Locked vertebrae, smooth teeth
There's colder weather coming than I had expected, but this cold snap will be short. Thank goodness. Clouds this morning, heavy rain early in the afternoon, and then the sun returned. The high was 78˚F.
I went into McWane for an hour or so, just long enough to talk through with Jun a troublesome bit of an argument I'm making in the geology section of the macrobaenid turtle paper and to raid one of the hardware drawers in the lab for spare parts for my Dremel to speed along Winifred's preparation. There's not much more to say about today. I wrote a lot of emails. I talked with Bill Schafer very early, and he's going to let us sell copies of Vile Affections and Cambrian Tales in the "coming soon" Big Cartel shop. Kathryn and I are sick of watching ebay take 15% of every dollar we make, so...less eBay, more alternate means of offering my books to my readers.
Have I been talking too much? I mean, waxing political? I know many of my views are unpopular with many of my readers, but...what am I to do? These thought stew in my head, fermenting, turning poisonous. Increasingly, I feel like my silence brands me a conspirator. After all, I identify as gender fluid, right? I vote Democratic, right? I'm an evolutionist and an atheist, right? I'm an environmentalist, right? So...I must go along with all that other stuff, the liberal, progressive slate, as well, mustn't I? No, I mustn't. One of the flaws with American political thought (which, thanks to the internet, has become the world's political thought), if that we tend to take on our political views as package deals. One belief does not necessarily imply any other, and that sort of reasoning is childish and does a lot of damage. It obscures the genuine diversity of political ideology. I'm sorry, but my beliefs are complex, and I am sure that at times, to those who like things simple, black and white, cut and fucking dried, they must seem contradictory. But they are not contradictory, just complex, the product of a life spent asking questions, not buying into prefab solutions. Right now, neither the far right or the far left wants anything to do with difficult ideas (or, I fear, people thinking for themselves).
See? Talking too much.
“What we on Earth call God is a little tribal god who has made an awful mess.” - William S. Burroughs
If I have not offended you too badly, please have a look at the current eBay auctions. Good stuff. That copy of the "Waycross" chapbook, those are very rare, and that's the first one we've offered since 2013 (!).
Six days in a row I have left the house, and this afternoon I went to a market for the first time since summer 2020.
On the way out of the museum today - which is closed to visitors on Mondays and Tuesdays - I paused to appreciate the quiet and the minimal lighting. And took this photo of the skull of RMM 070, the very first mosasaur I ever worked on. The specimen was found in the Late Cretaceous-aged Mooreville Chalk of Greene County, Alabama in 1977. Among the work I did as a high-school volunteer at Red Mountain Museum, beginning in the summer of 1978 was some prep work on the end of the tail of this skeleton. It was a tiny bit of work entrusted to a high school student, but it's why I think of this as my "first mosasaur." Me and that lizard go back a long, long way.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast
11:44 a.m.
I went into McWane for an hour or so, just long enough to talk through with Jun a troublesome bit of an argument I'm making in the geology section of the macrobaenid turtle paper and to raid one of the hardware drawers in the lab for spare parts for my Dremel to speed along Winifred's preparation. There's not much more to say about today. I wrote a lot of emails. I talked with Bill Schafer very early, and he's going to let us sell copies of Vile Affections and Cambrian Tales in the "coming soon" Big Cartel shop. Kathryn and I are sick of watching ebay take 15% of every dollar we make, so...less eBay, more alternate means of offering my books to my readers.
Have I been talking too much? I mean, waxing political? I know many of my views are unpopular with many of my readers, but...what am I to do? These thought stew in my head, fermenting, turning poisonous. Increasingly, I feel like my silence brands me a conspirator. After all, I identify as gender fluid, right? I vote Democratic, right? I'm an evolutionist and an atheist, right? I'm an environmentalist, right? So...I must go along with all that other stuff, the liberal, progressive slate, as well, mustn't I? No, I mustn't. One of the flaws with American political thought (which, thanks to the internet, has become the world's political thought), if that we tend to take on our political views as package deals. One belief does not necessarily imply any other, and that sort of reasoning is childish and does a lot of damage. It obscures the genuine diversity of political ideology. I'm sorry, but my beliefs are complex, and I am sure that at times, to those who like things simple, black and white, cut and fucking dried, they must seem contradictory. But they are not contradictory, just complex, the product of a life spent asking questions, not buying into prefab solutions. Right now, neither the far right or the far left wants anything to do with difficult ideas (or, I fear, people thinking for themselves).
See? Talking too much.
“What we on Earth call God is a little tribal god who has made an awful mess.” - William S. Burroughs
If I have not offended you too badly, please have a look at the current eBay auctions. Good stuff. That copy of the "Waycross" chapbook, those are very rare, and that's the first one we've offered since 2013 (!).
Six days in a row I have left the house, and this afternoon I went to a market for the first time since summer 2020.
On the way out of the museum today - which is closed to visitors on Mondays and Tuesdays - I paused to appreciate the quiet and the minimal lighting. And took this photo of the skull of RMM 070, the very first mosasaur I ever worked on. The specimen was found in the Late Cretaceous-aged Mooreville Chalk of Greene County, Alabama in 1977. Among the work I did as a high-school volunteer at Red Mountain Museum, beginning in the summer of 1978 was some prep work on the end of the tail of this skeleton. It was a tiny bit of work entrusted to a high school student, but it's why I think of this as my "first mosasaur." Me and that lizard go back a long, long way.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast
11:44 a.m.