#my heart swelling with civic pride whenever i see a row of well-stacked recycling bins awaiting pickup in the morning

[othernaut]

To a point. I think you're pretty right on forest people, but plains people screw up the metric a little bit. I can't speak for all forest people, but as one myself, what I love most about it is the ABUNDANCE and LIFE and NOISES and MOISTURE and THERE'S A COOL LICHEN and THAT MUSHROOM WILL KILL ME and OH HELL YEAH ANTLERS and BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD. It's natural overstimulation tuned to the highest possible setting. It's feeling like I'm sitting in my living room even when I'm lost in an enveloping cocoon of endless wood. Everything's noisy and significant, everything's family.

To this, I love the ocean and fear the desert. The ocean is loud and beautiful and vitally alive. The waves are yelling at you; the horizon has so many things to say. Just underneath me is a layered wonderland of completely bizarre life and, if I'm lucky, it might come say hi. The desert, meanwhile, reads less as flat than it does dead - hell, not dead, undead. My ears and eyes are telling me that the stillness and heat could only mean death, but then there's a fucking bug. There's a bird real high up there, what does it want with me? I'm so big out here. I'm so big and full of life. This place wants to drain me away. This place wants my bones and not even any moss will grow on them.

(although deserts at night: pretty fucking cool.)

The few plains people I know are untypable because they're fucking weird. Something happens out there in the great and silent green. There is a spirit that exists only in vasty, quiet places that do not even have decency enough to show their fangs, a hum that ripples over the sky with a change in the weather, and it does something eldritch to the neurons. The end result is infinite in variation - a quiet industry, gothic romance, bizarre homesteader fantasies. It's impossible to tell what they like, what they hate, and why. The echoing silence vibrates still inside their skulls. There's a reason cults blossom out there in the flower fields. There's a reason they look down at the dust when they smile.

To this, I posit two sub-biomes: beach and cave. Beach is a wonderful biome for my forest brain, containing the dual pleasures of COOL TREES and LOUD WATER. Maybe a crab'll come up and try to bully me. I can make the ground into whatever I want. I feel any sort of person can find something to appreciate at the beach. It's got a pinch of every separate delight.

The cave biome, on the other hand, is a locus of weird, and whatever type of person you are, you have to be weird with it in order to appreciate the earthguts. You have to be so full of desert that you want to paint the mesas and touch the scorpions. You have to be so full of mountain that you want to sleep on a sheer cliff. You have to be so full of ocean that you absorbed 90% of current and historical nautical terminology by osmosis. You have to be so full of forest that you want to camp in the winter.

But as the plains people are already weird, I feel the caves may call to them naturally. Too naturally. I feel there is a synchronicity, a harmony of silences between the vibrations of the empty sky and the vibrations of the empty earth. The same song that lures small town librarians out along old railway tracks to find where the bones are buried beneath the boards, the same song that old laborers hum when they sit on their porches and picture the horizon fuming with massed chemical factories, that song issues from the void in the soil. If you follow it to its source, there will forever be something immortal in you - even if your dead bones stay there forever.

based purely on anecdotal evidence from the 10 or so people I hang out with the most, I have put together a hypothesis