Consulting Cinnamon

July 22nd: breakfasted on a lovely array of fresh strawberries and goat’s cheese with honey, oat cakes and barley porridge. For luncheon we feasted on a catch of smoked trout, vegetable stew, and of course a couple of flagons of October Ale

The warrior and the shepherd.

A small comic I made to explore a mythology AU of my original characters. The shepherd finds the warrior wounded after a battle. They get to know and learn from each other during his recovery.

Place de la Comédie, la nuit - Daniel Murgatroyd

British , b.  1979 -

'Humbug' - pastel on 100% cotton paper

I have a LOT of feelings about how Gus has so many of the autistic (and some ADHD) traits that people find annoying and grating and get pissed off about (correcting people, infodumping, dropping special interests into unrelated conversations, rigidity in folllowing rules, etc) and Shawn has so many of the ADHD (and some autistic) traits that people find annoying etc (physical and verbal hyperactivity, jumping between tasks and jobs and so forth, habitual lying, interrupting in conversation, etc), BUT

With each other they sort of… build their relationship around those things, instead of treating them as Problems. Gus corrects incorrect things and Shawn forgets correct things (or habitually lies or etc) so they build an entire recurring bit around the situation where those traits intersect (“I’ve heard it both ways”) that turns it from a source of conflict into a shared in-joke ritual. When Shawn starts up one of his elaborate lies Gus immediately swings into commit to the bit back-up mode. Shawn treats Gus’s infodumping as a social strategy.

They balance each others’ extremes without genuinely resenting each other for needing that. Gus is overly rigid about rule-following, Shawn is overly impulsive about rule-breaking, and they pull each other towards a more sustainable middle ground. Gus is overly fond of routine and risks stagnation, Shawn is overly prone to starting and then abandoning things, between them they’re able to form a life that’s interesting and includes novelty but isn’t unlivably chaotic. (We see what happens with that one when they’re not together to balance each other out! During the time they were apart, Shawn had a jillion jobs and quit all of them, while Gus became a dead-eyed pharmaceutical salesman with zero, like, Upward Mobility.)

And then of course there are the traits they share! They both clearly have echolalia and a drive to stim, for instance, and instead of policing each other they just periodically break into random dances and vocal exercises and “singing” and general sensory-seeking nonsense together, matched to each other.

I just??? The fact that they visibly display all those autistic and ADHD traits that drive other people crazy but instead of being a wedge between them that’s exactly why they’re perfect for each other… and how it’s not that it doesn’t ever cause them annoyance because they’re just like naturally soulmates who never get annoyed by anything about each other, but that they’ve worked out rituals and strategies so that what maybe bothered them in the past now instead is a shared bonding activity, or acts to balance their weaknesses against each other…

If all the places we think of as "no longer wild" actually were, if the biodiversity we thought was gone actually was gone, life on Earth would not be able to sustain itself. The unintended and random plants, the wild weeds of lost and empty places, they hold us tightly, sustaining the few and meager scraps of symbiotic relationships that keep the Earth alive

The ditch beside the road is no longer a serene wetland. The wetland was bulldozed and destroyed and now it is a ditch, dirty and strewn with garbage. But because nobody looks closely, almost nobody sees...A few rushes and sedges have decided to grow here, there's a clump of stubborn and stunted cattails, and there in the weeds, a thickety willow cradling a blackbird's nest.

Easy to love the pristine wilderness in distant preserves, but will someone love this abused and ugly place? Will someone be moved to protect the wild of the roadside ditch and vacant lot as passionately as they protect the primeval forest?

Easy to see the importance of the Amazon rainforest for the very air in our lungs, but who will see the moss that grows between the bricks in the wall of their run-down apartment and realize, It is your oxygen that I breathe?

I read a paper one time suggesting that, even though the idea of monoculture is harmful through its influence on agricultural practice, monoculture does not actually exist, because in practice the weeds prevent it from becoming a reality.

2026: