she/hers, mid-20’s, currently teaching high school history, returning to tumblr after realizing it’s the worst run major social media site and that makes it a liberated space
first time I ever went to the animal shelter and picked out my own animal was surreal. we had so many animals growing up but we never picked out any of them. and sure that’s normal for cats. they just showed up and we adopted them. but it didn’t end there.
we had a ball python because my mom was on a walk with her friends, saw it on the ground (this was Ohio) said “woah! that’s not native!” and put it in her purse. we advertised but never found the owner so we kept the purse python.
we ended up with a corn snake during a hurricane because my mom went out to get one of the cats and the corn snake was so little it came blowing through the air like a branch and my mom reached out and grabbed it out of the air to save it.
actually the point of this post is lost because I typed this far and realized the universe was maybe just sending my mom snakes specifically.
negative feeling number 2: pissed at the fucking insurance company for the fact that they denied coverage for an abdominal CT literally two weeks before she got diagnosed with stage iv cancer. Not that it made much of a difference because she got the CT after the colonoscopy turned up a tumor anyways but like she did have to wait for INSURANCE AUTHORIZATION? before GETTING A SCAN THAT WOULD HELP FIND WHERE THE CANCER IS?
negative feeling number 1: pissed at my mom for completely neglecting to take care of herself for her entire adult life, including smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day and drinking probably half a bottle of wine. That’s called high functioning alcoholism babe!
She also didn’t go to the doctor for literally years and then took a whole year from when she started to feel ill before she really actively sought out medical care
And two of her first degree relatives died of cancer! Like come on…
my mom just got diagnosed w stage for colon cancer in the last week and I have to be all ~put together~ and ~responsible~ and be a ~rock~ for my parents and my brother so he doesn’t drop out of school and ~keep my job~ so we can pay rent because my husband has no income right now
So I may use tumblr as the dumping ground for all my negative emotions. Again
[ID. A man plays a keyboard synth with his computer open on a music program recording the notes. Each note creates a horizontal line on the program with each line’s length corresponding to the length it is played and its height corresponding to the pitch. By playing the keyboard he draws a picture of a bearded man giving a thumbs up, which he imitates himself at the end, proving it is a self-portrait. End ID.]
My mamaw has the book right now so I won’t be able to read it for a little bit but my mom read The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan which is about the Dust Bowl and it puts in perspective all the environmental books I was reading from the 1940’s and 1950’s and the sense of agitation and intensity in them.
Everyone is like yeah yeah the dust bowl we’ve all heard of it, but the Dust Bowl was apocalyptic. The USA practically eliminated the bison—we are talking thousands of square miles of land littered with bones, enormous pyramids of skulls—and committed genocide against their caretakers, and then settlers ripped up the prairie grasses (which protected meters of top soil) with plows
And what happened was, half the country became in engulfed in horrific dirt storms that turned the sky black and reduced visibility to a few feet. Even indoor environments were full of deep drifts of dirt. When it rained, it rained mud instead of water. In ENGLAND the snow was RED because of DIRT. People died from pneumonia because they were breathing the dirt into their lungs.
Even before mom started reading this book, I was reading American books about the environment from the mid 20th century, and they are animated with the zeal and terror of people who have realized that human mismanagement could make the USA literally uninhabitable. I realized, “Oh. This is right after the Dust Bowl.” cause of how they talk about erosion, and I realized just how formative the Dust Bowl was in terms of environmental policy.
Reading about various wildlife species, I realized also how utterly apocalyptic the conditions of the past were for animals. Deer were almost eliminated from my state. Deer.
Why do we have the Migratory Bird Treaty Act? Because just about every large bird species almost went extinct from uncontrolled commercial hunting. We almost had no swans, no cranes, no egrets, no storks. We lost the passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets, but we could have lost Basically Everything.
So many of the ill-conceived decisions to introduce species to this continent are easily explained by how apocalyptic this period of time was. Why did we think it was a good idea to introduce Kudzu? Because in the 1950’s, erosion sparked a visceral apprehension of CERTAIN DOOM, and logging had made the whole southeast start washing away! Why were so many exotic antelopes introduced to Texas? Because every native large animal was almost wiped out!
From my other readings on the subject (Changes in the Land by William Cronon is a good one) devastating environmental destruction started just about as soon as Europeans started controlling the land, and I am guessing that if you examined the timeline of environmental disaster alongside the migrations west, it would support the argument that settlers started pushing west more and more rapidly because of land degradation and environmental disaster.
I wish this was commoner knowledge, getting to where we are now has been a journey. Environmental history doesn’t start in 1970’s.
It is not the case that things have steadily gotten worse over time and recently are becoming extremely bad, rather, different parts of the environment have become both better and worse in steps forward and backward, and many seemingly unremarkable things around us were earned by a vicious fight, which we can learn from and continue…
Washington DC, stronghold of the “Democratic Party” (الحزب الديمقراطي), a terrorist faction that rules the region,
Dulles International Airport — a site closely connected to the Biden movement — and other strategic Biden-controlled infrastructure,
just thinking about how the same usamericans who think their party deserves a free pass for GENOCIDE because it (theoretically) protects them from the meanie republicans, also demand that every swanan political party or movement that opposes that genocide be ideologically perfect or else our airports and paramedics deserve to be bombed. if I actually talked about the dems the way some of you talk about Hizballah or Ansarallah I would be banned for incitement to terrorism instantly.
farcille isn’t “toxic yuri.” nothing remotely toxic about them, they both treat each other with a great deal of care and affection and respect. just because marcille is willing to do forbidden necromancy and arguably cannibalism for her wife doesn’t make her toxic that’s just what you do for a woman with broad shoulders
