Stone Cold Steve Autism

bsky replies: its not uncommon for some tops to put condoms on the strap because its still possible to transmit std's. also it could just be a joke and shes just doing it cuz shes bisexual or something and has them lying around maybe and its funny cuz they dont need them?

I'm working on clearing out some old tabs, and ran across this piece from last fall. The short version is that your gut microbiome and other microbes that accompany you in a series of symbiotic relationships throughout your lifetime persist even after you die. While you might assume that these bacteria and other little beings would perish along with you once you're no longer warm and living, it turns out that they shift gears upon your death, being part of the massive effort to return your remains en masse to the nutrient cycle.

There's honestly something rather poetic about that. Here you've spent a lifetime being the center of a holobiont--a sort of miniature, migratory ecosystem. And these many millions of life forms that you have given safe harbor to for thousands upon thousands of their generations are among the funerary vanguard caring for your remains after you're gone. They pour forth from their ancestral lands--the gut, the skin, and other discrete places--and spread out through even the most protected regions of your form.

And then, just as you constructed your body, molecule by molecule, from a lifetime of nutrients you consumed, so do these microbes go through the process of returning everything you borrowed back to the wider cycles of food and growth and life and death. The ancient halls where their ancestors lived in relative stability are now taken apart in the open air, and their descendants will disperse their inheritance into the soil and the water through the perpetual process of decomposition.

yes, i also have a lot of crazy ideas that i believe and i see and hear things that aren't there and sometimes i start freaking out because i think someone close to me died when they're perfectly fine or that someone's coming to kill me or that my pets have been replaced with alien creatures, but i'm also a person with a life and a childhood and friends and i am not a threat to anyone.

and i'm here. on tumblr. on youtube. in real life. i can see and hear what everyone says about people like me. and i'm fucking tired of it.