My Home Away From Twitter

I got this plant way back in May. Tillandsia Ionantha. It had a small side clone at the time, meaning the main plant could have been about to flower. It might have been stressed though, in shipment, so it just cloned itself instead. The clone grew throughout the summer and flowered near the start of Winter. The flowers took longer to grow in than those of my Medusa Tillandsias, which are one and done in a day. Hopefully the open tubes will hold for longer as well.

That’s Spanish Moss below it. The Spanish Moss is alive and also a Tillandsia. The branch used to display them is a piece of wood from a ficus or weeping fig that died a couple of decades ago. I thought the hole in the center was cool, but then the bark fell off and there was a neat pattern underneath.

The slipstream of trucks hurrying their shipments to parts unknown blasts the yellow plumes of late season grasses on highway hillsides. Feathery hands that wave to the traffic also cast flying seeds to the birds, to the wind, to cats chasing fluffy down through damp ally ways, and to the little girl with her dirty fingers and pots of wildflowers. 

Winter is coming to the subtropics, brief and desperate as it is, hoping to freeze pipes, ruin a few houses and perhaps a few lives, if it’s lucky - before the onset of mid-February and the slow retreat, of the ferns and mosses of the cold monsoon. 

The tepid mists tease out the seedlings of hairy bittercress, a European immigrant that plans to lie low beneath home awnings, riding out the winter only to invade every damp nook and cranny come spring. Beside it, native pony’s foot, whorled pennywort and hoary Bowlesia. Between them, the whisper of a soft, shy green suede that could be either algae or moss. It awaits the wet winter and the remission of more aggressive fair weather fiends. 

Dips a tire into a patch of Bermuda grass, prostrate in spaulding pavement before the drive. It will survive. The grass is not from Bermuda rather - it has overrun the place, and seeks to do the same to the neighboring continent. The Buttonweed however, has been here since before memory, hiding beneath the lawns its leaves impersonate, invisible until it’s iconic white blooms taunt the grounds keeper. 

We are here. 

We are waiting,

in the cracks,

on the wind. 

Come, 

Wow! Thanks for taking an interest in my other hobby.

Okay, the vine on the side is a Golden Pothos. Duh, but I like to provide ALL the information. The glass container is a small cat food dish resting atop a large cat food dish. I could not find anything like what I wanted at the store so I nicked these from my bro, who owns a cat. (Don’t worry he was cool with it and has more than enough of these.)

The moss is Slivergreen Bryum, the plant is Carolina Ponyfoot. (According to several Google searches and the use of my mom’s plant identification app.) Both were nicked from my yard and neighborhood. (With permission of course.)

The above Blender video was done on a gaming laptop using a track pad - the track pad may have been compromised after I made 3 of these, but it is an older computer, might want to spring for a mouse. The flashes in the water were achieved by carefully positioning about 50 pin lights, other wise it looked like tar. Texture is modified from a node tree I copied from a tutorial - it looks different from the original but was built on top of it. My computer seemed to struggle more with this as well, but it may have been due to my inexperience managing the data load. All assets other than the texture I modified are entirely original, save for some customized geometry trees on the plants.

Sometimes a new building would be built, and the distinction between it and the older buildings would be so impactful I would have to react. Not by asking questions but by going out, and finding out. I was no longer so young the explanation that the old buildings just grew into existence in the exact state they were in, satisfied me. There had to have been something here before, before me, before everyone. 

An odd genre of fairytales attesting to a flat-faced people with fur atop their heads was so lore-heavy it occurred to me I might be looking at something that was, at least at some point, very real indeed. A good source for information had always been the old school, it was almost as if any record of anything had been carried in from the old neighborhoods and collected there. 

Carried in by what, should have been obvious. 

It was hard however, to see the powdery, luminescent, frilled things, with their tangled limbs and habit of not ever moving when it was possible to see them do it, as beings with any agency. I’d found the fishers so terrifying as a child that Father could end our arguments instantly by asking if I’d rather talk to them.  

Other things out there in the world, were far more ornery but there was something about fishers  that always sent me running home when a crowd of them blocked the lonely roads at dusk. Though they walked the halls of the school, I crept past them in search of books, files, DVDs, VHS, and unexpectedly - internet! They would cut the old building’s power eventually and drag me out of the mildewed offices after silently moving the furniture I’d piled in the doorways. That these old buildings had power did not seem odd at the time. I knew wires as dangerous weeds in need of control, not infrastructure to be manufactured and installed. As much as the thought of being caught and carried home by the things brought terror, there were secrets in the school I was sure were important.  

The old ledgers with their facts and figures stored in bins made of plastic were the last thing I had investigated because they seemed so prestigiously dull, yet the effect of my inquiries that day were profound, for this was the first time any of the fisher had spoken, or rather written, to me. A piece of chalk met the old green board - a thing whose final lessons hadn’t been disturbed even by the winds blasting through broken windows - and wrote. “Come back when you’re older.” 

After that, it had not been possible to return, not until I was well out of apprenticeship and had almost forgotten about my childhood haunts. I saw the words it had written were still on the board in the room where I had found the ledgers. Time was a very different thing in this place.