Hrmm. Well Hold On Now Ive Been Filled With A Sudden Joy And Whimsy For The World

Frank Vic

from here

To my international friends: If you ever wonder why Americans are the way they are, just remember that 1/3rd of all US citizens are in a cult that teaches them to suppress the activity of their prefrontal cortex, particularly when it comes to doubt, critical thinking, and differentiating emotional responses from personal values.

South Mimms, Herts; 26.2.2023

I LOVE THEM SO MUCH!!!

I can’t wait for the game,,,, sob,,,,

Inktober (2/2)

In the first poetry workshop I ever took my professor said we could write about anything we wanted except for two things: our grandparents and our dogs. She said she had never read a good poem about a dog. I could only remember ever reading one poem about a dog before that point—a poem by Pablo Neruda, from which I only remembered the lines “We walked together on the shores of the sea/ In the lonely winter of Isla Negra.” Four years later I wrote a poem about how when I was a little girl I secretly baptized my dog in the bathtub because I was afraid she wouldn’t get into heaven. “Is this a good poem?” I wondered. The second poetry workshop, our professor made us put a bird in each one of our poems. I thought this was unbelievably stupid. This professor also hated when we wrote about hearts, she said no poet had ever written a good poem in which they mentioned a heart. I started collecting poems about hearts, first to spite her, but then because it became a habit I couldn’t break. The workshop after that, our professor would tell us the same story over and over about how his son had died during a blizzard. He would cry in front of us. He never told us we couldn’t write about anything, but I wrote a lot of poems about snow. At the end of the year he called me into his office and said, “looking at you, one wouldn’t think you’d be a very good writer” and I could feel all the pity inside of me curdling like milk. The fourth poetry workshop I ever took my professor made it clear that poets should not try to engage with popular culture. I noticed that the only poets he assigned were men. I wrote a poem about that scene in Grease 2 where a boy takes his girlfriend to a fallout shelter and tries to get her to have sex with him by tricking her into believing that nuclear war had begun. It was the first poem I ever published. The fifth poetry workshop I ever took our professor railed against the word blood. She thought that no poem should ever have the word “blood” in it, they were bloody enough already. She returned a draft of my poem with the word blood crossed out so hard the paper had torn. When I started teaching poetry workshops I promised myself I would never give my students any rules about what could or couldn’t be in their poems. They all wrote about basketball. I used to tally these poems when I’d go through the stack I had collected at the end of each class. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 poems about basketball. This was Indiana. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the class, “for the next assignment no one can write about basketball, please for the love of god choose another topic. Challenge yourselves.” Next time I collected their poems there was one student who had turned in another poem about basketball. I don’t know if he had been absent on the day I told them to choose another topic or if he had just done it to spite me. It’s the only student poem I can still really remember. At the time I wrote down the last lines of that poem in a notebook. “He threw the basketball and it came towards me like the sun”

Mushrooms are so fucking weird

Physiologically, the cells of a mushroom are more similar to the cells of a steak than those of a plant

You put a mushroom into a mri and you’ll get an image that shows they have as much electrical activity as any brain.

We know that the mycelium, the main body of the mushroom, is interspersed into the soil, that the head of the mushroom itself is just the flower or fruit.

We also know that most plants grow better in soil with a living mycelium, and that branches of it will create small nodes that attach to the plants roots

Large old trees have shown that they have smaller rings in years where younger plants did well. Young plants do better when there’s older plants and mycelium present, even when there is no difference in nutrient content. The older plants are using the mycelium to communicate, to detect the presence of young plants and delegate resources to them. They’ve done this for millions of years, living in communal symbiosis.

They’ll help deliver water to places they’re more dry, sugars to places with less sunlight, and even carry minerals and other nutrients from place to place. The plants access the mycelium as a social network, to communicate their needs and offer any access resources they have.

Plants have had internet millions of years before humans ever even walked the earth