This tree is not out of the woods yet.
I spent quite a bit of the day waiting around in town, because Art had multiple medical appointments in town. He had PT in the morning at 9 at the SEARHC clinic in Craig, and a dental appointment at the SEARHC clinic in Klawock at 1. In the interim, I put in an hour at work while Art hung out at the Veterans Center – open only on Thursdays, run by the infamous Jan, who is also my coworker. Small town life, right?
[daily log: walking, 2km; waiting, 4hr]
Month: February 2022
Caveat: epistemectomy
I just made up this word: epistemectomy – a procedure which removes knowledge from a person or information system.
I read strange things on the internet almost every day.
Earlier today, while Arthur was at the dentist, I found and began reading a web story (or, maybe, novella), on my phone. It’s about an object that functions as an “antimeme”. An “antimeme” is an idea (perhaps embedded in an object) that in its nature prevents people from being interested in it or remembering it. This opposes to the normal definition of “meme” – which is an idea that encourages people’s interest and recollection.
So unfortunately I can’t remember much about the story (okay, maybe that’s a joke).
Anyway, I recommend you can try to read it. It’s quite weird, though – just a warning. In fact, though, the story recalls certain features of certain secret societies that play difficult-to-define roles in some of my unfinished novels.
Here is the beginning of the story: We Need To Talk About Fifty-Five (part of the Antimemetics Division series).
Caveat: Poem #2026 “Anchorite”
ㅁ Just off the Port Saint Nick Road, here, my hermitage resides among the trees where cars can't go my dampened spirit hides.
– a quatrain in ballad meter.
Caveat: Tree #1119
This tree is from my past. It is in front of a big cliff. There is a little hermitage structure at the top of the cliff, called 연주대 [yeonjudae], on Gwanak mountain, South Korea.
In other news, today is Elizabeth Peratrovich Day. How did you celebrate Elizabeth Peratrovich day? I celebrated by selling 14 balloons at the Gift Shop.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 6hr]
Caveat: Frame Shop Journal #13
I last posted one of these “Frame shop journal” entries about 3 months ago.
Certainly it’s not the case that I haven’t been making frames. Perhaps I got so busy that I simply stopped consistently recording my work. The month of December probably saw me assembling on the order of 50-75 frames – I don’t know the exact number. This was the Christmas rush, combined with the community panic over the possibility that the Gift Shop (and therefore the framing and matting shop it includes) would be shutting down permanently.
But then with January 1st rolling around, the Gift Shop was rescued by new owners, Chad and Kristin. They are slowly implementing lots of changes to the business, but fully intend to retain the matting and framing aspect, and thus, for now, I continue with job security in my relatively low-stress, very part-time position.
As I said, I’ve stopped recording every single frame I’ve done. But setting aside the Christmas insanity, here are a bunch of shots of recent work, from January and the first half of February. In no particular order and with minimal commentary.
This last framing is much more significant to me personally than any other I’ve done. Can anyone guess why?
Maybe if I start posting more regularly, I’ll manage to include more examples of my work.
Caveat: Poem #2025 “Hypothetically untreed”
ㅁ Before leaving for work I walked there - down by the treehouse, by the sea. I check on it every day. So far it hasn't moved. Sometimes I worry. I imagine going there, finding doom.
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Tree #1118
This tree got broken, perhaps by strong wind.
[daily log: walking, 3km; retailing, 6hr]
Caveat: the
Apparently the word “the” has been declining in use-frequency over the last 100 years or so – though it remains the single most common word in the English language.
There is a recent article on the Language Log Blog about it: here.
There is a more in-depth (more definite?) article from the same source, from some years ago: here.
I have always really liked the word “the” – it’s one of my favorites. Perhaps it became a favorite about the time I realized there are languages that don’t have a word that means “the”. Russian, for example, has no definite article. And they do fine. Korean, too, utterly lacks a word for “the” (Korean, on the other hand, deploys a “topic clitic” (-는) that is quite weird and impossible to translate to English reliably, but that overlaps semantically in some respects with “the” – but not enough to be considered in any way the “same” word).
“The” is a very strange word, actually, if you start to think about it. If languages can do fine without a word that means “the”, what, exactly, is the word “the” doing?
If things go on with the same trend, perhaps English will evolve in the direction of eliminating definite articles. I did some googling and found the example of Aramaic (specifically its Eastern dialects) as being a language that once had but has now lost the definite article. The opposite change is much more familiar to me: though Latin lacked definite articles, all of its modern descendants (Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc.) have them. Historical linguists blame the Greeks for the spread of the definite article – the Greeks’ enthusiastic deployment of definite articles is well known.
That said, most evidence suggests Greek-speakers acquired their definite article mania from those Phoenicians. Early Semitic languages appear to have been original innovators of old-world definite-articlism, and modern Arabic is well known for its ubiquitous definite article, “al- “, such that that prefix is a marker for “Arabic” in stereotypical representations. Aramaic is interesting because, with such a long, long documented history (3000 years!) it has in fact passed through both processes: it at one point acquired a (the?) definite article (under influence from Hebrew and Arabic, perhaps) and then later lost it again (in many dialects).
In a slight digression, there is a nice word worth knowing: arthrous. This is a term in formal linguistics and philology, an adjective meaning that a particular language uses articles (both definite and indefinite, or of other weird flavors of article e.g. Swahili, I think). Thus English or French or Greek or Arabic are “arthrous” languages, because they have articles (definite, indefinite, or both); meanwhile, Russian, Korean, or modern Eastern Aramaic are “anarthrous” languages, because they do not have grammatical articles.
Perhaps in future English will make do without definite article.
(The.) End.
Caveat: Poem #2024 “Squashed like a bug, more like”
ㅁ The storage tent gave up the ghost, the weather had been such that over time its structure'd failed the stress had been too much.
– a quatrain in ballad meter.
Caveat: Tree #1117
This tree saw Sunnahae Mountain shed its shroud. Briefly.
[daily log: walking, 4km; dogwalking, 3km; disassembling, 5hr]
Caveat: a storied storage tent meets its end
I finished my fraught disassembly of my storage tent today. The morning was actually slightly sunny and nice, but by 1 PM it was quite windy and starting to rain.
I got the storage tent canvas parts spread out and weighted by rocks, and draped a simple 20′ x 40′ tarp over the “stuff” that had been inside the storage tent. This includes firewood, recyclables (because recycling isn’t currently done on the island, but I daydream it might one day be done again, as it used to be), some construction materials (boards and plywood and plastic pipe), some unused collapsed boxes and other various containers.
With the wind whipping into a frenzy, I threw a bunch of rocks and stuff on top of the tarp and hoped for the best.
The storage tent has consumed a lot of my labor over the past 3 years. I think it will be retired, now – too many of its structural pieces are bent or broken by the giant load of snow in December.
Caveat: Poem #2023 “Record keeping”
ㅁ The dog will sniff from here to there; her nose will show the way. She tries to find the places where she'd stopped the other day.
– a quatrain in ballad meter.
Caveat: Tree #1116
This tree was trying to jump off a cliff.
[daily log: walking, 3km; dogwalking, 3km]
Caveat: 나무도 쓸만한 것은 먼저 베인다
I found this aphorism in my book of Korean aphorisms.
나무도 쓸만한 것은 먼저 베인다 na.mu.do sseul.man.han geos.eun meon.jeo be.in.da tree-EVEN useful-ADJ thing-be-PART first cut-PRES The tree that is useful is cut first.
This is quite simple – “The good die young.”
Caveat: Poem #2022 “Phase transition”
ㅁ No rain is quite like rain at dawn - it wakes you up, you see; a rain like that is integral to making dreams be free.
– a quatrain in ballad meter.
Caveat: Tree #1115
This tree was alongside as Arthur’s return flight touched the runway.
Which is to say: Arthur’s back from his excursion to Anchorage, safe-and-sound.
[daily log: walking, 4km; dogwalking, 3km]
Caveat: Poem #2021 “Mostly empty space”
ㅁ The sea is not what seems to be, instead it sloshes there: a mass of molecules and space that grasps up at the air.
– a quatrain in ballad meter.
Caveat: Tree #1114
This tree took time to reflect among its peers.
[daily log: walking, 4km; dogwalking, 3.5km]
Caveat: Friday Blogroll
Blogs in my browser right now (in a few very broad categories):
Oddities and bibliophilic pursuits:
Technology, computers, internet:
Rationalist, Policy, Philosophy:
History, Politics, Culture:
Not really a blog, more of a news magazine:
Not really a blog, more of a news aggregator for tech and computer news:
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
Caveat: Poem #2020 “Not what it seems”
ㅁ The moon was there behind the clouds, and lurking like a whale; the sky was like the surging sea: a torn cloud showed its tail.
– a quatrain in ballad meter.
Caveat: Tree #1113
This tree saw something quite unexpected: a ray (just one ray during the whole day) of sunshine.
Arthur has traveled, on his own, to Anchorage because he needs technical help with his hearing aids and of course no one in Southeast Alaska can do that – so the VA is sending him to Anchorage, at their expense, to try to solve the problem. Some people have expressed concern about Arthur traveling alone. I suppose I share that concern, but I just hope for the best and think he’ll muddle through. Strangers are mostly helpful and kind, and all of Alaska is basically just a small town that happens to take up a lot of land, such that the “city bus” is run by an airline.
I got a phone call from Arthur to confirm his arrival in Anchorage. Apparently Arthur got off the plane at Juneau, thinking he’d arrived in Anchorage. He got as far as the baggage carousels before realizing he was in the wrong airport. Fortunately the plane (which takes off and lands multiple times in its island-hopping journey from Seattle to Anchorage, and has the atmosphere of an intercity bus) waited for him to realize his error and so he was able to reboard.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km; dropping Arthur at airport, 2hr]
Caveat: The Age of Hypochondria
A half-formed thought.
Conspiracy-thinking is a type of hypochondria at the level of society, instead of at the level of the individual. It’s an apophenic search for meaning where meaninglessness is the more rational explanation, and a kind of default assumption of malignancy. That said, between the excessive reactions to COVID on the one hand, and the explosion of conspiracy theorizing on both the left and right in our political space, I would dub our current era the “Age of Hypochondria.”
Caveat: Poem #2019 “Gnomic remarks”
ㅁ The map was drawn by idiots it failed to show the way; instead it lead the gullible to lostness - and astray.
– a quatrain in ballad meter.
Caveat: Tree #1112
This tree was there at the 7-mile bridge, where despite yet another 2 inches falling in the previous 24 hours, still had remnants of snow piled along it.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km; retailing, 6hr]
Caveat: Poem #2018 “Announcement”
ㅁ When I was young I liked the rain it always seemed to sing. I'm older now but I still like that tapping, plonking thing.
– a quatrain in ballad meter.
Caveat: Tree #1111
This tree was next to a house by the sea in the woods.
Inside that house, since I worked today, Art prepared dinner. He found a container of leftover beef-barley stew I had made a few days ago. He found another container of leftover fish chowder I had made a while back. He mixed these two together (!) and heated them on the stove for 3 hours, until they had a black crust on the bottom.
He didn’t notice he’d done these unconventional things until I pointed them out. It was one of those moments when I was quite grateful that the 2013 cancer had nuked about 90% of my taste-buds.
[daily log: walking, 3km; retailing, 6hr]
Caveat: really very old random photos
I’ve been doing some “spring cleaning” of a sort, up in my attic abode. I ran across some quite old photos that were not stored with my other old photos, and therefore had missed out on early efforts to scan and digitize. So I scanned and digitized these pictures. In chronological order:
From 1979, this is my 8th grade class picture. This was a formative year for me in some respects – it was the year I decided to become a nerd. This was, in fact, a more-or-less conscious choice from among the various social cliques and groups I saw to choose from in the middle-school milieu of the era. I’m still recovering from that ill-fated decision, 40 years on.
From 1983, this is me with my brother Andrew. I was a senior in HS – the slight tan seems to indicate late spring or summer. Andrew was… well, quite small.
From 1992 or 93, Michelle (my wife from 1994-2000 when she passed away). I remember this dress.
Caveat: Poem #2018 “Unfortunately delayed”
ㅁ The dream presented seas in flood I had to flee the flow But at my spot along the road the buses were too slow.
– a quatrain in ballad meter.
Caveat: Tree #1110
This tree was trying to hide behind the burned out woodshed on the neighbor lot.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km; dogwalking, 3km]
Caveat: important
“I have just learned the meaning of ‘important’. It refers to an ant who is being brought into the United States.”
Caveat: Poem #2017 “Your loss”
ㅁ The words, they fell like winter rain, they scattered as they fell. Those listening refused to hear, in silence they would dwell.
– a quatrain in ballad meter.
Caveat: Tree #1109
This tree was there where someone had disposed of deer carcasses, leaving scary skeletons lying around.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km; dogwalking, 3.5km]
Caveat: 개도 싸다니면 몽둥이에 맞는다
I found this aphorism in my book of Korean aphorisms.
개도 싸다니면 몽둥이에 맞는다 gae.do ssa.da.ni.myeon mong.dung.i.e maj.neun.da dog-TOO wander-COND stick-WITH beat-PRES If a dog wanders, it's beaten with a stick.
I’m not sure this is true as much in US culture as in traditional Korean culture. Dogs are much lower on the social totem pole in Korean culture, traditionally. The lowest dogs are often on the level of the social order where they are ranked equal to “lunch” – that is to say, dogs are food. This is not so true anymore. It’s not illegal to eat dog meat in Korea, so there are traditionalists who do it, but in general dogs are kept as pets no different from the way they are in the US, these days. But that’s not where this aphorism comes from.
Anyway, a wandering dog will be beaten with a stick. That’s clear – what’s it mean? It seems to be associated with the fact that people who bum around and don’t stick to one place and one activity are likely to be treated badly – legitimately so: itinerants deserve their fate.