then ignored it. Decided on the fish instead, and even then expressed doubts that the help could prepare it correctly. The server, sensing her role, carefully teased forth the details of her queenship's preferences, inquired as to every aspect of the preparation, and assured her majesty that it would be great. Queens only want the greatest.


The platter came, and on the first check after, the help could sense something less than complete satisfaction. Yon queen obviously thought that the thin end of the filet was overooked. 


Server says, I can take it back and bring you a new one.


No, says the queen, playing enlightened despot, suffering so that the serfs can be just a weentsy more comfortable.


"If it is not to your liking," says the server, "we are only too happy to bring you another. You will find the main part of the filet to be perfect, unlike the edge." She has slyly brought the cook into the mix, implicating him in the servitude, I think, rather than trying to blame him. "The cook has personally come up with this recipe for you, your majesty, and if thou are not happy, he will invent another." 


But the queen is feeling beneficent and indulgent today. She will have none of it, and will plow through this substandard fare.


Or, as it turns out, partly through it. She chokes down the thin overcooked end, muttering to her hapless prince, who repeats all the offers of make-up food. Then, as she gets to the succulent part, decides she is full. Has it boxed. To eat later, watching cable TV, microwaving the imperial meal.


Yon queen fishes her consort's wallet from her purse, and has him pay, then carry the take-out boxes. 


All this, and somehow, I am unimpressed by royalty.

"We Don't Care About the Last Election"

My state's Attorney General (Rob McKenna) supposedly sent out an email today, accusing last week's protesters of ignoring the will of the people, who last fall voted out certain taxes and in a few Republicans. He repeats the phrase "We Don't Care About the Last Election" (supposedly a rallying cry, but I don't remember) to rile up his followership at the arrogance and unreasonableness of the opposition. 
The purported purpose of this epistle was to convince conservatives to attend an anti-tax rally in Bellevue. Even though that's where we concentrate rich people, I would not count on a five-day protest culminating in a 10,000 plus crowd to happen there, as it did in Olympia. [Does Robblehead want crowds like that? No, he wants money, the gold standard of political currency.]
Olympia. People love to blame Olympia for whatever tax or policy or whatever. "Olympia takes your hard earned money and gives it to Mexicans," and similar myths. As well as some truths: regulations do exist, and agencies have offices in the capital. This misses the fact that the capitol fills each new year with a couple of representatives and their staff and entourages from Not-Olympia. There's some basis for blaming the Seattle Megalopolis, because most of the people live there and hence have more seats in the House, but the fact is that rural counties get more back than they pay in taxes and should just keep mum and hope nobody notices. But Olympia? No, given the choice, Olympia would rather listen to music and drink coffee and enjoy itself than try to impose its will even in Lacey, much less Republic. That's like way too fascist for a town with so many Evergreeners. 
But McKenna knew that if he slyly referred the union protesters, most not from Olympia, as Olympia, he'd be pushing buttons that make campaign money spit out.
He's smart enough that accusing union protesters of ignoring the last election comes off as lame, as if Rove is standing by him whispering "Don't engage in debate. Smear and move on." The last election ignored the one before, when the Democrats made a huge gain. Then there have been the times when the GOP ignored current elections and had daddy's supreme court install the president instead of the guy who won.
I'm honest enough to say that no, I don't care about the last election. A fraction of the populace affected by politicians is allowed to vote, a smaller percentage still turn in a ballot, and so every time a politician claims a mandate, it is based on spurious superiority in numbers. Besides which, no vote extinguishes my right to advocate for something other than status quo. Conservatives sure as hell do it, but act like I am impolite and unpatriotic for doing so.
The last election included referenda to cut off some revenue sources and ensured that a 2/3 majority is required to get any new ones. This effectively killed an earlier referendum that mandated limited class size in public schools, and requires that social programs serving our most vulnerable citizens be pared back.
The last election had no effect on the inhabitants of executive suites and corporate boardrooms who looted the economy (about the time of the election before). The people who invented and profited from Wall Street scams not only paid no price, they hold on to the loopholes and special deals that ensure that profits will never be taxed as harshly as labor. They did have to pay for enough ads to defeat the referendum that would have imposed an income tax on the very wealthy, but overall they made out finer than the rest of us.
A lot of whom care about the next election.
 

Old School

"Old School" did not occur widely in American English til I was too old to claim not to personify it.

Old School is my favorite pizzeria.
Old School teaches us how to survive.
Old School emerges in Old Age too wise to be ashamed of oldness.
Old School teaches archaeologists.
Old School rocks like 21st Century kids never will.

"Old School" means whatever my lengthening, fail-prone memory assigns.

Once and Future Islands

Early March found me in the Skagit lowlands, field after field of flat. Not much growing now, just puddles of rain and snowmelt. And maybe the water table coming up. Meanwhile, on NPR, the US Navy's chief meteorologist was being interviewed. The military is not exactly a bastion of liberalness (the policy for left of center personnel is Don't Ask, Don't Tell, with no end in sight), but when it gets down to brass tacks (or shell casings) they don't have a lot of patience for cockamamie right wing theories that fly in the face of science. A lot of math was developed with trajectories in mind; physics, chemistry, and materials science are at the heart of many a weapons system. Communications, surveillance, keeping copters and jets in the air,..the list of military needs that won't work on the basis of Creationism or Faith goes on and on.


This extends to long term planning, which is where the admiral came in. A scary proportion of Republican congressmen may deny the existence of global warming, but the US Navy sure as hell doesn't. They know that the sea is rising, and that the rate could suddenly increase if and when the Greenland ice reaches a tipping point and starts flowing into the sea at more than the accustomed glacial speed. They know that this will bring them headaches ranging from submerged and storm-battered bases to increased geopolitical stress and strife as populations migrate inland and fresh water tables are salinated. I'm sure the admiral would love to believe that it won't happen, but he knows better.


The low fields of western Skagit county have tasted the ocean before, and will again. The hills that poke up through the coastal sediments, long seen by farmers as intrusions into an otherwise nice field, will once more become islands. The dikes that have held back the Salish Sea will be gobbled by it, deltas will erase levees and fan out. 


All this in a blink of a celestial eye, a tic of geological time. The far-flung flats are no older than the last glaciation, anyway. The waters of the straits and sounds, seemingly so protected from the ocean and buffered by islands, rise and fall with wild abandon in just the short time that humans have been here. Not entirely because of water being frozen and then released, either. The land itself rises and falls as glacial weights pile on and flow away, as the oceanic plate plows beneath the continent, as faults give way. Some of the San Juan islands bob up rather gently on the rebound after glaciers leave, while others were thrust up suddenly from deep in the earth during subduction zone quakes that dwarf anything humans can recall. 


The Japanese quake and tsunami remind us that cities can be erased suddenly, landscapes altered in a day. (The geologists' office where I work displays a quote from Will Durant, "Civilization exists by geologic consent, revocable without notice.") The climate's change promises us a less obvious, but far more widespread, alteration of our earth. We humans, clinging to the coast, are in for some hard lessons, especially if we insist on denying what is demonstrably true because it does not comport with short term political goals or a particular religious outlook. Reality won't wait for the slow-witted, and even if they manage to make an ark, their drifting voyage will find whatever shores it may reach already occupied by people who operated not on faith, but on knowledge.

Costume Party

Tea Party gatherings tend to have individuals dressed up in what they believe to be the style of the Founding Fathers. A fair number of the Civil War and other re-enactor buffs I've met (people who take extreme care to research and reproduce details of costumery representing the old days when life was grand and slavery was legal) tend to be very conservative, so it would not surprise me if there is enough overlap between these folks to produce some accurately attired individuals.


But a genuine wardrobe speaks little about what's in it. The guys dressed up like Washington and Jefferson misunderstand their political idols as much as they misrepresent their god and savior.


The rowdys doing the legwork for the founding fathers liked to play dress-up, too. The Tea Partiers of 18th Century Boston dressed up like Indians. Some people see in this a statement of American-ness, appropriation of Native garb to differentiate the colonists from their overlords. My own more cynical view is that they just wanted disguises, being brave as long as they couldn't be identified. If the Brits actually thought Indians had done it, and retaliated against them, so much the better, but nobody truly expected them to believe that a previously unnoticed band of urban Indians was on the warpath. The tea dumpers just didn't want to be recognized during their vandalism spree. Kinda chicken, if you ask me.


The modern Tea Party attachment to the style of the American Revolution does not, so far as I know, include dressing up like Indians. Even the upper crust Virginian or Bostonian costumes, however, are just as obviously disguises, misdirection. 

Case in point: treatment of the District of Columbia as a colony by the heavily Tea-steeped new Republican House of Representatives. Would the Boston partiers, much as they may have wanted to avoid arrest, have been so chicken-shit as to tolerate taxation without representation? No, the whole reason for the action was to protest taxes levied without the colonies having a voice in Parliament. Yet Republicans have shown time and again that they do not want DC, with its majority of African Americans and Democratic voters, to have a voting member of the House, much less the Senate.


This Friday's budget deal also demonstrates that this new House will not hesitate to increase federal interference, even when it flies directly in the face of what local people want. Democrats managed to keep certain nation-wide policy riders out, but Boehner and his ilk managed to include a couple of restrictions on DC. Namely, a ban on using money for abortions and other women's health activities, and imposing a voucher system allowing people to direct public school funding toward private school tuition. This is tax money that was raised locally, which Republicans now insist that those black DC residents don't know how to use in their own community. This is only the latest in a series of insults to the democratic ideal of self-determination, from messing with gun control and birth control to overriding voter referenda. 


So when I hear some Tea Party activist rail against an intrusive federal government or wave that "Don't Tread on Me" flag, I think: bullshit. They can dress up like patriots, but their actions demonstrate disdain for freedom and democracy.