AAAAHH

Mamma Chen craved crab

And, being a biologist, 

Thought she could kill one.

Mallet for masticator, 

Fist focused white

Poised

To make art of arthropod

But the grey thing hummed.

The benthic baby,

With glistening stalks and

Rubber banded nippers blubbered 

Harmlessly as it scuttled against hard sink chrome.

Mother was moved,

But mallet was not.

Wrist cracked a whack

But obstinate carapace objected!

Glance after glance

The bout went on.

Despite brittle bones and a chitin chitter,

The creature scrabbled on.

Mamma broke,

Cheek streaked

With salty water that reminded 

The crustacean of home.

Pot on the burner brought to boil

And that was that.

Hiss

Bye bye

Bubby the Wanderer, lost in the rain.

The blog is one year old today. Hurray!

You really take on a project like this for the archive page. You want to be able to open that sucker up every once in a while and see a huge list of links. I got the idea from Homestuck’s archive of comic pages spanning thousands of entries. There was nothing fancy about it, just a massive wall of blue text flowing downward for miles. My archive doesn’t even necessitate a scroll wheel to traverse, it’s that small. And it isn’t for a lack of publishable content on my part either. I’m writing all kinds of junk all the time, stuff that either gets submitted once or thrown away and never again sees the light of day. I have some work to do this year, that is for sure. I’m pretty busy writing this big stressful thesis on Minecraft at the moment, so I won’t make any concrete promises. I do, however, intend to push some kind of content at least once a month. I suppose a crappy pen sketch counts. We’ll see what I can muster.

Now the fun part… site analytics!

Last month, February 2021, aaaahh.net received 827 visits. Of that number, 443 of them were unique visits. I have no idea how any of that is calculated. On average, the site gets 8.58 hits per visit with 7,130 hits total in February. I don’t know if most of those are bots or if 400+ living humans actually visited my website. A good chunk of those have to be real people, right? I think the software is supposed to sift out robots and worms.

In 2020, the website received 4,981 total visits and 1,723 unique visitors. Over 33,000 hits AKA page views across all of that. The total bandwidth for 2020 reached 694.23 MB. Not even a gigabyte of content consumed! I suspect I am overpaying for hosting.

As one might expect, the view counts really seem to shoot up during months that I actually post content. Total views seems to be on an upward trend, so maybe people are actually bookmarking this thing. Or the bots are finding it valuable.

That is all for now. If I discover any other interesting stats, they will be posted. If you have enjoyed the site and would like to ask a question, feel free to contact me at aaron@aaaahh.net. I don’t have this email on my phone yet, so expect significant delays in response time. If you would be interested in being part of an infrequent email list with notable content updates, please let me know.

Happy holidays!

Neck an unfurling fern

Blooming from the dirt

Already larger than a golden retriever

Soon larger than a car

Larger than anything

that will ever roam land

Just try to eat me

These trunks that churn loam

Forest feller

Meadow maker

You cannot fathom my girth 

O, but these lungs are tired

This behemoth drum

This sweeping neck

A titanic burden

Balanced by a tendril tail that whips in the wind

Steel not

This suspension bridge needs

The bristles and cones of bygone trees

Fuel the greatest engine that ever breathed

For twenty million years and more

And you, monkey?

Just six million

And probably not one more

Even now, my remains stun the world 

America has not forgotten my tour

An acre per a step for a lifetime as long as yours

And I am not forgotten

My hulking form 

Makes your children

Awed

Weep

Tom Brady is the strongest man that ever lived.

He’s clever too.

Look at those sharp eyes, shining diadems upon a high cheek dobbed in black. The luster of his smoulder, slickened by the sweat of other men, emboldens the eye of the watcher. He inspires in a glance. His teammates move with him, organs, extensions of his will and love.

I love Tom Brady. I love his form. I love his mind. He is a man that lives for what he does. We aspire for the same, but hope is not the distillation of Brady’s life. He is a crystal of victory, a diamond that drives the point into the rock and shatters it. All that lives and breaths bends toward his star. He drives, hands before and aft as he wills the earth beneath him. How can a wrist so twisted with muscle perform such supple machinations? We cannot experience these things. We cannot know victory as Tom does.

Tom Brady is the heart that beats at the center of the United States of America. The dream is his, as is the family. When he stands upon the stage of victory, the wife and children are never far from his thoughts. They are often with him as he accepts the fruits of his work. Those lips, still wet from the battle cries of the open fields, do not stray far from his son’s. A man that is not afraid to kiss his aging children is a man that must be respected. Not only is he a paragon of the physical; Tom Brady is a man of value, of heritage. The adoring eyes of his wife would inspire envy if they did not already fill the soul with a longing for the more noble standard of manhood established by the king himself.

If victory were a sash worn upon the shoulder, Tom Brady would appear to us as an angel. His shining aura blinds as it illuminates. His opponents slide from his armor like slugs. The unrighteous are repelled by his visage while the feeble find in his gaze the will to move mountains. Blessed. Divine.

Once, when I was too young to understand the intricate dance of Football, a vision came to me. My spirit was whisked into the firmament where I was greeted by Tom Brady himself. He said, “Do not be afraid,” and told of me the truth that lies at the heart of universe. Clothed in robes of white and shining like an eagle, the impression of his honed musculature could be made out among the folds. His arms, gentle but infinitely capable, enfolded and warmed me, and I glanced openly at the fine, jet-fighter pectorals. Where his sturdy hips met, the outline of a turgid force made itself apparent, and I blushed. Tom Brady was unshaken by my stare, and he held me closer.

“Understand, son, that you do not move about the world. This Earth is but a canvas upon which the tread of your heels work to mold fissures of time and energy.”

I did not fully comprehend Brady’s words then, but he reassured me that all would be clear in time. All I had to do was believe in my self and promote the best in those around me.

The vision slipped away all too soon. My spirit returned to Earth long before my mind remembered its true state, and when my eyes finally fluttered open, the light of the dawn star was already flowing through the cracks in my shades.

Civilization will not forget Tom Brady. The Earth will not forget Tom Brady. We can only hope to attain even a fraction of his power in our short lives. God bless him and his children.

At long last, I finally made time to upload the greatest piece of art I have yet produced. I wrote, drew, and inked this entire project over the course of Fall Semester 2019. It had been sitting in a folder for over a year now, but I finally took the time to scan and crop the images for upload.

Any likeness to real persons and locations is strictly coincidental. Also, it reads right to left because I was reading manga. Oops.

[READ THE FULL COMIC HERE]

: )

When I was younger, there was a brief period of time, a few weeks maybe, when the backyard did not get mowed. I don’t remember how old I was, but I do remember the glory of it. The grass rose up like a forest, tufted with fingers of seeds in serrated sheaths. Compared to the muddy, fungal waste that my childhood yard would become in proceeding decades, that brief period of stomach-high grass seemed like the beginning of the world.

We would play Pokémon in that grass, imagine all of the varieties that would inhabit my new corner of the wilderness. In the absence of any significant connection to real animals, Pokémon is like a drug to the child mind. It is really a wonder I went into that grass at all. I was generally terrified of insects and dead birds and anything that moved unpredictably. We were actually forbidden from playing in the tall grass. My mother screamed about ticks and other disease-carrying terrors, and my friend’s mother was even worse. Grass stains can kill, apparently.

The grass hurt my father the most. Each green needle stabbed at his pride and caused his skin to ooze beads of translucent shame. The grass was the latest slight in an endless train of frustrations that stretched back to before I was born. He would sigh over the grass and yell at the grass. He would complain about unheard whispers from the neighbors about the decline of our suburban integrity. This grass is destroying us! We are the neighborhood laughingstock!

Maybe the lawn mower was broken? That herbivorous shark of a machine with aerodynamic hull and one-thousand speeds? I really don’t remember.

The issue cleared up eventually. Dad fixed or borrowed a mowing device, and the tall grass was gone in an hour. I’m sure the exercise killed my lungs and forced my eyeballs shut for a week.

Many years later, the third-grade teacher that lived across the street would get a divorce and move away. In her place came an Indian family, a father, mother, and a little son that liked to wander and gape every corner of his new yard. This turn of events gave the neighborhood something to joke about. Little comments about smelling curry every time the doors swung open began to propagate. Sometimes the father didn’t wave or smile hard enough when the Lexuses drove by. An exotic new neighbor gives a suburb excitement to feed upon for months.

Among all the little peeves, this new neighbor had one crucial flaw–the father did not know how to take care of his yard. As his stay grew longer, so did his grass. Before long, his front yard was a matted forest straight out of my primordial past. I’m sure the experienced enriched the toddler’s life immensely, but it was a bane to the established neighborhood. Old griefs were reborn in my father, and he began to complain about the embarrassment just across the street. His imagination swam with the terror of plummeting property values. Is the guy going to hire a crew? My father eventually settled on the theory that the guy was a big city tech-wizard that had come to colonize American suburbia. No lawns in the concrete jungle.

Eventually, my dad took it upon himself to lay the green menace low. He took his monster mower across the street and cleaned up the place in no time at all. I don’t live there anymore, but I imagine the lawns are still as flat and brown as ever. An unpruned landscape is a very dangerous thing.

One of the chief traumas of my youth surrounds a pet frog. I have long been interested in keeping glass-bound pets, fish and such. This mania possibly stems from the massive fish tank that my mother used to keep in her store. It housed a pair of massive sucker fish (plecos, highly invasive), vicious orange cichlids with roving eyes, and a plethora of smaller fish that would be eaten and replaced over time. Maybe it was all the wildlife documentaries. Something in my deeper youth spurred me to keep strange animals, but my patience was not built for it. In the sixth grade, all I could think about was owning a dart frog. In the tropical rain forests of South America, the diet of these frogs allows them to manufacture some of the deadliest poisons in the world. In captivity, feasting on flightless fruit flies and basking under electronic light renders the domestic dart frog relatively harmless. The conditions necessary to sustain their lives, however, remain strict. The humid atmosphere and lush flora of the rain forest must be recreated in a glass cube.

I was not up to the task, and the frog that I had shipped to my house that summer died a few months later as Autumn began to make my house very cold and dry. Various follies compounded to create the frog corpse that still lies buried in a forgotten plastic coffin in my childhood backyard. I have gone over the various mistakes in my mind many times throughout the intervening years, but the gist of them is that I cared more about having the exotic frog than caring for the frog’s necessary habitat. The loss of the frog left me terrified, and I decided that I would not own another aquarium pet until I was mature and financially independent enough to do it perfectly. Though I raised some tropical plants in my room for some years after, I never did overcome my fears. Six more years of living without obligations flew by without any serious attempts at aquarium building.

The desire never really left, and now that I am a mobile college student, the aquarium mania has returned in force. Inconvenience seems to spur the fantasy on, in fact. I went through a period of intense longing for a goldfish last semester. Thank god I could control myself! Had a fish died in transit between my apartment and my house, I probably would have driven off a bridge. No, I am not so foolish as to impulse by another animal that I don’t have the means to take care of. I am, however, more than capable of spending large sums of money on objects that might eventually lead to me owning an animal. Hence, this:

This is ten-gallon filterless aquarium housing live plants. I finally put the whole thing together yesterday. I picked up the glass aquarium for fifteen bucks on Facebook Marketplace. I paid a small fortune for the rock and gravel because I wanted to support my local hobby shop rather than save big on Amazon. The plants were certainly an impulse purchase—I ordered those online from a plant dealer in Washington called Aquarium Co-Op. I realized that if I did not force myself to plant something, the separate parts of the tank were going to sit in my basement forever. What you see here is two varieties of Vallisneria and dwarf hairgrass. I intend to run to the store and pick up some hornwort to fill in the gaps while the baby plants propagate and expand. The lamp is just a desk lamp with a 20-watt CFL bulb inside. I’m pretty sure it will provide enough light.

A hobbyist in the know would call this aquarium design a “Walstad Tank.” That is, a soil-based tank that attempts to use an ecosystem of plants of bacteria to perform the duties of an electronic filter. Just beneath the pretty gravel cap is some organic soil that will hopefully not cause dangerous bacteria to flourish and kill the tank. Ideally, the plants will use it to grow expansive root systems and spread across the entire aquarium to form a lush jungle of green. I got the idea for my tank from a YouTube aquarist, Foo the Flowerhorn. They designed a series of filterless tanks, one of which is a lively Betta fish tank that has sweet potatoes growing out the top! I love Foo’s designs because they aren’t just plastic-laden fish containers—they attempt to create vibrant natural spaces that place just as much emphasis on environment as pet-keeping. The plants are not auxiliary. They are central to the success of the tank.

I quickly learned that there is an entire section of the aquarium hobby dedicated to planted tanks. In 9^th grade biology, my teacher asked us to prepare biospheres for the upcoming science fair. By feeding ammonia to a jar of pond dirt and hornwort gathered outside my house, I was able to sustain a shrimp for several days. I did not realize it at the time, but that is basically how a filterless aquarium works. The bacteria in the tank turns waste materials into useful nitrates that the plants can recycle to keep the environment going. To help grow the beneficial bacteria, I will be loading this tank with ammonia. My basement will soon smell of noxious piss, I’m sure, but I won’t be around much longer to deal with it. While I’m away at college this semester, my brother will be feeding the thing. I haven’t actually asked him yet, but who could say no to such an adorable aquarium? By the time I come back, unemployed and prospect-less, perhaps the tank will be ready to sustain fishy life. At the very least, a lush forest of aquatic plants would look splendid! I will update my blog as interesting details emerge.

My ultimate hope is to make good on my childhood mistakes. I must provide a wonderful environment for any living thing that falls under my care. I can’t even remember that poor frog’s name, but his shade will haunt me for the rest of my life.

In December of 2019, I completed a fifteen+ page comic of my own design. Well, I called it a “manga” because it reads right to left and I was reading a lot of that at the time, but let’s not kid ourselves here. The project spanned over half the semester, and it represents some of the most focused work I have ever undertaken. I was drawing every day, planning character designs and studying figures often. I can say with confidence that the comic project was some of the happiest work I have ever undertaken. It is strange, then, that the existence of the project pretty much evaporated from my mind the following year. The all-consuming wave of the pandemic wiped my brain like a magnet on a hard drive.

Once I find a suitable means of digitizing the comic, it will be uploaded here in full. For now, I would like to document some of the steps I took to place my life in the optimal configuration to draw as often as possible. I think the under-discussed key to improving at drawing (at least from the outset) is constant iteration. One must draw as much as possible. This is easier said than done, and this post contains the methods I used to achieve a state of boundless productivity.

I started the project by spending money. I’m a consumer whore at heart, and if I don’t buy something shiny, I won’t be satisfied that I’ve got the right stuff. My animal brain will dwell on what I don’t have and prevent me from starting in the first place. If you know anything about online drawing communities, then you are already familiar with this phenomenon. Tablet mania runs deep—many aspiring artists won’t start drawing until they purchase an expensive piece of Wacom tech. They realize with horror, as I have realized multiple times before, that it is not the technology that makes the artist. The drawings remain shit, even when rendered in Photoshop. Rather than feeling depressed over this mental dependence on shiny new things, I decided to leverage my habit to my benefit.

My girlfriend and I took a bus into Boston to buy some drawing supplies, mainly a notebook. There is a store on Mass Ave called Muji (It’s practically on top of the Massachusetts Turnpike). Muji is a kind of Japanese junk stores. It’s like an Apple Store for clothes and household knickknacks that plays hard into a beige, wood panel aesthetic. It is soothingly boring in there. Beanbags, benches, and incense complete the vibe. While most of their junk is priced beyond consideration, they used to boast a beautiful selection of stationery and pens. I still carry around $3 pocket-sized Muji notebooks for note taking and idea spaghetti on the go (the price has since raised a dollar, but I had the foresight to stock up). For this project, I grabbed something even cheaper, these $1.50 blank notebooks with basic binding.

If you are buying a drawing notebook, go dirt cheap. Seriously. When you spend big for a notebook with good paper and expensive binding, it doesn’t feel so great to fill it with shit. The fear of wasting a page on a bad drawing will ultimately get between you and the primary objective of drawing all the time. Don’t let the Youtuber artists fool you. These practice notebooks aren’t going to be beautiful flipping material from the onset, though you will be proud to do so when the notebook is finally full. I have considered doing away with buying notebooks completely, but stapled printer paper poses a serious durability problem. The inexpensive Muji notebooks are awesome because they still look and smell great when you buy them, so they scratch that purchase itch without making a dent in your conscious. You can even use these stamps they have to add little designs to them. Very Muji. The notebooks are on the smaller size and thin too, so you can slip them into a backpack or smaller bag without losing space or risking serious damage by crushing or bending them. Unfortunately, I don’t think Muji carries these things anymore. Before the pandemic, they slimmed their selection down considerably and most of their budget stationary disappeared. I intend to write them a letter.

I also visited my local comic shop and picked up a handful of material from the fifty-cent bin. Old Marvels. These would be my reference. The simplicity of the line work and high contrast coloration makes for simple study material. My reasoning stood that by copying entire panels from these comic books, I could develop an internal library of poses and figures to draw upon in my own work. Art is plagiarism, don’t forget that. These comics also provide that dopamine rush of spending money on something cool and are destruction-proof. I wouldn’t be particularly upset if these trash comics suddenly burnt to a crisp while I slept. By either sheer coincidence or the logic of industrial binding, the comics and the Muji notebooks were the same size. They could be leafed into each other to create a single, convenient bundle.

The bundle turned out to be everything. One day before Shakespeare class, at a point in the semester when the wind was brisk but still tolerable enough to sit outside, I pulled out my materials on a metal bench and just started copying the things I saw in the comic. The activity was so engrossing that I almost missed the start of class. I began undertaking these simple studies whenever I had downtime—between classes, while procrastinating another project, etc. By making my practice as portable and straightforward as possible, I had solved my mental block and managed to make drawing fun again. After years of cranking out meaningless essay materials on pure deadline stress and adrenaline, the shift to working on a project long term and loving every second of it was shocking. It is important to remember that it is possible to feel that way about work.

I did some pretty clever things over the course of this project. Inking was a problem. I didn’t want the final comic to look like it was drawn from pencil, but tracing is difficult without a light table. I had to invent my own. During my Halloween all-nighter to complete the first draft, I found a flat-screen TV and pilfered a sheet of glass from the university art complex. By laying the TV on its back with the glass on top of it, I was able to create a functional light table. I must have looked insane, but at least I could revise my work.

The pandemic should have offered me a slate of time to continue this craft unbothered by practical reality, but it fled my mind in March. Many things did. This website is another lost item. I had finally crafted a canvas for publishing my writing and artwork online, but this blog went blank shortly after quarantine began. Maybe some artists can work in such stifled conditions, but I quickly lost grasp of time and sank into the simulated world.

I want to get drawing back. Maybe the comic shop is still open?

A scratched bowl can be a precarious thing. Jeremy was scraping rice out of a plastic one when he noticed its etched bottom. As the rice was reduced to a few grainy pockets, little silver lines made themselves known. Jeremy stopped mid-chew and pulled the bowl closer to his face. The etchings were fine, almost pretty. But why were they silver? He lifted his fork and frowned. The utensil was silver too.

Jeremy softly placed the bowl down on the couch next to him and stood up, mouth still stocked with rice. Hands tingling and head faint, the teenager walked to the trash bin and opened wide. A semi-chewed lump rolled off his tongue and made a “piff” as it pelted the empty trash bag. The lump clung to the side of the plastic and did not roll. Jeremy steadied himself against a countertop as his thoughts raced.

He wasn’t sure if he should throw the bowl away or the fork. He tossed both. He went to sit down again when another terrifying thought struck. Jeremy ran to the kitchen and drew another plastic bowl out of the cupboard. This one was scratched even more.

“Have I been eating plastic and fork my whole life?”

Jeremy’s belly tightened as he imagined a stomach lined with a thickening layer of undigestible detritus. He began rifling through the cabinets, peering into childhood bowls and mugs. Each mug has a spiral of slashes at its bottom from years of tea swirling. His once coveted Thomas the Tank Engine sippy bowl possessed a hull practically torn to shreds. He threw it into the trash.

Jeremy’s head swam and his chest heaved at an air supply that suddenly felt very limited. His tongue was like a brick in his mouth. Before a panic attack could bring him low, a killing thought infiltrated the conscious world.

“Teflon! Motherfucking Teflon!”

He practically tore the cabinet door off its hinges as he rummaged for his mother’s favorite frying pan. She lovingly crafted scrambled eggs on that thing for Saturday mornings beyond count. The image of the thing once conjured the scent of frying bacon and grease-battered home fries, but that was gone now, replaced by an emerging terror. Jeremy’s rummaging became frantic. He tore through stacks of cookware, digging through pot lids like a crazed badger escaping the neighbor’s spaniel. It did not take long to find the culprit.

It was horrific. The old pan was scratched to shit, with flecks of black coating scraped clean from ages of spatula contact. It resembled a peeling wall. Some distant knowledge of the dangers of cooking with old Teflon equipment flitted through Jeremy’s brain. Disgust caused him to leap upward suddenly, but the edge of the counter met his cranium on the ascent. If the counter wasn’t what knocked Jeremy out, the cast-iron skillet knocked from its peg certainly did.

Jeremy awoke in a grey landscape, a clearing of sorts. The trees that surrounded him were like mercury pillars, sharp and reflective. He quickly realized that the clearing wasn’t lined with trees at all–they were forks! As he stared at them, they began to decay. The silver coatings peeled backwards, curling like tinsel to reveal rough interiors of knotted rust. The orange brown metal immediately began to disintegrate. Jeremy sensed plumes of invisible flecks invading his lungs. He fled, the giant forks festering all around him. He closed his eyes as he ran and covered his nose and mouth with the cloth of his t-shirt. Blind, he eventually tumbled down a smooth incline.

A burning at his back forced Jeremy to open his eyes. He had apparently rolled farther than he thought, because the fork forest was nowhere to be seen. His back was resting upon the lowest point of an extremely smooth bowl. It was like glass. It was glass. The burning became a searing pain, and Jeremy launched to his feet. The green-tinged glass was too steep and smooth to climb, but that did not prevent Jeremy from trying. As he tried to use his palms to grip the surface of the incline, he yelped. It felt like acid was eating away at his skin. His shoes smoked, too.

“Oh shit.”

Jeremy suddenly recognized his enclosure. His grandmother owned a bowl exactly like this, only small enough for a human to eat out of. It was depression-era glassware, apparently. Uranium.

Uranium glass.

Jeremy used to eat out of that bowl every time he visited nanna. It was his favorite. He could not believe that he used to scoop cheerios out of an irradiated bowl. His poor grandmother had plenty of glassware like it around the house. Thoughts of nanna’s brain turning to radioactive mush while scooping oatmeal elicited tears.

As the evil bowl devoured the soles of his feet, Jeremy could not help but cry out in despair. The material world unraveled around him. His skin intermingled with glass and metal and his nails melded into the cloth of his sweatpants as he gripped them. His teeth bloomed from his maw like glorious crystals and evaporated into the atmosphere alongside the rest of his conscious mind.

Jeremy died that very day. His sister discovered him dead on the kitchen floor, frying pan gripped so tightly in his left hand that his fingers bled.

This piece of writing is about politics. I doubt that the politics in question are particularly controversial at this point, but who knows? You have been warned.

Assuming the globe doesn’t turn into a fireball during the next few weeks, the government of the United States is set to undergo significant political change. The Democratic party will have a majority in the Senate and the House, as well as a Joe Biden in the White House. I know that, for many of my more conservative and apolitical friends, this turn of events is tinged with uncertainty. Certain political and media interests have long worked to frame the Democratic party as the nest of identity politics, hugbox artificers, and regulation fiends. The overwhelming sense that “nothing will really change” and “both parties are fundamentally the same” reigns supreme. The goal of this short piece is to try and add nuance to this dull equivalence. At the very least, I want to highlight some of the non-insignificant ways that a Democratic majority in our policy making could be pretty darn close to objectively better than the Republican stuff we’ve been contending with for the past four years.

As a rule, I’m not even going to touch identity. Though I personally believe that discussions about race and class are central to improving our country, I also know that many of the folks, young and old, that live in the white suburbs of northern Massachusetts don’t really give a shit. “I don’t owe people anything, what does this stuff have to do with me?” I get it, I used to think the same way. When you are born and raised in a place where everybody looks the same, there is little to no visible poverty, and crime is low enough that the cops are bored out of their minds hunting for speeding tickets, the social media posts from liberal college students about Black Lives Matter seem very foreign. Instead, I’ll be talking about other things that do have a direct impact on everybody’s lives, rich/poor, black/white–issues that the Trump administration has catastrophically failed to do literally anything about.

Let’s start with Net Neutrality and digital intellectual property rights in general. If you aren’t aware, Trump chose a man named Ajit Pai to be the FCC chairman in 2017. Before that, Pai worked as a Lawyer for Verizon and firms defending large communications companies. As head of the FCC, Ajit Pai killed Net Neutrality in the USA, deregulated various mechanisms in place to limit the already hyper-powerful corporate media landscape, and generally sides with the rights of corporate power over individual citizens. As an avid fan of the independent web (I code and host my own website for pretty much no reason other than to be somewhat more independent from larger social media moguls), this stuff is appalling. While the FCC has been hammering away at their project to make the internet as hostile as possible to individuals, the slew of conservative judges that the Republican administration has churned out over the years are no doubt working to cement legal precedents for a vision of the internet powered by corporate bureaucracy. Investigations into unethical and illegal behavior by large corporations were halted during the Trump presidency, surprise surprise. I find it particularly alarming that our government is so keen to dismantling Facebook and Google while internet providers like Comcast have been allowed to monopolize the physical information infrastructure of the entire country for decades. Somebody is paying somebody else a lot of money, and the Trump administration has been especially blatant about its conflicts of interest. Meanwhile, Comcast is increasingly free to snoop your online activity and tattle to Disney whenever they deem your internet use anti-profitable.

There is no guarantee that the new Democratic administration will be more resistant to the influence of rich monopolies. After all, it was old Clinton himself that passed some of the worst deregulations in the media landscape (indie radio pretty much died in 1996). That said, we may at least have an FCC that stands up for the rights of citizens. We will also have a government composed of policy makers with a higher inclination toward internet regulation than the past administration. Biden has already promised to bring back Net Neutrality and expand internet access nationwide, and now he has the senate majority to actually make it happen. I am hopeful, but I temper my hopes. You must understand though, that during the Trump administration these ideas weren’t even on the table. Any bill even suggesting that internet use should be at all protected would wither in Mitch McConnell’s desk. Basically, I’m just glad to have an administration that maybe, just maybe, can be reasoned with about these things.

My regulatory pipe dream is expanded rights for citizens regarding copyright law. If you use Youtube to watch smaller channels, you know what I’m talking about. Youtube is the corporate whipping boy. Corporations like Disney and Nintendo are allowed to immediately demonetize or even claim the income of any video they want, and it is up to the creator to manually refute the claim. It isn’t even a human or lawyer making these (mostly false) infringement calls. The process is automated. I follow a small aquarium hobbyist that has to deal with false claims multiple times a week, and the headache is getting to him. There needs to be penalties in place to disincentivize false copyright claims. And I can assure you, breaking up Youtube isn’t going to make it easier for independent content creators to fight for their rights. Beyond the Youtube sphere, Nintendo recently shut down an online Super Smash Bros. Tournament for pretty much no reason at all other than a desire to promote newer product and stifle attempts to keep the old Gamecube community afloat during the pandemic. How are a bunch of Smash players supposed to fight that injustice? Corporate media is leveraging its power to sculpt culture to the liking of profit-obsessed jerks. I foresee a boring dystopia in which all of our interactions online fall under some form of copyright, allowing the corporate government to censor our expression at will. In the ancient days, myths were a commons and ideas could move. Mickey Mouse was shoved down my throat before I could even conceptualize the idea of applesauce, let alone intellectual property rights, so I feel like I’m entitled to representing the fucking three circle mouse logo without worrying about a Disney lawyer ascending from the pits of hell like a Fury to claw my eyes out.

To tie this rant back to the discussion at hand: would Mitch McConnell and Trump defend me from that Fury? Hell no. It has yet to be seen if Biden’s gang will be more useful in that regard, but the change brings me hope.

(I did email Elizabeth Warren about my intellectual property concerns a few months back. She got back to me today… with an automated email about her response to Covid-19… I guess she didn’t read it.)

More pressing than our internet freedoms is the health of the environment. I allow the boomers their cognitive dissonance and strange moods, but if you are under the age of thirty and do not understand just how pressing the threat of climate change and ecological collapse is, then you need to be beaten over the head with a block of cement. I’m honestly shocked that politicians don’t use Trump’s anti-environment stance to attack him more often, but I suppose it really is an issue divided by age groups. In typical shill fashion, Trump has peeled back over one hundred pieces of environmental legislation in order to appease frackers and drillers. His environmental protection agency is a stunted little creature, and his gutting of federal land management is partially responsible for the uncontrolled fires of the west. These past four years have really hit home the ideological shift of the Republican party. Once home to pro-environment policy makers decades ago, modern conservatives no longer see America’s natural resources as anything more than materials for profit. It’s all Minecraft as far as the lobbyists are concerned. America’s lack of concern for the world has global implications as well. The clear cutting and burning of the Amazon rainforest has been met with zero response from the Trump administration. The asshole that runs Brazil apparently kisses Trump’s ass. While I’m at it, what the hell was up with the fixation on coal? “Clean coal?” Even if that idea wasn’t totally bonkers, coal isn’t a thing anymore. Coal’s not cool. Coal isn’t the backbone of our energy infrastructure. It’s embarrassing. It was a blatant appeal to sects of voters that Trump evidently had no real intention of helping.

I look forward to a wave of policy aimed at improving the health of the planet. It has to happen. I don’t need to echo the stakes; you can find more skilled advocates across the web. If I could have one wish, though, I think more public funding for transportation would be awesome. Every workday, i95 becomes choked with cars during the morning and again at night. The hours spent in Boston’s commuter traffic are brain-crushing, and I can only imagine the collective fuel waste. An expanded commuter rail with greater consistency, more trains, and a farther reach into the northern suburbs of Mass and even southern NH would be a miraculous boon. We need buses, too. As it currently stands, living beyond the cities of America without a car is nearly impossible. The original stimulus bill contained billions of dollars for the airline industry (which proceeded to pocket the money and layoff most of its staff), but almost no cash went to busing and other forms of transit. If Americans can reorient their relationship to physical movement, perhaps we can reduce fuel consumption, clear up the roads for the real car enthusiasts out there, and free ourselves from the bondage of the interstate highway.

There is so much more that could be discussed about the folly of the Trump years, but I’m just about burned out. If you’ve read this far down, thank you. If you were previously ambivalent to the current political climate, I hope I have illuminated some issues of legitimate concern. Trump has taken great pains to ensure that meaningful discussions about policy are silenced in a discord of jeers and victimhood, and the media has been somewhat complicit in this phenomenon. Ignore superficial politics and keep your eyes on reality. Don’t let the mainstream Democrats fool you either–old men with lobbyists behind them are similar across the spectrum. Now that they’ve won, they may try to distract you with self congratulation and token moves. We must remind them that this is there last chance. Don’t let corporate powers trick you into worship. Also, read a fucking newspaper.

There was a magic stream in the forest that could transport people to another world, and Sam liked to visit this stream as often as he could. Time did not flow properly in this other world, so Sam had to be careful about managing his hours there. Because of school, he could not go on weekdays, and Saturday was usually off because his mother insisted he go to temple. Once, before he fully understood the nature of the magic stream, he skipped school to play in the other world and emerged after some hours to discover that he had lost an entire day of real time. His parents were terribly upset about this, and he lost many of his freedoms.

Sam finally stopped visiting the stream when the giant insect from the other world destroyed Boston. It was a calamity far beyond the scope of Sam’s play, and he became very afraid of forests forever afterward. He learned on that day that magic streams are not always a source of good things. This is the story of that calamitous adventure.

The day started like many others. It was Sunday, and Sam told his mother he was going to hang out with Andrew down the street. For good measure, he informed her that they would be taking their bikes to the dairy for some ice cream and minigolf. She liked when Sam spent time with friends (especially those as well-mannered as Andrew), so she warned him to mind traffic and handed him ten dollars to spend as he liked. Sam, however, did not turn left toward Andrew’s Cul-de-sac, but right toward the newer developments.

Beyond the plastic houses with their freshly unfurled sod and their orange realtor signs was an old forest of oaks and maples. In truth, most of the forest was not that old. Lines of stacked stones told of pastures and fields that once checkered that landscape, but they were over a century overgrown now. Where ancient cows once grazed, foxes and squirrels and drinking teens now eked out a claustrophobic existence in the face of an encroaching suburb. The trees do not mind so much. They did not think so sourly of cutting as you might imagine. To them, new real estate means fresh sunshine for the acorns, and the trees know in their hearts that they will outlast the shingled boxes. Sam arrived at a bend in the road surrounded by one such unfurnished box and walked his bicycle into the backyard.

A little trail overgrown with ferns and saplings extended from one corner of the yard deep into the woods. Sharp raspberry tangles used to block the path, but Sam had long ago disposed of these with a pair of his father’s clippers. The trail itself was knotted with old roots and pocked with boulders. It was a twisting path, and Sam often had to look down as he walked to prevent tripping. The dirt was speckled with broken glass, dented cans, and brass and green colored bottle caps. There rested in one clearing the remains of a brick chimney and a cut up tire. A little circle of stones indicated a campfire, and sometimes half-full cans and bottles tempted the curiosity of Sam and his friends. Beyond this, the wood grew thicker and wetter. Puny asters crept forth from the carpet of brown leaves, and salamanders slid from log hollow to log hollow. The sky grew dim behind a canopy crown where squirrels build soggy nests and woodpeckers flashed their crimson crests.

On this Sunday, the sky danced between threats of drizzle and shine that promised a rainbow to the lucky. The air was growing colder by the week, but only the upstart leaves had begun to turn. At intervals, a light rain would speckle the earth, but the deep canopy protected Sam from drenching. At length, Sam reached the clearing and made note of some rusty folding chairs that had not been there before. He pressed beyond the clearing, and eventually he saw the stream. It flowed tepidly for lack of nourishment, and Sam appreciated the drizzle for its life-giving aid. Otherwise, there was nothing particularly out of the ordinary about this spot of the forest. Leveraging his foot against a jutting maple root, Sam leapt across the water.

The other world does not make its presence known immediately to wanderers. Its trees look much the same as our trees, and it even has squirrels and birds. Black squirrels, however, are the common variety there, and strange birds that did not fly so much as flutter or glide, like turkeys, wabbled between strands of brush. Sam called out, and all of the animal life of the new wood called at once back to him. It was a joyous song. The rain seemed to dim. The sun to pierce the canopy better here, and all was bathed in a brilliant glow like a perpetual sunset. Sam walked further and knocked on the bark of a pine, and the tree responded by oozing a delicious sap which attracted small birds and chipmunks. The creatures were unafraid of Sam’s presence. Sam scooped some of this honey into a jar and continued on toward a meadow.

Free of the tree-cover, the most brilliant features of this world become clear. The meadow grass, a shimmering goldenrod, stood twice as tall as Sam’s head, but no icky things like ticks of spiders seemed to inhabit it. The sky above was simply brilliant. A crystal blue framed the orbit of many moons that loomed so close that their craters and mountains could be counted with the naked eye. Layers of impossibly thin altocumulus flowed like distant waves across the expanse, and a thousand different kinds of birds, and unknown darker shapes still, constantly circled the sky, ascending and descending from the silhouettes of distant treetops.

TO BE CONTINUED

They said

That a long long time ago

Even before the Dinosaurs

When everything was very very

Primordial

The world was one big forest

And this forest produced oxygen all day long

There was a lot of oxygen to go around

Before the dinosaurs there were bugs and slugs and salamanders

We stop growing because our bodies

Know when to stop

Insects don’t stop

So long as they have the resources

So they said

I caught some specimens and put them in a box

I pumped the box full of pure oxygen

I put lots of hummus and grubs and cheese in there

Everything a bug likes to eat

I thought

I felt a little dizzy

It was already there when I woke up

Stock still, without opinion

An abdomen shattering the horizon

Wings like church glass

Carapace glistening

Shimmering rainbow

Oil on water

Eyes that saw everything

Everything

I heard the thrum before I saw it move

The sound consumed the highway and the birds

I lost balance and hurt my palms

It lifted imperceptibly

And then it rose

Smaller and smaller, until it looked normal sized

It ascended into space and was gone

beep beep beep

…

…

beep beep beep

what the fuck

…

beep beep beep

there it is again

what is that

beep beep beep

honey what’s wrong, nightmare?

no baby, listen

beep beep beep

what is that

I have no idea

beep beep beep

just go back to sleep honey

it’s nothing

beep beep beep

…

…

beep beep beep

not gonna happen

it’s not that loud

beep beep beep

did you leave the fridge open

not open

beep beep beep

did you check your phone

no shit, first thing I checked

beep beep beep

please calm down

it’s this corner, it’s coming from this corner

beep beep beep

it’s in the hallway

it has to be

beep beep beep

can’t go into the hallway without my fucking pants

can’t find shit

beep beep beep

just turn on the light honey

no, I don’t want to wake you up

beep beep beep

god kill me now

why don’t you phone the desk

beep beep beep

where’s the number

it’s next to the phone baby

beep beep beep

ya hello, there is this faint, rhythmic beeping noise

it’s really annoying

beep beep beep

if I knew what was causing it I wouldn’t be calling

no it’s not the air conditioner

beep beep beep

second floor

thanks

beep beep beep

you didn’t tell him our room number

like I want some desk clerk to know what room I’m staying in

beep beep beep

well how the hell is he supposed to fix it if he can’t find us

oh my god, you always find a way to make this my fault

beep beep beep

don’t go there now

every night it’s the same with you

beep beep beep

why do you always yell at me

why do you always make everything about you

I can’t do anything right

fuck me, I guess I deserve this

…

…

…

it stopped

…

…

I’m sorry honey

just go back to sleep

…

…

beep beep beep