💾 Archived View for milknoir.flounder.online › jernull.gmi captured on 2023-04-19 at 22:26:29. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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been engrossed in this Guide to Missouri Crayfish pamphlet I got from the MDC. Flipping through, reading about the 8 endemic crayfish species, some of whom live in a single stretch of stream in the entire world and that stream is in Missouri. The Caney Mountain Cave crayfish is literally just found in a single cave in ozark county!! funkengine tells me that all crawdads love hotdog water and so looks like I’m spending my summer with a cooler fulla dollar store hotdogs and my hands in the mud, meeting lots of new pals. Really makes you think “maybe my real sole purpose in life is to protect god’s boutique short-run crawdaddy populations from extinction”
went to the meramec today and saw a yellow throated warbler for the first time. It was fussing with a big poofy sycamore seed pod. Also finally got to see the pileated woodpecker that lives along the banks who has evaded me for about a year. ate a QT chocolate long John and watched the water.
scary first journal post because i'm much more comfy hiding in the gulfs between poem-ish lines but it's certifiably apeshit april so let's hunt peck and send it
starlings are chk-ing outside the window, my housemate is burning a candle that smells like if you put your face into the coals of a rained-on campfire. it's nostalgic and too powerful.
i've gotten to spend a lot of time alone in the bakery at night this week. the pace and insurmountableness of the day-to-day job usually strips the work of any meaning or beauty. but especially when i'm there alone, i can access again my limitless penchant for Being Sentimental About Anything. there is a tactile beauty to handling bread dough that i have never found a way to articulate. andreas weber wrote something about how all life is ultimately just matter and desire, some iteration of earth and starshit briefly enlivened by a Wanting. and i was thinking about that a bunch while mixing the doughs today. bread feels like such a fundamental example of that primordial matter/desire. margaret atwood wrote a poem where she said "all bread is made of wood, packed brown moss, cow dung, the bodies of dead animals, the teeth and backbones, what is left after the ravens, this dirt flows into the stems into the grain..." and then it's flour and it's in my hands and there's water from a tap and the yeast is feastin and fartin (bread is just yeast farts do not ever forget this) and suddenly you've got this little pillow-cloud of dough. and it's a living thing, made possible by other once-living things that now house it. and it doesn't care what you want it to be, or when you want it to be ready, or whether you're there or not. so you have to listen to it and meet it where it is in that moment, or buddy there ain't gonna be good bread tomorrow. it's basically humility school, everyday, and when i'm not too anxious about deadlines and kitchen vibes i get to absorb it. and when i'm standing in the kitchen at dawn and some pulpy sunrise is shaking out across the rye dough that smells like sitting in my uncle's alphalpha fields in summer and the joy does come, tryna let it spill a little instead of shushing it. letting it slosh around in my cup a bit. i guess sourdough bakers are microbially so tied to the sourdough culture they use that if you were to stir a little flour and water into a baker's cupped hand on their day off, there would be more than enough of the sourdough microbes living on their palm to start fermenting that little wet slurry. it's changing and being changed! it's the world in constant generative relationship!
prolly thinking about all that because for the last months i have been thinking about change all the time, which often feels as vague as it sounds. i think my life is asking me to change, to open more and differently, which is truly and unmistakably a gift. HOWEVER it's a gift in the way an unexpected houseplant is a gift, in that it can feel like mostly a chore at first. not always easy to feel especially grateful. the world is so much faster than me. endings and beginnings feel suddenly magnified and everywhere so i am penduluming between dread and delight a lot, but trying to lay out a little blanket with some good snacks and just take it all in. plus the days have been abundant as hell with wonderful stuff and good weather. and funyuns flavored wavy lays which are delicious. i am so happy to partner with funyuns brand flavored wavy lays on my flounder account. get the flavor of funyuns brand rings on a potato chip. i'm tipping the bag into my mouth rn to get all those luxurious, onion flavored crumbs. lays. golden grows here.