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Do you ever feel, even temporarily — that you can live, briefly, off the thrill of your dreams?

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I wish I still had weekend invites that I was slightly afraid to attend.

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I yearn for the days when I wanted to share them with other people.

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Dancin', enjoyin' the tunes, while I consider & mull over the horror.

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How do you get off building an entire culture around individualism, and then denounce suicide as "selfish"? Wherefrom comes this sudden virtue of selflessness?

The denouncement itself belies the farce of individuality as a value in-itself: you can't socially demand the self-sufficiency of the individual and then likewise bemoan their self-chosen abandonment of the very same society that abandons them.

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Sexy is, as sexy does.

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Travel back […] a few hundred years to before the industrial revolution, and the wildlife of Britain and Ireland looks very different indeed. 

Take orcas: while there are now less than ten left in Britain’s only permanent (and non-breeding) resident population, around 250 years ago the English […] naturalist John Wallis gave this extraordinary account of a mass stranding of orcas on the north Northumberland coast […]. If this record is reliable, then more orcas were stranded on this beach south of the Farne Islands on one day in 1734 than are probably ever present in British and Irish waters today. […]

Other careful naturalists from this period observed orcas around the coasts of Cornwall, Norfolk and Suffolk. I have spent the last five years tracking down more than 10,000 records of wildlife recorded between 1529 and 1772 by naturalists, travellers, historians and antiquarians throughout Britain and Ireland, in order to reevaluate the prevalence and habits of more than 150 species […].

In the early modern period, wolves, beavers and probably some lynxes still survived in regions of Scotland and Ireland. By this point, wolves in particular seem to have become re-imagined as monsters […].

Elsewhere in Scotland, the now globally extinct great auk could still be found on islands in the Outer Hebrides. Looking a bit like a penguin but most closely related to the razorbill, the great auk’s vulnerability is highlighted by writer Martin Martin while mapping St Kilda in 1697 […].

[A]nd pine martens and “Scottish” wildcats were also found in England and Wales. Fishers caught burbot and sturgeon in both rivers and at sea, […] as well as now-scarce fishes such as the angelshark, halibut and common skate. Threatened molluscs like the freshwater pearl mussel and oyster were also far more widespread. […]

Predators such as wolves that interfered with human happiness were ruthlessly hunted. Authors such as Robert Sibbald, in his natural history of Scotland (1684), are aware and indeed pleased that several species of wolf have gone extinct:

There must be a divine kindness directed towards our homeland, because most of our animals have a use for human life. We also lack those wild and savage ones of other regions. Wolves were common once upon a time, and even bears are spoken of among the Scottish, but time extinguished the genera and they are extirpated from the island.

The wolf was of no use for food and medicine and did no service for humans, so its extinction could be celebrated as an achievement towards the creation of a more civilised world. Around 30 natural history sources written between the 16th and 18th centuries remark on the absence of the wolf from England, Wales and much of Scotland. […]

In Pococke’s 1760 Tour of Scotland, he describes being told about a wild species of cat – which seems, incredibly, to be a lynx – still living in the old county of Kirkcudbrightshire in the south-west of Scotland. Much of Pococke’s description of this cat is tied up with its persecution, apparently including an extra cost that the fox-hunter charges for killing lynxes:

They have also a wild cat three times as big as the common cat. […] It is said they will attack a man who would attempt to take their young one […]. The country pays about £20 a year to a person who is obliged to come and destroy the foxes when they send to him. […]

The capercaillie is another example of a species whose decline was correctly recognised by early modern writers. Today, this large turkey-like bird […] is found only rarely in the north of Scotland, but 250–500 years ago it was recorded in the west of Ireland as well as a swathe of Scotland north of the central belt. […] Charles Smith, the prolific Dublin-based author who had theorised about the decline of herring on the coast of County Down, also recorded the capercaillie in County Cork in the south of Ireland, but noted: This bird is not found in England and now rarely in Ireland, since our woods have been destroyed. […] Despite being protected by law in Scotland from 1621 and in Ireland 90 years later, the capercaillie went extinct in both countries in the 18th century […].

—

Images, captions, and text by: Lee Raye. “Wildlife wonders of Britain and Ireland before the industrial revolution – my research reveals all the biodiversity we’ve lost.” The Conversation. 17 July 2023. [Map by Lee Raye. Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

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the weirdest thought after a long night of shrooms and strange musings & events:

I think I remain in love with both my (ex?) wife and my ex girlfriend.

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my little pink temptress,

every night

you keep me at bay from myself,

every night

all because,

every night

i wish not to part from myself;

every night

my little pink temptress,

every night

she lays me still, though

every night

still not, i lay

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If there's one thing about pain, it re-emerges from within every crack of every stone laid down - it demarcates every step in any direction.

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Heath update:

He loves hanging downstairs again since the reno. He spends all day in my room now.

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Trailer for The Screaming Skull (1958)

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August 21st - post-dated posting

It's been about 10 days since my dad said he's going to pull the plug, which my aunt had told to my mum about 2 weeks prior. He decided he was done waiting out whatever time the cancer drugs had bought him.

I'm amazed he made it this far. It feels like I've already mourned his loss over the summer I found out (2020). What an incredibly shitty year. Almost as bad as 2018. 2023 probably will be.

My options for what and how I could ever tell my dad everything I've ever wanted to say to him have been discussed at length; my assessment that it would be pointless now, and that it still wouldn't bring me any satisfaction, remains as before. Maybe not doing it will imbue me with some gift of regret that inspires me to be that much more forthcoming in the future; who knows?

It feels like it could happen any day now, given how short his original prognosis was prior to starting chemo.

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Having one dying parent quite helps to put the other parent's life into perspective, and thus your own.

And I don't want to become like either of them. I've watched my dad as if through a low-resolution telescope, destroy his body (and most of his worthwhile relationships), while my mom has rotted her brain and soul.

From there, it's almost as if there's nowhere to go, but up, and yet—

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I love that there are bourgeois thinkpieces decrying some mass tendency to indulge in "goblin mode", as if it were either as catastrophic an infestation as they think, or something anyone would choose other than out of necessity. Scum.

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Friday 03/25 2022

I have my 3rd (4th?) therapy session coming up. I woke up thinking today was Monday, and that I was late for an appointment.

Tbh I thought I'd be ready to dive into medication right away, but it turns out I'm not, so I'm doing this, instead.

I decided during last session I'd keep better track of how I'm feeling, so here I am (shit). There's been a surprising amount of content to write down that I have reliably forgotten to do so.

I have that feeling of "I don't know how anybody does it" (goes to work every day and still has energy to do literally anything) with the recognition, at the same time, that it's mostly just me: an effect of whatever chemical distortion my outlook is twisted by, combined with the usual regime of aggravating "externals" in life which weigh upon us all. It just feels like there's no recovery time.

I didn't mean to, but I started a sort-of fight over being always accused of never being "up" (awake at a "reasonable" hour) in time for anything, and couldn't, at last, hide my frustration at this accusation that has, as I've discovered, been a coping mechanism for over a decade now: staying up late and getting up late was how I cultivated the silence around me that I need. It's what helped me think, and Be, and function.

It feels like a losing battle. Bit by bit, things are slipping out of my grasp. My attention span, my interests, my leisure—even my weight; there are fewer and fewer corners left in which to hide.

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As everything worsens, so too will the power of nostalgia and the impetus to appeal to it in the cultural spheres of capitalism.