So perhaps you’re drawn into this first passage because you’re wondering what’s going to happen to the birds in this Episode’s video. TRIGGER WARNING - I’m not going to tell you the difference between an arborist, gardener or groundskeeper in this publication but you can vote on the paths each would take with a nest of two fledglings as a behavioral test for my readership and encourage more of my Voice Over use in future episodes. 2ND TRIGGER WARING - and an SOP for this publication, I will discuss death.
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Polyart is hypermodern and responsive to environmental input, linting
🌾Separating the Wheat from the Darnel 🔥
My wife’s father passed at the beginning of December, 2022 and I promptly put her on a flight from LAX to AVP in order to help her mother make the funeral arrangements. Back in October, 2021 I had left the high-end boutique landscaping firm, laboring there since 2018 through the pandemic, to go dutifully serve as a Funeral Service Assistant for a large Catholic Mortuary & Cemetery. As a last responder to first calls at morgues, residences, directing viewings, Masses, veteran and first responder ceremonies, conforming to various degrees of mandated restrictions, weather could always be a factor and with only a few experiences with internments this was my first graveside ceremony witnessing a winter crest upon the North East. I would join her the following week before Christmas for his memorial — cremated remains in a simple wooden urn, interned into the earth at a precolonial township cemetery in my wife’s family plot that was freshly coated with a few inches of snow. The great screenwriter in the sky did not need to “handle it in post” as the climate and set cooperated harmoniously to compose a dramatic adagio on a theme of finality in the endless mountains of the last great commonwealth of the union.
The Pastor was thankfully brief in the 30° weather and my grieving wife insisted I wear my late father-in-law’s winter coat that I handed inevitably to one of the youngsters, I believe a great-nephew-removed, who was only in a t-shirt and hiding his shivering. Consequently this gave me a reason to embrace my Yankee wife, who’s not one for holdn’ unless she’s holdn’ back them tears of loss that my family can stream at will. I was her talisman through complex emotions throughout our marriage as she had already lost her older sister to cancer less than a decade ago and we both suffered trauma in our childhood that I was given more tools to express.
This loss like so much we’ve seen recently without time to process, my father-in-law’s passing came only after younger brother had just passed suddenly in the previous winter walking the dog in the snow. Neighbors only later to discover him almost frozen with the quivering dog that never left his side.
After the colonial cemetery burials and flowers were set, at the Fireplace Restaurant luncheon I chatted in the parking lot over a cigarette with a young man who took time off from his father’s arborist business to pay his respects. As a California native plant horticulturist that specialized in abiotic disorders and root causation in botanical disease, my experience with the four seasons was very limited but understood it’s importance in even our own body’s need for a seasonal parasympathetic nervous system reboot, something I naturally achieved through Lenten fasts. No fasting at The Fireplace though as the trout, service and views were divine.
Having observed along the rivulets on the way I asked this lumberjack just how the Liriodendron tulipifera (Tulip poplar) and Rhododendron maximum (Rosebay rhododendron) still hadn’t dropped their leaves and also noted that the Equisetum hyemale (Horsetail reed) or maybe it was Juncus (Rush) all was still green and growing along the banks of the Susquehanna that I noticed on the drive from graceside. By observing his mid thirties’ chiseled stone hands that cupped cigarette’s like Bogey I knew he understood how trees have hearts like us, but theirs beat once a day.
He simply put it:
Life just has a way of clinging to every last chance of hope for survival and just when we think it’s over, it springs back in the following season.
That’s not exactly what he said but something even simpler… but there certainly was an unspoken look in his sunken eyes riddled from fighting addiction from the Oxy epidemic still gripping this land foretelling a future, silently screaming into the void to preserve the roots and hearts of all life. Like a vigilant fox he suggested with a glance, even with his personal battles to extinguish our nicotine delivery systems, sensitive to the presence of newborns being unloaded by parents from vehicles that had pulled into the snow framed parking lot. Growing up in a coastal chaparral where we field strip our butts I understood not just the politeness of this smoker’s code and gesture at the sight of others but ecologically from the inverse. I had a youth filled with navy shower droughts exasperated by heatwaves, foothill thermal and offshore winds creating ripe tinderboxes for smoldering butts to ignite – just to bring on the germination of seeds that only stratify in furnace temps. This in turn is followed by cycles of every increasing monsoon season — at least from my anecdotal observation; being born in the drought of ‘76. I grew up skating those dry concrete river beds searching for Hannibal Chang only for those urban rivulets to be filled to the point of breach that sends 55 million gallons of rainwater a day straight out to sea along with all the debris from last week’s nervous-system-stimulated homeless encampment debris. Addicts not too dissimilar from the arborist friend I was smoking with.
It’s apparent that the USAEC has no regard for the statewide habitat of coastal wetlands, as of ‘01 they had been reduced from 5 million acres to 1 tenth of that which remains of the essential salt marshes. Fires raging through developed foothills threatening poorly engineered dwellings of our elite highlanders, only to be sent fleeing from rivers of mud to there second homes probably near Boise. It was always that way.
Just as sediment samples reveal this consistent ebb and flow and to know Hollywood was once coated and named after a native shrub, Heteromeles arbutifoloia (Toyon) that can shrivel from starvation – catch fire and even afterthat devastating crowning regrow only stronger and into a tree no less, is not just a display in botanical fortitude, but when it comes to human health, the medicinal applications of its chemical derivatives like icariside, betulin, flavonoids like catechin, vicenin-2 and farrerol, along with the “anti-inflammatory” properties of the triterpene, Lupeol acetate — they are all equally rejuvenating not just for the plant but for the humans who know how to consume it. The list goes on and like the birds know, you can let the red berries ripen a little on the shrub or pick and dry them to eat later or you can just bake out the cyanide like the Chumash did. Can you imagine a Napa tasting but it was a quiche or tart made of ground pine/acorn, rabbit, quail egg, wild onion, wild lettuce dabbed with a honey glaze infusion of Tagetes lemonii (Mexican Marigold) leaf and flower pedals. Come on if I were one of the first indigenous angels of Our Lady of the little portion in SoCal, that plate would certainly be on the menu along with the purest spring sources of water from unmolested aquifers. Drained by the likes of my favorite Nestlé quik which I just won’t drink anymore.
Hershey is a superior product, one you take with you camping and with all that water BlueTriton Brands pulls they don’t even have a waterpark like Hershey.
The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sagebrush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden
If that was printed on the first page of Steinbeck’s magnum opus about free agency, you better bet come the end of the novel thou mayest already forget it just like most of us have done over the last 4 years.
A massive storm of truth is on the horizon and it’s time to reef the main sheets.
If helping my wife through the full force gale of loosing her father didn’t capsize me, the loss of my younger sister the following year would have sunk me had I not found used this platform of absolute “curated” free speech as a resource to find my tribe. The Thai fisherman pants under the mourning doves are some she brought me back from Bali in 2007.
So maybe my reader does find out what happened to one of those baby Mourning doves or what they are symbolic of.
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Posting my native biomes’ precipitation data since the floods of 1863 would actually not look too dissimilar from graphs of recent all cause mortality rates. It’s why ARKstorm 2.0 was developed by the Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project of the U.S.G.S. to reveal how on target the left coast is for a great deluge that’s always followed by earthquakes. Big ones. Hopi prophecy of the 3rd Great Shaking kind of big ones.
Similar to how life shakes me and I react through these polyarts I’ve mastered.
It’s making pretty messes pretty.
In creating this content I hope to reach many wondering souls,
earthly and still in transit,
to the heavens
doom scrolling hell.
I am going to commit real effort as a polyartist, who’s blessed with technical prowess and urged internally by a great force, to make a statement and voice a bold truth.
This moral imperative must be executed with an extreme action bias before my reluctant family decides to reverse dustbowl the old Golden pyrite state by zoom zooming in a pet packed Mazda CX-9. Like Ishi the last California Quail of SF that no amount of cutsie brat branding anime characters on the BART will bring back.
🦊 ← That young polyartist will be the last of her tribe and has plans to migrate east to them endless mountains of free speech, nestled in the last great bastion of liberty on God’s green earth. She’ll produce more art in mass than any collective of prompt fed bots and even had her contribute to one of these.
Can Zach’s Substack guess which one of these pics was made by said teenager?
We’ll go forth in vigilant stewardship of permaculture art farms where we also raise Alpaca and Moreno for crochet and Nubian Goats for milk and maintain forests rich with so much dense biomass. So thick that not even the Swedish Arctic Off-Road Robotics Lab (AORO) would ever be able to breach with their forestry machine automation nor thee Canadian FPInnovations with an army of Rakkatec RCM Harveris will pierce our walled gardens of true beauty. Back where my father-in-law is resting in peace, actually resting in mostly pieces of calcium phosphate and sodium but still resting, it was there where many a revolutionary iron that was spilled and rests. I pray for these lands and children’s children’s lessons in Socratic civil discourse that will keep many more family members and our fellow citizens of all that is good to follow suit in red spades. Fighting for good is good but I fear having to bury more family members which is why I featured my oldest son performing the music featured in the video above.
That bird keeps on singing.
Ora et labora (et lege), deus adest sine mora.
One of those baby Mourning doves, 1 of 3 was not pictured in that video but the other two brothers shown survived. Literally and allegorically as it has been less than a year since my sister’s passing and if I don’t go to sleep without 16oz of Hamm’s then I’m with her again in dreams, while we frolic as we once learned to do so as children in our shared subconscious playground, like a pax de deus with steps of the heart choreographed to compositions of love across dimensions. Loss no matter how sturdy the nest can occur but my sister was an independent spirit in life just like when she danced at the SF Ballet Co Academy or the Vaganova Ballet Academy in DC (then named Kirov Ballet). Watching Natalia Osipova’s video (linked below) with her Balanchine lines reminds me of lil’ Sis and her love of birds, butterflies, buds, blisters, booze and ballet. She was a queen bee and not-so-long from now we’ll dance again a joyous Lindy hop through the clouds.
Until then, I see you, I hear you and I certainly feel your presence in waking moments oh ʒizɛl u le vili:
👻HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A DREAM WRITING? Well I have…🎵
These tragically tailored true tales told on THY TERRIBLE TUESDAYS will dive into my sister’s writing in post mortem. She was a Ballet Teacher and Funeral Director. There’s a storage unit filled to the brim of journals we were raised to use, all filled with her penmanship that looks like it came out of a Jane Austen Baking Tips correspondence or maybe typed up on a Tim Burton Royal. Her leading and kerning always perfect and she kept a better system of cataloging with notes for me to follow than any CMS could have. We loved puzzles, labyrinths, Goonies and Scavenger Hunt:
Some of her cryptic messages are written as dance moves and that in itself will give me, an initiate to such a language a lifetime to decode which as she prefaced “this puzzle is hard Bubba, that’s the pointe” Since I had joined her Last Responder Brigade assisting Funeral Services, a trade she performed for 14 years, there were more industry stories she made privy to me and no one else that I will continue to curate and share here. The mortuary I served could process 6 cases a day in busy seasons but my sister’s memorial park was handling 10x that amount and her employer did not treat her well at all before her demise but she’s not voiceless. She has so much more to communicate.
Writing about the time spent in the hospital through her passing will be healthy before I set out on other artistic endeavors that involve follow ups with my use of the DCA BreEZe Online Services and Nursing Board portals. If they couldn’t remember my sister’s name then, it will stick to their careers from here on out like pagpag and if anything they’ll remember the songs of a pianist and vocalist that played Suzanne Toolan’s “I Am The Bread Of Life” or “Oceans (Where Feet May Fail)” in the lobby at the hour of her passing. I’m coming back to make another musical offering at that ivory alter in November in peace and love. AND REMEMBERANCE of a soul who embodied the grace and beauty of Audrey Hepburn with balls of Jeanne Baret.
As for WILD n’ WACKY WEDNESDAYS come back around in another 15 days for some crop milk and a story about demolition, climbing trees and roofs of hospitals and coercion, by obligate structures and how I narrowly escaped a gruesome death by literally being hit in the head with a trophy fish that was intentionally hung for that purpose by the most powerful family in my little big city by the sea. TILL THEN, TOOTLES.
Also sorry for tagging the Substack crew so many times in the last ramming speed MAKE MY MONDAY publication, that “at” symbol sure looks a lot like a horn so hopefully I’ll learn not to grab them by it so much and stay contextual…only really tag those amazing account handlers who’ve I’ve engaged with since the last post, and for certain and , , , , , , , , , and of course the Demidawggoddess at- . Your serotonin delivery uptake along with ‘s call to action bias DM (you were so genuinely helpful I felt bad as a human I artistically provoked such pure sincerity) you are all the Sauce my service station’s SmashStack needs. Can we make that a #2 Combo with a 16oz:
Yes, anyone who comments on this publication will get a drawing by me.
(Art for words within reason, and reciprocal of a little effort received from first few commentors)
Large print giveth and small print taketh away but once got a song from my children’s choir and got a holiday remix of a Thunder cat song.
Look, I’m not really a writer at all but as a reader my most recent contemporary influences are Richard Powers, Gary Shteyngart, Haruki Murakami and here on Substack, well I can always count on , , alongside many other captains of compelling narratives and vessels of independent human existence. So looking forward to nestling up to ‘s sci-fi as treat when I’m stargazing because his other writings have helped this father-of-a-daughter + two older brothers immensely. is also keeping it Sunday Funny 3 times a week as his pops influenced some of the trouble my early art would get me in regarding the nuns.
It was the pencil that drew it, not me. And then there’s that who paved the way for ArtStack publishing. Not very sneaky at all bro, your duty to the craft is hard to hide.
To all of you I howl and play on a Hammond organ a prayer in action: Rev. James Cleveland’s “Peace Be Still” as He blessed me to have found your publications.
I also miss this one Katz from the Atlantic, as I still aim to live up to his standards of stylization. When it comes to how I decorate the place and where to get all them orange check stacks on tacky stacks, maybe if I stick up for Nazi’s it will get me more followers and subscribers:
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