"A wall of pitch for the dying of light." (130)
Well, it was a day. At least there was sunlight. The high was 76˚F.
I spent the morning on MP2. Late in the afternoon I went to McWane, and Jun and I went over some of it. It will be at least three or four days before we can submit.
At this point, this thing has become a financial burden. I apologize to everyone who's waiting on me for anything. Sincerely.
Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be. ~ Charles Bukowski
Well, I can't.
I have not been this depressed since...well, long before the move. Maybe a decade. It's a flat, glassy depression. It is infinite. It's smooth.
I actually saw a very young paleontology postdoc whining about pith helmets being a symbol of colonialism. I wanted to cry, but I settled for laughing.
Here's something I wrote on Discord today (don't ask):
For me, despair is what you get when you strip away all hope, all ideology, all of it, and just do the math. But people confuse despair and resignation, and they are not the same thing at all. Someone grappling with despair is, well, still grappling. The resigned stop moving. I despair at the failure of our ability to learn from history (let's, for example, say WWII) and the futility or our grand gestures at equality (let's say the Civil Rights Act). In the end, we are clever apes, still acting like apes....I have hope. I just don't have much of it for mankind. The world looks remarkably like it did at the dawn of WWII. Only now there would be no Allies to defeat the fascist Axis. And how does one not despair when the loops of history grow so very small? (But there are really good people trying really hard!) Hell, we clever apes, the world over, are so superstitious, so ignorant, so hateful that we could not even come together to fight a plague. A plague that is STILL as bad as it was a year ago. Defense of the species fell to a relatively small number of scientists and politicians and activists to try and keep that from being many times worse than the horror it has been. You look at COVID-19, just that ONE thing, at what the world's collective reaction to COVID-19 means for a perilous Anthropocene future, and if you do NOT despair, your head is up your ass.
There's more, put I'll spare you. Someone questioned my right to even feel despair.
On that note, do please have a look at the Big Cartel shop. If only because I am an idiot. And Kathryn shouldn't have to suffer for my mistakes. Thank you.
The photo below, it ties directly to that next mosasaur project, the one I agreed to be part of yesterday. This is the first mosasaur I ever found, back in July 1980. I was 16. I found it in a railroad cut just south of Demopolis, Alabama. It also happens to be the first mosasaur I ever prepared,work I did in the winter of 1981-1982. And here it is, forty years or so at McWane Science Center...still safe. Oh, the weird globular red-brown stuff is iron pyrite, a problem in some parts of the chalk.
Later Tater Beans,
In Despair, Aunt Beast
4:21 p.m.
I spent the morning on MP2. Late in the afternoon I went to McWane, and Jun and I went over some of it. It will be at least three or four days before we can submit.
At this point, this thing has become a financial burden. I apologize to everyone who's waiting on me for anything. Sincerely.
Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be. ~ Charles Bukowski
Well, I can't.
I have not been this depressed since...well, long before the move. Maybe a decade. It's a flat, glassy depression. It is infinite. It's smooth.
I actually saw a very young paleontology postdoc whining about pith helmets being a symbol of colonialism. I wanted to cry, but I settled for laughing.
Here's something I wrote on Discord today (don't ask):
For me, despair is what you get when you strip away all hope, all ideology, all of it, and just do the math. But people confuse despair and resignation, and they are not the same thing at all. Someone grappling with despair is, well, still grappling. The resigned stop moving. I despair at the failure of our ability to learn from history (let's, for example, say WWII) and the futility or our grand gestures at equality (let's say the Civil Rights Act). In the end, we are clever apes, still acting like apes....I have hope. I just don't have much of it for mankind. The world looks remarkably like it did at the dawn of WWII. Only now there would be no Allies to defeat the fascist Axis. And how does one not despair when the loops of history grow so very small? (But there are really good people trying really hard!) Hell, we clever apes, the world over, are so superstitious, so ignorant, so hateful that we could not even come together to fight a plague. A plague that is STILL as bad as it was a year ago. Defense of the species fell to a relatively small number of scientists and politicians and activists to try and keep that from being many times worse than the horror it has been. You look at COVID-19, just that ONE thing, at what the world's collective reaction to COVID-19 means for a perilous Anthropocene future, and if you do NOT despair, your head is up your ass.
There's more, put I'll spare you. Someone questioned my right to even feel despair.
On that note, do please have a look at the Big Cartel shop. If only because I am an idiot. And Kathryn shouldn't have to suffer for my mistakes. Thank you.
The photo below, it ties directly to that next mosasaur project, the one I agreed to be part of yesterday. This is the first mosasaur I ever found, back in July 1980. I was 16. I found it in a railroad cut just south of Demopolis, Alabama. It also happens to be the first mosasaur I ever prepared,work I did in the winter of 1981-1982. And here it is, forty years or so at McWane Science Center...still safe. Oh, the weird globular red-brown stuff is iron pyrite, a problem in some parts of the chalk.
Later Tater Beans,
In Despair, Aunt Beast
4:21 p.m.