Luke O. @loppear@social.coop

Broken hearing David Graeber has died. In the middle of reading Utopia of Rules, after much love over the years. Thought his voice on the state of society would be with us for so much more of my life.

Wild hogs are back in the swamp, hanging out in sight of the back porch midday. Those cute piglets are quickly becoming normal sized. Git!

Sea Rim State Park (Texas) sunset from our camping trip last summer. Directly in Hurricane Laura's path tonight, thanks for the memories.

Anole on the ginger

Backyard wrens and mutually tawny deer
Followed by fadingly spotted fawns
Flit at the woods dappled lip
To a backbeat of carpenter bees
Nibbling in the porch beams

#smallpoems

To accept change as inevitable, and believe it is possible.

2020 in my mailbox

#Reading "Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution" by Peter Matthiessen. Good journalistic labor history, spending time with Chavez in the midst of 1968 grape strikes and boycotts, and situating the events and arguments from growers and strikers in a context of immigration, exploitation, racism, pesticides, and poverty. Desperation and nonviolence at the fore.

I'll keep using Firefox until well past when I should. Been a good run and fraction of my life.

Had some fun with capturing Water Striders on a little sun-dappled creek.

An endearingly clumsy experiment report on building a geodesic dome greenhouse. I want to give them a hug and a high five for their perseverance:

https://www.instructables.com/id/20-Geodesic-Dome-Greenhouse/

So many hummingbirds out in the garden this morning.

*poke*

Do you know anyone who is emotionally prepared for the possibility of living through a second term? Do all your scenarios have "it'll have to get a little better by Nov, at least"?

Actually, the creeping creepy overlap between The City We Became and Lovecraft Country is much more timely and germane. A good pair, staring directly into the racist ideas of the namesake horror and twisting it to shine on itself - one for the past, one for right now.

Just finished reading The Glass Hotel and currently reading The City We Became. Both have very central oddities that are very spoilerific, uncomfortable for me as I like to kibbitz stories with my partner but she also has a very low tolerance for even thematic spoils, and neither is likely to get a strong enough recommend from me for her to read them to discuss (though both were on her list to start)

Be chill and flamboyant like this tiny shiny fly

... real, but referenced in an eerily fictionalized and magical novel of Jim Crow North, "Lovecraft Country" by Matt Ruff.

Fear is palpable in so much of our unexamined racial interactions in this country. And comfort in caste.

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." - James Baldwin

Here's the Standard Form Restrictive Covenant, Chicago 1927. "[Restricted to not] be used or occupied directly or indirectly by any negro or negroes, provided that this restriction shall not prevent the occupation, ... of janitors' or chauffeurs' quarters in the basement or in a barn or garage in the rear, or of servants' quarters by negro janitors, chauffeurs or house servants, respectively, actually employed as such for service in and about the premises ..."

"Chained In Silence" by Talitha Leflouria is hard reading about women in convict labor in Georgia after Reconstruction. This is not about wealth per se but sets the raw ground of devalued labor, disposable underclass, and vagrancy laws to allow the rounding up of that class, that the incarceration exception to the 13th amendment immediately and persistently enabled.