Spelled The Way It Sounds

Folks want a quote from a Black or Indigenous person for their blog, but they don't wanna change their environments or GOD FORBID their consumer habits, even as the oceans rise to your door and the wildfires and logging bring down every old-growth forest.

(the history you cut out and paste into your cutesy little Revolutionary Scrapbook is still happening and still being made, btw. Your actions are part of it.)

anyway. I'm sitting here under a pungent yellow sky and aching for my people and the forests of Ontario. The Namaygoosisagagun First Nation (Collins First Nation, for the colonizers) fled on boats while the trees next to their houses burned. Thunder Bay is full of displaced Indigenous peoples trying to breathe with air full of ash. Gayaashki-zaagiing Anishinaabeg (Gull Bay First Nation, again, for You Folks) peoples were ordered to evacuate in the middle of the night and were just told there are no accommodations for them, now that they've escaped. Thousands of people scrambling for protection and safety, while a bunch of white colonizers complain about the smell of smoke.

None of this is new. It's all a very old song.

It also inherently challenges purity culture with multiple varied casual and symbiotically supportive relationships.

Taking both of those into account challenges the Patriarchy itself, and the idea that a singular man should be in charge and rule over his own household like a petty tyrant.

In the order that I happened to read them:

• A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys

• Spear by Nicola Griffith

Safety, ethics, and sustainability are all a part of urban gardening and foraging. I'm sorry that means you need to do homework before you can do anything, I know that sounds lame. But life is complicated.

Daily reminder: Leafy greens like kales uptake all those delicious heavy metals in urban soils like lead and cadmium.

Don’t eat sidewalk-crack kale.

Here's some cool references from the EPA on safe urban gardening:

REUSING POTENTIALLY CONTAMINATED LANDSCAPES: Growing Gardens in Urban Soils

Alder Buckthorn (beautiful delicious-looking purple-black berries: purgative.)

Pokeberry (beautiful delicious-looking deep purple berries: just straight up poison. a note on this one: greens CAN be eaten if treated correctly. if not treated correctly: also poison.)

Jimsonweed (stunning beautiful purple flowers: this is such a seriously dangerous plant I wore gloves to take it up. better known as datura, and no, I DON'T know how it got there.)

Bittersweet nightshade (tiny beautiful delicious-looking red berries: the only reason people don't get hashtag poisoned by this all the time is because it tastes so gross.)

Black locust tree (flowers with such a fragrant scent I can smell it across the yard: wood's poison. leaves are poison. bark is poison. if you, say, get poked with its thorns while gathering the flowers you may deal with serious swelling and two months of bizarre nerve pain.)

Paleopureza: a series of illustrations with dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals living around some places in my hometown, Seville. 

YOU DO IT ON ONE OF THESE! OBVIOUSLY!!!

and that brown end? the hard bit? pencil sharpener. or sharpened with a blade. are you following me? now, attach six of those to a harpy.

I do not like this style. I will never like this style. ... My biggest criticism is that I merely dislike this [art project]. Make me hate it. Make me furious over how much fun you're having with this thing I hate.

As preamble: i am one of the proud 27% who voted “good” on the first poll (didn’t see the second in time to vote). And, in fact, I found the imagery of “claws like sharpened bananas” so provocative i just had to give sharpening a banana a go (plus i remembered i threw some ripe bananas in the freezer like five months ago and thought hey, might as well! bananas, i’m sorry i failed to use you in smoothies as intended; i hope you find peace knowing you were donated to science instead. Rest In Peels.)

For my first attempt, I decided to take the easiest though least faithful-to-the-vision route first: sharpening the banana stem.

I was delighted to discover that a banana stem does fit into a pencil sharpener, so i got grinding.

And grinding.

And grinding.

Things were looking promising at first, but i rotated that thing in the sharpener for over three minutes and after a certain point, it just stopped getting sharper. I guess it became too narrow for the sharpener to like, reach?

(Pictured: the moment my wife asked me what the fuck i was doing to that banana)

But luckily my wife appeared around this time and, after expressing extreme bemusement, she acquiesced to applying her whittling skills to the task. I bestowed upon her a second frozen banana and she got to work.

What a champ.

And…it actually worked!! That bad boy was SHARP!

Like, not “draw blood easily” sharp. But yeah, if claws looking like this ^ were to shoot towards me, i’d be at least mildly afraid. That’s not nothin’ — right? right?

(I’m so good at photoshop)

But at this point i had to admit to myself the thing i’d known all along. Sharpening solely the stem wasn’t actually @pangur-and-grim’s vision.

So i tried, i really tried to sharpen the entire outer part of the banana with a knife sharpener + knife! Maybe it’s because the frozen bananas had thawed too much at this point but. it didn’t go…all that great

Then it was time for my final attempt.

I peeled one of those half-thawed nanners and shaped its soft body (which was the consistency of melty ice cream) with a combination of the knife sharpener and my bare fingers into what i hoped would be a fine point — once it re-froze.

One of them i “sharpened” the tip of; the other i tried to kinda sharpen the side of? By making a very thin ridge all along it. Because if they’re going to be claws they shouldn’t just poke people; they need to slice

Anyway that was an hour ago so i just checked on them and…

tragically, they are not sharp.

BUT i flattened them a little thinner to see if that helps, and now i’ll be patient for once in my life and wait to check on them till morning. Maybe being fully frozen will help

So yeah! The good news is you CAN sharpen a banana stem and that’s gotta count for something. The bad news is that sharpening the actual body of the banana has proven much more challenging.

if i never reblog with an update, it’ll mean I failed, no sharp peeled bananas to present. If i do update….

Well. You’ll get a photo of a razor-sharp banana.