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From the NYT: A study published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that if you look at the world’s mammals by weight, 96 percent of that biomass is humans and livestock; just 4 percent is wild animals. Four percent. I mean, I know we're fucked, but that is the tangible figure I really needed.  I really liked this image so I fucked around with it for a while and came up with this. It's a greasy dream sort of thing. Have you ever experienced these kinds of visual effects whilst tripping balls on Psilocybe? There were two different pathways for me- blindly i.e passing/experiencing the sensory stuff through my skin and flesh, and letting myself fall into the drift through my eyes, if you know what I mean. The radiant way, sometimes full of offset detail and weirdly coherent colour shifts that relate to all those other forms of occult logic. Everyone's all about the mushrooms these days but I wouldn't have the guts to do them now, frankly. While I used to love their utter unpredictability, my brain's just seen too many rough miles. It's like that seething, fleshy stump monster in Flash Gordon in that the best I could hope for while tripping is not being painfully envenomed by some lurking dissociated scenario. I am disappoint. Mushrooms were the only hallucinogen I actually enjoyed from a purely recreational perspective. That's another problem with being middle-aged; you're only halfway through the tedious process of fully getting over yourself.  The prospect of genetically engineered organisms entering the New Zealand biosphere for fun but mostly profit keeps rearing its ugly fucking head. I maintain a hard no position. You don't have to understand the CRISPR processes to smell what stinks about it, though apparently the technicians and researchers pushing for its release still haven't bought a fucking clue. They are giddy about the science. It behooves them to present an unimpeachable account of its utility, and they display both coyly venal and terrifyingly naive attitudes toward its commercialisation. It is not anti-intellectualism to assert that we cannot trust academia with the totality of this decision and if a sizeable chunk of the nerd complex didn't privately acknowledge this, trust me, we'd already be eating tomacco. We should reject most forms of genetic modification for a hundred different speculative- precautionary reasons. Genetic expression and regulation are bewilderingly polyvalent, to an extent beyond our current collective understanding (not just my understanding). Modded genomes will contribute to wild and domestic biomes to unknown effect. Unknown effect. I'm not down. But there is another compelling reason to reject this technology, one that has nothing to do with the materia, and that is its underlying imperatives. The proposed modifications to farmed organisms are just doubling down on the greedy, mindless MO that has gotten us into this collective shit in the first place. The expectation of an endless free lunch, of infinite extraction via intensive agriculture has already despoiled the entire planet. How will plants tweaked to fruit all year be anything other than corporate-garrisoned vampires on our insolvent resources? The unprecedented and aseasonal amplification of production will not feed a billion more humans*; it will devolve into jet fuel for a garbage-fire market system in which greed, exclusion and profligacy are utterly intrinsic. Capitalism as it stands is the enemy of equitable provision. GE tech will make no net contribution to managing our finite inputs. There will be no more water or fertiliser left to lavish on apple trees that never stop fruiting or wheat that triples the currently achievable tonnage, and that production will be squandered anyway. Intensive farming interests in New Zealand have already wrought utterly perverse and irreversible damage under the aegis of a sociopathic corporate entity. The result? A huge chunk of New Zealanders can no longer afford dairy products or drink and swim in what remains of our cowshit-poisoned waterways. Fonterra has already demonstrated both its ruthlessness and its impunity. In a GE near future, when their modified cows need more resources to deliver more profit, who will restrain them? Nobody. I don't want to consume GE organisms, for both private and extrinsic reasons. Corporate interests are attempting to force them into the food chain. I think we've already established just how much altruism and integrity figures in their reckoning. If that isn't the most compelling of all arguments to say fuck no to the thin edge of this toxic wedge, I don't know what else to tell you. * Fertility rates are falling around the world to an unprecedented extent: it's not just you who doesn't want to fuck or procreate. Yay herd stress! I am NOT Shouting: Read more Selected Ravings here Chaos reigns here in the Blackthorn kitchen on this most sacred of nights. Whilst rain swept any soliciting children back to their homes, we macerated our intellects with Resident Evil and stuffed our gullets with unsightly profiteroles laden with home made ganache and passionfruit cream. I am lactose intolerant and not too good with grain starch either but life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved. These are the ghosts of profiteroles past now. Halloween is our anniversary. 26 fucking years in close proximity is a long time not be stabbing each other with whatever comes to hand. I have learned a few important things about relationships: there are no soul mates, just the people you choose to be with. Good will is everything. Apathy will sour empathy. No one really emphasises boring shit like this, but they are the pillars of enduring regard. Just thought I should pass that on. Have a good time tonight or whenever you're celebrating. It's the start of summer for us so there are no fucking pumpkins. Only flowers.   My apologies to Edgar and vintage Daniel but with great hotness comes great responsibility. Language. It's interesting, isn't it? This may not be a particularly original observation, universally speaking, but I only just noticed the other day that right wing fuckwits always have to have some sort of euphemism for who they are and what they're doing. While Antifacists are just plain AntiFa, liberals are just liberals and feminists are feminists, white supremacists and male tears outfits always have to call themselves something else, don't they? Skinheads. Futurists. Nationalists. MAGA. All those puzzling acronyms. The Proud Boys. Why not Proud Men? You guys are all about super-literal interpretations of fucking everything, so your tricksy reticence confuses my feminine perception. I think we've already established that you're not too concerned about looking/quacking like massive wankers. Surely your self-evident and inherent truths require no such verbal ganache. Why not just stand on a corner shouting white people/men in general are inherently superior and the best at everything please reinstate every nanogram of our unjustly-revoked privilege immediately or we'll kill you? It's your only real thing. Why be coy? I urge all interested parties to just go on with their bad selves, stop treasuring their ballbags in private and summon the courage to call their arsehole parties Men Are Furious At Even These Token Concessions And Will Rule Over You Again or something equally forthright. Just go for radical honesty and demand full Viking funerals with 10 teenage girls assaulted and incinerated with every drunk high-value citizen who falls through river ice chasing a dog that looked at him wrong. Don't ask, don't get. Jesus fucking christ, even Incels, that most reviled, maladaptive and fucktarded of demographics somehow summon the fortitude to moosh two brutally explicit descriptors together and wear them with the kind of petulant abandon that underpins their assaults upon randoms. Who's more chickenshit than a fucking Incel? Logic. Invented by men, for men. We can but spy it dimly. There is a moral to this story and that is never get involved in something that needs a euphemism the way dirty fingernails need a dark polish. Also: in light of the historic weight of judgement regarding feminine presentation, and with his consistently puerile execration of us in mind, I'm pretty sure it's equitable for me to note the endless gratitude we should feel toward Trump's physiological and mental repulsiveness. I know it's hard, but consider this; imagine the extra legions of sloppy apologists there would be for his shit if he was even remotely cute or smooth. There are a lot of shallow cunts out there who would vote for him in a trice if they could bring themselves to identify with or aspire to him physically. I'm happy he has a face like a sunburnt toe wart and the conversational skills of a dead dugong. That he has to walk, in public, like a poor person, for fear of getting perigluteal with a mobility scooter and losing that thing forever. Especially post-politically, when no one will ever go hunting in that cleft again. Thursday slash Friday slash dramatic views of the bay *again* yes I know I did that last week.9/8/2018
 I'm going to post a few things about the building process because I feel there's stuff I wish we had known before we began; it's like having kids- no one tells you about the bad shit until you're stuck in the middle of it. We've learned a lot and really sort of know what the hell we're doing now that the process is almost over. Just like life. You finally get a few things sorted and then poof, you're back to level one: microbial sludge. On that note I will leave you and go the fuck to bed before the paint fumes induce me to produce lewd couplets. There'll be another lipstick review this week because I have a backlog to document before offloading some. Reasons- I have them. Shut up.   This prolonged exposure captures the essence of the teen poodle's infernal spirit: play play play yap play play steal play rubbish rummage play play drag person 5 K play play sleep play. At eight months his testosterone is off the charts and it's fair to say that Fir is a fiend for action. A wee trip to the vet is due: don't tell him that.
Fir will find your bladder and stand on it at 5.30 every morning with unfailing accuracy. His opposition-pull reflex is off the fucking charts. He gets up on the sofa behind you while you're lighting the fire, positions two paws on your shoulders and presses a sloppy toy to the back of your head. His recall might be getting (slightly) better but he'll still fly across the yard and disappear into the unfenced bushes or frolic on the road if he gets the chance to bust out of the side door. He pulls everything onto the floor and jumps up and down on his back legs screaming like furious toddler in a supermarket if I dare leave the room without him. Doorways are for pissing in when it's cold and windy. The rubbish bin = lunchbox and don't ask what he does with high-quality poos if given a chance. Just... don't. Fir loves citrus, persimmons and almonds, which is weird and annoying because you have to give him yours, goddammit. He bounces on the spot barking hysterically at the prospect of R's fried egg sandwiches. I've realised I don't really know how to raise a normal dog. They always end up like this. Also- highly recommended for extreme-chew dogs with squeak fetishes; the Kong rubbery squeaky bones. The noise isn't too maddening, ours has lasted over a week now and doesn't show signs of disintegrating into atoms, unlike almost every other toy we've tried.   Fir growls at rearranged furnishings. He is cute, though. 
 Which is tragic, and also why we can never, ever consent to lose them. First, we tooled around the glass house with its tropical collections. Sticky. Vivid. Enlivening.
  
This beautiful Red Tailed Black Cockatoo hen is always down for a grevillea flower destruction opportunity or a closer look at your jewellery.  The divine Himalayan Poppy, Laburnum and Allium flowers.  When you meet onions that are more worthy and far better looking than you, you've learnt your true place in the universe.  * See more of our photography* Port Chalmers, New Zealand * Photos du Jour *
  We're keeping it small and cosy as opposed to enormous and tacky because we're not believers in trashing what makes a site appealing in the first place in order to install something which is supposed to take advantage of those amenities. Call us crazy. The Idlehouse will be cute, contextual and relaxing with relatable human scale and lots of soothing outdoor goodness because this seaside site is all about the garden and the view. Here's some able units from DS Building, a local outfit, stringing up the foundations. I chose them because they had worked with SIP panels before: believe it or not, this methodology is still somewhat novel here in New Zealand. It's fast, pre-cut, structurally efficient, super-insulated and relatively eco-friendly, on balance. I don't know about you, but I am massively over crappy traditional stick construction. The glazing will be low-E double. No, I am not getting any kickbacks for saying any of this stuff. Sigh. Now we have to go and dig some big fucking holes which I am not looking forward to. Talk to you soon.  Yes, this shit is late but we are still writhing in this last sludgy bit of boredom before the building of the Idlehouse and associated landscaping begins. Also, I am sick with the horrible yellow-phlemmgy coughing flu that's circulating (thanks R) and just can't really be arsed to put in any hard yards. This year has been one big stretch of flaccid, unwelcome fuckery and the least creative of my adult life but you've probably noticed that by now. Björk's The Gate. The video is shiny, and my draggy parts applaud that. But the other parts of me are like not this shit again. It looks like something Heston Blumenthal rubbed out after a dry spell and that's... that's not an unreservedly good thing (do you, like me, want to bludgeon virtually every vapid hominid he invites to those heinous staged theme dinner thingies? We've been bingeing on them recently and have come to regret it.) I'm a bit angry at the boring paucity of the song, tbh; just bleating the same lame phrases over all this tinselly visual winsomeness is getting on my fucking tits. It's called poetry, and I can get that shit anywhere. Tunes: look into them. Am I being unkind? Björk got publicly kicked in the heart by a third tier fuckboy. Painful? Hell yes. Humiliating? Certes. But unexpected? Come the fuck on now. Guðmundsdóttir, we've all been there, so stop fronting like that frankly icky amalgam was something for the ages when your average hedge sparrow could've plotted that trajectory in advance with a fucking crayon on some butcher paper. Being shit on by someone never worthy of you anyway isn't character building and you won't find much worthwhile pawing through the debris. Dickbags will get their pound of needy, gullible flesh any time we hand them opportunity. Most of us have, at one time or another. Everyone's time is a wasting while you flush that sludge and grope for your creative centre.
SPECIAL EMERGENCY NUZILLAND ADVISORY: vote, you bloody apathetic motherfuckers. We have our first real chance in ten fucking years to evict these ruinous ditchpigs so can we please do that? * More Selected Ravings. They are incredibly select *
Felix has always been a beautiful dog with elegant proportions which amplified the already janky dissonance between the necessity of the procedure and the potential psychosomatic fallout (for everyone involved). If that sounds like vanity, it really isn't; all animals rejoice in the power and efficacy of their own symmetry and taking that away from another beast is no small consideration. Taking him in to the clinic on the day of the operation was one of the hardest things I've had to do. It goes without saying that seeing him in a piteous daze on a mass of blankets in his vet cage post-op was a horrible, chest-crunching impact, and I didn't consider myself squeamish. But Alison at Humanimals Dunedin did a thorough, careful job of this awkward, late-stage procedure and the result is neat and utile, for which we are very thankful. Thanks also to our friends who ferried us back and forth from the vets, and to everyone who gave a shit and wished him luck. This pathology was able to sneak up on two relatively well-informed people who were very engaged with their dog, so don't be like us and dismiss the warning signs I will enumerate in a forthcoming post. Seek a medical opinion of any change to your animal's condition that persists for more than a week. Just fucking do it. We didn't, and all of us paid for that dismissive attitude, especially Felix. We feel a lot of shame and anger at ourselves for that. To anyone trying to decide between subjecting their furred friend to such a major procedure vs euthanasia- don't let your own negative presumptions get in the way of a good decision. Keep your head where it needs to be- in your knowledge and best interests of your animal instead of buried up the arse of your own speculative fears. Sometimes you have to let your friend go because it is best for them. Sometimes they aren't a good candidate for a change in their physical status and you must weigh the pros and cons. Felix is intensely physical, lives for his motility and we were deeply concerned about his post-quadrupedal morale. Would his new condition be enough for him? We hoped yes, and I think that was a good decision. All of these images, bar one, are of Felix after losing a leg. Within two weeks of losing that leg. I know not every dog will (literally) bounce into their new state like he has, and he's not out of the woods by any means. But he really is a happy little fellow, far happier to be pain-free than trapped in some malfunctioning idea of 'entirety'. Our fears are not their fears. His joy is our solace. Long live Foofie.
A wee bit of context: this is New Zealand. We have a general election coming up in September and we are staring down the barrel of another neoliberal term of pathetic social injustice- expanding poverty, homelessness and environmental degradation at the hands of the farming and mining lobby. Borrowing to buy groceries, watching your/your childrens' opportunities for secure employment and housing recede into the distance, our waterways choked with pollutants and our natural resources battered into nothingness; these are our everyday realities now. They might sound familiar to overseas punters and I want you to really, really understand that this is the whole fucking world and the picture you're being sold of this country by interested parties is complete and utter bollocks. Recently, Green Party co-head Metiria Turei (now a lawyer) admitted lying about her situation whilst on a benefit (what we call welfare in NZ) in order to receive enough money to actually live on (she didn't tell welfare about her flatmates). I'm going to stick my hand up and say I don't know a single person who hasn't done this to one extent or another as a way of negotiating their survival while at the mercy of a system designed to be punitive and utterly inadequate. All while listening to plenty of rich people bragging about their trusts and their offshore shit and their tax-dodging workarounds. So fuck everyone clutching their pearls about this. I've lived here long enough to know who's grifting our collective resources on a massive scale out of sheer fucking gluttony and who is just trying to make it into next week in an economic and social system stacked against anyone who's not already wealth-adjacent. Toby Morris is a local artist with a social conscience and the ability to neatly encapsulate one of the ugliest facets of NZ society; its frustratingly glib and utterly internecine battle with itself. Its need to blame the victims of neoliberal insanity for the latter's inevitable outcomes. I hope he doesn't mind that I boosted his shit, because I'd like you to see it.       Thank you for listening. Share this and give Toby a hand job or something on Twitter. And vote, fellow NZenders. Ideally Labour or Green. The time for sitting on your fat arse and nekk weekin is gone.  If you know poodles, you probably know they're high-functioning fiends in nappy form who will test boundaries you didn't know existed and treat your life like a theme park for dogs should you permit it. And we sort of do let Felix do that, which is our own fault. He's the kind of dog that flies over to the stereo when you're putting on a CD and then stands poised in front of a speaker to catch the music with his mouth. He employs sophisticated displacement routines when thwarted, taking his rope toy into the bedroom (where there is plenty of floorspace) and spinning with it in a violent, head-shaking circle, like a ninja with nunchucks, a process that helps him reject our judgement and expresses his inner turmoil. He has an alter-ago, blanketmonster, who emerges when his head is covered with any sort of cloth; blanketmonster is full of furious courage and master of all. If an underling should insist on booping his nose through the cloth, they will be subjected to many devastating raaahrings.  Felix started looking at the internet over my shoulder and soon realised it was dog-relevant, being cat-heavy and featuring a lot of unassuming prey animal content. I made the huge mistake of showing him huskies on Youtube and now he is an addict, insisting on two YT viewings per day. He's angry with me as I type this instead of getting onto far more pressing concerns such as talking parrots, pool full of ducks, dogs howling and the eternal leopards looking in mirrors. The retriever drive is strong in Felix and he would stare at the fucking ducks in perpetuity if we let him. I think he understands that they are representational instead of absolutely real, but he still gets up and low-key looks for the animals once the laptop is closed, as though he feels slightly foolish doing so but just needs to make sure I don't have a duck stash under the bed. I only ever really watched music and documentaries on YT until Felix began influencing our viewing habits. One shouldn't write it off completely as a cesspit of subcreatures- I mean... don't read the comments unless you are planning an end-of-life righteous killing spree, but there are small specks of pure visual and spiritual gold. Black Palm Cockatoos drumming to impress mates, for instance. And if watching (I think these are Rufus or Allen's) hummingbirds bathing en mass doesn't do anything for you, I'm not sure what will. Both Felix and I recommend the following pieces.
I think it will be another lipstick review this week unless something interesting happens. It's the deadest time of year for us so that's just how shit rolls right now.
I'm using other peoples' photos to illustrate what I mean because we leave taking photos in heavy rain situations to basics with shitty cameras. There's been a pretty big slip down the road at Back Beach beneath some houses and at times like this I'm glad we live in an old quarry on exposed stone and not on punk-arse loess. Just saying. *braces for karmic rock to back of head as cosmic retribution for even mentioning that shit*
I don't usually comment on the end-of-life choices of people I don't particularly admire and nor do I pretend to have any insight into his private circumstances, but the Chester Bennington suicide prompts me to pass on a warning about something I've learned for myself. Depressives need to look after themselves extra-hard as they enter their forties. Like me, you might have thought you were getting your mood disorders/mental health issues somewhat under control in your late 30s. You found a decent partner. Got sober. Came to terms with your sexuality. Put down roots. Maybe had kids. Got your shit together. And then... it all falls away from under you. Midlife troubles are more than just a perceptual glitch that runs you into an existential culvert. It is an actual, material, physiological thing. If you thought you knew irrationality, buckle up bitches because your hormones can take you to parts of nuttytown you never knew existed. It is almost impossible to convey to the uninitiated just how hard the endocrine fluctuations that manifest at this juncture- for both women and men- can hit you. Nobody talks about it, especially in relation to the male experience, but I'm here to tell you it's real and it can fuck. you. up. I hadn't had explicitly suicidal thoughts for about 15 years... until I hit 41-42. Suddenly I was all the way back to a late teens-level of depressive ideation and hideous mood instability. I'm only barely perimenopausal (the nebulous stage before menopause, typically 35-50) and I wanted to walk off a fucking cliff. Testosterone and oestrogen are present in and vital to all genders. They respond to all sorts of bodily travails and seasonal cues. Levels start to change and can swing out of relative balance in middle age, surging and dropping in response to each other. That unaccustomed state can be devastatingly disruptive to anyone who is already struggling with depression, bipolar, schizoid disorders etc. etc. It's a natural process, but this is me begging anyone reading this - especially men, who are often totally oblivious to their own hormonal fortunes- to prepare themselves psychologically and emotionally for the mental fallout. Pay extra attention. Get extra help. Just suck it up and tell your friends and family you're having trouble as soon you notice the needle pointing down. None of this might have had any relevance whatsoever to Bennington's action. But I'm seeing a worrying pattern emerging in midlife depressives and fuck-all attention being paid to the physiological changes that are more than likely exacerbating it.
Aphex Twin. Best conceptual subversion ever. Click right for the complete, long arse, super N-word version if your sensibilities can tolerate said epithet. I'm just going to pour Twitter petrol over my head right now and say that I personally prefer to differentiate between nigger and nigga. To me, one is obviously offensive and the other affectionate/inclusive, but then I'm not black and don't get to decide how it is perceived by people who are. In the same way as only I get to decide who can say bitch or cunt to my face with impunity. In my experience as someone who's probably been called almost everything under the sun except nigger (stupid fag-loving slut was probably my all-time favourite WTF high-water mark) it's best to back the truck up and repossess that shit so that racists and misogynists aren't the ones in charge of terminology. Not everyone agrees and that's their prerogative. But R is my bitch and we have learned, after 5 binged seasons of The Wire, that we are both off-brand niggas. I just wish I'd known before now. * More Selected Ravings * Link Roulette * More fucking Link Roulette *
Supermarkets sell out of bread. The reality is we still have soggy daisies on the shortest day. And good blues. Luminous and saturated at the same time. I think we have some of the best blue on the planet.  Our daily walk alongside the harbour isn't the worst thing that can happen to someone. I'll trade getting rained on for these clouds and their reflections. The big Larus Kelp/Blackbacked Gulls are starting to pair up again, loitering idly together, running through random phrases of their courting routines and ducking for crabs in the sea lettuce. You can see one floating in the lower third of the image below. A lot of people dislike them, reviling their intelligence, persistence, resourcefulness and courage. It's because Blackbacks refuse to go quietly. They are a totem and consolation, reminding us implicitly that axial tilt is a real thing and that this internal drab is in remission; I will take their word for it.   Sometimes bands of rain out of the south are split by the snaking length of the harbour and will cling to the line of the peninsula rather than dumping their shit indiscriminately. The sun rides low toward the north, so we end up with these freakish split-frame meteorological vistas. This is the first time I've caught one with a camera.  R is always impressed by the sight of these boats at Back Beach and insists that I take this shot when there is any sort of light. It might be a male thing. So blame him for this same frame as last time bullshit. Boats are just cars on water to me- sort of ugly, barely fit for purpose and vaguely transgressive. But then I can swim really well and don't fancy a propellor slicing into my backfat. The clinker dinghy.  * The ravings are selected * Photoessays * Port Chalmers *
There are a thousand hearts in my eyes right now because it's so stupidly hard to source the fancier variants in NZ. Hope I don't kill it. Go down the whole hole head first. You're welcome.
Well, about the most exciting thing that happened this week was meeting this incredibly hairy dog whilst walking locally. Felix didn't try to savagely x him out, which was a bonus; as he gets older I think he's slowly getting better with his more presumptuous compatriots. He was fine with other dogs as a puppy until a local arsehole let his much larger beast go violently batshit at him in passing. Poor Foof was indelibly terrorised, becoming regrettably super-anxious and aggressive around a certain type of larger, dominant dog ever since. It's such a shame because he lives to play and there aren't any smaller, 'safe' dogs who can keep up with his insane athleticism; they get sick of puffing along in his wake and lose interest. And here beginneth my rant about this kind of dog-related bullshit. Felix may be a mouthy arsehole on occasion but he's too small to be dangerous and is leashed in public 98% of the time- 100% around other dogs. We try really hard to keep a foot on him because we, you know, recognise that his behaviour can be problematic.
They're looking to put a bit of lateral, smart-casual scruff on their too-catalogue presentation, hence the dog. Their ambient bougie cluelessness extends through barely looking up from their phones into abhorring the idea of constraining their retarded, utterly unsocialised retrievers/exotic breed flanker pieces with something as off-brand as a leash. It's the weekend. Their weekend. Most of them don't know or care that their oblivious, self-regarding fuckery can inflict hassle and even danger on unsuspecting strangers, but here's a clue for the curious: if strangers are having to fend off your bossy-arse, uncontrolled accessories because you won't even call them back to you (the guy at the leadership retreat said raising your voice was beta-signalling), you're being a selfish, stunted cunt. You're as shit at walking your dog as you are at managing everything else (see: tech industry). Everybody hates you. Leash the fucking things.
There was nothing nobly disinterested about my wanting to finally watch this thing. I had a cold, was in a shitty mood and was more than happy to slake my puffy gaze with the spectacle of karma as administered by angry bears. Grizzly Man is admittedly a gratifying watch for a number of reasons, not all of them socially irresponsible. Herzog's measured, compassionate observation and genius for winkling the shiny-eyed lunatic out of complete randoms (that coroner) are generally worth a squiz. We're always down with bears and mountains and foxes. But most alluring was the absolute, cast-iron, aforementioned certainty- obvious to anyone who's ever spent time around other animals- that the bear-bothering Timothy would end up as sticky grist to the Darwinian mill. It's not that large wild animals are inevitably going to attack anyone who spends time in their orbit; nothing could be further from the truth and many of us owe our lives to that forbearance. I've ridden borderline personality horses. Handled Oxyuranus scutellatus without knowing what it was (we were too far from any antivenom source anyway; lol, thanks dad!). Swum in oceans heaving with Crocodylus pororsus, Galeocerdo cuvier and Chironex fleckeri. Broken up dogfights. Run very quickly away from angry and extremely feral Bubalus arnee. And I'm still here.
I stumbled over this shit on some other totally unrelated website. For those of you unfamiliar with the phenomenon, Primitive Technology is a nameless Australian guy running through various practical experiments in the bush with well, primitive technology, to achieve basic levels of anthropoid comfort and functionality. He makes a kiln, simple forge, baskets, prawn trap, pottery and various huts etc. from the modest resources of his northern Queensland bush setting and if that doesn't sound especially riveting it's because you've never experienced his delivery.  It is minimal. Silent. Unsmiling. Largely devoid of eye contact or indeed any of the extraneous and highly execrable elements now sadly synonymous with Youtube presentations. There is no calculated self-aggrandisement; no desperately studied tattoos, no chicken dos, no notice-me piercings, no branded items. Primitive Technology man wears crap board shorts and a series of inexpensive haircuts to get shit done. The episodic demonstrations are like plunging one's face into clean meltwater after extrication from the synthetic ooze that is the rest of the internet (by and large, present company excluded). His delivery rides the line between meditative and ruthlessly purposeful and I find myself watching the episodes over and over in bed late at night. R doesn't even mind. I think he's a little bit in love with him too. Having grown up in Arnhem Land, I guessed where he was from the eastward shift in the otherwise similar birdsong, especially the Peaceful Doves warbling away in the background as is their charming/fucking incessant wont. I've lit friction fires. Whittled poky things from those white-wood saplings, constructed coil pots from the slippy clay gouged out of riverbanks, made bush cubbies and hardly ever worn shoes. All this is tremendously significant and formative and Primitive Technology really plucks that atavistic string. If you've never done any of this stuff you have never really contacted your inner feral. It's my contention this constitutes an important deficit that many more people should concern themselves with. In the absence of other, more explicit causation, it might just be why you're having those panic attacks and eating your feelings. I'm not joking.  Against all those nobler considerations I will admit to finding Primitive Technology more enjoyable for being shirtless and well-made, because I am a hopeless voyeuristic hobag. The sight of a semi-naked idiosyncratic sort of person glowing roseate in the light of a hand-built forge or mutely treading clay in the middle of nowhere moves me deeply. There is something oddly fetching and completely un-gratuitous about that stoic, rain-shaped thatch of possum-coloured hair, silty fingernails and robust architectural pallor, especially whilst demonstrating that most erotic and beguiling of all personal qualities: competence. Together they are a slutty primal bush-pig banquet. I don't know how Primitive Tech man would feel about my unseemly objectification but that just sprinkles his sexy mystery with more sexy mystery. Primitive Technology: would, hard, repeatedly. Highly recommended.
 Uninspired, yo. Drawing a big blank recently. Probably because it's still warm enough to do boring perfunctory outside shizniz and this is keeping my brain in end-of-summer-fry mode rather than letting it slide naturally into magic winter swamp-consciousness. Hate it when that happens, and I know it's boring for anyone reading this so I apologise. I'm even having a hard time listening to music and had to force myself to throw a Björk mixtape out of sheer fucking bloody-mindedness; the effect was startlingly somatic, like someone pumped my veins full of lemonade and the bubbles were crawling along my interior walls. Hormones? Moon phase? Mental illness? Ticks all boxes, rolls up questionnaire, inserts into nostril, lights end on fire. Also: politics. Le Pen face-planted in France which is fantastic and perhaps signals that the world's trifling ho voting bloc is actually seeing the Trump novelty presidency for the defective carny trinket that it is. But I've learned never to underestimate the global net volume of stupid and with all this greasy right wing tonnage (feels like squid guts, smells like Kardashian bum cleft) dumped on our unsuspecting doorsteps by various leagues of petulant morons, I'm starting to share their confusion re the political spectrum and where my fat arse sits on that lateral.
All that has always felt like liberality to me. I've gotten even more that way with mileage, in inverse to the usual hardening of the ideological arteries into supposedly inevitable conservatism. But am I liberal? I ask that lately because I do actually judge the living shit out of a lot of stuff and some of my most strongly-held convictions aren't very fluffy. Examples: I'm absolutely, 100% fine with the death penalty, for homicide and other violent crime involving cruelty, premeditation and long-term offending. Enthusiastic, even. Fuck forgiveness and empathy. There's no robust ethical case for feeding and housing recidivist scumbags (especially when their victims receive no such consideration) and I'd lose bugger-all sleep flipping any number of kill switches on a volunteer basis. It's true that I cannot actually support a death penalty implemented by a State and adversarial justice system skewed into the ground against the non-rich and non-white, but my objections are purely, utterly practical. How do you like me now? Then there's my loathing of negligent breeders (all genders). In countries with access to birth control and abortion, people who have more than one whoopsies kid without the means or inclination to support their brats to a reasonable standard really, really piss me off. Not because of their reliance on welfare or tax subsidies, to which their blameless children are certainly entitled, but because they have voluntarily disadvantaged their offspring, dumped a shit bucket of consequences on the rest of us and that is demonstrably fucked up. I feel like a lot of people should care enough about kids to not have any. Sometimes I'm even fairly sure I could be entrusted with the codification of those restrictions. As did Hitler. Don't get me started on the arse-whipping I'd like to hand out to environmental rapists and their gold digging collaborators (all of whom could be gainfully employed elsewhere. I know this because I know plenty of you.) Twenty to life, sluicing out mercury-tainted tailings dams in jandals for those bastards. Good behaviour doubles your sentence because it just proves you knew better all along. I'm not joking.  Then there's the flatulent elephant in every fucking room at the moment: immigration. The idea of unrestricted or even poorly-administered immigration appals me for a lot of reasons, and this is possibly something I struggle with most in my distaste for state-imposed sanctions against personal freedom. As a relatively (on a planetary scale) privileged individual born into a western democracy, the stinking NIMBYist hypocrisy of all this is like something pulsing, pink and tentacular wrapped around my forehead, but I just can't with the prospect of ten million more people filing into the country of my birth. I'm not talking about refugees; sneaky conflation of the two entirely separate issues is grotesquely sleazy and pointless. And it's not a race thing; I dislike everyone pretty equitably. It's just that we're already up to our tits in the kind of greedy denialists who make a humane existence for everyone else here an impossibility. There's no room for more. It's an icky slope, isn't it? You can dress up your personal disinclinations in specificities- for instance, I don't consider not loving the idea of hundreds of thousands of socio-religious conservatives turning up on the doorstep quite as gross as slack-jawed racist objections, but the effect is largely the same. Would I support a wall if we didn't already have the Pacific? Shit, I don't know. Have you, in the privacy of your own conscience, asked yourself that one yet? This is one of the great contemporary failings of liberal philosophy. Many of the people who claim to regard everyone as manifestly equal and march against immigration restrictions are also the people who selfishly gentrify and benefit from segregationist policies whilst calling wall-supporters nazis. That's just the herpes-crusted, donut-loving truth. I've never met a liberal who could articulate a solution to the global demographic clusterfuck. They're like me; they don't want xenophobic restrictions on immigration, but nor do they want to find themselves another bobbing mass in a dangerously crowded stew of incompossible anthropoid elements. What the fuck are we going to do and why is the honest/humane answer so obscure in comparison to the nasty/stupid one? What's the pokable difference between me and your average low-functioning triple-chinned conservative anyway?
* The Ravings are Selected: just saying what you've been thinking for 4 long years now *Monday slash Tuesday slash Four Fucking Years of Blogging like I have nothing Better to Do25/4/2017
 This is the first thing I ever posted to this blog and that was four years and three days ago. Which is a fairly long time. Blogs are like companion animals in that you have to feed and look after them and generally give a shit if you want them to live, though it's hard to decide what constitutes a vital sign. Is it the size of your audience? I get, on average, about a thousand looks a day; I think my biggest day was over three thousand. That feels sort of alright for an non-promoted, noncommercial site that won't fuck for clicks, but whatever; maybe it's pathetic and all the cool people on snapchat have trilliony billions of views and this blog is a sad little bitch sitting at home licking the last ice-cream off the lid because nobody loves it. You decide. The only time I was ever particularly surprised or chuffed by my figures was back when R proudly announced at I'd had fifty clicks a day for a whole week. I still think of it in allegories like the whole open mike night in a shitty club thing- you'd be happy and in all honesty stoked to the tits with fifty people not leaving and even making the effort to look up from burning their names into the tables with their cigarettes or privately reviling their companions.
Blogularly, the impact of net neutrality circling the drain in the US looms large. Of course it's repulsive corporate piracy and will possibly relegate sites like this to cobwebby oblivion. But both R and I view this site as more than just a flea market table for our most presentable ideations; sharing knowledge and observations is a responsibility that falls to the people who have the time and ability to do so, and we take that seriously, given the cesspit of stinky mental garbage we're all forced to wade through online. Neither of us would have made it this far into our lives without all the many people who have cared enough to share their private commonalities, both homely and exotic, and shit they learned to do the hard way, whether through music, text or visuals. The internet should not be the exclusive domain of ratchet narcissists, neckless racists (who should study that familial group shot in good light before wanking on about endogamy) and unsavoury Youtube cat maniacs (it does something cute, or it gets the hose again). We might be a wee bit ratchet, somewhat neckless and quite unsavoury, but we don't trowel our eyebrows on in the morning*, fuck our cousins** or pimp our associate animals for likes***. The Blackthorn Orphans. Dripping homemade syrup on a world of shit since 2013. It's black so it might not show up very well, but we hope you can taste it. * any more ** to the best of our knowledge *** Felix is all like say my name, bitch. It's his idea. Still love this album. And this is the perfect version of this song only it has to be a lot louder than your device will probably allow. Nasty nostalgia ne plus ultra. Inspiration, going forward. |
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