lysbethabrams

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❤️

I Imagine the Butches’ Stripper Bar

At my butches’ stripper bar you can watch butches fold laundry, iron. Objectify them while they slowly refinish a rolltop desk, take off a trailer hitch. They file taxes, wear waders, bake you a layer cake. I’ll lay her cake, my imagined patrons mutter. I think of who I eroticize, how: they’re always getting stuff done. At real stripper bars women just dance—so many things they could be checking off their lists. I guess men don’t want to see women work? They get that at home? In my Champagne Room the butches plant bulbs, build bookshelves, clean basements, write checks to the ACLU, retrain your dog. Fantastic grow the flannel plaids; they lean and squint, lick pencils, adjust a miter box. They make box lunches, chicken stock. The butches make your day.

                                                                                                                                               -Jill McDonough

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Beauvoir wrote this when she was 55, which would have been around 1964. I find it oddly comforting to be feeling the same thing now that I am 55. We all like to think that we are unique, and we are told this repeatedly when we are young, but I question this. I think that each generation of humans goes through the same realization that we will grow old and must die eventually. Here is the rest of that quote: "...It's because of this discrepancy that when you've laid your stake on being -- and, in a way you always do when you make plans, even if you know that you can't succeed in being -- when you turn around and look back on your life, you see that you've simply existed. In other words, life isn't behind you like a solid thing, like the life of a god (as it is conceived, that is, as something impossible). Your life is simply a human life."

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I never did like those Leyland cypresses, though I could not say why they made me so uneasy. Maybe it was the uniformity of the rows, one after the other until it got too dark to see in the daytime. When they came for me, however, I had nowhere to go but into that darkness.

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Fun day in Newport with Henry and my new favorite app StopMotion

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Working outside every day gives me a lot of time to observe. There is something compelling about wind in conifers, more so than in deciduous trees. These are mostly Leyland cypresses, with some pitch pines thrown in. Adding filters and text is just plain fun.

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It's been awhile since I posted one of these little INFJ doodles. This one spoke to me after a wonderful family party for my Mom ❤️ who just turned 80. A young cousin said that she liked them! That made me feel happy! Family times that are shared in the present become family treasures that you hold in your heart. Loved ones who are no longer with us are still within us ❤️

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Catching my breath after a week of boffo fungal sightings. First up we have the cutest little birds nest fungi (genus Crucibulum in the Nidulariaceae family). Second is earth star fungi - equally so damn cute (genus Geastrum in the Geastraceae family, or possibly Astraeus in the Diplocystaceae family TALK TO THE DAMN TAXONOMISTS). Third is cup fungi (Pezizaceae family and about a million different types) - they look like little ground ears to me as though the forest floor is listening. And the fourth, well, sadly I have no idea what this one is; some kind of cauliflower fungus perhaps? I wish I knew more fungi. I only studied plants in school, never took a mycology course for which I could just kick myself now because who knew how useful this knowledge would have been. OBVIOUS FAIL but who knows what they are doing when they are in their early 20s.

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My little bowl of indoor duckweed!

it’s kind of an adult attention deficit thingy…

I have a small water garden on the patio, in a 5 gallon pail. The aquatic plants are mostly things from clients gardens that they didn’t want, such as the duckweed (we skim duckweed from one pond every week since it multiplies so fast, and I like the bright green color, so I just brought some home). Well, when we had tree work done, it totally changed the patio from mostly shady to mostly sunny. So it has been interesting, and heartbreaking, watching some plants thrive and others die. Turns out duckweed really doesn’t do well in full sun! So I figured I’d bring some inside and put it in a blue glass bowl since I really like the color combination of blue and green. I really REALLY like certain 3-color combinations, in this case: green-blue-yellow (I also happen to like red-yellow-green, red-green-brown, and blue-green-brown. But I digress). I have so much *clutter* that I didn’t even see the bugs till I looked at my photo. I have a box of cicada skins - how can you NOT save these when you see them? Bonus if you actually get to see the emerging cicada! I saw one the other day on a Locust tree (HAHAHA seriously). So the skins are here and there. Except when they get dusty. It’s impossible to dust these little buggers. I hate dusting anyway. I hate cleaning too. Which is probably why there is so much crap in piles all over the house. I paid one of the boys to clean one summer but it turns out they hate cleaning too. So. I usually keep the plastic roaches under the bananas, near the wind-up plastic mouse THAT REALLY MOVES LIKE A MOUSE haha. I don’t know how they got over to the windowsill. The roaches were part of a set of plastic vermin that I once used to decorate the boys meals. There is nothing like being served eggs with little black ants on top. I don’t know what happened to all the ants but they have dispersed over time. I don’t do this anymore, sadly. Max is going to turn 20 next week! No more teenagers!

Angiosperms are flowering plants, as opposed to gymnosperms, which do not produce flowers (like pine trees). Duckweed is actually a group of aquatic plants, and the smallest of these is the genus Wolffia, which I don’t think this is (taxonomists generally fall into 2 camps, lumpers and splitters. The splitters put duckweed in its own family, Lemnaceae. But the lumpers put them as a subfamily within the family Araceae. This is pretty exciting stuff to those of us who love to organize stuff. I don’t like to clean stuff though. I think I mentioned that). And mostly they just propagate vegetatively, so that is why the green mats get denser and denser. And probably why the client hates them. People think they are algae! Seriously! They don’t even LOOK like algae!

I really hope the duckweed survives the winter. I’m thinking I might put it in the dining room, on the lazy-Susan that my mom gave me.

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I I laugh every time I look at this

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Alone in a crowd

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Brunch, Liana Finck

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Undead, part 5. Thus endeth my little poem about zombies

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Undead, part 4

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Undead, part 3

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Undead, part 2

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A little poem I wrote about zombies, called "Undead" -- part 1