Greenstorm's Journal

Two moments from the last few days that require some observation:

One of the willow volunteers does a ton of physical outdoorsy sportsy stuff in his free time: climbing, snowshoeing, hiking, etc. It's been suggested to me that he handles his emotions by doing a ton of physical stuff (like my mom) though this is the first time I met him. He also has a lot of charisma, and it's funny because his charisma was 100% similar to mine in the way it operated: that sort of warm attentive twinkle, the sense of focus, the type of question, the type of approval offered. I know a couple people who operate like that and it's always odd to be on the other side. He was also trying to make eye contact and I was doing the ultra-autistic zero eye contact. I make eye contact to ramp up intimacy, and he was already doing attentive intimacy so it would have felt super odd to meet his eyes in that situation. This is not someone I'm interested in going there with.

This morning I heard someone shouting so I ambled outside. I have a neighbour two down who has a pair of absolutely magnificent guardian-breed dogs (I don't know what breed specifically, maybe pyrenees, but the size, coat, colouring, and carriage are unmistakable). He's had them for maybe a year, or almost a year, and they're always immaculately groomed and he's constantly walking them and working on either boundary training or invisible fence training with them, they seem incredibly well taken care of. I was therefore surprised when one of the dogs was, in true guardian fashion, standing at the edge of his property looking down the road and the owner was repeatedly yelling at him to come back, sounding upset/angry. The other dog was, also in true guardian fashion, ambling back towards his owner.

I did a lot of research on guardian breeds and a lot of research on training when I got my pups. It was all just words until we spent some time together, at which point it became so ingrained into me that I don't think about it anymore.

Guardian breeds have a job. They know their job, and they have moral certainty that they should do it and do it well. They're smart, determined, problem-solving, and driven. They're also generally very confident, to different levels based somewhat on breed (independent vs partnered-with-humans workers) and somewhat on personality. Trying to make them not-guard when they think there's a problem is setting everyone involved up for trouble and conflict both external and internal. LGDs can often be convinced (by a trusted person) that something is safe and doesn't need to be guarded against, but they can't be convinced to respond without thinking in the same way that so many other dogs can. They're always evaluating the best way to do their job. Thea has come to get me when there was a wolf she couldn't handle. Avallu has slowly learned I'd prefer he get me if there are humans at the gate, instead of feeling like he has to deal with it himself (Tornjaks are one of the more people-oriented LGD breeds).

Plus, dog training isn't separate from life. Every thing I do is feedback for my dogs, and likewise everything they do is feedback for me. Training isn't about forcing them to do something, disciplining them if they don't, or imposing my will on them. It's just figuring out the most effective interspecies communication, and making sure that my behaviour consistently aligns their interests with mine.

So to come back to the neighbour and a bit of foreboding I had: my dogs really like to mark right outside my gate, so when I open my gate to drive the truck in they go out. At first they would run down the road, I'd call them (Avallu is moderately deaf, so I'd sign to him, but he's also more headstrong) they would keep running down the road to clear and mark the area (because disincentivizing things they're guarding against is best done further away, it's safer from their POV), I'd go get them, bring them in, and ignore them because they'd done the bad thing of running too far. This was not working for anyone. I'd read that every recall is a training session, and that dogs won't come to someone who primarily yells at them, but at some point it clicked. Instead of ignoring them when I got them back in, I had a little hug-and-pet party with them. Now as soon as the motor turns off on the truck they run back and find me for hugs, after having done close-by marking as I pull in. I'd changed from a disciplinary mindset to a teamwork mindset and it made a huge quality-of-life difference to everyone.

That's why I feel a little uneasy when I hear my neighbour yelling at his pups for recall. This is the first time I've heard that, but: they're coming up on the big shift that happens around 2, when their guardian instincts kick in and they become more independent. They are never going to be a dog like a herding dog which lives to instantly obey: they will always think it through first. There are two of them and they probably almost outweigh him individually: these aren't dogs that can be physically controlled or disciplined (not that any dog should be physically disciplined, eep). They can also be very dangerous dogs. So I hope he sorts out a good way to communicate with them, and also that they don't, for instance decide to guard his home from other humans. I am wishing him the best of luck, they are glorious dogs.

Note a menu is a list of things to select from, not a to-do list to accomplish all of

Things to do:

Fire (consolidate brush, light fire, feed fire, haul stumps to sit on, poke fire, cook marshmallows over fire)

Talk.

Mushrooms (heat wax, drill holes, pound in dowels, cover with wax, must all be done in relatively quick succession)

Sauerkraut (cut cabbage and hot peppers and maybe root veg, salt cabbage etc, pack cabbage etc into crock)

Render lard (thaw fat a little, chop/grind fat, put fat into crock pots or oven)

Make soap (make recipe, mix lye, mix fats, heat fats, combine, pour into molds)

Harvest rose hips

Cover straw

Muck out barn (I suspect no one will want to do this)

Help me move the tailgate

Feed baby muscovies

Scritch pigs

Hunt for eggs

Check bucket hen for chicks

Organize carport

Split and/or stack wood

Kill and process roosters

Vanilla comparison

Squash comparison

Food:

Eggs (boiled, scrambled, frittata, custard, those steamed dashi ones, devilled (avocado instead of mayo?))

Potatoes (mashed, fried or roasted in lard or goose fat, lemon-greek, latkes, other)

Squash (roasted savory or sweet, soup, stuffed, honeyed)

Carrots (roasted, pickled, soup, candied, other)

Cabbage (fried, ethiopian with carrots, salad)

Pork (roast, pulled, in peach BBQ sauce, fried chops, ground as sauce for potatoes, ground as meatloaf or burgers, quick sausage, bacon)

Goose (breast rare, confit roast body)

Chicken (stewed with dumplings, soup)

Rice (topped with pork sauce, goose confit, sardines, mixed pickles, chili crisp, maggi, fried egg, and/or steamed or fried greens)

Breakfast hash with bacon or quick-sausage and an egg on top

Casseroles involving many of the above and hot peppers, bonito, kelp, berbere, lemon, many fermented bean things, canned tomatoes, mixed pickles, who really knows, I do have a lot of spices

Applesauce (grape, vanilla)

Meringues

Chocolate lava cakes

Smores

Optional, need to buy ingredients for:

Mega caesar salad, need romaine

Doukhabour borscht, Kris' recipe (oh shoot, there will be two Krisses)

More smores, need more g/f graham crackers

Something with fried mushrooms

Deep fried things, I need to get un-flour-contaminated corn starch or use my tapioca starch since my normal use corn starch is certainly contaminated with gluten. Squash tempura? I could make the dipping sauce easily

Prep:

Maybe I should pre-cook some potatoes to make a frittata fast and easy, or hash browns or whatever.

Get cream for Kelsey's coffee.

Get more milk.

Boil some eggs for snacks.

One of the weirdest experiences I have at this point is watching people be deeply offended by being required to say no. Like, they are asked if they can/will do something, and instead of making a decision based on their priorities and own knowledge of their lives, they do the thing and then are deeply angry, contemptuous, or affronted by the fact that they were asked.

I'm not saying I haven't felt that way in the past -- I certainly have -- but part of adulthood for me has been coming into ownership of my life. I make decisions about it. And the more people ask me, freely and non-coercively, the more info I have on what folks would like and I can then say yes or no.

I get that a lot of folks have damage around saying no if it might inspire an emotion in other people, but that is damage, right?

I get that some people are in coercive situations where they can be physically or financially harmed by saying no, but that isn't the majority of these situations, though I do think some folks autopilot as if the majority of situations are coercive.

I get that different pockets of culture have different ways to negotiate the method of asking, whether it's oblique reference or straight out statement.

I get that different pockets of culture used to have ways of negotiating importance or impact to the people involved, and maybe these methods have decayed with cultural intermixing so folks aren't great at asking if something is kinda nice vs life-changing. I know with Josh he'd originally assumed that my asks were life-changing, so I try to calibrate with him when I do an ask ("this would be nice but if it's a big deal don't worry about it")

I still dislike it very much as a commonplace element of the culture I inhabit and I would like it to go away.

Went to the fall fair in the next town over last weekend to hang out with Ron. I got to wander around for awhile before he got there. Some thoughts:

The smell of horses. I'd forgotten it in my body; I grew up with a couple horses, and it's such a sweet calming smell. It was lovely.

I maybe haven't been at something so intensely all-ages since I was that age? Not just kids-too-young-to-babysit-themselves and parents, or city folks and a very few of their only-child kids, but the whole spectrum of ages. Lots of teenagers and preteens in all the 4H barns, many kids concentrated in the kids play area full of transparent balls that floated on water and bull rides, but also just lots of folks around. I probably looked like that wandering around hand-in-hand with my first boyfriend. Because it was spread out over the fairground I could go closer or further from clumps of people, which was nice. I often prefer further.

I watched the heavy horse pull event for awhile. I'd never seen something like that before: draft horses are always lovely, but in this case they were in teams of 2 taking turns pulling a big metal device that got increasingly more weight stacked atop it. Each pair had to pull it a certain distance, I think ten feet, but could pull it further if they chose. Everyone was steered by reins on the ground. As each team went, they announced the "above team weight" so that must have factored in; there was one tiny but draft-shaped team that tapped out early but were so much smaller than everyone else that they were quite high above their team weight early on. I'm not completely sure how they decided who won; folks dropped out as they couldn't complete the pull or as they thought it was too much for their horses, and a winner was announced at the end.

There was tremendous variability in the nervousness of the horses, in their synchronization, and in how well they complied with their commands. It was really common for them to start forward before they were fully hitched to the weight, and several times teams had to circle around again to be hitched up after they took off too soon. Then again, a couple of them were super bullet-proof.

While chatting with Ron a couple things came up: possible work stuff, and he floated the idea of maybe a co-property-ownership housing type situation with him, me, and two other people (one of whom I know a little and like a fair bit). I guess I'm folks' go-to person for that sort of thing now? A different job would be a requirement for something like that for me. And perhaps obviously, the only reasonable first move in doing a land thing with someone is sitting down for dinner with them and actually meeting them all. So I don't expect that to go anywhere, but who knows, and it was fun.

The small animal barn was enticing. There were some duckles that were the same breed as I did this year: cayuga x pekin. They were lovely.

There were also a lot of baby rabbits for sale that made me very much miss my bunnies, I took pictures of all the rabbits for sale and the numbers but did not come home with any. That's probably for the best, since there's not a good rabbit vet around here and I'm not set up for having all my cords chewed. Still. I like rabbits and I miss them. They have real personality.

There were also some poor geese there, a mom with one gosling who was nervous and calling out a lot, and a pair who seemed a little less nervous but were probably why the first one was calling so much. Well, that and being down low around so many humans. None of them had water to submerge their faces in. None were for sale; if they had been I'd have just brought them home to get them out of there. All the other quite small animals were on raised platforms of some kind, so they were less loomed over, I guess geese are just too big for that? Either way, I like geese and if I ever take any to the fair I'll make sure to take a group of at least 3 or 4.

I did hang out with an alpaca for a bit. They are smaller and cuter than I remember.

On the way home a couple things happened: I listened to a super useful ADHD podcast that I'll get into later, and I stopped to pick up a ton of hog feed. While the feed guy was loading an ant (looked like an ant) flew into the neck of my shirt and started biting between my boobs. I brushed it off and it ended up under my shirt, biting my nipple. I could not get it out, and I felt really weird trying to deal with that in public. I think I've become a lot more body-conscious up here, trying to handle the weird local Christian whatever culture, and I'm pretty sure I don't like it.

Anyhow, good afternoon at the fair. I would have stayed longer but Ron got a text saying that a person he'd hung out with the day before had covid, so he left, and I figured I could get to the feed store before they closed. As I left I saw something intriguing which, in later research, turned out to be the farmhand challenge with folks hauling logs and things. In hindsight I'm sorry I missed that. Maybe next year.

Next big social event will be the music festival in the park next weekend. With this stuff it feels like it never rains but it pours; last weekend were so many potential things to go see and do, likewise next weekend, then it will drop off for awhile again.

Several days ago I was reading elizapples.com (recommended) and came across a fragment to which I relate:

What was it all for? If I am to pursue my passions, will I always suffer like this? And how much more can I handle before it’s no longer worth it? As these questions floated by me in the darkness, I heard a voice whisper: “Eliza, you are here to love apples.”

It wasn’t the first time and I have a feeling it won’t be the last time that apples pull me out of depression.

***

I was at the farmer's market today. It's my social event here, though unfortuately it happens only during work hours. I was introduced to someone and had a good conversation with him: a conversation where he was thinking about what we were saying, evaluating it, being honest and engaged. It's been a very long time since I've had a conversation like that with a stranger. It was nice. I've been invited climbing tomorrow with them but...

***

I also got a letter today from the District telling me they'd had a complaint(s?) about the garbage in my yard. I've been making inroads since the roofers were here and I think it's way better than it was; it basically all went to shit when I got something like 40 boxes of food from the grocery store when their freezer broke down, then ravens ripped open all the garbage bags/cans and scattered everything and I couldn't pick up garbage and get to the dump after work fast enough so they just re-scattered. I have pretty limited inside space to keep this stuff. Anyhow, I had a chat with the bylaw officer, things will be fine if I plug away at it as I have been, my cardboard mulch is ok staying in place. There's no fine or formal complaint at this point.

So that's demoralizing and feels bad but isn't actually a problem. The bylaw guy was friendly. I'm curious though, obviously, who the complaint was from. I'm personally capable of recieving this as information/comunication, but I also know that for many people making a complaint is an argressive act. Is there someone who wanted to do this in an aggressive way? Was there a complaint against the new neighbours across the road blasting music and shooting a couple weekends ago, they assumed it was me, and they retaliated? Is there someone I have to worry about in the future?

To be honest I'm not actually worried about it, but I'm very curious and a little cautious.

***

I was going to pick up my tiller today but the co-op had sold out. I ordered one online but it'll take a week to get here. I took my little tiller to the engine guy to get it fixed but it'll be done sometime next week.

This means less planting this weekend and more next (during the pottery workshop and moving furniture) and it could mean I'd have time to go climbing with the folks from the farmer's market, BUT... I should spend time picking up my yard and de-pigging my house. But I can't suggest climbing next weekend instead because it's even busier, and I'd like to keep in touch with this person and have another conversation.

***

The other day I sent something to a friend about the distinction between feeling feelings, and doing actions. The difference between loving someone, for instance, and choosing to be with them: that's a big one. He couldn't relate.

***

The farmer's market person asked how I could care so much for plants but still kill animals. I told him when I killed my first radish to eat it I was really sad, and he said that was different. I'm here, now, to write that I disagree. The personal experience of killing what you love, of making that choice, is just that: personal. I talked a bunch about when and how animals die in nature for him, but I don't think that answered his curiosity.

The thing is, I am here to love things. I'm always killing what I love.

***

Imagine being killed without love?

***

At one point during my farmer's market conversation this person stopped, cocked his head, and said, "you think things through carefully, don't you? That's rare" and I agreed with great angst and rue that it was, indeed, rare.

***

I am here to love gardens, seeds, plants. My ring is in the mail: crossed scythe and wheat, and oak leaves. I'm here to love my tomatoes and my corn and the next thing after that. I'm often here to love people but that shouldn't win out too often.

***

I think I'll stay home and pick up trash and garden tomorrow instead of going climbing.

It's another prickly day. Hormones? Spaciousness? Dealing with contractors? Breakup stuff? Who knows. It's a day to be critical of things and to wrap myself in a little solitude as much as I can. It's like running my fingers along the texture of something to find flaws: today I'll find the any and all flaws, but I need to hold off on deciding what to do about them until I'm feeling constructive rather than destructive. Right now I just want to blow things up.

It makes me think about my longstanding dissatisfaction with mind-body duality. It's so pervasive that it's baked into the language at every bite. I'm sitting here, in what I suppose is my burnout, and there isn't a seperation: when I am feeling bad, I am feeling bad. When I have no energy, I have no energy to think or to move. When I can't be pecise and deliberate I both lose my thoughts and knock things over. My sense of how autistic folks work is that they're outliers on either end of the mind-body duality thing: sensory or emotional overwhelm doesn't "limit itself to the mind", whatever that means, but it travels into the functional vessel that expresses the mind and either controls it where neurotypical people would retain control, or it severs and results in dissociation and shutdown.

Even beyond that my mind, my physical self, and my environment are well-connected. Sunshine is happiness and energy, we know that. Gut microbiome influences mental inclinations, we know that. Lack of abundance is hunger is irritability and then tiredness. Uninvitingness is inactivity is high rates of depression. And so what we do to our minds, we also do to our bodies.

One step further, the individual-society dichotomy is getting extra play lately and it's also getting under my skin. People expect to make the world different by doing the same thing harder and that isn't, nor will it ever be, how it works. Humans are social animals and they do what the humans around them are doing: being cruel and belittling, overworking, or destroying in the name of lifting people to equality, finding peace, or building a different world seems remarkably shortsighted and I'm not here for it today.

I'm tired. It's been so windy here, there's no point in putting anythign anywhere: it will end up somewhere else. Cardboard boxes and feed bags are all against the fence or in the pigpen or thumping on the house. Boot-thieving mud is drying out quickly into workable soil. It's cold and biting out and maybe the ground is less dry than frozen, who's to know?

And with the idea of joining a small community coming up, I find myself wanting to be part of a community that isn't about hiding from the world, that isn't about whipping it until it obeys, but that has genuine vision and will turn some little corner of it into something better for people beyond ourselves, and outside our borders.

Borders? Bah.

I can lie for survival, and a lot of my life did feel like that was needed. When I'm not in the kind of fear that comes out in my body, though, I am too resentful and angry at the pressure to lie to do it often. When I'm angry I can't lie but I can often misperceive the truth.

I've spent a lot of my life in the fear that lives in my body, often without knowing it. I've also spent a lot of my life outside of it: I've had a lot of life after all. When I'm afraid -- of being without food and shelter, of being without love or care or human consideration -- I often can't connect to other people in a real way.

When I depend on someone else for my needs I am afraid of them because they can withdraw support for those needs. My entire history is folks withdrawing Maslow's bottom-tier supports from me because I don't behave properly when my soul starts to wake up and connect. I'm too independent, intense, analytical, loud, absent, out-of-scale, inhuman, incorrectly emotional. People get deeply uncomfortable around that. They don't feel safe, they don't feel loved, they don't feel validated. If I only toned it down a little bit, shifted this or that a little bit, waited a little bit, compromised on a different set of things, was a little more secretive, lied a little more, then it would be ok. But it is not ok.

That's why I entered into this partnership with myself. That's why I'm here with Threshold. The land does not think I'm excessive: we understand and love each other and it's just ok. I don't need to be a little quieter, a little less intense, a little less excessive. I can put in my two hundred tomato plants and see what happens and the land doesn't tell me it's ridiculous or that it can't be done. We work together and out of it comes the joy of partnership I can't have on a longstanding ongoing basis with people. Threshold lets me decide how much of myself I'm going to put into what I want to do, then we do it.

People don't often ask me to be someone else completely. The manic pixie dream girl stereotype has served me well: people love a quirky unconventional person they read as female coming into their life and turning positive regard on them while they explore the edges of convention they'd never noticed before. People love someone weirder than them in the room who fits a comforting stereotype because it gives their own weirdness room to breathe; as long as I remain within the stereotype and follow the script I'm not challenging their construction of love or reasonableness. They love that at first.

I'm not a manic pixie dream girl, though. They are not the protagonist in my life nor can they ever be the center of it; I do not always believe or feel the right way about things; and I'm not even a girl. I love my body; I value my voice and my curiosity; I don't mind going big just to see what happens as much as I sometimes get caught in just details to try and understand what makes up the base fabric of what I'm doing. I believe in the world, not just as backdrop, but as a system we're all part of. I love the world. I love my self. When I'm safe, I love every fucking thing whether or not I'm supposed to. It's typical in poly to say that love is infinite but time is not and yeah: my love is very fucking divided. The only things it recoils from are real fear about my survival and from the demand to love and people only demand love from people they believe love them. For so many people love is a contract. My love isn't a contract. My contracts are contracts.

In any case folks like the first taste. I don't know whether this is because they don't perceive me fully until later or because I tone it down a little in the beginning. This is where I was confused with the autistic concept of masking. I can't "mask" well: masking is lying about who you are and it would destroy my place in the world with anger and resentment so quickly I'd be lying in the gutter or a jail before you could even blink.

What I do is veil. I draw a mist around me that obscures my inner engine, that quiets that loud thrum into a whisper. I say I like gardening instead of saying my life exists to interact with plants and I have done variety trials with nearly the entirety of my free time. I stay quiet or add my pronouns to my signature or zoom name instead of saying, "hey, I'm not a lady and I'm only fractionally a man, this ladies' night/women's group/no men policy makes me feel pretty invisible". I say I have two partners instead of saying I don't base my attachments or commitments on who I have sex with. I say "I'm not sure that will achieve your desired results" instead of saying that everyone deserves access to food, shelter, community, love, and security of person regardless of their beliefs and actions. I say there's a big urban/rural divide these days instead of saying "don't dehumanize my neighbours". I say I think people need more connection to the land instead of saying that the human/nature divide is a ridiculous artifact or that our focus on the land as either an anthropomorphized security blanket or a source of resources is an impoverishment of our souls. For that matter, I don't use the word soul much and I politely ignore when folks lean hard into body/mind dichotomies.

I veil. I dim. I quiet. I polite. It's not quite lying so it doesn't bump into my demands and anger. It just diminishes me, living in fear, treating everyone as if they were an enemy because I can't afford to test them just in case they actually are.

Facebook memes tell me I should tell my friends I love them more. I don't love my friends. I love the people I feel safe unveiling around and who also are willing to unveil around me. I love the people I can say the above to and they respond, not like I've just pooped in their livingroom, not like I've just kicked their puppy-selves, but with whatever level of agreement or arguement or indifference they are feeling about the thing. I love the people for whom my existence, as I am, is not a personal affront. They don't need to like me or get along with me or anything in particular. They just need to not kill me either overtly or subtly. And, what do we need not to be killed overtly or subtly? Maslow says: food, shelter, love, regard, curiosity, beauty. The Blackfoot who inspired him say: self-actualization, meaningful community, and the belief that community is safe into the future.

Autistic communities ask all the time, in a kind of oppression olympics, is it better to be able to mask and burn out and collapse in on yourself and forget who you are, or is it better to not be able to mask and be marginalized by society and lose fulfillment of your physical and community needs? I started this post to explore whether it was better to veil since maybe that was a less corrosive alternative.

In the end? No. None of it's really ok. It's shivering in the snow and eating tree bark when we should be recieved into the firelight at a banquet. That's my only answer that isn't a lie.

All the queer people I've met in person are single-on-disability or are supported physically and/or financially by a live-in partner, except one. They talk about how queer means breaking out of normative thoughts and behaviours. They talk about how difficult that is and how it's penalized in so many ways.

Today on the poly group I frequent someone talked about how he and his partner had decided to see each other less frequently, how they didn't like the feeling of routine and so they decided to only meet up when they really wanted each other. His way of gauging that was through her messages; did they seem like they really wanted him? Then they'd have a date. The comments slammed him for manipulation and he took down the post. The moderators said, how could you blame people for being triggered by withholding sex as a relationship tactic?

Autistic groups talk about "female autism" constantly. Sometimes they say "FemaleAndNonbinary autism". Every once in a blue moon someone mentions men who have something more like female autism.

People who advocate for shorter work weeks and lots of vacation time to build a more humane and even productive system slam the leader of the province for taking a vacation to travel and see his family during an official wildfire emergency, after 18 months of covid emergency, going into more covid emergency, and the wildfire folks have had their prioritization in place for years.

I think about the concept of autism a lot. I think about what about that concept overlaps with me and what doesn't. In the last days I've been thinking about how I abstract differently than other folks. Stepping out a little, I *bundle* differently than other folks.

When we learn anything from ideas to actions we learn in tiny pieces that, through use, disappear into a larger coalesced whole. In academia complex concepts get used until they're easy to compress into jargon: whole life-work ideas become one word in a sentence of many words. Physically many tiny motions and corrections and attention-directions are practiced until they come together into one fluid action and then become an automatic response. Abstraction is part of bundling this way. Driving is part of bundling this way.

The more we use our bigger bundles the more we see those bundles as a real entity and not a collection of smaller parts. We forget the reality and the precision of the foundations because our minds cannot hold each foundation stone at once and still build atop them. If "land tenure" or "species" needs to be unpacked in a statement the statement will fall under its own weight, much as driving skill vanishes when each calf muscle and each eyeflick needs to be consciously controlled.

I'm shit at bundles. It takes me a long time to put them together. I ask too many questions and can't easily exclude variations or incongruities so jargon or even language feels imprecise. I can't squint properly and blur the edges of a category with enough conviction. It takes years for me to link the perception of a particular kind of shape and colour to the tension in that calf which sets it on the other pedal with exactly the right amount of pressure without a stop in my conscious awareness and a check-- is this the right bundle for this circumstance? Is this what people do? Social behaviour is just a bundle, just like driving, just like assuming "men" or "species" means something similar in anything other than a very rough non-overlapping statistical cloud. Social behaviour is the easiest of these: this topic, that facial movement.

I think when people care about something their bundles solidify. They tighten up. The contents compress into invisibility, and just the big abstraction is left. We lose the ability to create new bundles and double-down on what we have. We hit the gas or the brakes without thinking; we double down hard on categorizations; we say words louder and with less nuance.

The bundles just have what we put into them, though. They don't have every circumstance. They are just a set of automatic thoughts and behaviours. It feels to me like this way information is lost. I know we need to build into those abstractions but we also need to test the foundation stones, to wiggle each one frequently, to see if anything no longer fits and needs to be updated.

Sometimes updating something brings the whole castle down.

I'm going cross-eyed at this tangle of metaphors. I don't fit anywhere because I don't bundle right. I don't shear off what's supposed to be irrelevant information; I don't structuralize the core of the bundle correctly. Any group is composed of people inside and people outside based on a handful of characteristics. I can't squint hard enough to only see those characteristics. Any idea is composed of generalities. I don't like using the idea unless I test the generalities for the specific circumstance. It works so well with ecosystems. People hate it.

I'm tired and I've lost my point. Perhaps I'll revisit this later.

It's a way we get things wrong.

This was supposed to be the last day of the high-level heat. Most places in the province beat their previous all-time heat records, most on two consecutive days; in some cases the new record was over 10C higher than the previous all-time record. Lytton broke both the Canadian all-time high temperature record and was also hotter than Las Vegas has ever been in recorded history. Nowhere hit 50C so at least there's that. Fort has not been spared. With careful curtain and air management I've been able to keep my main floor 8C or so below ambient at the hottest time of day and the basement has stayed 16C below or so. Thank goodness for the basement! But doing the largest possible air exchange at night to cool the place and set up for the next day has brought in hordes of mosquitoes; over dinner I swat enough of them that there's a noticable scatter, not quite a pile, around me. I'll be glad when that's done.

The fire danger rating jumped from moderate to high or, in many-to-most places, extreme in the last few days. As our high temperatures roll out, the edge of the incoming normal summer weather brings thunder and lightning. I, and everyone, hope that it brings some rain with it. I'm here alone; I don't think I have it in me to evacuate all the animals on several fronts.

As I do chores later in the evening to avoid the heat it's clear that the days are getting shorter. The sun was below the horizon by 10:30 and I'm sad about it. This year it feels like summer has actually arrived; we missed it entirely last year.

Today the yarrow started flowering. The air is hot and wet and with that semi-medicinal herbal scent breathing is like drinking hot herbal tea. A haze has settled on the horizon and the sun set through browns and reds. My pigs are quite alright -- they've made two champion wallows and don't seem to have suffered from the weather, maybe related to their origins in Georgia -- and all the other animals seem to have pulled through too. Tomorrow is supposed to be 10 degrees cooler, and I should be able to go outside after work and get some things done. I could also break down all the pork loins and shoulders that have been chilling since Saturday but it's been too hot to butcher them further in the house.

My counselling appointment was very good today, I saw my regular chosen counselor for the first time since before my weird medication/concentration camp breakdown (during which I mixed up my counseling and Dr's appointment and so missed both of them). Talking with her I began the process of knitting up the chaos into narrative, the process of making meaning of the world that allows me to drive forward. As I'd realized before I'm not quite sure where forward is, though, and I suspect I need to sort of learn to be just where I'm at again. Last weekend was a good start, there were hours of sitting on the grass with the dogs and watching cottonwood fluff and crooning to the geese and just existing, which I had not done in quite some time.

From three sources in the last week I've heard I need to learn to inhabit that space at will and I'm not sure how to do it. It's an innately unpeopled and demand-free space. It can't exist in proximity to transitions into and out of the world of humans.

I don't know. It does need to happen though.

Now to shower, and to sleep, and to maybe wake up into a day where I can go into the greenhouse after work and harvest myself a salad without dying. This was a good year to plant cucumbers and melons, they're so happy in there. It was not a good year to do a trial test to find varieties that would grow and fruit in my normally-cool climate. The trial is compelling anyhow. Early evidence supports the Lofthouse and William Schlegel tomatoes, plus stupice and bloody butcher and definitely sweet cheriette. My green grocery-store cherry looks like it was open-pollinated; at least all 8 or so of the plants I grew from it are very uniform, and they seem to be doing well too. Very exciting!

I hope you're both warm enough and cool enough, wherever you are, and that your air also smells like flowers.

Awhile back I invited my mom up for Christmas, and Christmas turned to new year, and then she has a trip out sailing planned for several months starting next Wednesday. But it turns out she has time to come up tomorrow, and to then go back down Wednesday and catch her trip to, um, I honestly don't remember if it was back from Tahiti or something about Japan or something up the west coast or anything about it really. I got a text from her today saying she could come up tomorrow, and did that work. So.

I had Avi scheduled to come up on Wednesday: he's post-breakup and having a rough time, I threw out the offer, and he's taken me up on it. So then he'll show up when Mom leaves until the weekend.

Then I have until the middle of the following weekend with Tucker and Tucker disappears for, well, two to three months give or take a couple weeks. Gonna be a big bucket of people all at once, and after that I suspect I'll enjoy some quiet. If I'm honest, probably somewhat before that.

Then I likely have another visitor in April or May, and in June Josh comes up for maybe a bear hunt.

July and August are for breathing, I guess - I'd like to go down to the coast and visit Adrian and Ellen if I can swing it, maybe once the baby pigs are on the ground - and then I have a Dionysian revel and an Orphic thing and I'd like to host my Threshold international pig-killin' and cannin' thanksgiving.

I guess the year is shaping up.

Gonna hold my breath and get swept under a deluge of people first, though.