Sorry, by Vocal Grooming, I mean this
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming,_Gossip_and_the_Evolution_of_Language>
not merely "vocal". [⛧]
thanks, I trust you are usually fairly precise in your language-intent.
One of the recent offerings I withdrew before sending here recently
was on the business about "images" and aphantasia. I am probably
*hyperphantasic* but in a broad spectrum kinda way. Some of my
strongest "images" are not in the visual sensoria... olfactory and
proprioceptive and even something "in between" several sensoria which I
identify as "textural" (up to and including your own claims/references
about trypophobia). I also find that my visuals are very intense by
some measure but not very precise or stable. If I "stare" too closely
at any damn thing it skitters away like a dust mote or fades off as in
the gloaming.
Your defense of gridding the garden reminded me of road trips where
you'd run across a tree farm or orchard where all the trees are
perfectly lined up ... nauseating ... maybe akin to trypophobia, some
deeply ingrained (false?) registration of toxicity.
I didn't mean to actually "defend" gridding as in fact I don't really
grid very much or well myself... Permaculture principles (for what
they are worth) make lots of good arguments against such. I *did* form
my garden area (when I first moved here) as a 60 circle visible to the
airplanes who use the nearby Otowi bridge (under VFR rules) as a
waypoint. I planted it the first year in "alternating sections" of
winter-wheat/winter-rye, raising and lowering my tiller every 60 degrees
as I spun around the concentric circles... unfortunately I counted wrong
and it yielded 45 degree sections, so the "crop circle from space" I
intended to look like a nuclear radiation hazard turned into a TV Test
Pattern... since then I have varied my tilling/planting quite
widely... the most entertaining (to me) being building a "labyrinth" of
plantings/paths... It looked great when freshly wood-chipped/planted
but went unruly pretty quickly. Another time I thoughtlessly plowed
under a couple of rotted pumpkins which yielded a huge botchy patch of
pumpkin plants the next spring which by mid-summer yielded no end of
squash bugs. Fortunately that was the "year of the geese and chickens"
who once directed did help knock them down to a reasonable count... I
avoided cucurbits for a a couple of years waiting for the sequestered
squash bug eggs to maybe turn into microbe-food? Haven't had many
since. Many of the 25 years I've been here, the garden was fallow, I
haven't tilled in a decade (trying hard to channel masanobu fukuoka
<https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/one-straw-revolutionary/?srsltid=AfmBOopLQ89ZazE9dC2zopo4qt-1H3SsHA-jesey50x_uT1ma2R7UgUE>,
or just being lazy or both)... This year it was mostly "chicken
pasture" with a lot of wimpy cover/feed-crop stuff (lettuces, spinaches,
turnips, beets, clovers, etc) which I under-watered and they ravaged and
fertilized. Pulled. a few of the uglier weeds.
It also reminded me of Trump's claim that Finland rakes the forest.
Granted, I recognize the satisfaction of Engineering, making the world
in your image. My first real sense of that was the aircraft factory I
got to walk through at Lockheed to get to the campus nurse for my drug
tests.
You got to test drugs in college, cool! I was fascinated by
rivet-patterns on WWII planes as a kid. I'd trace the outline of a
plane from a book, then sit and ideate/imaginate the sheet-metal plates
and the rivets holding them down. A few decades ago I scored a c19
book on "rivet patterns for industrial boilers" which was quite
comforting to look through and read snippets about the why and wherefore
of various staggers and overlaps and such. I gifted it to a friend's
teenage son who is/was fascinated with mining and railroad tech (esp
steam era) and was raised very effectively up and around an autism
diagnosis. I miss that book but am glad he is enjoying it in a similar
way, alongside the "Ingenious mechanisms for inventors and designers" of
the same era (levers and gears and springs oh my!).
I probably have some kind of aberrant trypophobia, not precisely
trypophilia but maybe more an inversion of the disgust/fascination response?
Watching all those robots do things like shaving aluminum blocks was
transformative. Feynman's "what I can't create, I don't understand",
ALife, and biomimicry all argue for a fuzzy boundary between science
and engineering. I'm sure there are Dork tests out there similar to
OCEAN that might ask whether you get in the flow more by staring at
lichen or desoldering capacitors.
As much as I love the acrid smell of solder/flux, I do prefer a good
lichen. I've colleagues who are wicked-capable of racking/stacking gear
and cable-dressing huge racks, etc... not my thing really. I can
barely bring myself to coil hoses and extension cords when they are not
in use.
But it feels a bit like the built environment has hijacked "wonder". I
have a Quine atom tattooed on my left hand.
Does not surprise me. Though I barely appreciate what such is.
And it's a beautiful concept. But thinking about it's uniqueness
under different systems feels very different from, say, watching a
batch of baby spiders spread out to discover the world.
We have (not quite-spider) daddy-longleg hatchouts in our bathroom...
fortunately mary is as fascinated as I am, not rabidly eradicating them.
I expect that the dopamine circuits being exercised are different.
Another fascination to pursue (or not) in my own garden of many forking
paths... thanks.
Tech like AI, social media, gooning, etc. seems akin to alcohol or
heroin. It hijacks your pleasure centers such that the rest of the
world turns gray and boring. Conversing with a sycophant, even with
the veneer prompt of "be argumentative", who never ghosts you (unless
Cloudflare fails!)
was that a DDOS?
, never has its own agenda trying to coerce you into their domain (Hi
Nick),
and then the guy on the list here who entices you onto his lawn then
runs out shouting "get off my lawn!"...
never dismisses your idea as a complete waste of time, etc. is a kind
of hijacking ... very similar to professionally produced pornography
or Hollywood movies where every woman is a bombshell and every man has
a six-pack. Pffft. Gimme real sociality over parasociality any day.
I've never really had a comfort zone and I'm not trying to find one
now that I'm almost dead.
I like this phrase... I'm much more entranced by my own "now that I'm
almost dead" (for many values of almost and dead) than ever before...
and you helped add dimension to it along the way.
Of course, we've tread this ground. There's a difference between
factory farms and .... what was it? ... "husbandry"? "permaculture"?
IDRemember.
mumble,
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