.

i read the hobbit in 3rd grade and i thought it was really lame. however i liked bilbo baggins for some reason and i was fully convinced he was some sort of rabbit/mouse thing until i saw the lotr movies and was really, really confused

i was a nine year old

SPILLED.

Charlie Squire, “Mattel, Malibu Stacy, and the Dialectics of the Barbie Polemic,” evil female (Substack), 2023.

(Commission)

ordered a “who drink arnold palmer” t shirt for the laughs and it came printed “who drink arnorl palmer” and a sports logo on the back. which possibly makes the shirt funnier 

funniest shirt alive

You get there and all the pretty boys look up from drinking from the reservoir and gallop away like gazelle

The day before yesterday I got to try a ripe pawpaw for the first time.

Someone else was supposed to come in at the center, but I was in the mood to be alone, so I fucked off into the woods at the earliest available opportunity, looking to collect more hickory nuts.

I hiked about two miles down the trail, seeking to find a little-used path as far from the center as I could reasonably make it. I was five or ten minutes down a fork in the path heading down a valley when I unexpectedly smelled something familiar: the scent of ripe pawpaws. I only knew that scent from having come upon a rotten one several days back on the trail.

I had seen pawpaw trees on the way up, but I looked around and saw nothing. I indulged a beast-like impulse: I sniffed. I turned until I was facing the direction of the scent and moved towards it. And I saw, about 50 feet away down the hillside below...a pawpaw grove

Some interesting facts about pawpaws:

The pawpaw is the largest fruit native to North America, known for its "tropical" flavor. Despite being reputed to be delicious, it is not found in grocery stores due to the fruits being far too delicate to ship without spoiling. A few people farm them, but otherwise the only way to get one is to come upon one growing wild, which is rare, because the opossums love them.

Pawpaw trees are hard to grow and take 10-15 years to produce fruit, but you can see wild ones in mature and well managed woods of Kentucky. They are small, barely trees, only about 15-20 feet tall, with trunks only a bit bigger around than a circle you can make with your index finger and thumb. They almost always grow in clonal colonies, groups of many trees that are all clones of each other due to being propagated from the roots of existing trees. They are also strictly understory trees, growing in the shade of much larger trees.

Now, an interesting fact about Eastern Kentucky: At the fringe of Appalachia, and even into parts of the Outer Bluegrass, the terrain frequently turns into very steep rolling hills.

It's hard to notice if you are in more cultivated areas that have been leveled out more, but in wilder parts you can seldom just casually walk in a straight line through the woods. Unless you are following the contour of the hills, you are either sliding and gripping saplings to slow your descent or you are climbing on all fours.

Such was the hill below me, descending at roughly a fifty-degree angle into the pawpaw grove.

I was going to get me some fucking pawpaws.

I climb down the hill by a combination of scooting, sliding, and scrabbling. After a few minutes of struggle I am standing in the pawpaw grove, alone, scanning the branches with my eyes.

The ground is littered everywhere with pawpaws, some very rotten. I see only two or three fruits remaining in the trees, and I walk around giving each tree a good shake, thinking to myself about how this is certainly an experience shared by millions of years' worth of primate ancestors before me.

After nearly ten minutes of (literally) fruitless tree-shaking, I start to eye the fallen pawpaws on the ground around me.

Some of them are perfectly fine-looking. The skin hasn't even been broken into. I pick one up.

It is very soft, but not squishy like something rotten. It is about as long as my index finger (my hands are small) and oblong. Its smooth skin is pale green and spotted with brown like a very ripe banana. I tear the skin back and give the creamy orange insides a test lick.

Friends.

It was transcendent.

Imagine the most perfect ripe mango, but with a flavor that is more banana-like, mellow and creamy and mild instead of tangy. The texture is perfectly smooth and soft unlike any other fruit. You can lick it and it will just melt in your mouth.

I am autistic and a very picky eater due to the difficult textures of many foods, and this fruit has the perfect texture. Mangos are already one of my favorite foods and this is somehow even better. I remember, deliriously, that farmers are seeking to improve pawpaws for possible commercial production, and it seems like the height of foolishness there in the pawpaw grove. There is no possible way wild pawpaws could be improved. All of creation is tainted by the Fall of Man, except for fucking pawpaws, because they are beyond the earthly tier of fruits.

I lick it like a dog going crazy on a Kong full of peanut butter until it falls apart in my hands and start scanning the ground for another.

They are all perfectly ripe and mostly untouched by bugs or creatures. I start just squishing them in my hands and licking the creamy insides. I am just planting my face in these fruits like some kind of animal. My face and hands are covered in pawpaw squish.

I go through like ten of them before returning to my senses. I've been thoughtlessly wiping my hands on my pants, and they are now more soiled than the clothes of the messiest toddler. I feel primal and connected to my ancestors. I have truly earned my Primate Card.

My mom said in the car that I smelled very strongly of something (pawpaws) so it's safe to say that literally every person I passed on the way back down the trail got a good whiff too, and likely connected it to the Pawpaw Squish that was basically all over me.

Regrets: None

Where's that meme of the person tearing into a mango like a feral animal because that was me

this one, op?

Yes thank you

7 months later.

Animal and plant, ape and flowering tree.

Diverse species of flowering plants evolved to swaddle their seeds in sweet fruit delicious to the palates of animals, who unlike plants can move and roam, carrying seeds to a place little seedlings can germinate and grow. The lineage of primates evolved to feast on fruit, using the sugars to help fuel their energy-demanding mammalian bodies and complex brains.

I am nothing like you; you are nothing like me. But we are bound together, belonging to the same ecosystem. We are made caretakers of one another, in accordance with a law far more ancient than the laws of Money or Profit or Power.

You gave me a wonderful gift, in a lonely, sunlit forest where nothing is earned or deserved. It was so incredibly lucky, to happen upon the sweet golden wealth of perfectly ripe pawpaws by chance, that it seemed like some kind of miracle. And like a miracle, it seemed to gently turn my head to look upon something of sacred importance.

Do you still remember? How I made you? How you made me? How we cared for one another, even before I was Asimina triloba, even before you were Homo sapiens? Can you still feel what moves in the mycelium beneath your feet, the pulse in the sprawling vessels sketched by the paths of migrating hummingbirds and foraging bees?

And I remembered.

The symbiosis is complete.

It just makes me emotional to participate in an ancient mutualistic relationship with a plant.

How the tree gave me the best damn fruit experience my frail human senses have ever processed, and how I have fussed and worried over this little seedling, fueled by the sense that I have a parental obligation to the seeds by virtue of having enjoyed the fruit they came in.

I'm glad at least one sprout is thriving so far, because the tree TRUSTED me with that fruit

okay I've had this confusion pop up several times. apparently pawpaw is a term that can refer to papaya, despite also referring to a completely different fruit (Asimina triloba, the North American pawpaw)

Pawpaw fruit:

Papaya fruit:

This is also the cause of a lot of bafflement when I say that pawpaws can't be bought in stores. Papayas are widely available in stores, but Asimina triloba has thus far proven near impossible to grow commercially due to how quickly the fruit spoils after ripening and how soft and easily damaged it is.

It's borderline magical in our age of 24/7 streaming and shopping where everything is commodified to hear, "this item is incredible, delicious, and you cannot buy it."

Man you are gonna love what the world of plants has to show you then

UPDATE!!!

Pawpaw seedling has grown so big! And has a younger sibling!!!!

Building my hamster a whole metroidvania for him to suddenly die in

youre not allowed to come in its for hamsters

i had a really fucked up dream omg

p&f related?

sorry but phineas and ferb were not in it.

buford?

no characters from phineas and ferb were there.

remember when this was the craziest thing politicians ever said

this could work. we never tried it

Fascinated by this one Instagram account run by a girl who got divorced young and decided to make a career as a cottagecore divorce influencer out of it apparently

happy summer to dykes in tank tops and basketball shorts, goths who's makeup is melting, little kids catching frogs and fireflies, guys who just bring their guitar everywhere now, 13 yr olds very obviously in their emo phase during a family vacation, gas station employees, old people sitting on porches, and dogs swimming at the beach

Cowboy Werewolf Priest. Sometimes it takes a monster to hunt monsters.

Since "furry" is losing the Film Noir Werewolf poll, I thought I'd throw all you furries out there a bone with the Cowboy design. Enjoy!

a bone is pretty much one of the best things you can throw me. curveballs probably the worst

I split my lip open like a dumbass taking the reference photo for this lmao

when internet people are like “i love gothic literature but i hate anything that discusses incest, sexual violence, oppression, misogyny, abuse, torture, gore, murder, or death”

no actually me and everyone else who’s ever watched crimson peak were brainwashed by guillermo del toro into believing that incest and violence are cool and awesome. sorry

Horrifying that this pearl-clutching over horror actually being dark is unironically becoming A Thing…

(tags via @waterandsilver, id in alt)

The irony of the “umm incest and violence are bad and only evil men would be interested in that 😡” Puritanism being pedaled is that it guarantees that only men get to write about anything taboo and thus dark media is overwhelmingly misogynist.

It’s genuinely sickening how much vile harassment marginalized artists get for making anything darker than Owl House or whatever the Kids Cartoon De Jour is, because these people know how much easier it is to destroy an artist’s life if they’re already marginalized in some way.

Ohh this exactly ^^

Marginalised people (women included btw) are always always held to a much higher standard even in terms of respectability, policed often by members of their own community in a bid to appear more respectable, policed by supposed leftists who don't want to feel the slightest bit of discomfort to their protected conservative worldview which they never questioned, and at the end of it all privileged men are always going to be the only ones writing any controversial genre fiction because that's not gonna be a "hard sell" because no one's coming after them or anything. And so horror remains misogynistic and racist because the moment there's anything actually horrifying, nuanced, or unsanitized entertained in fiction by a marginalised person there's an angry horde with pitchforks already gathering at their window for it

girl is that a 9/11 in your pocket. or is your penis just two ofd them and exploding

you just hate my 2 exploding penises.