LurksLikeABoss

like. structured poetry and free verse experimental shit teach you two very different skills that are both very important for creating pleasing prose. structured poetry helps you develop an eye for rhythm and rhyme, consonance and assonance and how to make the sound of your words pleasing to the ear while still conveying your ideas artfully. and if you look at the right stuff, free verse poetry can teach you how to distill an abstract idea into its most intense and emotionally evocative form. really good free verse poetry can say in 300 words or less what might take most people 3000 words or more to convey. both structured and free verse can also teach you how to utilize metaphor and simile to paint a detailed and concrete picture of a very abstract feeling such that the metaphor and simile you're using perfectly illustrates a complex idea that still holds up to extended elaboration.

like. honestly. seek out poetry and analyze it. make note of the word choice and the feeling it evokes. don't approach a poem like a puzzle you have to "solve" to understand. let the poem create feelings in you and try to figure out how it created that feeling on a technical craft level so you can better understand how it evoked that reaction in the first place. study the rhythms, the rhymes, the use of repetition and similar sounds in words and really examine how harmonious or discordant they sound together, think about why a poem has a certain structure and what the structure itself is trying to convey. you dont even have to fucking buy a shitload of poetry books. part of how i studied poetry on my own time was surfing fucking pinterest and collecting poems and quotes that made me feel REALLY strongly about something and then going back and examining the words to see what about them struck a chord in me so deeply.

I have not managed to find anyone who thinks that in the wild, but it is so damn funny.

A little "Red" potato. Javelina babies are called little Reds because of the reddish cast of their reddish fur, which blackens as they mature

Also everyone: When there's a hurricane you should never drive through water more than six inches deep, water that's a high as your ankle is enough to sweep you away.

"Don't you people have storm drains?"

Yes.

I am stronger than the jar

⁠⁠I know what left and right are

⁠⁠smashing the jar will make a mess

⁠⁠I have strong and dextrous hands

If you can jam a knife in the lid of the jar and wiggle it until the jar lid pops, you're good, it'll open.

Hot water is also supposed to help with this? If you run it over the jar it should expand it and help it loosen.

Take the jar and hit the side of the lid against a hard surface like a table or counter top. You want to hit the side to interrupt the seal. A couple firm taps should be enough!

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.