Winter called for more children. This week's is named ytree! His heritage traces back through some earlier projects, and this week I felt a compulsion to give him new shape.

./foo type=dir
./foo/bar type=file content=foo/bar.yaml

Arch packaging uses MTREE as a programmable archiving format. I built on the concept by switching from the bespoke line based format to a YAML encoding with an archive entry per document. A complete archive is serialized from a stream of independent documents.

--- !ytree/tar/dir/v1
name: ./foo

--- !ytree/tar/file/v1
name: ./foo/bar
contents: !ytree/res/file/v1
  path: files/ytree/example.yaml

--- !ytree/tar/file/v1
name: ./hello/world
contents: !ytree/res/buffer/v1
  contents: !!binary aGVsbG8sIHdvcmxk

--- !ytree/tar/file/v1
name: ./hello/world
contents: !ytree/res/string/v1
  value: hello, world

The file resource type produces the most familiar behavior, populating archive contents from local files. I also added content providers that allow for specifying object data inline, rendered from a template, or fetched remotely.

def entries(version):
    return [
        ytree.tar.File(
            "version",
            ytree.res.String(version),
        ),
    ]

All of the mapped types have public python APIs so they can be generated programmatically. A function like this could encapsulate a version number on the fly. That could be transformed directly into a tarchive or serialized to YAML and served elsewhere.

# version.yaml
--- !ytree/tar/file/v1
name: version
contents: !ytree/res/string/v1
  value: decorating

I could build a sort of tree of archives with indirection. The first file could represent some set of metrics each named by a path and this second one a catalog with the particular "database" name given by the path for dispatching.

# status.yaml
--- !ytree/tar/file/v1
name: version.yaml
contents: !ytree/res/url/v1
  url: https://yieldsfalsehood.com/version.yaml

That evaluates to a tarchive with one entry populated by a snapshot of that URL. I can access a specific configuration item in there by deferring to tar to "extract" the database (version.yaml) first then the item stored as a file (version) inside it.

#!/bin/bash

set -euo pipefail

domain="${DOMAIN:-https://yieldsfalsehood.com}"
url="$domain"/status.yaml

curl -s "$url" \
    | python -m ytree.tar -c \
    | tar -Oxf - version.yaml \
    | python -m ytree.tar -c \
    | tar -Oxf - version

There's currently unoccupied space to configure SSL trust for those types of resources. So far I do have runtime configurable support for most jinja template loaders. Template resources themselves bind context data to a template name, which are resolved at runtime. There's no telling what this might look like when rendered!

--- !ytree/tar/file/v1
name: foo
contents: !ytree/res/template/v1
  template: template
  context:
    name: world

There is effectively no loader by default, which is fine if you never reference a template. If you do then you need glue, like this ad hoc loader that embeds a template body into the command line so you can see the secret message.

#!/bin/bash

set -euo pipefail

domain="${DOMAIN:-https://yieldsfalsehood.com}"

curl -s "${domain}"/ytree/template.yaml \
    | LOADER='--- !jinja2/loader/dict/v1 {mapping: {template: "hello, {{ name }}"}}' \
            python -m ytree.tar -c \
    | tar -Oxf - foo

Cymru the Christmas Caterpillar has died. Weeks ago! He emerged Christmas Eve Eve and I got him some broccoli rabe to snack on. I found his cousin hanging around the houseplants a few days later, and he also spent his brief life in a cage. All for my own meddling. I wrote them and Jeffrey a letter about the woes of occupying space and prayed to Golgi to wrap it in love.

I went back to New York for Christmas itself and received a little family history as a gift. That I've managed to miss the impact of my Irish heritage on my life seemed like a personal fault at first, then I discovered Plastic Paddy. I rejected my connection to New York having not been raised there then tapped into it watching North by Northwest. Five or six generations and a few thousand miles removed from Ireland, I thought "struggled through some of Ulysses" was as Irish as I was and couldn't accept the identity. Or maybe I could but didn't because it would mean having to do the work of exploring what that meant beyond "the culture around me seems inexplicably familiar". And if I did that for New York and Ireland then I'd have to do it for Japan and Wales, back through the indigenous cultures there and through to Africa and the depths of the Pacific, when part of me would really like to exist with some degree of naivete of the patterns around me.

It rained and snowed last month. I saw a reel that told me to ask ChatGPT to enumerate a table of people's frustrations, desires, and fears as a marketing shortcut, then another that explained the same process using the same language. My frustration is when it snows a little more after I've already shoveled, my desire is for narrower roads shaped by the marks left in the snow, and my fear is that winter will never end. My disappointment is that we've changed the climate to power intelligent machines to paint pictures of weird hands while pre-destination and luck continue to justify suffering.

I spent most of January eating. I cooked and baked and adapted heritage recipes. I thought about legacy and the planner and how robotic and inhuman it's felt to desire to encode myself in one declarative expression. But that can't be much different than a painter's craving for a self portrait or the aims of all the great grandmas aching to record recipes, testimonies, and family stories. So in the kitchen emerged four characters. The tall red headed woman is the Tree Witch, god of identity, particular about the precision of the recipe. Beside her is the Cousin of Chaos, who's never owned a measuring cup and instead samples and judges along the way insisting that the meal is what it is in whatever fluid shape it exists. Between them is the moderating Force of Ancestry, affirming their duality. And then there is The Human, shortest of them all, the writer in the room who'd like to believe that the thermometer doesn't alter the temperature of the body.

I saw Poor Things a couple weeks ago and spent time with the dead and with the young. Greek Man speaks in mythology, and the feral, queer, and closeted hear familiar sounds from a safe distance. If Bella is at home in the lab then I'm at home in the kitchen, the garden, Emacs. I stopped by Keystone on their last day in Montgomeryville on the way home from a memorial service and grabbed a porter kit that I brewed in anticipation of the spring. The Farmers Market left the Madison lot, which used to be a mill and is now apartments. The market manager has passed and the market moves on. You claimed they're both right, I said, but that doesn't make sense. I know, she said, we're in conflict.

January 2024 became the first month without publishing since this experiment began. I wrote when I could but I felt a depression pressing down on me. Everything was gray and heavy. All I could do was eat and sleep until I couldn't anymore. The doctor said I was dehydrated then he said I was eating for two billion. Now I'm back down to two hundred or so and energized again. One of the storms loosened a fence panel so I went out for repairs. Somebody once said the posts were fine so the rails and pickets have become a patchwork. Winter is dark but I feel light halfway between the solstice and equinox, strengthened by the sisters.

It's my sad lot to announce that Jeffrey the Snake has died. I finally thought to name him one night while watching Teemo watch him through the grass and a few mornings later found him curled up and cold. I dug him a burial site near where he'd hang out next to the kitchen door then left little Enkidu lying in his new bed while the dogs and I took a trip through the woods to ask the trees why they didn't keep him warm. I hoped I was wrong, I tried to wake him up, I read to see how long he might just be playing, but I couldn't wait to see a maggot leave his nose. He was still motionless in the same spot when we returned so I covered him with soil. I'd been moving keepsakes off the sun room shelves to make room for new memories and considered leaving the piece of labradorite I bought last year. The card it came with said it offered protection in times of transformation, which it was good for, so I buried it with Jeffrey to protect him in his next shed.

I bought a new stone, one without a card or any prescribed identity. I couldn't find much online about it and I've already forgotten its given name, so I gave it the name Instar. I took cuttings of the backyard basil before the first freeze in the beginning of November, one of which rooted in a glass of water. There weren't many leaves to begin with, and I found that what I initially left had been eaten entirely by a stowaway. I'm not sure if he actually had enough to eat or if the cocoon he was able to weave with what he had is sufficient, but I moved him to a terrarium and I named him Cymru the Caterpillar.

I also bought a new wallet. My last one finally finished falling to pieces, so if you're wondering where all the microplastics came from I might know a guy. I considered clips before settling on a cigarette case. I was still searching for a solution to carry a smoke since losing one this summer, and this also houses a built-in lighter and a small deck of cards. I made a bespoke calling card for this demo but I think I might update the generator to contour the design around the arm. I have already updated the planner to add VJOURNAL support for the checklist view. My initial use was to print a head of my backlog each week, but I've since changed myself specifically not to do that. I like the feel of having something there, and it looks like a canvas to experiment with forecasts or fortunes. I could have a recipe show up for a specific date. Or a paid advertisement! This week I added a copy of Sunday's chalice lighting and extinguishing words.

I was the worship associate at a service last month. The theme was hope, and I read through The Four Quartets beforehand in search of inspiration. We dedicated a Little Free Library that day and on its top shelf I saw Eliot, who I still don't quite know for the twentieth or so time, staring back at me. I watched North by Northwest and thought about a guy I know who left Long Island for a brief tour of the Midwest and now rides trains around the mid-Atlantic drinking tea and cocktails with his blonde girlfriend. In the sequel, Guy From Nassau takes a detour through Florida, where Gay Man is born in the forest just outside the castle walls with a rusted spoon in his mouth unaware of his eventual meeting with Guy From Bucks.

I started to clean and reorganize after Thanksgiving, which somebody framed as seasonal nesting. I hung some art and prepared the plants for winter. I printed new pictures for a new album and in the background of several shots noticed the same woman. First she was at a potluck sat two tables over from me, then a gardener at a tavern, then in a car driving by a food truck. I stared into her madeleine eyes and remembered her from every meal I'd ever eaten. I went to a tea house and waited and tried not to be obvious when she walked in the door. I played coy and invented some excuse as an invitation for her to join me. We clinked, I sipped and slipped into a wakeless sleep. I dreamed of brambles and a cardinal caught in the thorns. The radiators banged as a draft cut through the house rattling the chains holding the lights over the houseplants. I leapt from the bed straight to the ceiling, looking back down at my slumbering self. Through the window I saw him pulling up the roses by the roots. I flew down the stairs as fast as I could but I couldn't unlock the door. I banged on the glass and shouted. Jacob, it's me! I'm still here! But he couldn't hear, or wouldn't listen.

A friend and I attended a guided tour of a local cemetery then I volunteered at the homestead open house. I recently heard somebody remark about people studying history to understand where they came from, but for all my treasure hunting I still have blind spots in my own personal history. If every story is Gilgamesh then consuming any story is a search for lost time, which is a nice distraction from actually finding it.

Some Guy boarded a train I was on then struggled his way through getting dumped over the phone. He explained to his then former paramour that they must have been emotionally damaged in the past, that they take things too hard, that one day someone's going to tell them the truth. He said that he tells people the truth, and I thought about sharing some truth with him instead of gossiping about his heartbreak to the Internet, and about whether some piece of our inner ears might be wired like noise canceling headphones collapsing the songs of ourselves. I packed both thoughts up with the other clutter to send back into the world and make space to host my holiday party this weekend. We ate s'mores in the kitchen and played games in the dining room. I ordered dips and in the reflection of the food tray I saw a name for myself.

I read a comment referring to polyamory as scheduling kink while on a break from hacking on the planner, which I just updated. I thought about when I would take the time to say an individual good night to each of my stuffed animals and to a portrait of Hamlet's father Shakespeare, dead before this play began. Still I missed a few appointments last month, but for COVID. I found facsimile where I could and noted where I couldn't and thought about identity on a costumed walk for Dany's birthday we took in lieu of the 5k we'd normally run.

A relative identity as I ripple through the fabric, the edges of myself dissolved and reshaped as I walk about. An absolute identity, some bits of fabric bound up like a fixed point in the shape of black holes and plastic. The virus bound my lungs to 2020, a temporal nerve connecting a collective body that walks through time. I picked up a copy of "Launch Me to the Stars, I'm Finished Here" and wondered about cycles of grief and time travel in art. It's certainly in my vocabulary here now. I think I got it from Woolf, Proust, and Joyce, who all developed it roughly simultaneously. Connecting through history seems natural enough for anybody at an individual level so in cases of widespread trauma, conflict, and plague it might emerge in some perceptible pattern like the synchronizing of cicadas, these periodic self-organized anthologies of intergalactic reflections of the garden our molted shells left hanging on the trees for our future selves to find.

Rescheduling and making new plans to look forward to absorbed the brunt of having to cancel so I indulged in getting organized. I fleshed out my calendars with fancy recurrences and updated the checklist tool to support them. I added a tool to generate a calendar with dates for Easter for any number of years. I based it off skyfield at first to find the full moon using the definition of the date from Wikipedia. It was relatively expensive and a little maddening because I couldn't find clear guidance on which timezone to use for measuring the start of March 21. The other tools accept a timezone so I implemented the same for this declaring that even though I'd have to make a choice for the sake of generating the thing the tool itself didn't necessarily impose an opinion beyond a default. Then I found that dateutil, which I'm already using for handling recurrence rules, implements a closed form calculator so I switched to that. Free of that burden I wondered which sects have an opinion on the timezone and which years it could affect the determination and induce a schism. That would be the year Nonna insists on keeping "the old date", the true one she says, before choking on a piece of ham. Vicki, away in Miami as his grandmother lay dying on the kitchen floor, thinks about the dinner he expects to have the following Sunday before hearing the news.

I also added a tool for populating a business card template from an event or contact. I started planning a party and put the details in a calendar. The tool generates HTML from that similar to the checklist tool, as well as an embedded SVG of a QR encoding of the thing being serialized. I generated the printed samples from the source repository so they should be reproducible, although the sunrise and sunset times might vary slightly. The sample configuration uses the Penn statue on Philly City Hall as its point of reference but these were based on the point of view of the flag pole outside North Wales Boro Hall. It was easy enough to add contact support so I did that as well and thought about adding VJOURNAL support to the checklist. I think if I add the component type to the grouping then I could render the group of event types like I currently do and for a group of journal entries on the same day, process their bodies as Markdown into HTML fragments I could render in their own block. Then if I had a journal dated Monday with a few thoughts for the week it should appear as the first block followed by seven for each day. I currently squeeze six blocks onto one page but with that layout I could spread an entire week over one sheet.

I also want to add monthly and yearly granularity to the checklist grouping. I consider what I have now "daily" so the other two should mostly fall in place when I finally get around to shaking them off their branches. More things to do to occupy myself. Eli Whitney thought he'd make less work but made more because he forgot to fill the space with emptiness. Planning to plan is an infinite time hack if you ignore the 500 flowers wilting from neglect while you do, a meadow full of metaphors. I was reading about Mattison and Thaddeus Stevens while I was sick in bed and as the Lexapro was ramping up and I felt a rush to spin more plates. I joined a few group hikes and embraced a budding extroversion. I wondered how much was there already, how much of human nurture manifests as social nature, how much of the art is in the artist.

I saw a guy on a reel refer to humans as an apex species and I called his speciesism vanity. I thought about trees developing fungus to serve as their nerves. Shaped by the power exchange that they're compelled to enable in silent witness the fungus find themselves attempting to assert their own identity, cannibalizing the trees and evolving their own fleshy shell to stand upright. But for all their evolution and hairy knuckles they're still as much a piece of the tree as the roots and bark and leaves and the colony they thought they left behind. I thought of some cave dwelling ancestral aunt who between cuddling the wolves and singing with the birds drew pictures of her and Big holding hands between the cedars. Made so aware of his position he banished Carrie, who took the birds and flowers and all the rest of the garden but left the wolves. And one night alone and cider drunk Big longed for the flowers and thought how unfair it was to have been banished from the garden, because self awareness is the gravest sin of all. So he invented a god in his image, righteous for having been the banisher, with Charlotte, Samantha, Miranda, and all of the City warring on their behalf, entire forests fed by the fire. After generations of so branching the fruit of the tree finds itself repulsed by where it came from, full of inherited guilt, and the tree seeing itself in the fruit is repulsed at the sight and so the two run from each other. And as the fruit breathes freely feeling the grass on its skin, and as it laments its fall and weeps into the soil around it, I cannot help but wonder if there would grow a tree different than the one before but tree all the same?

Fall fell again, fast. I made my burnt offering to Huitzilopotchli and drank Leo's birthday peach hooch with friends, though most of it ended on the floor. I brewed this year's hops, presented about Ambler history, and decorated for Halloween. And I finally got COVID. Life was moving so quickly that the sudden stop sent me back in time to 2020. I've had other ailments in the meantime, I even had to cut my Memorial Day short this year, but the mental impact of this feels stronger, amplified by the history and memory associated with the virus. At the very least it's been a moment to reflect on what's changed and on how any amount of time can be both a long time and a short time.

I started serotonin supplementation this month. I felt like I made it pretty far with weed, walking, and freedom from work but for all my self-awareness, denial, and backwoods home therapy I can still get stuck. For the most part depressions feel normal and cyclical. I'll slow down a bit, turn inwards, then outwards, then rearrange some furniture or decorate, and begin the next season. Sometimes I don't notice the slow down until I'm stalled entirely or nearly out of gas. I started journaling awhile back to capture a few lines about what I got up to throughout each day, and that evolved into a way to monitor for my overall activity level. The meta-monitor is losing interest in the journal itself.

I also began capturing maintenance like weekly cleaning tasks and yearly inspection reminders in calendars alongside appointments, etc. I'd load all those on my phone so I could see a rough checklist for the day, but I didn't have actual checklist interactivity. So I wrote a set of tools that includes one to transform those calendars into a printable checklist format. I thought I'd share a screenshot but they looked pretty awful, which is apparently how I advertise my graphical products. They look fine on paper! I should print and photograph samples but in the meantime the code itself has a complete working example to build. Now I only show appointments on my phone so that view is less cluttered. The checklist printout includes appointments plus all my routine tasks. I print a few days at a time and mark things off as I get to them. The code is reasonably stable now and it's pretty easy to make each new sheet so with few barriers to producing them it becomes obvious when they start going missing, usually preceded by a few days of a lot of unmarked boxes.

Last fall I fell for broadcast TV and wrote about Antonio getting addicted to cable on Wings. This fall I sacrificed a few nights entirely scrolling through reels for the first time. The majority of what I saw was ironic Christian male sexuality followed in a close second by unironic sexuality. I also found people who've experienced the tragic loss of friends or loved ones to death and divorce sharing a line or two about their sorrow backed by the sad Barbie song. I relinquished my license to criticize grief art by making my own, but these videos stirred something critical in me. I wondered if I felt insecure because my encoding takes 10,000 words about vibing on the Wissahickon when a more compact representation might only need a three second video of me green screen dancing over a shot of the creek with a caption that says something like "deeply despairing, miss you more everyday".

I actually feel a renewed sense of purpose and commitment lately. Beyond the change in the air and the pointy proteins stunting my social life I sense a change also in my own perception, though that might be the escitalopram kicking in. I feel social, and now that I can't share air I want to and now that the leaves are falling I miss the green. I wound up down the creek twice this week, once with the dogs and once with a group. Somebody told me that if you follow the water downstream all the way to the end of the earth you can find the asbestos and emotional baggage we tossed into it pooling outside the cottage of the Tree Witch, pleading for its next identity. The pond where it gathers forms a magic mirror that shows whoever looks at it what they want to see in the world. Some see lonely people, some see friends and family loving each other, some see them hurting. One day Some Guy rolls his ankle on some rocks, slipping and skadooing through the looking glass into a world full of mirrors. Everywhere he looks he finds an infinity of himself as the exit fades further in the reflection. The more he tries to see the more mirror he becomes, inch by inch transformed into glass like all the others in the room wondering what he was made for.

Three posts in one week seems like a lot in this economy but I finally beat Tears of the Kingdom and figured I'd splurge to mark the occasion with some potential spoilers. It occurred to me that I started around Memorial Day and finished around Labor Day, just enough game for one summer. Josha kept pondering the connection between the surface and the mines until it dawned on me at 4AM. I survived the hundredth wave late the other night and thought I must be getting close, but the game kept going. Then I got stuck with half health and no way to travel so I cooked with the four portable pots I had outside the final battle. Then I got a blood moon just as I finished that and had to do it all over again. Throughout the game I kept thinking of the fate of the Aztec at the hands of conquest. All the stories about Ganon were told from the perspective of an outsider civilizing force that casts his rebellion as wicked and power hungry. I thought about subtext in the codices and about whether the Cretans regularly lied to Paul as an inertial reaction to his mission. I grant people grace, then one of the books I read about the Aztec last year said no actually, a bunch of remains were found scattered around the Templo Mayor, evidence of brutality and human sacrifice. I'd hop in a time machine to ask the Cretans but maybe they really are all liars. I contoured a possibility that the Ganon relayed through memory was at worst led astray from good intentions. I thought he got the colonizing capitalist's treatment, branding the resistance leader as a bloodthirsty tyrant to enslave workers in the Zonaite mines. Then he shows up guns blazing laughing all maniacal about how it's him, he's the conquistador in fact. All ten plates of philosophy I had spinning in the air shatter on the ground as he cackles about covering the world in darkness, and I serve him my most disappointed Are You Serious Right Now face.

That would have been enough for a post, but on my way to write I read a story about an older couple ravaged by an attempted murder-suicide earlier today that I felt bound to invoke eventually. We signed a lease on a place in Montgomery Township years ago and soon after moving in I saw a listing for a house on the same block going for far less than we were paying. Everything seemed well enough until the last sentence of the description clarified that rent was below market because of a recent homicide in the unit, a murder-suicide I found out from a news article. One night on our way home to that place we were blocked by every local SWAT team, who'd shutdown the block because some other guy a few doors down in the opposite direction also shot his partner. Of all the lessons we could have taken from COVID it's clear that It's OK to Divorce Later in Life wasn't one of them, but to be fair to our collective body's apparent inability to learn this we never really seemed to comprehend It's OK to Divorce At All. Some ancient eukaryote devastated by mitosis blamed all those who'd already split for not giving fair warning, invented a god and blamed him, blamed the now separate half, and blamed all the life that grew between them as more and more layers of abstraction divided them. The change in perception from a whole to two halves is a lonely one, the pain of separation cuts deep, and if I strain hard enough I can almost see how a desire to iron the fabric and end the process of division entirely might emerge from that. But I think that's ultimately a fool's quest. The fabric ripples on and though some section of it might fall to static, it eventually snags on itself and self-organization snowballs into Self. One half is seen as one again, and what felt like the endless sprawl of Ganon is jockeyed into position contained as another cog in our entire machine.

I saw The Tallest Man on Earth this weekend, who by some feat of modern engineering fit entirely inside the building. The Gardener would come on during the COVID years when I was busy in the garden, and I felt loops close to see it live and be in a crowd in Union Transfer again. The show itself was great, and the heavier emotionality in the music was undercut by a playful stage presence. I thought that if they played everything all mellow then we might get weepy and think about the bad times and that instead of organizing by the typical denominational lines we could group up by the type of hymn that gets us going. Every year we'd gather for a competition, calling our strongest singers to move the others to tears. Danny plays a moody mandolin tune about heartbreak and trees in autumn, Jessica sings a slow, soulful aria in a language I don't understand in some ways but do in others, Rebecca stands in silence for entire minutes, Jeremy's Jazzophonic Junkyard start with gospel and end with the blues, three choruses swell to an explosive ending each more explosive than the last, and a tent revival sponsored by a local tissue conglomerate fills the space between matches. A crew of 50 pull on ropes rolling out an organ 100' wide and taller than the captivated audience can see. At the console sits Gregor, who breaks the silence with one mighty pump of the bellows before his fingers fly across the keys, like a hummingbird his entire body pumping and playing strong and precise. By the tenth measure all in attendance are in a fervent froth, crying, screaming, and pulling at their hair. I overhear somebody make a comparison to his performance last year and look around at all the people listening and smiling and talking. I start to feel like a stranger in this story when suddenly the organist pulls out all the stops. Nobody remembers much of what happened after that but when they wake up the next day piled around the organ, lives and identities swapped between them, they know who to declare winner. During the award ceremony Gregor is about to give a speech when he's interrupted by the sound of honking and yelling. The ground beneath them was paved during the contest. It's rush hour now and I'm driving here!

We walked around Peace Valley to celebrate Teemo's birthday on Monday and to be around the holiday crowd and hurl anxiety into the lake. I started writing this Tuesday and got distracted by a bug in my build tooling. I've been working on planner/almanac/checklist development recently that had me rebase my workflow from wkhtmltopdf onto weasyprint, which required upgrading my entire laptop, which broke all of my virtual environments. I got moving again quickly except for one line of the blog compilation that was failing. I finally sorted that, patched my own tooling to get running, and confirmed somebody already filed a bug with the ruamel developer. I had in mind for an opening paragraph some reflective metaphor about love and giving and about how even an act of love can be a difficult form to pin down in the shifting folds of the fabric. There's only so much that can be given to either the doing or the writing, and there's so much to be done that for now the blog lives on cold cereal served in an ash tray with a side of prayer it doesn't get too screwed up.

I read about the Rittenhouse Round Up two weeks ago, which is how I first heard about the Anti Flower Show Movement. I read that the name was chosen to elicit curiosity and that the creator wondered who would be against a flower show. And I thought about three cedars sitting on stained wingback chairs around a table covered with scale models of all the flowers in the garden in a dark wallpapered room smoking cigars they grabbed by the handful from a glass bowl on a gas station counter next to a handwritten sign that reads "Five For $25". Cedar Center remarks about the barometer and thinks the pain in his knee is an omen. Cedar Left emits a short, monotone "Hmm." Cedar Right swirls an oaked wine and can't stop thinking about Jeremy. Outside the window 13 sparrows with signs stomp in a circle shouting slurs in exchange for seed. On the sidewalk behind them two pairs of cardinals sit at a bistro under the shade of a lilac all feeding each other. A mysterious bird in a top hat, sunglasses, and trench coat stands just inside the alley beside the cafe under the shadow of the building and goes unnoticed by Tyler walking by, who waits outside the convention center for Andy, who never shows. Tyler curses the flowers and leaves.

I made a trip to check out Dharma Bums and chatted up a mythical guy from the mythical land of Central Jersey while I was there. We met up in Doylestown the next week to walk around and visited the cemetery, the Presbyterian graveyard, a record shop, and an open mic night. On the train home I read the history of Ancient Toilstown, around which the Titan of Industry cast his mighty lasso. The rope cut into the bellies of the Toilstowners as they walked, and so over generations they designed the System of Rotation to determine who'd suffer the lead. One day Some Guy argued that the rope is cruel, and quickly the Titan loosened his grip sending slack into the length. Those who had been balanced against the weight of the rope fell and were trampled by those behind, which some said proves the need for the rope. As they picked up the slack and resumed their walk some argued for knee pads and back braces, and others said the rope should be made into smaller pieces. Just as the lasso tightened again three families began to feud over the rotation schedule. All attention turned inward to the center of the circle and again the rope fell slack. Then the Titan stumbled backwards and the lasso dropped to the ground entirely. Distracted from the fight the walkers started hopping over the edge of the rope, lifting each other out as they did. Some wanted closure on how the fight would have ended and stood in place, some grabbed the legs of those leaving and kept them put. The Titan regained his stance and pulled hard on the rope until the lasso was even tighter, now held only inches from his face. Those who remained looked up to see his crooked teeth, bloody tears, and fiery hair. Embedded in his pockmarked skin all their childhood fears were lurking, and in his terrible roar all the embarrassing secrets they hoped everybody'd forget were sung in perfect pitch. Those nearest the front picked up the rope and resumed walking, and after some time the people behind them took over, and after some time the people behind them took over.

I renewed my GPG key last month. There was a moment where what was published had expired, but I've updated what I host here. I went to Arts Fest in Lansdale the next day and gave a Founders Day walking tour down Main Street with the historical society. The crowd ballooned so big we mitosed, which was scary and fun. General Stores were the general craze until the 70s when the mall siphoned life off Main. Now the mall is dying, and as that black hole implodes some slack might ripple back to feed the stars buried in the boro. How should they shine, though? Not all preservation or restoration is worthwhile, and even the Tremont knew neglect. I complain about consumerism and catalog shopping, yet Geller's seems indistinguishable from Amazon and Costco. The trains used to pollute, strangle, and enslave just as surely as the delivery vans do now. There's an implicit, ineffable line drawn when attempting to summon only the good parts of the ghosts of the past, and nostalgia for a thing that never existed is the cast in which form the imaginal discs of development. More of the same means more pavement and more profit motive. The same but different would be a basement bowling alley topped with a shared market and performing space sheltered by a rooftop community garden. Local bands would play a lunchtime concert that the high schoolers would broadcast live on WNPV, and all of us in earshot moved by some frequency that rings over asphalt and setbacks might feel the world grow smaller.

I started my Labor Day weekend with a visit to the Tomb of Thaddeus Stevens and was a little surprised to find that Lancaster is incredible apparently, and a city. I thought it was three farms and a highway, but it's so much more. I saw more architecture than cattle, though I did find that the baseball team is named The Barnstormers and that their mascot is a cow named Cylo, a pun on the silos that shaped the city's agricultural history, so I forgave my own assumption.

I visited a dispensary, passing through 30 chambers to the floor so the licensed salespeople can still get a taste of the experience of incarcerated dealers. I thought about putting wine behind locked doors plastered with warning signs then stopped for a bite on the way to the cemetery. While I was eating I read that Narcan will be distributed through pharmacies for $45. A spokesperson for Rite-Aid, your convenient one stop shop for both the sickness and the cure, said it "should be a medicine cabinet staple that is in all homes and first aid kits so that individuals are prepared to act in the case of an opioid emergency" less than a week after the company announced bankruptcy following mounting lawsuits over their role in sustaining the opioid crisis.

One of the stops on the Lansdale walking tour was Dresher's Arcade, which used to be Dresher's Garage, a Buick dealership and service center. The company moved out and developers converted the driveway cutting through the building into the arcade that exists today. I looked up what distinguishes an arcade and spotted one in Lancaster then I noticed a footprint in a wet section of sidewalk that I reported to public works, who said they'd report it to the contractor. I pulled weeds around the tomb and cleaned up around Sweeney's plot and reported some damage to the group managing the cemetery. I drove in because the Amtrak and SEPTA trains were off by five minutes and I felt a moral aversion to spending 55 minutes waiting. I thought I could sandwich the day in Philly, but personal responsibility seems like a devil in all this trying to latch onto those spirits I'm summoning. I picked up a biography of Stevens from the library on the way, which tied the emphasis on personal responsibility he was raised around to his later sense of social responsibility. Years later as Johnson chiseled away at what could have been a revolutionary victory and as the Freedmen's Bureau failed to do anything constructive, Northern Whites found themselves on board the S.S. Enriched Black People Would Idle sailing full steam ahead toward wage slavery. Anybody making the claim had to work twice as hard lifting their bootstraps the next day to prove that they themselves weren't the lazy one, that they're certifiably personally responsible and therefore not Incredibly Racist and Readily Duped.

I passed a billboard on the side of the tracks on the way to Brooklyn calling to fire Anderson, who's gone now so maybe it was effective, but it should be calling out the dingus standing in the way of me riding the rails all the way to Lancaster. I thought I'd write to both authorities to report the schedule misalignment and found the times swapped for the better. I considered my personal responsibility and started to doubt I'd actually double checked myself that day. The SEPTA app said it was downloading a new schedule before I looked today, so it is theoretically possible the schedules fell into place in the meantime. I could probably find archives and confirm one way or the other but living with the uncertainty is palatable, and costs far less time than having to paint my own face on that billboard. I did make a visit to the train station while I was in town, praying to all the gods at each of the crossings penetrating the downtown loop. I don't think there's a single entity I could call or email to report that treachery, but I thought if I could take the train I could at least shout poems about forbidden love to the heart of the city over the traffic from this side of McGovern.

The local ambulance concern is on a municipal fundraising campaign, and the Lansdale mayor is promoting "for-profit hospital systems". Rite-Aid simultaneously announced they're closing the Lansdale location on Main Street as part of the bankruptcy, a severed limb left to rot sacrificed in defense of hoarded wealth. Profit-motivated exploitation isn't a partnership. The hospitals are all non-profit and so is the EMS company. I'm a member everywhere and a customer nowhere these days. We could be discussing how a network of privately owned non-profits might contour the path toward a change of ownership and how to calm traffic and preserve, promote, and restore art and architecture. Instead the window was shifted so far to the right I got whiplash watching it zip by under the banner of for-profit hospital systems.

I hadn't found my words yet so I wrote all the ones I had on a poster and stood outside Rite-Aid before filling up on some of my favorite First Friday food truck food. Standing there with my signs I thought about the Hundred Armed Ones imprisoned in the tenth level basement below 550 Madison and its arcade. The three toil in turns managing the Internet switchboard by hand, routing every packet at the speed of light. A slurry of addicts and unlucky schoolchildren sustains them as their fingers soar across the planetary jacks. Every fragment feels like one more thread binding them to their position, even this website, even this letter to the mayor:

I'm confused about the promotion of for-profit hospitals in "The Promise of Private/Public Partnerships in EMS Funding". As far as I know all the local hospitals are non-profit. Is somebody looking to develop a for-profit? I also don't understand the connection between specifically for-profit hospitals and the current fundraising need, or why a specifically for-profit structure on the private side of a partnership should ever be welcomed so readily from the public side.

I made a weekend visit to the city to huddle close and bury myself underground. I met with friends for a backyard movie and after the birthday hike I spent the afternoon making potatoes, panzanella, patties, and pasta with peppers and parsley abiding a theme of foods that start with carbs. The dogs got a can of wet food in their kibble, and the birds got extra bread crumbs, seed, and nectar. We all walked some more through the boro and passed a Very Old Man teaching a Little Child what the Toads taught him a thousand years ago about how to jump in mud. Presumably Mother stepped onto the porch and pointed out that Baby is dirty, and Great Grandfather said yes. The Witch Next Door meanwhile had been sitting in her living room with an open book in her lap and a notepad balanced on the armrest under her wrist. She tapped her pencil to the page then stood and grabbed a smile from the coat rack on the way out the door. A cloud full of E. coli, speeding trucks, wild boars, and roaming gangs of ANTIFA conjured above Definitely Mother, ready to burst into reality as Baby leapt from puddle to pond. "Priceless!" beamed The Witch. "I wish I had a camera."

There's a repo company that has a phone number that's nearly identical to mine. Theirs has a 7 where mine has a 4, and through some combination of miscommunication and misdialing I receive calls from people whose cars were towed. Sometimes people tell me about the medicine and other personal affects they want to retrieve. One guy was visiting from out of the country and didn't speak English so we wound up texting each other with the help of an online translator. I had two different women call me this morning while I was out walking, and I returned the calls when I got home. I tried explaining the mix-up to one but I confused her, and she's calling me again as I write this. She said she called the other number but they didn't pick up and she wants to know who has her car. I said I'm some guy in Pennsylvania and that these problems are the company's to own. If I did win the jackpot lottery I think that after financing my personal gardener, chef, and driver I'd buy the business and turn their lot into a public garden. Anywhere people had been towed would become free parking, and any abandoned vehicles on the books would become cheap, accessible, reliable shuttles. This would be too good for Florida, and the sparrows would lose their minds to witness it in action, but social recovery seems like the holistic way to end the calls.

I'm crossing an anniversary, which is harder to see than a waxing crescent on a cloudy night. Identity is fluid so princesses train to discern the presence of the pea until they're ready to evolve into queens with the power to assert and assign identity while princes apprentice kings as they transform and enforce state. Internalizing all the family roles is a dialectic of self, and I felt stagnant in mine before forgetting I'd been worried at all the weekend of the Barbie release. I made a point of attending a Free at Noon while I could and had a chat with a woman on our way out of the venue. She said that she works nearby and plans her Friday so she can attend and that her father who was with her is retired.

I met with friends in Old City afterwards for drinks and Barbie before hopping the train home and thought more about the identity of this period of my life. I've used sabbatical, temporary retirement, and extended vacation, which have been enough of a placeholder to carry me forward, but I have no absolute bookends to delineate before and after, especially as I drift and drag my feet on writing this. My last working day was in July, but my employment ended in August. I was fully unemployed for a few months then picked up volunteer jobs. By those inflections I could delineate three stages though I've been thinking with the perspective of one long frame of reference from when I left until the present. My last paycheck was in August and that included unused PTO, which felt like getting paid not to work for a few extra days at the end. At some point my cash flow turned negative and I began living exothermically, now everything looks the same but feels a little different.

I overheard a guy on a hike last year mention some other guy who'd make his bed every morning. I wondered how many men have seen the beds of other men or witnessed their morning routines. I don't think I actually spoke with the person telling the story and for all my changing and adventuring I'm still socially strange but my bed has been well made since the thought entered my head, and half the men of the tri-state area could attest to that. I began to incorporate hotel aesthetics into my own bedroom when I was traveling for work. Through the COVID years and after Leo I leaned on aromatherapy and spa day at home then in my Yankee Doodle way bought myself a retreat there.

Revisiting Joyce helped reignite my own religious and philosophical interests. I couldn't recognize the right angles of myself in Stephen, and I was such a wallflower I couldn't fully appreciate Bloom's own outsiderness. Dubliners feels familiar now, framed by Polyester. Recognizing the same wild homes was comforting, and I thought about how to write about home honestly and lovingly. The stories can be discomforting, and neighbors airing grievances can leave social scars, which makes the authentic thing seem even more valuable in its earnestness. I felt sympathetic to the old mythologizers stuck at home that witnessed their families' dysfunction and had to invent archetype to tell their stories. I leaned on distance through abstraction to gain my own footing writing and recognized a similar roundabout style reading old newspapers. I feel less accountable to the standards of journalistic reporting in what is my own personal journal, and I felt I better understood Thoreau's denigration of newspapers as gossip rags. I was put off by those remarks, and I felt I recognized a precursor of the more unsavory sides of today's populism in Walden. By comparison to newspapers a hundred years ago I think there is refinement in how stories are reported, though I have become more critical of indulgent reporting. One of the Ulysses commentaries I read made some dramatic point about how dangerous it is for Stephen as an artist to get lured into the newspaper instead of leaving Dublin. I think growth is the evolution of perspective from unaware to aware of sameness, and if it's difficult it's because the reaction is exothermic, it's draining to let go.

As much of a challenge as it is to show grit without moralizing it I think modern art at all times iterates asymptotically towards a more terse linearization so that stories begin and end in medias res. The expression of values is massaged out of the words themselves and encoded into the edges of the narrative to make entire chunks of life digestible for those with compatible receptors. For instance I once met a guy from Bucks who married his mom at six then filed for divorce at 30 and moved to the city. They didn't speak for a bit but now he takes the train up for a long weekend on some feast day every year and occasionally to visit his old barber.

I thought that our collective body might lack granularity, that we have more life stages in common than the four or five broad strokes we usually paint with, and that too few princesses have succeeded at distinguishing them, but I couldn't say how many is too many. Adolescence is difficult enough to identify, and the language of "internal biological clock" throws people for a metaphysical loop. At a social level I think the accumulation of experience acts like the ticking of an external clock so that we're induced to transform by sets of interactions. Communal tragedy like a 9/11 or COVID, extreme weather events, meeting people, losing them, moving to a different town, retiring, and all the same things then done differently without the veil of work, have intermediate sums that add up to similar totals given sufficient time.

I read a bit about Reconstruction after leaving work, and Marley Me wanted to shout at the screen like at a movie. I wondered what life in the North would have been like if we'd had a better Civil War divorce lawyer who could have tweezed apart Fort Sumter with the precision of a neurosurgeon. I don't think the language of "employer" would exist here, and these contours around life shaped by our current approach to labor would be incomprehensible. We'd have flying cars, well funded public transit, peace, and infinite free energy. The South would be Florida At Scale, where people are sold and fed to each other as a way of life. And we'd doom scroll through images of Southerns playing and washing themselves in a polluted Mississippi, avoiding the question of why they don't live as comfortably as we do.

I had wondered about the appeal of the hemlocks to early settlers when I set out and managed to stumble through local history as well. Somebody on another group hike last year remarked about the vibrancy and diversity of the local foliage compared to England, and around the anniversary of Penn's landing in Chester last October the newspaper pointed out that the fall foliage would have been near its colorful peak as he debarked the Welcome. A Lenape speaker shared a story about how the cedar was the only tree to offer shelter to an injured bird, and so the oaks and maples who denied it help were made to drop their leaves. I felt repulsed by the thought of the deciduous trees discarding leaves like people discarding people, to say nothing of the chloroplasts enslaved within. I became a Tree Tender and was gifted a baby peperomia for the effort because I too was entranced and ensnared by the trees. The evergreen seemed noble by comparison in their treatment of their needles, so long as nothing is said of the chloroplasts enslaved within. Heartbroken by the thought and dismayed by the cedars I felt the same revelation, that for all the running away from kings and religion and politics and home the same old familiar shapes emerged in Pennsylvania. I left Fauna for the alluring land of Flora only to be frightened underground to Fungi. We reached out to touch hyphae and held hands while the wars above shook the soil around us, until I saw the mushrooms feast on flesh and I was animal again.

I visited a former coworker in Brooklyn last week. I walked and rode trains all the way from North Wales. We caught up over lunch and I hopped the last train out of Philly on the way home. I went to a concert in Doylestown last month and made my first visit to Musikfest this week. I drove up then rode two shuttles into the festival. The mill is dilapidated, the casino is thriving, and I'm riding the rails everywhere but here. I spoke with a guy in town who worked all week and had to wait until Friday to go. I thought if they really wanted to call it a free music festival then everybody in Bethlehem would be free from work for the week. All the best acts would be booked during the day, and the old street cars would be revived with service from Philly. And then we'd build the same there and in Allentown.

A few years ago I read a theory that so many movies are filmed around Philly that it shapes people's mental image of the suburbs, though I've since come to see Levittown as the salt in that recipe. Some material chunk of life around me in Florida came from the mid-Atlantic, but I didn't identify with the region. I still sense some ineffable difference between the two but I had to grapple with the sameness I discovered. Even the weather here has become familiar as the long, slow rains that used to soak the area have given way to short, heavy storms that skip entire blocks. When I first moved up people were surprised I'd leave Florida, now when I tell them they turn somber and say that they understand. I've started to wonder if there's a Florida Man diaspora in Pennsylvania, refugees of the culture war and climate change, a thought that froze me when Mastriano proposed making Pennsylvania more like Florida. The Foulkes left monarchy in Wales for freedom, the Landises left Switzerland similarly in pursuit of pacifism and religious liberty. There are more reasons than Wawa that Pennsylvania would seem familiar to those emigrating. Awareness of the shared connection is a wind break for the kindling of an unnamed spirit that summons us here, and watching the flame fail to take is like watching the stone slip from Sisyphus in slow motion. Florida Man sees the celebration of filth and centers it, relinquishing freedom to fight like birds at the feeder. One of the gods of the mid-Atlantic, a distant descendant of Aphrodite and Hephaestus, himself horny and worn down by the furnaces, paints pictures of his ancestors, even dear old uncle Ares. The two disregard each other while another meadow or meeting place is paved into a parking lot.

I went to the Phoenixville Vegan Fest last weekend then to the Panico's punk show. I made a trip to the city this weekend then spent Saturday at a block party in Lansdale and met a guy whose band was playing in Ambler the next day. I followed him and his wife over to St. Stan's for a Journey cover band and beer sponsored by Local Tap, who supplied Middle Child and Miller, of which we had two pitchers. The walls outside the bathrooms were finished with plywood spray painted in large letters "WOMEN ←" and "MEN →". There were no dividers between the five urinals and every 10 seconds or so I heard the moaning of a ghost trying to speak. On the way out I thought about the dads and I peeing on each other in the atrium just out of sight of the Turbo Ducks.

I went for a walk down the Wissahickon nearly a month ago on the anniversary of my last working day to start gathering these thoughts, about four hours from home to Ambler. It began to pour on my way up Butler as I was crossing Maple so I ran to the train station for shelter. On the ride home I heard a woman behind me realize we wouldn't be stopping at Locust Street, then a week later I boarded the wrong train out of Glenside so I hopped off at Ardsley and took a night walk down Keswick Avenue. Last year for Leo's birthday I washed myself in the Appalachian air and this year I returned to Ambler to let the boro wash over me. I had a beer and left a flower at the bar. I walked down Butler to the Wissahickon then to a punk show at the yards. I brought a roach to smoke by the creek but I dropped it on the walk. I felt I'd lost something I'd taken for granted and thought that while it's concise for Utnapishtim to be one person it's more useful for him to be one symbol. Surely more survived the flood, and their collective humanity is itself the immortal thing. I made it to the cemetery late in the afternoon and had a more emotional talk with the stone than I did last year, feeling the cresting weight of his absence in my return to the Cedar Forest. I can trace threads of my life back through him, and I can see where I carved up life with him and how I redistributed the pieces to sew new life. The peaches didn't reach their full potential but they did grow enough to brew one liter of wine that's still fermenting. I left him one of the peaches and three clippings of anise hyssop then stopped at his parents' for a visit. I had prepared tomatoes, onions, and basil the day before and filled up on hummus and fried cauliflower at the block party. I made it home around 9 and had leftovers with the dogs before bed.