june

It's June again, the one month for which both the remainder of the calendar and the calendar itself exist in supporting roles. Day to day experience compels my own sense of identity to locate behind my eyes in my brain, all organs subservient to that one. Brain I defines myself by emotion and poetry. Then Anal Allfather shifts and what pain I thought I knew is overshadowed by the crippling torment of an irate colon. Asshole I thrashes, bleeds, makes brain cry. He is belligerent and when he's unhappy we're made to work harder with less food. We're tired and sore and when night falls we gather in the brain, most of me huddled around a fire to mourn our pitiful position and sing sorrows to the flames. Hunched over I crawl back through time to the vermiform elders and say I finally understand your struggle. The worms laugh and I realize that I'm alone even here and still attached at the hip to the parts of me I tried to escape.

I thought about my ancestral self foraging acorns without lidocaine or hot water and about the impact of simultaneous trauma at scale. I wondered if Chad-tor would call me lazy and undeserving of a share of the mammoth if I were to spend a day weeping with the willows. At some point I must have been left for dead, as the plague moved slow at first before visiting us all at once. The pain hobbled us, a collective shock so traumatizing that the twenty or so alive at the time convened and agreed to establish civilization and build factories to make topical analgesic offerings to Uranus.

I made it to the farmers' market Memorial Day weekend. I bought dog cookies and marigolds that I planted around the peach tree. The peaches are still ripening but they're the biggest I've seen them so I think the netting is working despite the gaping hole at the bottom.

I spent part of Memorial Day itself on the battlefield of the emergency room waiting area. The other casualties included a guy with a severed finger, a woman seemingly in labor, and a couple who'd been in a car accident. The triage nurse apologized for processing the fingerless guy first and I said that's triage. Then I wound up so low on the priority queue that instead of seeing a physician I was assigned to healing in the herb garden. I cried about it to the sage and thyme while extracting the medicinal from medicinal marijuana. I thought back on a documentary I watched about English herb gardens in 2020 before I planted my own. I was so drawn to the serenity that I overlooked how a history of mining, factory work, and imperialism might provide the demand for it in the first place. I found myself writhing about, cursing the assholes I blamed for all the pain to begin with, forging a connection to the ancestral, rural, and closeted whose struggle I knew at last.

I spent time last week deadheading and strewing roses in the front yard then pulling weeds at the historical society. This May was apparently the driest on record and the other plants are already showing signs of stress so we'll see what struggles rise with Sirius next month. The club that supplied the Earth Day tree sent a notice that some of the redbuds and maples were mixed up. I thought the redbud I planted had died, but I found maple leaves today.

I finally picked up Tears of the Kingdom, or My Allfather Can Beat Up Your Allfather, but I was met with a modal prompt to install a system update before I could play. The consoles have been offline for almost a year and in that time I've packed away the wireless access points so I spent an hour building a fresh one like this.

# /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf
ssid=xyzzy
wpa_passphrase=foobar1!
hw_mode=g
channel=7

# /etc/dhcpd.conf
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option routers 192.168.2.1;
subnet 192.168.2.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
  range 192.168.2.2 192.168.2.5;
}

$ sudo systemctl start hostapd

$ sudo ip addr add 192.168.2.1/24 dev wlp3s0

$ sudo systemctl start dhcpd4@wlp3s0

$ sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o tun0 -j MASQUERADE

$ sudo iptables -A FORWARD -i tun0 -o wlp3s0 \
           -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

$ sudo iptables -A FORWARD -i wlp3s0 -o tun0 -j ACCEPT

$ echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
1

I finally clicked OK to install the update expecting it to fail so that I'd be prompted with settings to update the SSID. Then I found out that the update was either locally available or that the dialog and progress meter were all pretend, but either way I ultimately didn't need an Internet connection. The game itself reminded me at first of Return to Oz, though the Soldier Constructs killing the Chuchus felt like RoboCop. The world feels more crowded and modernized. Hyrule even has skyscrapers now! Breath of the Wild centered the wind, Tears of the Kingdom centers civilization and the pains of technology. I was drawn to the first as a virtual extension of reality, a way to continue hiking in my mind. I asked for the same game but different and I received another extension of reality, this time the social part. I finished the Wind Temple, and Tulin got excited that he gets to fight with me. I smiled a half smile and said cool in my least sarcastic voice as we forged a party. Camus left Sisyphus at the base of the hill, and Link has found himself once again playing babysitter for the aristocracies that develop and pollute the land he inhabits outside the castle.

This weekend I went to First Friday where the Pride and Freedom theme had noticeably less engagement than last month's That 70's Night, then on Saturday to Lansdale Day where the Strawberry Fest theme had even less engagement. The challenge is how to ask why bother having a theme if it won't be promoted in such a way as to encourage promotion rather than discourage having a theme at all, and so far the only gentle and effective phrasing I've found is to lean into the theme myself. After Lansdale Day we kicked off summer here in the boro, and I spent the evening in the park with neighbors I first met at last year's kickoff. I finally saw a doctor yesterday, who referred me for surgery on Thursday. On her way out of the examination room the nurse taking my history handed me a paper gown that was so small it barely covered my chest. I wasn't sure if I was wearing it properly or if I was supposed to be naked underneath, hanging freely with my delts and traps modestly covered. Ever confrontational I wore it over my shirt, which really pulled the look together.