MADB🧿II.exe

Athena Nassar, from "Love Is Not Always Song, but the Swelling"

Max Slobodda

I dreamed that I was working on an ecology research boat and for some reason aboard the boat there was an injured otter. One of my colleagues started feeding it cat kibble and thawed cooked shrimp on a plate and he even taught her to say yes and no. (Pulling a lever on a striped ball was no, on a plain ball was yes.) The otter was very intelligent and she became accustomed to and even fond of humans. She stayed on the boat even after she recovered. She cozied up to human hands to request to be petted on the head. This made another of my colleagues, who was more senior, very upset. She (the colleague, not the otter) explained to him that it is dangerous for wild animals to become acclimatized to humans.

Here’s where it got weird. We tried to reason with the otter to convince her to leave us forever and go back into the wild, since the otter had learned to understand English and could now speak. I told her that she had lost the instinct to bite our hands, and that otters are supposed to bite. She answered that she was sorry that she used to have the instinct to bite us, because it was rude, and that we were her friends. (She figured out it was rude among humans because she noticed that none of us bit each other, not even playing.)

I relayed this answer to the senior colleague who, after cussing out the other colleague for “de-animalizing” the otter, came up with a plan. (De-animalizing, my colleague explained, turns a wild animal into a pet, and “a house-animal is no animal.” She explained this in German. My German is very bad.)

This was the plan: We were to give the otter a “shamanic experience” to make her think she was having a meaningful vision. My senior colleague would drug her, and drape her in the preserved pelt of another otter, so that when she woke up, she would ask herself, ‘who am I?’ And come out of the pelt thinking she was being reborn. I thought draping her in the skin of a dead member of her own species was macabre and possibly itchy, and that the whole “shamanic experience” idea was pure plastic, but the risk was that she would be de-animalized if she stayed with us longer, so I followed along with the plan.

My senior colleague drugged the otter, the otter woke up and crawled out of the other pelt, and then, since I was the intern on the boat, I stomped rhythmically on closed tiptoes in front of the otter and conveyed information to her in a droning song. I chanted about how it was dangerous for wild animals to stay among humans. I don’t think I was wearing a mask, so the otter recognized me and didn’t get why I was doing that weird song and dance. Ritual does not come naturally to otters, even tame ones. Nor are they in the habit of having dream visions.

But she was sort of enthralled by the rhythmic footwork of the dance and she was still a little cross-eyed and high, so she was paying rapt attention to what I was telling her. She asked me, very earnestly, “do corrupt intentions underlie your deeds?” (Meaning humans as a whole, not just me)

I told her, (in a normal voice, no longer doing the song bit) “My friend, some of us are very corrupt. It’s not safe to trust any of us.“

What I said to her was more words than that, but I focused so hard on saying it that I said it with my real still-in-bed body’s mouth and breath, which woke me up. I don’t know if the otter was persuaded to return to the water.

I love these patterns that bugs make in eucalyptus trees

By Jason Ting

If you're ever in a cave and have the opportunity to get on a boat and go down a subterranean river, do that. You're gonna be different after

Also if your guide is real cool they'll shut off your lights for a minute so you can experience absolute darkness. This will also make you different after

If shepherding people out of this world is anything like that I may have a fulfilling career path to consider

I don't know what to do about this guy though

you

One fun fact about me is that there is a pit in the forest. It is a part of me. I do not know where my reflection ends and I begin and I am so entwined with its murky waters I have begun to wonder if I am human at all, or if I am some creation of mud and wood given life against its will. When I die look for me in the pit. I will be in there, watching you.

Visited the pit again today. The waters gone. There’s a dead bird at the bottom of it. I don’t know what this means.

I keep accidentally ending up at the pit. Like I’ll tell myself I’m not going to go to the pit and then I go to the pit. Or I get lost on the trail and end up at the pit. I’m having fucking dreams about the pit. What is with me and this pit.

Sun dog in Saskatoon, Canada, on December 25, 2022.

Source: Wikipedia

The many shapes and colors of lichen never cease to amaze Teddy. In some instances, these primary growers of vast variations can be found right next to each other, even on the same tree.

when a human infant is in the womb, moments from being be born, a vague figure of glowing amber light appears before them. in one hand, it holds a small soapstone carving of a coiled eel. in the other hand it holds a mortar and pestle made of polished red quartz. it bids the infant to choose between these two things, but we don't know the significance of this choice, because all babies throughout history with no exception have always picked the soapstone eel. so that's still one of the big mysteries out there.

when albert camus said “the sea; i didnt lose myself in it. i found myself in it” and when sylvia plath said “if i lived by the sea i would never be really sad” and when hozier said “love, when the sea rises to meet us” and when an anonymous writer said “and yet my heart wanders away, my soul roams with the sea” and when homer said “I’d rather die at sea”

and when marguerite duras said “there is one thing i am good at, and that’s looking at the sea” and when agnès varda said “it’s important to always be by the sea. the sea is the element of love”

and when hermann broch said “those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part,” and when keri hulme said “I know about me. I am the moons sister, a tidal child stranded on land. the sea always in my ear, a surf of eternal discontent in my blood,” and iain pears said “being by the sea is like a permanent baptism; the light and air hypnotizes, and your soul is washed by vastness.”

and when julia de burgos said “the sea, the true sea, almost mine now” and when saadi youssef said “but to the sea, to this sea, i return” and derek walcott said “you want to know my history? ask the sea.”

and when e e cummings said “for whatever we lose(like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea” and when john masefield said “i must go down to the seas again for the call of the running tide is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied”

and when albert camus said “I will have always loved the sea. it will have always made everything peaceful inside me” and when chelsea wolfe said “I never was a child I was pulled right out of the sea and the salt, it never left my body” and when virginia woolf said “I live; I die; the sea comes over me; the blue that lasts” and when emily dickinson said “say, sea, take me!”

and when Isak Dinesen said “The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.”