They say that death is a part of the hobby. Though snails are honestly pretty hard to form a deep emotional attachment to, I really loved this nerite. Though unnamed, my snail was a lively critter, an honest guy, and an instrumental component of the aquarium environment. It always sucks to lose something in your care, and that depressing fact of the hobby is no different for a lowly mollusk.
I haven’t taken the opportunity to speak much about my five gallon tank on this blog. I took a trip in August, but before I left I quickly seeded a little aquarium with some clippings of vallisnera, hornwort, fine sand, and a nice rock. I filled it with some water that had collected in a plastic bin outside and left the tank on the windowsill by itself for a week and a half. The sunlight did its work. Clouds of algae cobwebbed the hornwort and an emerald film of duckweed covered every centimeter of the tank’s surface. The sand was a much more forgiving medium than the gravel had been and the vals sent forth a bounty of runners to propagate fresh growths. Even a pleasant fuzz of algae grew along the slanted face of the rock like moss over a boulder. It was a lush system vibrant with life, teeming with tiny pond snails and swirling daphnia. Mosquito larvae from the stagnant bucket water dove and danced in the primordial water column.
The algae on the glass was an eyesore, though, and I knew I needed a nerite to clean the place up. I discovered shortly upon returning from my adventure across the country that there was local fish shop not a fifteen minute walk from my house. The staff are incredibly friendly and knowledgeable, and their selection of freshwater plants and small fish are ideal for my interest in small, filterless aquariums. I was so impressed by the place that I returned the very next day after my first visit and immediately bought a gourami and amano shrimp for the ten gallon (detailed here). On my first trip, however, I bought a nerite.
It was large–a zebra nerite I believe. The shell featured a black strip spiral that bent toward a cracked tip. It was much larger than the nerite I bought months ago for the nerite, and I suppose I should have suspected that it was just an older snail. If a creature gliding along a single slimy foot could be described as lumbering, this snail lumbered. It may have been slow, but the job was done, and it was done well. In a week the glass was free of algae. I like to think that I gave this shy grazer a pleasant last few weeks before it passed.
(If you want to read about my aquarium as it developed through the spring, click here)
Why do we build fish tanks?
We build fish tanks to house fish, of course. It was always my goal to house some living vertebrates in my aquarium, but a certain fear of moving prevented me from doing so. The thought of having to pack my fish into buckets and travel across the country filled me with so much anxiety that I couldn’t bring myself to buy some fish, regardless of how small. Well, my situation has changed for the better. I have what some might call *stability*. I didn’t post anything in August because I was very busy sorting out my life. I did a little traveling, applied to jobs, and generally tried to distract myself from myself, and the results were amazing! By sheer luck, I managed to acquire a teaching position with great pay and settle permanently into an apartment with my grandfather. You already know what this means: Money + Residence = Fish!
I am tempted to purchase a fancy camera, because my old Android is woefully inadequate for representing the fine beauty of my new pet. The above image is one of my better captures. The specimen pictured is a sparkling gourami, a relative of the popular betta fish. Gouramis and betta fish are both labyrinth fish; fish that have adapted a special labyrinth organ for taking in atmospheric oxygen. It is because of this trait that you’ll typically see bettas placed in such shitty conditions at pet stores–they don’t need highly oxygenated water to survive since they can breathe straight from the surface. The sparkling gourami is less immediately flashy than his cousins, but they are brilliant fish in their own right. If they capture a beam of light at just the right angle, the gourami will truly sparkle. Its eye glows bright blue, and tiny flecks in the scales running down its body will illuminate and dance as it darts about the water. This fish is extremely agile. It can turn on a dime, literally twisting its body as it weaves through dense foliage. When my gourami wants to stop short, he extends his fins (including two “feelers” that sprout from the base of his belly) and instantly drops his momentum to zero. He’s a curious fish, too. His bright eyes are always roving in their sockets, and he will come right up to the glass when you approach and watch you. If you stick your finger toward him, he’ll puff up and try to act tough. Sometimes, he’ll dash back and forth in front of the glass to show off his glittering splendor.
People that aren’t in the know tend to think that fish are boring pets. I think these people merely mistreated their charges. A fish given adequate space, good water, and plenty of plants to explore will become very active. At the very least, my single gourami is one of the most active fish I have ever seen. He is constantly roving his territory, and will always emerge to play when I sit by him. He has quite the territory to explore…
The tank has finally reached jungle status. Sometime after my previous post, the vallisneria on the right went wild. I suspect a significant portion of the root system finally broke into the nutrient rich soil beneath the gravel cap, because the blades suddenly soared with growth. I knew vals grew like crazy, but I really did not anticipate that they would wrap around themselves like this. It is a tangle. The blades a carpet along the ceiling of the tank. Combined with the hornwort and the duckweed, which just won’t stop growing, a rich canopy of green has overtaken the surface of the aquarium. This is an ideal environment for the little gourami, whose natural environment includes shallow ponds and slow moving streams. He is well equipped for navigating the tangle of foliage in search of flakes that I scatter along the breaks in the surface. The leftmost vallisneria is a smaller variety that has decided to grow horizontally rather than vertically. It has propagated into a dense forest.
The other plants are doing decently, but not thriving. My original tuft of hair grass is turning brown and starting to dissolve, but it is at least spreading. Smaller blades poke through the gravel and form small tufts here and there. The crypts that I had planted months ago are not growing larger, but new leaves are sprouting. Perhaps someday they will crack into the richer soil and start going big. Otherwise, I may need to trim the canopy to allow them more light. For now, I am going to let them chill. The algae isn’t terrible, but thick clouds continue to dwell around the base of my vallisneria groves, and there are some strands of hair algae growing up in the canopy. The solution to this is still growing. Observe:
Shrimp, fish, and snail are hanging out!
Better pictures of him will come with later posts, but the skinny white guy beneath the gourami is my amano shrimp! Her scuttles through the water and along the surfaces of plants and rocks with his many legs. His whisker-like antennae are constantly swirling about as he gathers microbes and algae into his mouth with his front mandible things. He never stops eating. You can see the buildup of plant material through his translucent carapace, and it eventually forms a long dark line in his intestines before being released as a strand of waste. He is a machine of an algae processor, but he can’t do it alone. Next time I visit my LFS (local fish shop), I intend to get a few more alongside some little cherry shrimp. A 10 gallon tanks needs quite the cleanup crew.
The third new member of my aquarium ecosystem is actually not so new. The gourami and amano are probably a little over a week settled in, but I had actually purchased a nerite snail some months before. I never bothered to make a post about him, but there wasn’t any drama to tell of. He settled right in and started scraping the glass for algae. Nerites are slow, peaceful, and probably the best scrubber you can find for a natural aquarium. He doesn’t even emerge from the safety of his shell.
Like a suction cup, the nerite sticks to surfaces and licks them clean
Here is another picture of my gourami. Someday, I’ll have a nice photo shoot and try to capture his glitter dance in action.
He wants friends (and probably a mate)
The 10 gallon is still at my parent’s house. Before the weather turns cold, I need to transport this thing to my permanent home. I’m living in Malden now, just north of Boston. The LFS nearby has a nice supply of gouramis, so my little guy will have some friends soon enough I’m sure. I’d love to breed them!
I used to play this game in 9th grade art class. I sat at a table with Gabe and Jake, unlikely pals, and we wouldn’t actually make all that much art (the teacher was a bit loopy). We would mostly talk and tell stories. I was reading Homestuck at the time, so the idea of creating my own Choose Your Own Adventure was at the forefront of my mind. So that was the game we’d play. It was an art class improv! One of the stories we told was of a great undersea war between dolphins and sharks and orcas and all that. Gabe was a dolphin rider bent on justice and war.
Another of our creations was cruder, but I stand by my 9th grader sensibilities. Basically, you play as Hitler. The story started something like this:
You are Adolf Hitler. You have just been released from the Berlin jail after doing time for inciting a riot. You hold a book in your hand. What do you do?
No, we didn’t immediately start rounding up brown shirts and slandering the jews. We were 9th graders bored out of our minds in art class, not Wehrmacht idolaters. We needed to blow off some steam, and we did that by killing Hitler, a lot.
I’d be the storyteller of course, and my friends would be the players, giving Hitler commands and such. Depending on what they told Hitler to do, I changed the story. If they weren’t extremely precise in the commands they gave, however, there would be dire consequences. Telling Hitler to walk around, for example, would probably get him run over by a car. A passing woman might mistake Hitler for a lunatic and shoot his brain out with her pocket pistol. Hitler might accidentally kick a little baby out of a stroller and wind up in a police chase Grand Theft Auto style. Like some hellish ouroborous, old Hitler wouldn’t be dead two second before the game started again:
You are Adolf Hitler. You have just been released from the Berlin jail after doing time for inciting a riot. You hold a book in your hand. What do you do?
Adolf had just written Mein Kampf, of course. In this game, the tome was not all that useful for reading or convincing, but it was a very effective bludgeon. If I remember correctly, we used the slab of paper to beat the brains out of a cop once and crush a baby. The memories are hazy, but ultra violence was in vogue at the time. Our adorable little Hitler would devour babies, get into shootouts, and generally cause widespread chaos wherever his adventures took him. In that way, he’s not all that different from the real Hitler.
Killing Nazis is a lot of fun. Movies like Inglorious Basterds and Saving Private Ryan succeed entirely on the concept. These stories are told from an outside perspective, however. Has any story tried to BE Hitler? That idea has some obvious problems, namely because most of the people that would want to role play Hitler are also the kind of people dreaming of the next Holocaust. A written story of this kind wouldn’t work because you inherently need to make the bastard sympathetic (BORING). That is where a game shines. Cyclic loops, no need for character development, killing Hitler in a thousand different ways is fun, etc. You are Hitler, and you die a lot.
Should the player be allowed to actually recruit some brown shirts and start shit up? Sure, let the Nazi role players have a little fun, but the second you stand up to the podium to give a rousing antisemitic speech, the thing explodes.
It’s not the weekend, which is a perfect time to reflect on the weekend before last weekend. If you’ve already forgotten about the weekend before last weekend (and if you live in a place without fireworks, that’s probably an easy thing to do), then you need to remember that it was recently the Fourth of July. It’s one of those holidays, like Cinco de Mayo, named after itself, though sometimes it is shortened to “the fourth” like in the question, “What are you doing for the Fourth?” If the answer isn’t usually “launching fireworks!” then you live a radically different life from my own.
For an unfortunate majority of Americans, fireworks are something watched from a distance. Come the Fourth of July, folks across the world drive up to their local elementary school or their town’s empty patch of field to see the tax-funded display in action. I’ve seen a lot of those. From Massachusetts to Maine to Quebec city, there are a lot of fireworks to see. And guess what? They all suck.
In the state of New Hampshire, where people are allowed to buy fireworks at their own pleasure (though it is never pleasurable to spend money on fireworks), you can find some of the most incredible gunpowder shows that you will ever see short of an active battlefield. In fact, there is a particularly well-to-do lake in southern New Hampshire whose residents go fucking nuts over fireworks. Immense wealth and little concern for safety combine to create a display that literally blackens out the sky and generates a mist of smog that lasts into the morning. Dead aquatic life washes upon the beaches in heaps, and the children find burnt out shells in their sandcastles from generations ago.
The denizens of this lake, like horseshoe crabs migrating to their ancestral beach to spawn, pile onto their boats come sundown. They move by feel and instinct toward the center of the lake. Nobody ever really organizes the big firework show, and there isn’t a single authority overseeing its execution. Dozens of disparate group chats, Facebook, and the hourly weather forecast dictate the insane impulses that ultimately craft one of the most insane displays in America. Viewers crowd about their pontoons or set up adirondacks on the beach to catch sight of the show. The bravest and stupidest among them will seek the true center of madness, spots directly underneath the arching blasts. This is perhaps the only place in the country where you can have the quantity and quality of a professional fireworks show launched directly over your head.
Fireworks launched from a new location along the far shore–more people launch ever year
This recent Fourth of July was special because it actually happened on the weekend. Usually the holiday falls on a Wednesday or something so folks wait until the following weekend to have their fun, but this year we got a rare Sunday Fourth. The problem was, however, that we had just suffered an intense heatwave and the good weather was spent. It showered intermittently throughout the day, and normally folks aren’t too keen on losing hundreds of dollars worth of cardboard and gunpowder to a storm. Emphasis on “normally.” You might recall that we are just getting over a global pandemic, and the people of the lake weren’t intending to wait inside any longer.
The action started around eight if my memory serves me. The sky had confined itself to an early dusk after a swath of grey clouds moved in. We had gotten some sun earlier in the day and had some good swimming, but showers ruled in the end. We had pretty much given up for the night when a brief break in the drizzle awakened a sensation within me, and the other lake dwellers felt it too. A familiar popping noise began to churn in the distance and I knew it was starting. Rousing the other folks was the hard part–the bad weather had made them lethargic and they had already given up the firework show in their minds. It took a lot of hollering, but the party was eventually corralled into the boat and we were off.
The growing sound of the firework barrage urged us onward despite the fresh sheets of rain and a blanket haze of mist. We ploughed through that black water as fast as the junker would carry us, parting fog as we went. The rain picked up, and I was terrified we’d miss the show. The red and green indicators of fellow boaters and the thunderous flash of fireworks amidst clouds of smoke and fog guided our way as we made a straight shot for the center of the lake. We slowed as we approached the nucleus of chaos, mindful of striking the other boats that had begun to lump together and drop anchor. We weren’t going to nest at a safe distance with them. We were after the heart of the action, a conspicuously empty patch of water just below where the fireworks fly. Many of the watchers had evidently grown skittish, for few boats moved to fill this space. The water directly in front of my grandfather’s house was empty, of course, though it needn’t have been this year. Uncle Kenny wasn’t going to be tossing any explosives into the water this year.
We hesitated for a moment at the edge of the boat herd and decided to push forward into no man’s land. A lot of the folks had moved to the lake recently, and this strange Fourth would be one of their first. Somebody had to show them how to take a little risk. Well, the second we moved forward, the cop that lives across from my grandfather started lighting off his payload (see, taxpayer funded fireworks!). They went off right over our heads, and the familiar deadened sensation in my ears returned. Hearing damage is a staple of this event. Getting soaked usually isn’t, but I embraced it.
Standing on the deck of the pontoon in a rainstorm as blast after blast is lobbed over your head is an experience. A friend of mine likes to say that the Fourth reminds us of our revolutionary heritage. The shower of fireworks, the deafening explosions from all sides, is about as close to the physical experience of gunpowder warfare as most suburban Americans will ever get. We joke about Apocalypse Now. While it would be silly to say watching fireworks a little too closely is akin to experiencing the Vietnam War from a river boat, The lake fireworks show really does capture some of that chaos. There is a danger to it. My cousin still can’t hear out of one ear because a box of fireworks exploded next to him. Despite the stupid danger, we continue to uphold the tradition. It makes us feel something. There is a rawness to exploding things that seems to never get old, and after Covid-19, the lake dwellers were hungry for it. They would have set those things off in a blizzard.
Ethically speaking, should we be blasting all of this plastic into the atmosphere? Definitely not. You aren’t going to convince these guys, though.
Historic Route One is possibly the most lamented object on the North Shore. Talk to anyone, take a ride with somebody that grew up in the last century, and you’ll get the whole mirage tour. They’ll point to a Yankee Candle and a Starbucks along a particularly forested bend in the road and tell you, “that’s where the pirate ship was.” It was a real ship, masts and all that. There used to be this Chinese pagoda castle thing up on a hill. Weylu’s. Oh, and you can’t forget Kowloon! Pure Orientalism, you couldn’t get away with building something like that in 2021.
The dinosaur gets people the most. A statue of an orange T-Rex that stands upright (as dinosaurs did in the olden days) once marked an ice cream and mini golf place. The dinosaur is still there, propped up on the massive grey brick threshold of some mega construction project. Obviously, it’s not the same. You used to be able to, you know, stop and play mini golf. The dinosaur scared the shit out of me personally, but I always looked for it on the drive to Malden.
That’s the thing, the highway magic isn’t totally gone. As you drive along Route One, you’ll notice that the road is a bit funky. Prince Pizzeria has a model Leaning Tower of Pizza coming out the top of it. There’s an Italian restaurant with a mobster hat on the sign. A giant cactus declaring “HILLTOP” used to mark a pretty good steak house. These magical accents are just that–accents, little details that blend into the growing number of Super Walmarts and the plastic outlets. There was probably even more of it before I was born, but the magic is shrinking every year. The sign of the Square One Mall, once brightly colored red and blue, has faded pink and inscrutable.
It’s not like Route One is an unpopular roadway, either. Try to get from Revere to Middleton at 5pm on a weekday and you’ll see what I mean. Killer traffic. People are driving, but I guess they aren’t stopping as much. It’s hard to own an independent business these days, and the big money Super Walmart people are busy buying up land and transforming it into concrete cubes lined with plastic. They might keep the fluorescent dinosaur around as a token with a plaque, but today’s Route One investors have no interest in making something new to match the creativity of the past. That is what irks me the most. If you are going to build something on this stretch of road, why not do something out of the box? The greatest way to uphold the magic of the past is to invest a little magic into the future.
A shadow had fallen over the town of Middlebury. In the span of a single week, two of Middlebury High’s most lauded students went missing without a trace. The first was the athlete, the star of the woman’s soccer team and the apple of the National Honors Society’s eye, Kasandra Nievo. The second, Eric Davidson Jr, first child of local dairy baron Eric Davidson and universally respected president of his class, went missing only days after. These disappearance injected a palpable anxiety into the spring air of Essex county, and one could not drive more than a few streets in any direction without confronting missing persons posters and flashing LED signs.
A poem entitled Big Fight
Love her but
she’s a bastard.
Should have thought faster
(or at all)
before the slammed can
made the stairs a dump.
Wet wipes, ripe
pad streaked brown,
refuse, expletive.
Fists on hips,
sinewave curve,
black hair
like wire.
Taut cheeks,
defiant gleam,
electrifying
eye on fire.
Rebuked.
Cauterized.
Proselytized.
We’re about
the same height but
her thighs would crush me.
Sullen, I
jerk off in the corner.
From Apocalyptic Review: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Every once in a while, a piece of media will be leap into the public conscience like an atomic blast. Although “Mecha” was already a popular genre in Japanese manga and animation for decades, the release of Gainax’s Neon Genesis Evangelion in 1995 exploded the popularity of both giant robots and anime across the world. Americans were already familiar with their own soft brand of fighting robots with the Transformers franchise of toys and television shows, but Neon Genesis Evangelion was something else. It’s intentionally short episode count allowed for a quality of animation rarely seen outside of feature-length animated movies, and the show’s intense themes of apocalypse, authoritarianism, and psychological turmoil added weight to a genre previously dominated (in American eyes) by the likes of Astro Boy and Optimus Prime. It is a wonder of worldbuilding and kinetic action. With the show’s rerelease on Netflix in 2019 with an entirely remastered dub, we are finally allowed a legal method by which to experience the cult classic paradigm shifter for ourselves.
As an example of popular apocalyptic media specifically, Evangelion portrays a bizarre blend of Japanese atomic apocalypticism in a futuristic/cyberpunk setting and, as its name implies, Christian evangelicalism and biblical occultism. The anime is decidedly dispensational in its vision of the end of humanity, and its invocation of epic battles with angelic beasts and the resurrection of Godlike beings seems to pull images and themes from Revelation at will. Though Christian imagery is loaded throughout the anime, the depths of the show’s fascination with rapture are at first cleverly disguised by the typical Mecha formula. The world of Evangelion takes place in the Japan of an imagined 2014. The story follows Shinji Ikari, estranged son of the inventor Gendo Ikari, as he arrives in Tokyo-3, a technologically advanced metropolis built upon the ruins of the old city. Fourteen years prior, the world underwent cataclysmic change after an explosive event known as the “Second Impact” melted Antarctica, shifted the world off its axis, and plunged the Earth into climate catastrophe and war. Though Tokyo-3 appears lush and affluent, the heat of the city is seemingly equatorial and a natural ambience composed of deafening cicada chirps indicates an ecosystem that is unbalanced and only recently vigorous in its repopulation of the planet. In the first episode, these elements are only accents—the contemplative tone of the initial moments are undercut by sirens urging the Tokyo-3 into lockdown. An angel is descending upon the city!
[…]
We see in Neon Genesis Evangelion a merger of apocalyptic traditions that is rarely seen. On one hand, the anime certainly follows the tradition of contemporary Japanese apocalypticism inspired by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Animated films like Akira (1988) render a futuristic Tokyo created in the aftermath of an incredible explosion. Evangelion’s brutal architecture of apartment complexes and skyscrapers seems to adapt this popular aesthetic, including the foundational imagery of explosions to kick the plot off. Unlike the American nuclear terror, Japanese nuclear apocalypse is often framed in the aftermath of disaster rather than a buildup to the blast. However, Evangelion mixes Christian rapture culture into the formula. The show contains a Mecha-apocalypse that is entirely aware of its own course. Plot becomes prophecy, and considerable pleasure can be derived from piecing the events together, especially in repeat viewings.
Evangelion is an anime that unfolds. Once you really get into the world, the show drags you straight to its violent conclusion. Though I originally set out to watch the anime for its striking animation quality, I found myself increasingly drawn to the convoluted plot and religious imagery. The show pretty much begs you to binge-read the wiki afterwards! The lore and iconography go incredibly deep. It is also a particularly relevant piece of media for our current disinformation age. The reality of Tokyo-3 is ruled by conspiracy and lies underscored by an insatiable appetite for an Evangelical reckoning. Imagine a version of Q-Anon that spoke of giant angelic monstrosities and a scientific method of inducing rapture via giant God-robots… that’s sort of like Neon Genesis Evangelion. In a lot of ways, the show can be really upsetting. Though it adopts Christian ideas about the end of the world, I must warn you that the end of Evangelion is far from happy. The New World that this rapture brings about is far from paradise.
Keeping up with politics is important. It’s also incredibly difficult. Not only are the day to day movements of politicians and pieces of legislation really emotionally taxing, the general pace of law making is very slow. For example, the bill that I have been eyeing for months, H.R.1 AKA the “For the People Act of 2021,” was introduced to the house back in January and only recently saw any kind of decisive action in the senate today. Your average person doesn’t have that kind of patience (hence the value of good journalism to keep us up to date, but I won’t get into that now lol). Well, if you want to stay informed, I recommend making a habit of discovering a piece of legislation you are personally interested in and keeping up with it. Become personally invested in a law! There are great websites you can do this with, including the official government site for congress.
The above link leads to the summary page, which gives a handy outline of the bill’s contents. If you want a deeper look, however, you’ve got to find an analysis or read the legal jargon of the bill itself. The website also lists actions taken on the bill. It’s a little out of date as of writing, because the senate just shut down the whole process with a filibuster. That last bit has me upset for a number of reasons.
H.R.1, among other things, attempts to ensure mail-in ballots, force redistricting to be carried out by nonpartisan commissions (redistricting happens every 10 years and is used to gerrymander voting districts to, frankly, allow Republicans to be way over-represented in congress despite lower numbers), and limits campaign spending from foreign nationals. It also allows for automatic voter registration and expands early voting. It has been criticized by the Fox News universe for allowing folks to vote without any form of ID. This is false. While the law eases up on ID requirements (which can already be bypassed easily in most states that require it anyway), the law does provide a provision that requires voters without ID to sign a statement. In the event of an investigation into election integrity, this statement can be traced. Of course, fraud is historically a nonissue in elections despite the insane claims of the previous president.
In short, the bill is awesome. It does everything I have ever wanted a voting bill to do. The stuff about gerrymandering specifically could seriously improve the political landscape of the united states and force campaigning politicians to tackle real issues rather than rely on cheating their constituents into a majority.
It occurs to me that not all that many people really understand what a filibuster is. Some have this notion that it is a last ditch effort, an emergency tool, to shut down legislation that might be bad. Literally speaking, filibustering is the act of giving a speech on the floor that never ends, so the process of congress can’t go on. It gums up voting and pretty much kills a bill. You can do this by spewing nonsense for hours on end at the pulpit. Bernie Sanders has some pretty epic filibusters:
Bernie’s filibuster actually talks policy, which is impressive. Other filibusters can be truly nonsense.
The thing is, filibusters are not generally used as an emergency measure. It is common practice on the senate floor these days, and it tends to come out immediately. In this case, the republicans have chosen to filibuster the voting bill. This means that the bill isn’t even going to be discussed or debated. Your elementary school vision of the legislative process probably involved rigorous debate. Senators would argue their case, call up experts to comment, and show charts of data to back up their claims. Well, that isn’t what actually happens. The modern senate either votes or doesn’t. There is no healthy discourse, no discussion. It is brain dead. This system is dysfunctional, it does not encourage intelligent, rational discussion of laws.
Now, you may be thinking, “Gee Aaron, I can appreciate this perspective, but why can’t the proponents of H.R.1 just compromise to get the bill passed?” Talks have been had, of course. The republican discourse on the bill, however, has been entirely bad faith. Many republican senators back Trump’s claims that our elections are fraudulent, abd Mitch McConnell recently dismissed the bill as a simple power grab without seriously debating its actual components. They aren’t going to talk about it. Unfortunately, this dynamic is pretty common. In the event of redistricting, republicans would have to seriously change their platforms to actually attract new voters to win elections, so their obvious response is to use the easiest tools available to destroy the bill at inception. To them, this bill is life and death. A shame, I say!
I will be monitoring these events further and will provide comment if the situation changes. The calls to end the filibuster continue. Both parties have been pretty egregious in their exploitation of the filibuster, so I think it is time to rethink that whole process. At the very least, there needs to be serious debate on the senate floor. We can’t let these zombie politicians continue to eat our tax dollars while not doing their job.
(The following is an article I wrote back in February for the Brandeis Hoot. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to just move my writing around on the web, but I never signed any agreements so I’m pretty sure they have no power over me.)
The pothos, Epipremnum aureum or “devil’s ivy,” is the gem of the novice planter’s world. Observe the allure of its emerald leaves, waxy spades flecked in gold and the subtle spiral of its endlessly unfurling tendrils. A king of propagation, the pothos is undaunted by carelessness and such paltery forces as sunlight and entropy. If the water flows, so do the leaves, and it is for that reason that the golden pothos is the perfect addition to your depressing holdout in East.
Plants are a delight rarely afforded to college dorms, and that is a shame. Humans and plants are kin, and the mind is greatly enriched by the sight of healthy growth. We campus-going Brandeisians have at our disposal a wealth of gardens and forests within exploring distance, but the time to appreciate these things is often limited. Given that most students aren’t going to shell out cash for high wattage CFL lights and timers, keeping an indoor garden is seemingly impossible. This is where the pothos shines; the plant will remain green and lively even under extremely dim circumstances. It is said that the plant is called “devil’s ivy” because of its uncanny ability to remain bright and attractive even in darkness. It will certainly endure the caustic atmosphere and cave-like setting of the average dorm.
If this plant sounds familiar, that is because you have certainly seen one (if not hundreds) over the course of your life. The hardy specimen is likely one of the most popular houseplants of all time. They adorn the secretary desks of offices around the world. They hang from shelves and windowsills. The pothos rivals succulents for their ease and accessibility in the plant-care hobby. Next time you find yourself in an office or department store, keep your eyes peeled for a vine-like plant that droops from the pot in tangled curves. The heart-shaped leaves covered in a glossy finish will give the plant away. Once you know what it looks like, you will find pothos everywhere.
Growing a pothos is a secret pleasure of mine. A windowsill or a desk lamp is all the plant requires in terms of lighting. In my experience, the light doesn’t even need to be direct. The winter light that streams through the southeast facing window of my Mod has provided ample sustenance for my own pothos, and, judging by the emergence of fresh leaves toward the back of the plant, even the ceiling light seems to be enough to encourage fresh growth. Watching these leaves form has been a pleasure. New leaves unfold from existing stems like spontaneous paper butterflies, and the stems follow in an unfurling loop. The branch of a tree separates at a single point and grows outward like a spike, but the pothos unfurls new shoots like ribbons peeled from its own flesh. Disgusting image, beautiful result. The leaf and stem connect at two points along the father branch before snapping off and blooming into a glossy new heart of green.
You don’t even need soil. The pothos is aquatic, and it will take root in a jar of water. If the specimen you purchase happens to come with soil, then you do not have to overworry about overwatering; moist soil will not bother this plant. Drench the soil, let it sit for a week or two and the pothos will grow. Stem clippings placed in glasses of water will propagate entirely new plants, so sharing the love is easy. My own little dorm experiments are doing swimmingly! It is not uncommon for hobbyists to grow pothos from the top of freshwater aquariums to act as a natural devourer of nitrate. A vase of pothos is sort of like a vase of roses that doesn’t drown itself or attempt to stab you. My only advice is to let your water sit between waterings/refills in order to allow the chlorine in your tap water time to dissipate. Then again, the pothos can probably survive chlorine. Hell, these things could probably outlast a nuclear fallout.
An old pothos is like a tangle of living hair, a tendril mess of emerald growth that always overflows its container. The leaves, like frozen tears, hang erect from their verdant arms. My plant is still small. The leaves burst from the soil on solitary stems like a carpet of flat hairs, but already the process of splitting stems has begun. I eagerly await the day that my child will reach toward the carpet with locks of photosynthesizing potential. Each plant is a prophecy, a promise of clean air and happiness for the price of nothing. In the case of the pothos, the price is literally nothing. It is an abuse retardant creature, a flora that will forgive your failures for years on end. Do not delay! Find a snippet of this awesome plant and kickstart your own personal journey to tender bliss. Your drab room is desperate for it.
I was boiling up a plate of spaghetti when my mother came inside and mentioned that she saw cherries at the supermarket. I would have left right there, but the pot still had pasta in it so I resisted my impulses. As soon as dinner was finished, however, I rounded my brother up into the crossover and hit Market Basket.
That’s right folks, the summer cherries are finally reaching east coast shelves. In an era when nearly any fruit can be had even in the heart of winter, cherries remain a rare treat. I’ve never had a good cherry outside the months of June and July! Most fruits are best enjoyed in their season, but cherries are really something else. I spend a good part of every year thinking about cherry season. When it finally arrives, I eat cherries until I am sick. I’m sick right now.
The darker the cherry, the sweeter. I usually love sour foods, but I definitely prefer the blacker cherries. I don’t know about fresh picked cherries, but the dark ones that finally reach New England tend to be nice and soft. They have a tendency to explode, so do not dress nicely while eating.
I’m still mad. I was playing Super Smash Brothers Melee rather than looking for work as usual when I suddenly thought about Trump’s messed up presidency again. I recalled a distinct discussion I had with a friend of mine in which he argued that Trump had little to do with the intensity of the pandemic. In his eyes, the stupid bastards that weren’t going to maintain social distancing or wear masks were going to screw everything up anyway. To an extent, there is merit to this idea. Keeping Americans tied down to common sense rules is about as easy as getting a knife on a rabid eel. The thing is, we could have started preparing for the pandemic and closing international travel MONTHS in advance.
I remember a distant spring when the Democratic primaries and the impeachment were the things I was most concerned about. I was reading the newspaper every day, keeping up with politics, and generally being a really put together person. You know what made it on the NY Times front page multiple times in January? Yes, the coronavirus. As the confirmed cases in China mounted, the sense of urgency within these articles grew. When it came out that Trump was briefed about the severity of the virus back in January, I wasn’t particularly surprised. If you read or even watched the news at any point leading up to March, you probably would have gotten some idea about this thing (though Fox News was calling it a hoax at the time, big surprise). Of course, since the government was doing fuck all to prepare for the thing, I assumed corona would just be another swine flu, something that made the news but didn’t actually affect me in any way.
Want to see propaganda in action? Fox News watchers across the nation are losing their shit because of a federal investigation into the origins of the coronavirus. The lab escape theory, which we had no reason to give any attention to a year ago when we were literally trying not to die by going to the grocery store, is now very popular, and Fox News fans are now using it as a corona-gotcha. They are patting each other on the back, giving each other reach-arounds and shit. Well, guess what buddy. Conspiracy or not, we still knew about the virus for months and didn’t do anything to prepare for it. Our production was totally caught off guard, and thousands died for it. The conspiracy theory I want investigated is whether or not Trump was sucking Xi Jinping’s dick when he was told to ignore the manufactured virus and let America crumble in its wake.
Our nation should be better than this. While a pandemic-tier virus was brewing in China, our popular TV news networks were manufacturing outrage and political discord. It’s literally killing us. People die when we twiddle our thumbs and turn every important issue into a Dem VS. Repubby screaming match.
Folks like to debate whether Orwell or Huxley’s vision of the future is more accurate. They are too sophisticated. I think Idiocracy is probably the winner. That’s not a particularly innovative take, I know.
Ayep, that’s just the state of things. I have no idea how we are going to resuscitate a broken media culture in this nation. Guilty Zoomers like to argue that individual responsibility is worthless and large scale legislation is the only way to fix anything, but I think making individual efforts to change habits and continuously fight the zombies is important too. Even if it doesn’t matter in the end, at least you can say you were awake to the last breath.
That’s right, here’s another segment on politics. If you are easily enraged and/or possess bad opinions, you should probably stop reading now. I have more interesting content elsewhere and upcoming.
Sometimes I like to think about the various ways our media failed to convince people that Trump was a bastard. It shouldn’t have been hard. The shit that guy was spewing daily should have tipped off a lot more decent people that something very wrong was happening to our nation. I suppose it is more than possible that a lot of decent people are also closeted shit eaters, but you also have legitimately thoughtful people tolerating an idiot. I think a primary cause of the wide scale Trump blindness was the simple fact that the majority of people don’t read the news. A lot of people don’t really watch the news either, and your weekday morning TV newscasts just aren’t going to report on anything that isn’t a major press conference or a crime.
Keeping up with the government with your standard news programming is like trying to read a book under a white strobe light. Anyway, when people do watch the news, it’s probably Fox News’s opinion programming. To most Americans, Tucker Carlson is the news. Last I checked, his show was the highest rated on television, clocking in at over 4 million viewers last June (go check Forbes). Fox News played long segments of Trump speaking as little as possible, for obvious reasons. If you try to extend Trump’s pithy sound clips, you reveal nonsense. The “Sleepy Joe” memes that buzzed around the 2020 election would irk me because just two minutes of hearing Trump speak reveals a level of dementia that made my own poor grandmother (god rest her soul) sound like she was giving a college lecture.
The main thing I want to stress in this post is that America’s disenfranchisement from strong journalism is not accidental. It’s tactical. Smart politicians have been picking away at the public perception of journalists for decades, and we are starting to reap the fruits of this effort. Vast news deserts are spreading across the nation, where local reporting is dead and only national level news is available. People start to drink up the Fox News/CNN Koolaid and lose sight of reality. This is great for politicians, who don’t have to sweat about investigative journalists revealing their dealings. The drop in revenue to real reporting institutions like the NY Times means that they have less funds to field journalists abroad. This is really bad for wartime newsgathering, because it’s freaking expensive to send independent journalists into the battlefield. During the Iraq war, resources were so low that a government program to send journalists with platoons was devised. In theory, the journalists could be tactically shielded from illegal, unethical, or bad-optics movements overseas. Imagine Vietnam without cameras! Well, we are still shooting people across the Atlantic and nobody really talks about it, so I suppose it’s working.
I could write a really substantial analysis here filled with facts and citations, but I’m more interested in bashing Trump. You might remember (or probably don’t) the failed 60 Minutes interview that Trump had with Lesley Stahl. During that interview, Stahl reminds Trump of a thing he said to her in response to a question about his use of the term “fake news.” Trump apparently said:
“I need to discredit you [the media] so that when you say negative things about me, no one will believe you.”
Beloved president Nixon once famously declared, “The press is the enemy.” The scary thing is that Nixon got axed for breaking the law, but modern politicians increasingly walk free from criminal and unethical activity. Trump committed Watergates like it was his job, and no amount of journalistic outrage stopped him.
Journalist bashing is old. Even good old Teddy dedicated a long speech to complaining about the “muckrakers,” the investigative journalists revealing the maladies of meatpacking, the monopolization of oil, and political bosses. In high school, we are taught that Woodrow Wilson was the happy go lucky WWI president that wanted to unite the world in his League of Nations. We don’t learn that his Seditions Act of 1918 allowed him to silence any piece of media that represented the government in a bad light. Straight censorship of the press. Don’t get me started on the 1950s.
The disaster scenario that Trump’s largely unpunished term represents is one in which the press’s role as the people’s watchdog ceases to be meaningful. The institution of journalism crashes into a heap of smarmy assholes running opinion shows and sensational reports on violent crime. Of course, good journalism is far from dead. I’d like to end this rant as I always do, by encouraging you to seek out informed news outlets and turn off Twitter. When grandpa starts huffing about the latest Fox News scandal, kindly remind him that too much TV will turn his brain to mush.
A functioning Democracy needs journalists! I fear a lot of Trumpies don’t actually give a shit about Democracy so long as they can wield some power over others.
