of all of the bizarre things I’ve seen while working in skilled nursing the one that’s going to stick with me until I die is bug god
nothing can possibly prepare you for the moment you show up to give a man his apple juice and he says “Do you think bugs come from the same god as us? They’re older than our god. They have their own.”
Kim Addonizio, from “For Desire”, Tell Me
Transcript: To hell with the saints, with the martyrs / of my childhood meant to instruct me / in the power of endurance and faith, / to hell with the next world and its pallid angels / swooning and sighing like Victorian girls. / I want this world. I want to walk into / the ocean and feel it trying to drag me alone / like I'm nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass, / and I want to resist it. End transcript.
I dont know how to explain it but i feel like the moment you start to study biology you end up going insane a lil bit and sooner or later you will end up becoming a tiny lil bit neopagan(knowingly or not) when you realize that our ancestors were kinda right.
We all come from the same primordial soup, the air is alive with bacteria, viruses and other little creatures and so is water, life is everywhere you look, the whole world humming with that primal energy when every living thing is taking a breath.
Animals have their own languages and are no different from us in many ways, elephants can hold grudges and so do corvids, you shouldn't mess with them. Orcas have their dialects, and sometimes they won't breed simply because they are so culturally different from each other. Bees can count and they will play if given the chance. Spiders can remember you, and they create plans in advance.
There are kilometers of mycelium under our feet, ancient beasts that existed long before we did. Trees will communicate with one another when threatened. There's a plant that seemingly mimics other plants and scientists aren't sure how it's doing it because that implies the plant has eyes. EYES. Can you believe it.
Our planet recycles things. The rot ensures that the dead do not go to waste, their bodies transformed into something new. Death isn't the opposite of life, it's merely the other part of the cycle. Reincarnation, a transformation.
When we first believed we were above all that, stronger and wiser than the other beasts living on this planet, i think that's when we truly lost our way. Because our ancestors were right.
We all are one in one way or another, and you can't really deny that.
Anyways that was my caffeine induced rant after reading too much uni material and having a moment of pure unlimited insanity
something i think about a lot in relation to cycles is that they're a kind of circuit. a loop through which a current flows. and it is vital to understand this if you're going to break them without leaving the ruined, ragged ends to bleed out into empty space like poison, or attach themselves parasitically to someone or something else in order to survive.
yes congratulations you've broken the cycle but did you cauterise the cut. did you close the circle or leave it hemorrhaging its corrosive contents into the air and the groundwater and the soil.
tags by @thesealfriend
of all of the bizarre things I’ve seen while working in skilled nursing the one that’s going to stick with me until I die is bug god
nothing can possibly prepare you for the moment you show up to give a man his apple juice and he says “Do you think bugs come from the same god as us? They’re older than our god. They have their own.”
"Genesis", Oil on canvas by Matthew Cornell
Sometimes I forget how alien the world used to be. How our earth used to be entirely diffrent in so many wonderful ways. How we can never see it, but as humans we can understand and know, we can know, we can know.
Computers are very simple you see we take the hearts of dead stars and we flatten them into crystal chips and then we etch tiny pathways using concentrated light into the dead star crystal chips and if we etch the pathways just so we can trick the crystals into doing our thinking for us hope this clears things up.
How does it feel to be the most Galaxy Brained person in this entire thread
Well that certainly belongs on the post
why would this distress you friend the dead star crystal chips are just singing to each other with invisible ripples in the fabric of reality itself perfectly normal stuff
I'm not talking about radiation, or nuclear weapons, or anything that you can do with uranium, I mean its mere existence on Earth is a reminder of cosmic horrors on a scale you can barely conceive of.
When a nuclear power plant uses Uranium to boil water and spin steam turbines to keep the lights on, they're unleashing the fossilized energy of the destroyed heart of an undead star.
Allow me to elaborate:
In the beginning, there were hydrogen and helium. The primordial fires of the Big Bang produced almost exclusively the two lightest elements, along with a minuscule trace of lithium. It was a start, but that's not much to build a universe out of. Fortunately, the universe is full of element factories. We call them "stars".
Stars are powered by nuclear fusion, smooshing light elements together to make heavier elements, and releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process, powering the star and making it shine. This goes on for millions to billions of years depending on the stars mass (although not how you might think, the bigger stars die young), the vast majority of that time spent fusing hydrogen into yet more helium. Eventually, the hydrogen in the core starts to run low, and if the star is massive enough it starts to fuse helium into carbon, then oxygen, neon, and so on up through successively heavier elements.
There's a limit to this though:
This chart shows how much energy is released if you were to create a given element/isotope out of the raw protons and neutrons that make it up, the Nuclear Binding Energy. Like in everyday life, rolling downhill on this chart releases energy. So, starting from hydrogen on the far left you can rapidly drop down to helium-4 releasing a ton of energy, and then from there to carbon-12 releasing a fair bit more.
But, at the bottom of this curve is iron-56, the most stable isotope. This is the most efficient way to pack protons and neutrons together, and forming it releases some energy. But once its formed, that's it. You're done. Its already the most stable, you can't get any more energy out of it, and in fact if you want to do anything to it and make it into a different element you're going to have to put energy in.
So, when a massive star's core starts to fill up with iron, the star is doomed. Iron is like ash from the nuclear fire that powers stars, its what's leftover when all the fuel is used up. When this happens, the core of the star isn't producing energy and can't support itself anymore and catastrophically collapses, triggering a supernova explosion which heralds the death of the star.
What kind of stellar-corpse gets left behind depends again on how massive the star is. If its really big, more than ~30 times the mass of the sun and its probably going to form a black hole and whatever was in there is gone for good. But if the star is a bit less massive, between 8-25 solar masses, it leaves behind a marginally less-destroyed corpse.
The immense weight of the outer layers of the star falling down on the core compresses the electrons of the atoms into their nuclei, resulting in them reacting with protons and turning them all into neutrons, which creates a big ball of almost pure neutrons a couple miles across, but containing the entire mass of the star's core, 3-5 sun's worth.
This is the undead heart of the former star: a neutron star.
If, like many stars, this one wasn't alone but had a sibling, it can end up with two neuron stars orbiting each other, like a pair of zombies acting out their former lives. If they get close enough together, their intense gravity warps the fabric of spacetime as they orbit, radiating away their orbital energy as gravitational waves, slowing them down and bringing them closer together until they eventually collide.
The resulting kilonova explosion destroys both of the neutron stars, most likely rendering the majority of what's left into a black hole, but not before throwing out a massive cloud of neutron-rich shrapnel. This elder-god blood-splatter from the collision of the undead hearts of former stars contains massive nuclei with hundreds to thousands of neutrons, the vast majority of which are heinously unstable and decay away in milliseconds or less. Most of their decay products are also unstable and decay quickly as well, eventually falling apart into small enough clusters to be stable and drift off into the universe becoming part of the cosmic dust between the stars.
However,
Some of the resulting massive elements are merely almost stable. They would like to decay, but for quantum-physics reasons decaying is hard and slow for them, so they stick around much longer than you might expect. Uranium is one such element, with U-238 having a half-life of around 4.5 billion years, about the same as the age of the Earth, and its spicier cousin U-235 which still has a respectable 200 million year half life.
These almost-stable isotopes were only able to be created in the fiery excess of energy in a neutron star collision, and are the only ones that stick around long enough to carry a fraction of that energy to the era where hairless apes could figure out that a particular black rock made of them was emitting some kind of invisible energy.
So as I said at the beginning, Uranium is significant because it stores the fossilized energy of the destroyed heart of an undead star, and we can release that energy at will if we set it up just right.
When you say it like that, is it any shock that the energy in question will melt your face off and rot your bones from the inside if you stay near it too long?
been thinking about trees
#us coal mining is a fun bit of cultural connection with us over in wales#ultimately we both got fucked#and had to fight tooth and nail for unions#ironically thanks to tectonic plates we were essentially mining the same mountain range#thousands of miles apart#what you call blue ridge mountains#we call Yr wyddfa#west viginia and all the coal towns are siblings as far as im concerned#we were raised on the same stone#that makes us kin Via: @scottish-valkyrie
my toxic writer trait is that I'm obsessed with the idea of haunting.
what happened to you? who happened to you? how does it follow you around? does it trace the same path up and down the stairs every night? does it change the way you make your breakfast? does it make you look ever your shoulder every time you think you're alone in the house? does it make it so you never feel like you're totally alone in the house? is the house your childhood home? your hometown? your body? you lost something but you never actually lose it because it's right there behind you. a habit, a verbal tick, a flight-or-fight response. there's fingerprints on the mirror whenever you look into it and you can't be sure it was you that left them. something is there. even when the thing is gone, it's always there.
Whereabouts do you live, roughly speaking, and what drew you to that place in particular?
I'm in Michigan, and that's as specifically as I will answer that question! We have really lethal lakes.
Seconding the tags. Lovely poetry
look, yes, of course a pond will kill you. A little-L lake will kill you, if you are careless enough, but they are lazy things, pitcher plant predators, and they do not hunger. The Great Lakes remember when they were the blistering endless winter and the slow crush of ice reshaping the land. They remember the implacable starvation of an unbreaking cold across the continent, and they carry that ancient ice water in their bellies, hungry still. Lake Superior wears her winter boldly, and she will wrench frigid breath from your lungs in the heat of August and pull you, unrotting, to her depths. Huron beckons you further and further from shore with such a gentle slope, so easy, until you are finally chest-deep in the water but you cannot see the shore anymore, only the endless expanse of her. Erie sends her fogs like snowfall, whiteout blizzards, blinding you to her rocky shallow basin, reaching up to claw the belly of boats. Lake Michigan pretends, charming, a child's ocean, and her longshore tides creep along her beaches and tear away anyone foolish enough to believe the clear blue lie of her docility, most lethal of all.
Ontario is no business of mine.
Here, in order of appearance: Superior, Huron, Michigan and Erie.
The Great Lakes aren't haunted. No matter what anyone says, the Lakes aren't haunted. They are the memory-eaters, the old dark painted over with charming blue, and what sinks does not rise, not even the dead. When the Lake raises goosebumps, it isn't the bodies in the depths. It's just the Lake, reminding you that you are mostly water and water calls to its own.
The oceans, the old saltwater womb, warn you with every breaker that they are dangerous. The oceans never let you forget that you crawled from their hold, with your saltwater veins, but not all of your ancestors did, and there are things beneath the ocean tides, waiting with teeth to spill the blood you stole. The oceans with their shawls of hurricanes, their steady beating, make it impossible to forget the threat of them.
But the Great Lakes? The Lakes will lie to you. The Lakes will not gift you the buoyancy of saltwater, will tempt you with still surfaces and cool drinkable freshwater. The Lakes will promise that there is nothing with teeth waiting below, as though the Lake itself is not the maw of something hungry. The Lakes are new to the world, in the scale of epochs, and they play games. They lap at your knees like they are tamed, but if you swim long enough there will be a moment where the Lake throws you sideways, pulls you under, and you remember that this is a wild thing, with teeth of ice and nothing but water in its belly. They hold the last breath of every foolish swimmer that lowered their guard for a second too long, and the carcasses of centuries of shipwrecks, and they do not surrender what they take. No, the Lakes are not haunted. The Lakes are not cursed. There is no monster waiting in the depths, only the depths themselves, and that is enough.
They say that freshwater doesn't lay quiet in its bed until it's had its measure of blood, and the Great Lakes are thrashing at their shorelines.
Oh, my darlings, bodies and shipwrecks and memories are not the only things the Great Lakes devour--seasons, too, the Lakes cling to. All summer long the Lakes hold tight to the chill of winter, scattering cool breezes off their shoulders onto the coast. All summer long the Lakes hoard heat, storing it down in the deep thermal reservoir of fresh water, the golden heart of sunlight tucked away for the dark winter months. All summer long the Lakes steal warmth from the air and store it away, and when the sharp northern winds bring winter, the Lakes breathe out the last ghost of summer and fling themselves skyward. When the air is freezing, the Lakes have held fast the deep battery of summer, and the warm memory of July evaporates from the water and crystallizes in the atmosphere as January snow. All summer long the Lakes trade in winter winds, and all winter they shake out the white storm coat of summer.
Euripides (Tr. Anne Carson) / @wholeheartedsuggestions / Jenny Slate / Euripides again
something i think about a lot in relation to cycles is that they're a kind of circuit. a loop through which a current flows. and it is vital to understand this if you're going to break them without leaving the ruined, ragged ends to bleed out into empty space like poison, or attach themselves parasitically to someone or something else in order to survive.
yes congratulations you've broken the cycle but did you cauterise the cut. did you close the circle or leave it hemorrhaging its corrosive contents into the air and the groundwater and the soil.
tags by @thesealfriend
i know we’re both just messing around pretending to be whole but look at me. if the train was coming would you move. if the ground was falling from under your feet would you even notice or would it just be another tuesday for you. if somebody stabbed you could it hurt worse than you already do. what i’m saying is that i love you but i think we both drive over the speed limit when it’s raining. what i’m saying is that i want to hold your hand and i understand about how you sometimes have to sit down in the shower. what i’m saying is that i’m here for you and if the train comes please move.
i wrote this 7 years ago, somehow. every day someone else finds it and whispers to me - oh, i understand this. something always turns in the wash of my stomach: i am so, so glad you feel seen. i wish you had no idea what this post was about.
i wrote this while working in a program for new writers. on wednesdays, two of the teachers would be contractually obligated to read our writing aloud to the group of 300+ teens. i had never read my work in public before. i had something like 6k poems and was panicking about it. none of them are good enough. sometimes the train is howling. it is hard, actually, sometimes, even as an adult.
and then i thought - what is one thing i wish i could tell all of them. each of these 300 kids. what did i need to hear, at 16?
i wanted to tell them about the day you wake up, and the sun feels warm finally. i wanted to tell them about carving a life out of soapstone, your hands turning bloody. i wanted to tell them that sometimes yes - it actually does feel easy. i wanted to tell them about weddings and cookie dough and long road trips. about albums of new music and old friends laughing and the sound of snow falling.
you will learn the pattern of the train. you will learn to close your eyes when you hear the engine rumbling. you will learn to let yourself have the grey days in their lily-soft numbness. sometimes it will feel like life is wet paint, and god has smeared your canvas across a sewer grate. sometimes it will be so boring it isn’t even pronounceable - the tenacious, soundless blankness. survival isn’t just ugly nights and wild mornings. it is also the steady, unimportant moments. it is just driving with your seatbelt on. it is calling a friend on the way home. it is burying your face into the fur of your dog.
when i had finished reading this poem aloud, the auditorium was silent for a solid minute. someone stood up to take a picture of where it had been projected onto a screen, and then three more people followed the action, and then - like a bad internet story, people remembered they were supposed to be clapping. kids came up to me after it - thank you for writing that. i think i hear a train coming.
i would write this differently now, i think, but it has been 7 years. i still live by the tracks. i also haven’t picked up a blade in over 10 years. the scars are still there, but these days i only pick up scissors to cut my hair. i know why you can’t tell your mom about it. i know how the numbness slips over everything, a restless horrible cotton. i know how when you dropped the dish, you weren’t crying about the broken glass. i know about feeling like all the roads have closed their exits, that you aren’t supposed to still-be-here - and yet.
i am still here, and still yours, and i haven’t forgotten. what i’m saying is if any hope is calling to you - i know it’s hard, but you have to listen. i’m saying keep driving, but slow down the car. sit down in the shower, i’m not judging you. we can stay in the dark with the good hot water and do nothing but stare. notice the stab wound. make it through another tuesday.
i know what it is like to miss yourself. do what you need to. come home to me. i am writing to you, my past self, from the future. i’ll be waiting for you.
and when the train is coming - please move.
@roach-works // Melissa Broder, "Problem Area" // Mary Oliver, "The Return" // @annavonsyfert // Koyoharu Gotouge, Demon Slayer // Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance // David Levithan, How They Met and Other Stories // Tennessee Williams, Notebooks
“X bodily fluid is just filtered blood!” buddy I hate to break it to you but ALL of the fluids in your body are filtered blood. Your circulatory system is how water gets around your body. It all comes out of the blood (or lymph, which is just filtered blood).
“Okay but why is it always so chemically roundabout and unnecessarily complicated” well buddy, that’s because your blood is imitation seawater. See? It’s very simple.
Blood is what now?
It’s imitation seawater what part is confusing
Buddy if anything is living in your blood (except for more parts of you) in detectable amounts then you have a serious microbial infection and need to go to the hospital.
Humans are seawater wastelands kept sterile of all but human cells, with microbial mats coating their surfaces.
Thank you that’s…very disturbing
It’s not my fault you’re human.
Ok but “It’s not my fault you’re human.” Is the best comeback ever.
You can use it against anyone except children that you biologically helped to create.
Picture this: you are a Thing That Lives In The Ocean. Some kind of small multicellular animal a long time ago, before proper circulatory systems existed. “Wow,” you think, metaphorically, “it sure is difficult to diffuse chemicals across my whole body. Kinda puts a hard limit on the size and distance of what specialised organs I can have. Good thing I have all this water around me that’s the same salinity as my cells (they have to be that way so I don’t explode or shrivel up) so I can diffuse and filter chemicals with that.”
“Wait a minute,” you say a couple of generations later, because you’re not actually a small animal but an evolutionary process personified and simplified to the point of dangerous inaccuracy for the purposes of a Tumblr post, “instead of losing all these important chemicals to the water around me, how about I put it in tubes? I can keep MY water separate from the rest of the world’s water! Anything I want to keep goes in my water! Anything I don’t, I dump back into the outside water! I’m a genius! An unthinking natural trial-and-error process that’s a GENIUS!”
“Wow,” you think a great many generations later, “being able to have such control over such high concentrations of important chemicals is so great. Look how big I’m getting. I even have a special pump to move my seawater around, and these cool filter systems to keep the chemicals in it right, and that control and chemical concentration has let me grow so many energy-intensive, highly specialised organs! Being big is so hard. I need special cells just to carry my oxygen around now, to make sure my enormous, constantly-operating body has enough of it.”
At this point you are embodying a fish, and eventually, fish start straying into water with different pressures and salinity levels. (I mean, they do that since befor ehty’er fish, but… look, I’m trying to keep things simple here.) “What the FUCK,” you think. “My inside water is at a different salinity and pressure to the outside water?? How am I supposed to deal with that? I can’t have freshwater inside my seawater tubes! My cells have a set salinity and they would explode! I need to start beefing up my regulatory and filter systems so that my inside seawater STAYS SEAWATER OF THE CORRECT SALINITY even if the outside water is different! Fortunately, adding salt to my seawater is a lot easier than removing it, and I want to be saltier than this weird outside water.” At this point you beef up your liver and urinary systems to compensate for different salinities. (Note: the majority of fish, freshwater and saltwater, have a fairly narrow band of salinities they can live in. Every fish doesn’t get to deal with every level of salinity; they are evolved to regulate within specific bands.)
You also, at some point, go out on land. This is new and weird because you have to carry all of your water inside. “It’s a good thing I turned myself into a giant bag of seawater,” you think. “If I wasn’t carrying my seawater inside, how would I transport all these important chemicals between my organs and the environment?” As you specialise to live entirely outside of the water, you realise (once again) that it’s a lot easier to add salt to water than to remove it in great quantities. Drinking seawater in large amounts becomes toxic; your body isn’t specialised for removing that amount of salt. Instead, you drink freshwater, and add salts to that. The majority of your organs are, at this point, specialised for moving your seawater around, protecting it, adding stuff to it, or taking stuff out. You have turned yourself into an intelligent bag for carrying and regulating a small amount of imitation seawater, and its salinity (and your commitment to maintaining that salinity) is based entirely on the seawater that some early animals started to build tubes around a long time ago.
And that’s what a human is!
Well, there’s another few steps, of course.
Because at some point, operating along lines of logic that worked out perfectly so far, you did decide to be a mammal.
A mammal is a machine for adapting to Circumstances. A mammal is a tremendously resilient all-terrain life-support system, with built-in heating, cooling, respiration, and incubators for reproduction. Mammals internalise everything (grudges, eggs) and furthermore are excessively, flamboyantly wet internally. Sure, everyone’s a bag of chemicals; but mammals slosh. Mammals took the concept of an internal ocean and took it in an unnecessarily splashy direction, added aftermarket mods and a climate-control system,
and just to show off, you leaned across the metaphorical gambling table and said: “my internal ocean is so good-“
“Bullshit,” said the shark, keeping it salty (ha)
“My internal ocean is so brilliantly resilient, more so than any of YOURS,” you said, holding their attention with a digit held aloft, “that for my next trick, I shall artistically recreate the ballad of evolution as a performance. I shall craft a complex chemical ballet depicting the origin of multicellular life - using some of my own material, of course-”
“Oh, ANYONE can lay an egg,” yodel the fish, and the ray adds: “ontogeny does NOT recapitulate phylogeny!!”
And you’re like, “yeah no, it’s an artistic rendition, not a literal thing. Basically I’m going to take some cells and brew them up-“
“Like an egg.”
“Like an egg. An egg but internally.”
“Yeah,” said the viviparous reptile, “yeah, like, that can work really well. I’ve always said it’s the highest test of one’s chemical know-how. It’s a lot of work. And forget about support from your family - forget about support from your PHYLUM - all you get is criticism.”
“I’m gonna do it on purpose forever,” you said. “The highest chemical, thermoregulatory, immunological, everything-logical challenge. It’s gonna be my thing.”
“I’m with you,” said a viviparous fish, stoutly. “Representation.”
You kindly don’t point out, once again, that you’re planning to do this outside the ocean, in a range of temperatures; carrying the dividing cells in a perfect 37.5• solution of saline broth in all terrains, breathing oxygen in a complicated matter, you know, bit more difficult; but you need your allies.
“It’s solid,” says the coelacanth.
“But is it metal?” says the deep-vent organism.
“Oh, it’s metal. I will feed the young,” you say, magnificently, “on an echo of the mother ocean. The first rich feast of cellular matter, the first hunt for sustenance, the first bite they sip of our liquid planet-”
Everyone waits.
“Will be a blood byproduct. My own blood byproduct.”
Everyone looks uncomfortable.
“But,” a hagfish says carefully, “don’t you outdoorsy guys still need your blood?”
You cough and explain that if you stay wet enough internally and hydrate frequently, you should be able to produce enough blood byproduct to sustain your hellish new invention until they can eat your peers.
The outrage that follows includes questions like “is this some furry shit?” And: “milk has WATER in it?”
And you won the bet. “My inner ocean is such a perfect homage to the primordial soup that I can personally cook up an entire live hairy mammal in it. And then generate excess blood byproduct from my body and give it to the small mammal until it gets big.”
That is an absolutely bonkers pitch, by the way, and everyone thought you were a showoff, even before the opposable thumbs. When the winter came, and the winter of winters, and the rain was acid and the air was poison on the tender shells of their eggs and choked the children in the shells; when the plants turned to poison, and the ocean turned against you all; when the climate changed, and the world’s children fell to shadow; your internal ocean was it that held true. A bet laid against the changing fates, a bet laid by a small beast against climate and geography and the forces of outer space, that you won. The dinosaurs fell and the pterosaurs fell and the marine reptiles dwindled, and you, furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship, held hope internally at 37.5 degrees. Which is another thing that humans do, sometimes.
It has been MONTHS, @elodieunderglass, and I am still mumbling “furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship” under my breath as a comfort phrase, and the FUCKING INDIGNITY that it came from this godforsaken post about THE HORRIBLE WETNESS OF MAMMALS!
“The horrible wetness of mammals” would make a great band name.
“hold hope, internally, at 37.5 degrees” and “Mammals internalize everything (eggs, grudges)” Now live permanently in my vocabulary
