AAAAHH

Once again, we find ourselves living under the yolk of the bomb. Behind all the posturing and the bluster is one simple fact: they’ve got atomics, and they might just use them.

Ma made spaghetti 

every night, to the tooth,

like unrefined grain. And if you did

not eat it, she’d bite her hand and cuss.

Her slipper would connect with your

jaw and you would sleep

bruised, hungry.

Ma’s rules, said Sal, weren’t too hard.

“Come home when the streetlamps come on.”

Well, what if they never came on?

Sometimes my brothers would tell me

to do things without explicitly saying 

anything at all. Laced together, 

my sneakers, worn flat, hand-me-down ragged, 

made a bolas. I gave them a Lone Ranger lasso swing and 

fwoop, missed.

I shattered the lamp on the

second swing and Stephen started running.

I knew he’d tell but I couldn’t chase him on account

of my shoes hanging from the pole and 

the sidewalk being about a mile or so of beer bottle.

I took a shortcut over papa’s grape wall, but

I slid on some moss and cut myself ten thousand times

invisibly 

on the crab grass below. A shower of rich 

black pustules pelted the earth. A single

exploding grape permanently alters a white shirt.

Ma was ready with the slipper when I got inside.

I knew Stephen was sitting

just around the corner,

listening from the bottom step.

I have kept this image on my computer all year. When the politicians attempt their brain-melting trickery, I look at this picture to remind myself where I stand:

Over one year ago today, a protestor wielding a traitorous confederate flag was allowed to prowl the seat of our legislature. Others wore Nazi paraphernalia or openly supported white-race militias. Others were just idiots, but they were all united in a common cause: to overthrow a democratic election. The president of the United States sat by and watched the show, his face glued to Fox News and Twitter.

From experience I know that many of the more conservative leaning people of the United States become irritated when the word “fascist” is used to describe certain behaviors that the right has undertaken in recent years, but the January 6th riot pretty much wraps the word in a bow. Storming a democratic process with the intent to disrupt a democratic election, capture politicians, and and steal documents is exactly the sort of activity that a Brownshirt would engage in. And as we know from our history classes, the Brownshirts were a rabble, a militia. The thugs that the KGB/whatever Putin calls them now hire to kidnap and torture Russian dissidents are people willing to do dirty work for cash. The idiots that are willing to attack Democratic institutions in the name of their glorious leaders are the foundation of future fascist states. History has shown us the fruits of this path over and over again, but, as my old history teacher once said, “people just don’t know their history.”

I can’t guess what the average Trumpy wants, and I suspect they are not entirely sure what they want, either. The Neo-Nazis and the Neo-Confederates, however, have very well defined prejudices and goals. They want America to be a new China or a new Russia- a state run by bosses, fueled by slavery, and controlled by force. The greatest failure of the Trump administration (and there is a heap of failures taller than a skyscraper), was the elevation of these fascists to political relevance. The worst part is, there is in all likelihood an alarming number of people out there that see this trajectory as a success.

Don’t let the fascists win. They want to enslave us and rot the heart of democracy out of our world. Let January 6th stand as a reminder that our way of life is always transitory. Unless we work to maintain and improve the values of the United States, our country is just as likely as any other to go the way of Rome and erode softly into failure.

I like the idea of observing January 6th as a day of reflection on the state of our government. When there is enough grievance to allow confederates to rally the masses, then there is something seriously wrong here. On the other hand, perhaps there has always been a violence-idolizing strain of America obsessed with bringing back the old ways. If that latter case is true and the confederates are mobilizing once again, then get the guns ready fellow Patriots because it is time to remind the traitors what it feels like to be the losers.

We made the most of it.

At this rate, it looks like Inktober is going to run into Thanksgiving.

I discovered, recently, an essential aspect of the fall season that grows as the days shorten and the trees grow bare. , I feel a keen sense of foreboding. It is a foreboding for the cold. It is a foreboding for the dark. Dark days and drizzling winds carry a whisper of winter. Foreboding is at the heart of this perilous and exciting time of year!

Get out there and enjoy it while it lasts.

America, wealthiest nation on Earth, hub of global innovation, is the only place that doesn’t offer you free, straightforward healthcare. Our nation also lacks a slew of other safety nets and nice things that our friends across the water have had for decades. Perhaps you have heard this all before. That’s good, because this really simple discrepancy in the civilized world is finally reaching ears. I had the good fortune of living in London for a while, and I was floored by how easy it was to settle in and get some healthcare. I didn’t even have to sit on the phone with anybody or log into a digital portal, and it was completely free. When people in Europe pay their taxes, they get that money back in services. In America, tax money seems to enter a black hole. Or, more accurately, it lines the pockets of a thousand bureaucrats and inevitably returns to the richest people on the planet.

I am very happy to live in Massachusetts. Though “Taxachusetts” is sometimes a painfully valid nickname, our state actually has services to offer its residents. We pay our home-care providers, we give disabled people quality educations and jobs (not quite minimum wage though), and if you need health insurance you will be able to find some. We also support the best universities and public schools on the planet, fostering the kind of intelligence that has allowed us to live such technologically advanced lives. Our state does amazing things with its taxes, which is more than one could say for New Hampshire, Mass’s cranky northern brother that skims tens of thousands of dollars in property taxes from individual homeowners every year and only offers its residents opium addiction and anti-abortion legislation. Hey, at least we can shop up there tax free!

All I’m saying is, the taxes aren’t going away. They just aren’t. Anybody that claims to lower your taxes is lying, or else they are moving your taxes on to somebody else (hint: somebody poorer). So rather than throwing up our hands and letting the politicians pocket our money and walk, why don’t we try to make taxes work for us? If you are going to be taking our money anyway, I better get a tangible good out of it.

Oh wait… somehow this discussion always falls to the small folk, the lower and middle class taxpayers. There does exist in this insane year of our lord 2021 a class of people that wield such an incredible mass of wealth that collecting a few billion from only a handful of them would easily pay a lion’s share in services. How did this happen? There was a point in American history when the stars aligned for the ultra-rich and they finally managed to get a puppet into office. His name was Ronald Reagan, and by his decree our nation was plunged into a forty year+ reign of conservative policies that have allowed levels of wealth inequality to match that of the oil and steel barons of the early 20th century.

Now you are probably thinking, “well shit, if only we had somebody up in the white house willing to consider amending–” WAIT WE DO. Trump is out of office, and Biden’s limping operation, geriatric as it is, has put forth some really straightforward ideas about moving taxes off the working class and onto the tech gods. These measures one-by-one have been shot down, of course–first by republicans and then by democrats. Both are in the pockets of billionaires. Remember the old cave man maxim: “Democrat bad. Republican worse. All lizards.”

The latest attempt to tax billionaires by collecting off their asset gains is novel, temporary, and probably won’t even get off the ground:

“The tax would be levied on anyone with more than $1 billion in assets or more than $100 million in income for three consecutive years — which applies to about 700 people in the United States. Initially, the legislation would impose the capital gains tax — 23.8 percent — on the gain in value of billionaires’ tradable assets, based on the original price of those assets.”

“Billionaires have avoided taxation by paying themselves very low salaries while amassing fortunes in stocks and other assets. They then borrow off those assets to finance their lifestyles, rather than selling the assets and paying capital gains taxes.” -Jonathan Weisman

700 people could give a fraction of their wealth so that we can invest in infrastructure and fix our healthcare, and they won’t. Let that sink in. You should be mad.

Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, has decided that this proposed billionaire tax is unfair:

“‘I [Manchin] don’t like the connotation that we’re targeting different people.” People, he added, that “contributed to society” and “create a lot of jobs and invest a lot of money and give a lot to philanthropic pursuits.'”

Manchin, of course, makes millions in kickbacks from the fossil fuels industry and probably millions more in invisible bribes that we will never know.

Yes, praise be the techies. Our mech overlords, hallowed and merciful, have already done so much for us. We should leave them alone to play with their fancy electric cars and launch rockets while normal people perish in overstocked hospitals and starve in the streets.

Perhaps the Besos’s of America will remember the people that made them. They probably won’t. Never forget that we pay well above our fair share in taxes so they don’t have to. God bless Amazon.

To live in a new world.

Death is a part of the hobby.

My brother saw the knob on top of my tank heater and decided to mess around with it. He twisted the thermostat up to 90 degrees. I came home to check on the tank, and when I dipped a finger in it felt like bathwater. My gourami, unnamed, could only swim in fits. He sank like a leaf to rest on the rock between spurts of activity. His gills hyperventilated. He seemed miserable.

I never found the body. Either my merciful family decided to discard it while I was not home, or the fish jumped shift. If the latter case is true, perhaps his body slipped into a crack between the floor and wall. The phantom scent of bad fish wafts into my nose sometimes when I pass the tank, and I do not know if I am imagining the smell or not. Either way, my fish is gone.

My fears ultimately came true. I am not ready to keep a fish, emotionally or physically. I will stick to my snails and shrimp.

RIP. He was a good fish.

I hate Tom Brady I hate Tom Brady fuck Tom Brady Tom Brady is a cocksucker and a bastard. Fuck Tom Brady.

Bill Belichick is washed.

Inktober is an old tradition of making ink drawings every day of October. I have attempted to do it before, but I have never made it to 31 days. Will 2021 be different? Yes!

Some adherents to Inktober will follow a template of themes. I don’t have the energy for that, so my drawings will be random. I will post whatever flows from the pen.

The equinox is here, and summer dies a slow death with it. The breeze visits more often, and the air hardens. Further north, trees already begin a transformation of hue. Apples ripen on branches and gourds are plucked from the earth. Fall has come!

It is hard to acknowledge that the long, hot golden days of the year are over, but the change of the season brings with it the promise of cozy days ahead. Cherish the weather while it is still warm-ish. The frost will be here soon enough, and the winds will eventually win out over the pleasant air (climate change allowing).

Happy Mid-Autumn! Get a look at that plump moon in the sky.

They say that death is a part of the hobby. Though snails are honestly pretty hard to form a deep emotional attachment to, I really loved this nerite. Though unnamed, my snail was a lively critter, an honest guy, and an instrumental component of the aquarium environment. It always sucks to lose something in your care, and that depressing fact of the hobby is no different for a lowly mollusk.

I haven’t taken the opportunity to speak much about my five gallon tank on this blog. I took a trip in August, but before I left I quickly seeded a little aquarium with some clippings of vallisnera, hornwort, fine sand, and a nice rock. I filled it with some water that had collected in a plastic bin outside and left the tank on the windowsill by itself for a week and a half. The sunlight did its work. Clouds of algae cobwebbed the hornwort and an emerald film of duckweed covered every centimeter of the tank’s surface. The sand was a much more forgiving medium than the gravel had been and the vals sent forth a bounty of runners to propagate fresh growths. Even a pleasant fuzz of algae grew along the slanted face of the rock like moss over a boulder. It was a lush system vibrant with life, teeming with tiny pond snails and swirling daphnia. Mosquito larvae from the stagnant bucket water dove and danced in the primordial water column.

The algae on the glass was an eyesore, though, and I knew I needed a nerite to clean the place up. I discovered shortly upon returning from my adventure across the country that there was local fish shop not a fifteen minute walk from my house. The staff are incredibly friendly and knowledgeable, and their selection of freshwater plants and small fish are ideal for my interest in small, filterless aquariums. I was so impressed by the place that I returned the very next day after my first visit and immediately bought a gourami and amano shrimp for the ten gallon (detailed here). On my first trip, however, I bought a nerite.

It was large–a zebra nerite I believe. The shell featured a black strip spiral that bent toward a cracked tip. It was much larger than the nerite I bought months ago for the nerite, and I suppose I should have suspected that it was just an older snail. If a creature gliding along a single slimy foot could be described as lumbering, this snail lumbered. It may have been slow, but the job was done, and it was done well. In a week the glass was free of algae. I like to think that I gave this shy grazer a pleasant last few weeks before it passed.

RIP unnamed nerite, you were a good snail.

(If you want to read about my aquarium as it developed through the spring, click here)

Why do we build fish tanks?

We build fish tanks to house fish, of course. It was always my goal to house some living vertebrates in my aquarium, but a certain fear of moving prevented me from doing so. The thought of having to pack my fish into buckets and travel across the country filled me with so much anxiety that I couldn’t bring myself to buy some fish, regardless of how small. Well, my situation has changed for the better. I have what some might call *stability*. I didn’t post anything in August because I was very busy sorting out my life. I did a little traveling, applied to jobs, and generally tried to distract myself from myself, and the results were amazing! By sheer luck, I managed to acquire a teaching position with great pay and settle permanently into an apartment with my grandfather. You already know what this means: Money + Residence = Fish!

I am tempted to purchase a fancy camera, because my old Android is woefully inadequate for representing the fine beauty of my new pet. The above image is one of my better captures. The specimen pictured is a sparkling gourami, a relative of the popular betta fish. Gouramis and betta fish are both labyrinth fish; fish that have adapted a special labyrinth organ for taking in atmospheric oxygen. It is because of this trait that you’ll typically see bettas placed in such shitty conditions at pet stores–they don’t need highly oxygenated water to survive since they can breathe straight from the surface. The sparkling gourami is less immediately flashy than his cousins, but they are brilliant fish in their own right. If they capture a beam of light at just the right angle, the gourami will truly sparkle. Its eye glows bright blue, and tiny flecks in the scales running down its body will illuminate and dance as it darts about the water. This fish is extremely agile. It can turn on a dime, literally twisting its body as it weaves through dense foliage. When my gourami wants to stop short, he extends his fins (including two “feelers” that sprout from the base of his belly) and instantly drops his momentum to zero. He’s a curious fish, too. His bright eyes are always roving in their sockets, and he will come right up to the glass when you approach and watch you. If you stick your finger toward him, he’ll puff up and try to act tough. Sometimes, he’ll dash back and forth in front of the glass to show off his glittering splendor.

People that aren’t in the know tend to think that fish are boring pets. I think these people merely mistreated their charges. A fish given adequate space, good water, and plenty of plants to explore will become very active. At the very least, my single gourami is one of the most active fish I have ever seen. He is constantly roving his territory, and will always emerge to play when I sit by him. He has quite the territory to explore…

The tank has finally reached jungle status. Sometime after my previous post, the vallisneria on the right went wild. I suspect a significant portion of the root system finally broke into the nutrient rich soil beneath the gravel cap, because the blades suddenly soared with growth. I knew vals grew like crazy, but I really did not anticipate that they would wrap around themselves like this. It is a tangle. The blades a carpet along the ceiling of the tank. Combined with the hornwort and the duckweed, which just won’t stop growing, a rich canopy of green has overtaken the surface of the aquarium. This is an ideal environment for the little gourami, whose natural environment includes shallow ponds and slow moving streams. He is well equipped for navigating the tangle of foliage in search of flakes that I scatter along the breaks in the surface. The leftmost vallisneria is a smaller variety that has decided to grow horizontally rather than vertically. It has propagated into a dense forest.

The other plants are doing decently, but not thriving. My original tuft of hair grass is turning brown and starting to dissolve, but it is at least spreading. Smaller blades poke through the gravel and form small tufts here and there. The crypts that I had planted months ago are not growing larger, but new leaves are sprouting. Perhaps someday they will crack into the richer soil and start going big. Otherwise, I may need to trim the canopy to allow them more light. For now, I am going to let them chill. The algae isn’t terrible, but thick clouds continue to dwell around the base of my vallisneria groves, and there are some strands of hair algae growing up in the canopy. The solution to this is still growing. Observe:

Better pictures of him will come with later posts, but the skinny white guy beneath the gourami is my amano shrimp! Her scuttles through the water and along the surfaces of plants and rocks with his many legs. His whisker-like antennae are constantly swirling about as he gathers microbes and algae into his mouth with his front mandible things. He never stops eating. You can see the buildup of plant material through his translucent carapace, and it eventually forms a long dark line in his intestines before being released as a strand of waste. He is a machine of an algae processor, but he can’t do it alone. Next time I visit my LFS (local fish shop), I intend to get a few more alongside some little cherry shrimp. A 10 gallon tanks needs quite the cleanup crew.

The third new member of my aquarium ecosystem is actually not so new. The gourami and amano are probably a little over a week settled in, but I had actually purchased a nerite snail some months before. I never bothered to make a post about him, but there wasn’t any drama to tell of. He settled right in and started scraping the glass for algae. Nerites are slow, peaceful, and probably the best scrubber you can find for a natural aquarium. He doesn’t even emerge from the safety of his shell.

Here is another picture of my gourami. Someday, I’ll have a nice photo shoot and try to capture his glitter dance in action.

The 10 gallon is still at my parent’s house. Before the weather turns cold, I need to transport this thing to my permanent home. I’m living in Malden now, just north of Boston. The LFS nearby has a nice supply of gouramis, so my little guy will have some friends soon enough I’m sure. I’d love to breed them!

Meanwhile, in Malden…

What’s this?? A second tank??!

The hobby grows and grows…