Caveat: Tree #149

I went to the airport to pick up Arthur on his way back from the VA in Juneau – but the leg of his flight from Sitka to Klawock was canceled due to weather. It is misty and drizzly with very low visibility. So I came back home.
Here is a purplish tree in front of someone’s house along the expressway. Some kind of maple. It came out somewhat blurry.
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[daily log: walking, 3km]

Caveat: Tree #147

I took Arthur to the airport this morning. He has some tests the VA doctors want done, and needs to be at the hospital in Juneau.
Later in the day, he called me to say the doctors are keeping him overnight. This is … concerning – but not overly so. Arthur and I have already discussed that the doctors at the Juneau VA seem overly cautious. He feels like they are wasting his time, but he nevertheless is deferring to their wishes. We’ll see what happens.
I took this picture of a tree against a metal shed at the airport this morning.
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Here is the airport.
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[daily log: walking, 2km]

Caveat: Poem #1030 “Syntactic verse”

ㅁ
strident birds  green ideas  forceful sunlight
gloomy eagle
grave concerns  red movement  gentle wind
rough bark
angular branches  precipitous descent  able creatures
spinning insects
the day
arrives
but nothing
changes
except now
it all feels
different
deep soil  dull failure  dead spirits
ghostly contortions

– a quennet. This poetic form, called a quennet, is one of the many odd and wonderful things to emerge from Oulipo. It is a specification not based on meter or rhyme but rather parts of speech and word counts – you could argue that it is syntactic versification. I think more could be done with inventing such constraints.
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Caveat: Tree #144

This tree survived the treepocalypse. Maybe I posted a picture of it before, I don’t remember. But it stands somewhat lonely in the rock and dirt.
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[daily log: walking, 1km; ditchdigging, 1m]

Caveat: Evidence for the Anthropocene

This is pretty interesting. It’s a diagram showing the distribution of biomass by taxon, for the whole Earth.
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What really struck me more than anything else is that humans + livestock, in the lower right corner, far outweigh all wild mammals and birds. And humans nearly outweigh their livestock. I never thought that could be true.

Caveat: Tree #141

Arthur and I drove into town: “Thursday is shopping day.”
Therefore, I present this tree from the archives.
The tree that I have selected is to the left of a scary-looking sign. The sign memorializes a prison uprising on a notorious prison island in South Korea (실미도), during the 1960s (the era of the dictatorship). Apparently the prisoners were being trained for a suicide mission against North Korea, but they decided to use their new skills to rebel and escape, instead. Things got messy, of course.
But anyway, it’s a nice tree.
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[daily log: walking, 1km]

Caveat: Tree #140

This is a tree viewed by looking straight up at the site of the new well-shed thing.
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[daily log: walking, 1km; ditchdigging, 1m]

Caveat: Tree #139

This is a sad-looking pine tree about two-thirds of the way up the slope toward the treehouse location. It’s the only actual pine tree I’ve run across on Arthur’s two lots – there are quite a few of them out east along the road where the muskeg is (the flat stretch near the bridges), but not so many here along the hillside. This pine tree looks like someone attempted to decapitate it at some point, but it’s decided to stay in the game for now.
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[daily log: walking, 1km; ditchdigging, 1m]

Caveat: Tree #138

I scrubbed barnacles in the morning.
I dug ditches in the afternoon.
No walking took place.
So, here is a tree from the archives: on the grounds of the Korean Shamanism Museum, July, 2017.
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[daily log: walking, 1.5km]

Caveat: Tree #137

Arthur and I went out in the boat today. Still fishless, though.
The tide was very low in the morning. I took this picture of a tree reflected in the water with a fat starfish under the water in the shade of the dock.
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Here is the low tide – you could actually step from the beach to the dock.
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Here is a sea otter I saw.
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[daily log: walking, 1.5km]

Caveat: where is the man who lives out of himself?

Where is the Poet


The inky-garmented, truth-dead Cloud — woven by dumb ghost alone in
       the darkness of phantasmal mountain-mouth — kidnapped the
       maiden Moon, silence-faced, love-mannered, mirroring her golden
       breast in silvery rivulets:
The Wind, her lover, grey-haired in one moment, crazes around the
       Universe, hunting her dewy love-letters, strewn secretly upon the
       oat-carpets of the open field.
O, drama! never performed, never gossiped, never rhymed! Behold — to
       the blind beast, ever tearless, iron-hearted, the Heaven has no
       mouth to interpret these tidings!
Ah, where is the man who lives out of himself? — the poet inspired often
       to chronicle these things?
- Yone Noguchi (Japanese poet [composing in English], 1875-1947)
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