adventures-in-poor-planning

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literally drinking a beer by the lake and still opened tumblr. some of us are beyond saving

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'On the way home I felt a great and simple sadness. I missed my dad. I missed him very much. The train curved and sunlight fell against the window, obscuring the passing fields with a mesh of silver light. I closed my eyes against the glare and remembered the spider silk. I had walked all over it and had not seen it. I had not known it was there.

It struck me then that perhaps the bareness and wrongness of the world was an illusion; that things might still be real, and right, and beautiful, even if I could not see them - that if I stood in the right place, and was lucky, this might somehow be revealed to me.'

- H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald

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In England Have My Bones [T.H.] White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: ‘Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.’ He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either. [...] But the countryside wasn’t just something that was safe for White to love: it was a love that was safe to write about.

"It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak."

Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water, for example: the tale of a lonely man on the Scottish coast with an Iraqi otter on his sofa. Or the books of the BBC radio naturalist Maxwell Knight, former MI5 spymaster and closet queen. Doubly disallowed to speak openly of his allegiances, Knight wrote a book about hand-rearing a cuckoo called Goo. His obsession with this small, greedy, feathery, parasitic bird is terribly moving; it was a species made of all the hidden elements of Knight’s life: subterfuge, deceit, passing oneself off as something one is not. [...]

[T.H. White] kept [grass snakes] because ‘it was impossible to impose upon them, or steal their affections’. He loved them because they were misunderstood, maligned, and ‘inevitably themselves.’

----------- Chapter 4, H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2014)

Does anyone know other sources that talk about the intersections between queer writers and nature writing? As a queer lady who does exactly that, this passage has always stuck with me.

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where's that one post slandering the great lakes? op come out, I just want to talk...

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i want all my friends and followers and mutuals and acquaintances to know from the bottom of my heart: i don’t respond to your messages because i’m an insane person, i am insane medieval hermit software running inappropriately on modern queer hardware and social media scares me. it is not your fault

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it's just me and my horrible reputation (friend sent it to me)

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We saw a Clearwing Hummingbird Moth at the garden center today!

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“War on Graffiti.“

Elio Petri - Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970).

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“A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” — Max Weber

INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION (1970) dir. Elio Petri

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doodles of plants i've photographed :)

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Summer on the Highland Scenic Highway, Part 2: The Not-So-Secret Life of a Mountain Bog.

Cranberry Glades is one of the great natural features of the Yew Mountains, a highly-diverse ecological complex of sphagnum bogs, marshes, and beaver-engineered wetlands located in a frost pocket between the mountains (link here to an informative video on how these areas form). Many of plants and animals found here migrated southward from Canada and New England as the glaciers advanced during the last ice age and were subsequently "stranded" in the local mountains when the planet warmed and the glaciers retreated. Some of these species, including bog rosemary and mourning warbler, are at their southern-most ranges. West Virginia's greatest naturalist, Maurice Brooks, once described high elevation bogs such as Cranberry Glades as a "bit of Canada gone astray". Their highly-acidic environments host plant communities uniquely suited to survive in them, including the carnivorous sundew and lovely, delicate orchids, such as grass pinks and rose pogonias. And during the first couple weeks of summer, the show is on.

From top: tall meadow-rue (Thalictrum pubescens), also known as king of the meadow; meadow phlox (Phlox maculata), also known as wild sweet William and marsh phlox; grass pink (Calopogon tuberosus), also known as tuberous grasspink; rose pogonia (Pogonia ophioglossoides), also known as snakemouth orchid; a stunning orchard orbweaver spider (Leucauge venusta); swamp candles (Lysimachia terrestris), also known as earth loosestrife; fringed loosestrife (Lysimachia ciliata), yet another gorgeous summer primrose; greater purple-fringed orchid (Platanthera grandiflora), a true beauty of Appalachia's shady seeps; a group of chanterelles (maybe Cantharellus appalachiensis?); scarlet beebalm (Monarda didyma), also known as Oswego tea; swamp dewberry (Rubus hispidus); great rhodendron (Rhododendron maximum), which is just starting to bloom in the mountains; and the extraordinary green flower garlands of green false hellebore (Veratrum viride), the grand final act of this lovely but deadly mountain plant before it goes dormant in the summer heat.

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fun

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young man. what is that you have found.

I said young man. you picked it up off the ground.

I said young man. you should put that thing down.

I don't think! that! you! should! eat that!

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fuck yesssss they just gavwe me early access to all of the future grief i could possibly imagine for myself 😍