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Spinescent
I still have a scar on my left index finger from an off-target attempt to pick a ripe blackberry back in September. It makes me think that maybe there’s something to this blackberry brand of spinescence — leaving a mark on contact and bearing good fruit in season.
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Serotiny
Maybe I’ve been waking up on the right side of the bed lately, but I’m finding it easier to center the miracles in mundanity rather than the seeming inevitability of full-on ecocide for a change. And I guess it’s easy to feel a sense of solidarity with that stuff because it underscores the value of an ordinary life, and certainly makes me feel a sense of belonging just by virtue of being here to participate and bear witness to it all.
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The Strange and Unusual Afterlife of Self-forgiveness
For much of my life, my brain would do this thing where it would make a quick jump to thoughts of self-annihilation whenever I sensed abandonment. It seldom happens anymore, mostly because I have made a point in recent years to cull out vampiric friendships and be hyper-selective about who I trust. It also doesn’t hurt that I have reduced my level of expectations for human behavior to a misanthropic low. And I probably can’t discount the fact that, besides not really trusting anyone, I’m otherwise healthier overall than I’ve ever been. Even so, if I’m in A Mood®, I’ve…
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Piss & Vinegar
There’s this thing that happens to me about once every few months where I get mistaken for service staff while I’m patronizing a restaurant or brewery. That it even occurred with some frequency through a pandemic — where I was only in such places once every few weeks, and generally only long enough to pick something up — suggests that it would happen even more often if I spent any more time in public. It’s probably something that’s been happening throughout my post-pubescent life, but I only started keeping track after a notable experience in 2018. Ever since then, I’ve been completely…
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Grave to Cradle
A few months back, I got sucked into a reading streak about the legacy of extractive industries. It wasn’t exactly calculated. It all started in February when I finally broke into Kerri Arsenault’s Mill Town, a book I’d been wanting to get to since it came out in September. Then I broke into Jane Little Botkin’s Frank Little and the IWW, another book I’d been meaning to read after hearing it referenced and touted frequently throughout the first season of a podcast called Death in the West. While one is closer to memoir and the other is more like a…
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The Discreet Harm of the Bourgeois Workplace
This past week a year ago was my last at my old job. If I can help it, it will remain my last ever in the bourgeois workplace. I’m a year removed from that gig, and I feel like anything approaching a full recovery is going to take another year or two. That’s like two to three years of rehab for every four years at a toxic job—the last three months of which I even worked remotely after relocating. If I had to start this process from the top, even if I could somehow survive it a second time, nothing…
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USFS 2019
USFS 2019 is what it is. It's a love letter in overt terms to pop culture and dad jokes, and in sneaky terms to Montana (if you know, you'll know when and how). It's a recovery story and an attempt to narrativize family history under the guise of a century-later update of Norman Maclean's "USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky." It's neurodivergent and millennial as hell and I sorely hope this machine kills fascists. It's an affirmation of the Mister Rogers maxim that feelings are mentionable and manageable. It's a Sagittarian proletarian comedy in…
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USFS 2019 — Part 1, Chapter 1
I was 26 and I thought I was expired and I knew that was irrational, but I also wondered if there was a reason I was still alive and I just hadn’t figured it out yet. I said it wasn’t a big deal when a guy apologized from the window of his pale Isuzu Trooper for running down the pathetic estate sale sign I’d just pitched. That was before I realized I was talking to Pete.
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USFS 2019 — Part 1, Chapter 2
We cached Dad’s Sasquatch trove in the garage, deciding that was the best spot to stage it so Pete didn’t have to haul it around in Mindy until he was headed back out to the Peninsula. Though there was plenty of daylight left after migrating the boxes downstairs, Pete and I called it a day soon after. We tried to battle furniture for a while, but didn’t last long on that detail. We’d gotten as far as inventorying all items that would be a two-man job and thought momentarily about moving those bulkier pieces toward the door, but lost motivation…
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USFS 2019 — Part 1, Chapter 3
I left the house around 6pm, still without any sign of Pete and Elliott, but I knew they couldn’t have been far from Challis at that point. Normally, I wouldn’t have felt the need to let anybody know where I’d be in the event that we might miss each other. And I suppose it wasn’t necessary in this case. Pete and Elliott were both acute observers and knew as well as anybody what to look for to guess at my whereabouts within a reasonable confidence interval. When I was at the Challis house, my running shoes and hydration pack lived…
