I Must Catch Them All

I will never stop talking about how messed up it is that in North America, short, mown grass surfaces in outdoor urban/suburban environments are seen everywhere and feel right, intuitive, and natural, when plant communities that could be described as "low grassy turf" straight-up did not exist in most of North America prior to European colonization.

Everywhere millions of acres of neglected curbs, swaths of ground separating fast food places or gas stations, spaces surrounding churches, roadsides, ditches, parks, yards, are maintained using carbon-emitting machinery as flat grass surfaces for reasons so obvious to us, we've forgotten them.

It is a labor-intensive, wasteful, effortful ritual of contempt and neglect for the land. A space of mowed grass between a gas station and a road is so utterly empty, so utterly identical to every other space of mowed grass, that the human mind doesn't even process it as "something," it's just space. No one would rest here, no one would sit here, no one uses this space, there is nothing beautiful or life-giving or important or worthy of conscious register here. It may not even occur to the mind that there is "something" in between the gas station and the road.

So many thousands and thousands of acres of space are nothingified like this. Even just a single square foot of space can be so RICH and exploding with life, if you love it. If you tend to it and give it your heart. How much land is never glanced at, hardly walked upon, except to have a lawn mower driven over it. How much life-giving habitat razed into a cruel, butchered parody of a murkily remembered European landscape.

Think how priceless a tiny little garden, a patch of sunbeams in a forest, a small trickle of stream, a single mossy log, can be! A person in communion with nature can love a place by the square inch! No place on Earth ever was "nothing!"

But all around me I see the flat carpets maintained by machines. I see so many precious square inches of Earth ignored and treated as nothing instead of loved and listened to closely and cared for.

How many strawberries could have grown here? How many little mushrooms could have popped out of this soil? How many kinds of lichen and moss could have fit on a medium-size boulder here, before it was all destroyed and made into nothing but a surface to be run over with a lawn mower?

tbh the submarine thing is the perfect demonstration of the thing a load of studies have borne out, where the more wealth someone has, the more likely they are to DRASTICALLY overestimate their competence in basically any field.

plus, tho I don't personally know of any studies into this, I also think it's pretty clear that wealth creates what I think of as the 'Nothing Bad Ever Happens To The Kennedys!!' mindset, where wealth insulates some people from consequences so much that it also makes them drastically overestimate their ability to survive danger.

collection of flipbooks, available for purchase here: https://traceloops.metalabel.com/release-tvo7

it’s the great pupupu bake off !

Aftermath | Øystein Sture Aspelund

I love hearing people go into a genuine, uncontrollable laughing fit. It brightens my soul in a manner I can't explain.

Rolling green hills and the great blue sea

KIKI'S DELIVERY SERVICE (1989) dir. Hayao Miyazaki x

By Calder Moore

Bumblebee butts! (Bumblebutts)

(All images found on Pinterest)