#American starthistle

[blackswallowtailbutterfly]

Bzzz!

Just some bees in my garden and in the fields and on a neighbourhood walk. :)

Featured bees include bumblebees (native), green sweatbees (native), honeybees (invasive), carpenter bees (native), and some I'm not sure about.

Featured flower hosts include bull thistles (invasive weed), rose of sharon (invasive), New England aster (native), cup plant (native), starthistle (not native), Nuttall's sunflower (native), purple coneflower (native), anise hyssop (native), white wood aster (native), swamp milkweed (native), sow thistle (invasive weed), creeping charlie (invasive), creeping thistle (invasive weed), wild rose (native maybe), wild bergamot (native), bride's feathers (native), bigleaf lupin (native maybe or invasive), and upright prairie coneflower "Mexican hat" (native species, but a cultivar).

All my photos, unedited. Don't mind the weirdness of the third last photo. It's my phone's "portrait" which I found out belatedly can have, uh, interesting results.

[meanwhileinstasiville]

Starthistle apartment complex, a story about malo management, where latino and company town meet.

A scary thing; Kirk of a low corner apartment who variously *stockpiled* and also *fabricated* weapons. A schizophrenic, or so I was told.

A "sane" man; Andrew of crushing obsessive compulsive disorder, or so I was told. Seeming to be flatline, I mistook him for a sociopath, joking that "your garden is coming in really nice this year" after he complained of a row with "the manager" Heather. *Quizzical look* "he's saying you killed the manager and buried her in the garden" said mom to clear it up. A certain faculty for agitating Kirk that we'll come back to.

A sort of normal disabled guy; Larry, also gay, not significant to his condition or the story.

A self-hating Jew; Steve, a boyfriend of Larry, also gay and with significance to his comorbid condition.

A recovering drug addict sex fiend around her concert days; Venerable, because she was a multitool of sorts (First name withheld for privacy). An enabler and also girlfriend, "crazy women are hot in bed" said mom of their relationship.

Daddy's little monster; mom, trying to composite a makeshift family *with some redeeming quality whatsoever* out of yet another Arkham asylum. She once checked into "2N" the psych ward because she didn't want to be alone on Thanksgiving. "She's a whore" thought Andrew, "She's a drug addict" thought Venerable. "She's the unknown" Thought Kirk. "A nazi from money and somehow also a jew from money" thought Steve (who lended me some very good if heavily homo biased books on philosophy, not relevant to the story per se). "A sociopath trying to run the complex from her apartment" thought Heather.

Some two churches bordered the place, at that time.

A manager; Heather, trying to sort herself out and also boarding her boyfriend in her onsite apartment, struggling with a group of people more dangerous than crazy when taken alone. Stacked up neurotically like a house of cards.

So what happened? What's "malo" management?

Andrew, well on the antisocial spectrum or so I believed, was a classmate of my former boss's son. Coincidence, it happens. Econometrics degree, vs his son's econ in general. Was in a core curriculum class *with me* when I flirted with the college. So I picked a class out of a hat, women and minorities in the media, for the next term and you'd never guess who was also in there. Stirring the soup, I would call it, what latinos do when managing a society without "the mappo" we'll say.

And yes, the city showed up again and again for Kirk. Even the chief after a while. As it expected of schizophrenics so far as the media paints them. Andrew's "button pushing", completely unnoticed preceded most each and every Kirk "outburst". We'll call Kirk "the malo" in this case; keeping the peace while also keeping the complex appropriately terrorized. Not the least of means, acting out *the exact amount necessary* to summon officers on a whim. (Really it's Andrew, who is so cold as not to disturb Kirk, but affable enough to make suggestions to him all the same) A guy who goes and puts a hat on a bear now and again, we'll say.

Where *IS* Andrew during these outbursts? Why, in Venerable's apartment, of course. His crippling OCD has it that he needs to "conservative every resource" having gone so far as to turn his electricity off *at the breaker* (his pipes may have been capped, for all I know).

(Agencies like the fbi and other enforcement groups are aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, and grandparents, to latinos; a bear was the "law" of native american society, and why depart from nature when you have the best object lesson and example *right in front of you* "Wouldn't want a bear to turn up where you recreate, work, live, now would you?")

Where's Venerable? She's cashiering for my former boss.

(When I really needed to know what was going on there, and this should make something I said to Bijou years ago *crystal clear* to her, I had Andrew "teach me to drive" actual and in point of fact *the 4th person* fifth if you count my aunt Sue, to teach me. What happened was, "pay attention to stop signs" along side a button pushing exercise of seeking mine out; and you know, I guess he did well because the park department picked him up, crippling OCD and all afterward)

A stability problem with her relationship kept the manager in line. Andrew's OCD crippled him in isolation and that kept him in line, tethered to Venerable. Mom's paranoia and tendency to exaggerate situations to the level *she was accustomed to dealing with* in her prime, kept her in line.

And Kirk, the bear, was best left alone. Where even his severe schizophrenia dialed down where he wasn't agitated.

What about Larry???

Larry kept Steve in line by normalizing his homosexuality and supporting it emotionally.

Keeping Steve from upsetting Andrew enough to go to Kirk. Enough support even to keep Steve's inane complains "the food is terrible and there's not enough of it" (my example not what he was doing) from destabilizing Heather's relationship.

Keeping Kirk nonthreatened by at least one other person. Enough not to trigger a Venerable relapse.Latinos have the most advanced social system on the face of the earth, so when any of these "defund this decommission that" campaigns actually work, malos are what we're going to get.

This is where I should point out that my old boss and I have the same personality cluster; he has an empathy deficit he "treated" by using a journalist friend of his son's as "an interface". I have a sympathy deficit, where I can't relate to neurosis or the basis for it. Put another way, "Remember to set your clocks ahead one hour...'oh man!'" the store bulletin board posting went. He being hyper sympathetic to people as a sort of racial characteristic, thought the posting would eliminate the problem. Lacking empathy, he failed to notice the time change posting was next to such informative postings as, "cash money for bling", and "can't stop wont stop 228" and down below "anything you want is free" "plus you get fired". So he couldn't understand why they were late. I wouldn't think to put up the posting; I'd call fifty some people starting at six am.

I should also point out that I shored up my deficiency with a sort of literary prodigy who talked like reading a Stephen King novel. Before I realized what sort of person I was turning into. Not a good look.

When I was working there, he went with "do what you have to do" as a byline for self-generated situations with his employees as often as not. Empathy matters.

When I was in situations with employees and sometimes even customers, I'd caution them with "it's not that I don't care; it's that I can't care" Leading to an odd experience where, "you don't care at all!?!" resulted from a customer complaining about how a product (which was not medical in nature) made them feel. After I had explained that. Sympathy matters.

Why is a store connected to an insane asylum masquerading as a senior and disability complex? Why are empathy and sympathy important as well as the distinction between them? The worst kind of nepotism.

(And yeah, a "heather" was also boarding my aunt, who is disfigured, a town over at the time; ie mom must be ugly because heather is someone else's landlord; always with the complementary and supplementary social angles on things with that system)

And you can't make this stuff up. Seems like it caught on fire a couple times, too.

The latinos? Star this L.

[that-crazy-scorpio-man]

American basketflower that was also on the side of the road when I drove to the observation deck.

[typhlonectes]

American Basketflower (Centaurea americana) aka American Starthistle, growing in a prairie on the edge of Houston, TX, USA

photograph by Paxon Kale