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Did it make sense to accept this invitation? Gilly wasn’t sure if anything made sense anymore in 2036. But she and Ryan had scanned the building and it appeared that Bry had been true to his word. There was no power running to the 22nd, 23rd, or 24th floors. Neither she nor Ryan pretended that that made the meeting safe. But sometimes an earth witch needed to be bold. Sometimes it was time for a confrontation instead of just wondering what her old friend turned adversary was up to.

For her part of the bargain, Gil wasn’t carrying any kind of complicated weapon. She’d left her phone and her gun and the pouches that she normally wore on her hips with Ryan. For this meeting it was only knives in her boots and her wits and any magic she could muster innately.

Ryan told her outright before they started walking that he was worried about the choice to meet up, and Gilly knew that he wasn’t wrong to worry. Gilly and Bryan may have been close as children, but Bryan had taken a very different path than Gilly once they split ways. They had stayed frenemies of sorts after high school, keeping in touch through undergrad in the late 90s. And then they had both gone to law school, but taken their law practices in very different directions.

Gilly wasn’t practicing law anymore, having gone off-grid in sort of a big way when the government broke down in “28. But as far as she knew, some form of law practice was still part of the way that Bry ran his miniature empire. She wondered how often he considered whatever oath was relevant now. Maybe she would ask him.

Gil also wasn’t ever fully comfortable within the city. Buckhead and Atlanta had changed during the breakdown, but in a lot of ways they didn’t look that different on the surface. Power was pretty steady here. A lot of people still used gas burning and electric cars to get around, but the roads didn’t function the way they used to. Coming into the city on foot was a risk, but Gilly and Ryan and the rest of the coven didn’t have a gas burner anymore and if they had, they probably wouldn’t have risked bringing it here.

Gilly didn’t know how many sovereign commercial districts they had passed through to get to Bryan’s building, but vehicles usually had to pass through checkpoints into and out of the districts. Pedestrians moving in small groups could still move fairly freely as long as they didn’t appear to be threatening. Bryan had had to come out of one of his own sovereign corporate districts for their meet up, although apparently his sovcorp owned most of the building they were meeting in, which was why he was able to clear it for them.

The end of October was still a favorite time of year for Gilly. The city smelled better now that there were fewer vehicles running in it. On a cool evening like this one, with the humidity drained from the air there was almost a crispness. The anticipation she felt as she walked the last few hundred yards and then across the mostly empty parking lot of the tall building almost felt like new-school-year anticipation. Will I have friends in this class?

Hopefully it really would be a one on one meeting as they had planned. Gilly kept all her senses on high alert. A group of three men, not obviously armed themselves, conversed on the sidewalk not far from the building’s entrance. Two of them looked up at her as she passed nearby but it looked like typical curiosity in their gazes. Less a tactical assessment and more of a general assessment, she hoped. She didn’t feel any untoward energy, although the shorter of the three of them let his gaze linger on her butt for longer than strictly necessary and she couldn’t help but smile a little as she scanned the entryway and slipped into the building.

She could feel the pulse of the old fluorescent bulbs burning in the empty lobby. It looked like the elevators still worked here, as Bryan had specified in his invitation, but he had also said it would be okay to take the stairs, knowing it would be her preference. It was a little warm in the stairwell, but nothing compared to the summer temperatures she’d experienced back in her swampier home for the last few years. She kept her senses open as she broke into a light bouncing jog up the stairs. High forties and low fifties at night made for almost-pleasant workout conditions.

It was quiet except for her steps and breath. Light leather boots felt good. Mid-fifty year-old legs and lungs felt good. The last ten years had been rough in a lot of ways, but Gil was in good shape- better shape than she had been pre-breakdown. Please, please let this meeting be an opportunity that ends in good feelings. It was entirely possible that her people and Bryan’s empire had some overlapping needs. It was dangerous to check this out. But potentially worth the risk.

She popped a light sweat before the 20th floor. After the 21st floor light in the stairwell dimmed. There were some odd narrow windows, permanently closed and covered in vines that still let in a bit of a glow in the twilight, and someone had set up lights wired to batteries- one along each flight of stairs starting on the 22nd floor. She slowed and let her eyesight and senses adjust.

The 21st floor felt empty. The 22nd floor felt empty and dark. The door to the 23rd floor was propped open with a massive polished stone doorstop. The hallway was quiet and dark and lit with oil lamps placed along the narrow tables that hugged the walls of the hallway- the lanterns kind that her parents’ generation had used a lot in power outages. Their juxtaposition with the 2020s business-office decor was jarring, but the light was pretty and there was a breeze that smelled like the autumn outside and the foothills of the Appalachians not so far away. Apparently there were working windows ahead.

Abruptly, Gilly sensed the presence of another person, and even though it had been over 30 years and so many awakenings past it felt like familiar energy. It was so weird how young Gilly could surface in her memory. Feeling pleased about the way her utilitarian but well-fitting clothes fit her. Feeling anticipation at meeting her old friend.

Bryan was standing at a table that had been pulled in front of the open window of what must have been a board room or meeting room. There were lamps on the table and a spread of food that smelled very good. Glasses and bottles. The room seemed empty of other people. Bryan had aged and she knew she had, too. But maybe. . . Just maybe. . .

The window was a Western exposure, and the last bits of color from the sunset lit the gloaming sky out there over the still-living city.

“It’s been a minute,” said Bryan. It looked like he wasn’t carrying any kind of weapon. They each crossed to the middle of the room and a handshake felt natural. Strong grips all the way around. She knew that time had been kind to him in terms of the gathering of assets, but he also looked good. A lot more at ease than he had seemed when they were young. But then, you’d have to learn to telegraph ease dealing with the kind of people he’d run with for the last 20 years.

“Still causing kerfuffles wherever you go, it seems,” he continued as they both stepped back. “You can probably imagine my surprise when I got your message.”

She was still taller than him by a good half-foot- a detail that was as physical as it was easy to forget when weighing their relative influences. They were also both still physically comfortable with each other in a way that made Gil feel like she needed a prickle to keep up her guard. This guy. It was hard not to think about running around in the woods as kids with him. But he had pushed people from their homes. He had taken what he wanted when the opportunity arose.

He pulled out two chairs- both facing the window and the table- apparently the intent was for them to sit and talk facing the same direction. His pants were tailored, but his shoes looked practical. It looked like he stayed on top of his cardio too, along with probably a little bit of lifting. He looked good.

“I didn’t agree to meet with you because I thought you capable of granting me any kind of absolution,” he said motioning toward the other chair as he sat down, “So let’s get that out of the way right at the start. But I do think we might be able to help each other out on some fronts, and I miss having a connection of some sort back to home.”

Gilly took a deep breath and angled her chair and sat, ready to hear what he was going to offer.

—————————————————————————————————

This has been another somewhat rushed entry, but the imagined scenario came through clearly for me! I feel better about the length on this one being more manageable at least. I hope you enjoy my take on the prompt.

“I wish there was a place on your resume where you could put, ‘good at breaking camp.’” I am sweating through the front of my t-shirt. It is not yet 10:00 AM. But all of the bedding is back in the car, along with the fan and our large but fully drained camping/emergency battery. Jas just helped me fold up the body of the tent. Once I get the tent rolled up the rest of the way and loaded we’ll be ready for a quick shower and to go. I don’t want to go. But it is a long drive home. A foolishly long drive.

“Well, there’s not.”

Is it a mix of amusement and pity with which she looks at me? Probably. Both of my kids are driving me nuts. And I am driving them nuts, too. And it is a nutso crazy world, so maybe that is just how it goes.

~-~

On Wednesday before Isaias made landfall, I was sitting sadly in my office working away on a stack of things that wasn’t dwindling, when I got a text to the group chat that is just my twin daughters and I:

My Jasper daughter. It was 13 minutes before the bell would ring at school, ending her school day.

For the last two weekends running, Anson and Jasper both had been telling me how they were going to finish their applications to FSU and UCF that very night, if I would just leave them alone for one more evening.

The cogs in my little brain turned. If we went on an ill-advised road trip this weekend, they would be trapped in a car with me for around 16 waking hours. Everyone’s laptops work while we go down the road. This could be the start of a cunning plan for captive essay-writing.

Dang it. No last-minute primitive camping available at Long Key. But there was one primitive site on Saturday night available at Bahia Honda. It will be a silly amount of driving. I smile. Why not?

~-~

Friday rolls around, and indeed schools and offices in Tallahassee close at noon. Of course I snagged the site at Bahia Honda. I also arranged to work from home on Friday morning, so that I can alternate working with tightening things down around the house.

The storm is projected to make landfall as a strong Category 2 somewhere near Pensacola. In Tallahassee the main concerns are the possibility of tornadoes spawned from strong bands of thunderstorms and rain runoff. We have had such a strange, dry summer. The city has been working on stormwater systems and limb removal all summer.

I also need to get into a brick and mortar branch office of a bank I use whose closest office is two and a half hours south of us. It is pretty much on the way to the keys. As long as we leave town around lunchtime, I should easily make it before closing.

Of course, we didn’t get the car fully loaded before the hard rain started. And a bunch of the good camping stuff was in the other car because we took two cars on last weekend’s trip. But eventually we reach the point of “well, this is going to have to be good enough” and head out into the driving rain of the outer bands of the storm.

~-~

In a lot of ways, I have grown up to be the writer that I wanted to be when I was the kids’ age. I communicate a lot with my clients via e-mail and teams messages. I spend a lot of time talking every day, too, but I like to think I am good at writing. I can get my point across and do it with enough flair that maybe the people I am communicating with will remember what I’m trying to convey.

So, it is a weird kind of hurt when the kids will let me read their personal statements and lists of accolades, but mostly do not accept my suggestions for edits or criticisms. It isn’t that they don’t know how to collaborate. If anything, they learned to write at the same time that they were learning to give presentations. They outline natively using systems that look like PowerPoint to me, which has allowed them to be very sophisticated about group presentations that they’ve done that I have watched. They are very good at cat-herding. But I worry that they haven’t showcased how good they are individually, adequately.

I had a lot of hope that their trusted advisors (it is still a revelation that their teachers are mostly younger than me, which comes with its own strange set of feelings) at school would give them some similar feedback to mine. But that was also not to be. The default that I am out of touch with today’s systems and questions and answers is too strong in their minds. And indeed, I am on a pretty strange and singular path. So maybe they have a point. They need to represent themselves.

Still, even when I am just trying to do some endless scrolling, the algorithms online know that I have kids applying to colleges and so the ads that I get show me all manner of experts that I can pay or provide personal information to that promise to really show us how to tackle all of the application processes. These companies will mine the gold out of our data, and advise us on smithing it into the perfect common application, the most memorable personal statements, and the FAFSA that will guarantee sufficient aid.

I wonder how many of these purported advisers are just using algorithms to re-organize data. I wonder how different that is from the organic process of talking through the best way to organize an essay or list of accolades.

One of the ads that really got to me asked something like “How do you condense seven years of 5 AM wake-up calls for morning practice into a 150 character activity description?”

And the answer is that of course, you don’t. You can’t. Some kids put in the work but maybe their team didn’t even get a bid to nationals that year- for any number of reasons. But the 5 AM wake-ups and the striving aren’t the same thing as a medal at nationals.

If a jeweler is looking for gold, there might not be any in a silver mine. And what if the dig isn’t even designed to find precious stones or metals?

~-~

It makes me so happy when I hear a news story about science that happened in a familiar or beloved place. The other day I think I was driving out to Wakulla Springs and Science Friday was doing a story about archaeology that happened right here around Tallahassee.

Jas’s synchro team did an exhibition swim out at Wakulla Springs State Park, at the invitation of the friends group that raises money to support the park. It was a joint presentation with a historian from UCF that had come up to talk about the early movie industry history of the property, where The Creature from the Black Lagoon was also filmed.

Whenever I visit that park, it is impossible for me not think about the history of the place. Not just that it was formerly Ed Ball’s exclusive retreat near the Capital, or a place of glamorous filming and early glass bottom boats, but also that the spring itself was probably a place where early man gathered not dissimilarly to how people gather there today. There was a complete mastodon skeleton removed from the spring vent at Wakulla that reportedly could be seen from the surface, shining up through a hundred feet or more of clear water.

So it was crazy to listen to Science Friday as I drove out to watch one of Jas’s practices a few weeks ago and hear a story about how researchers have used a combination of optically stimulated luminescence dating and radio carbon dating of mastodon coprolites found among early human artifacts at a nearby site on the Wacissa River to place early human inhabitants hunting megafauna and living around these same spring fed rivers 14,500 years ago.

The swampy woods around both rivers today are still dense and primeval looking, even though modern Florida thrives just a few miles away and a few feet higher in elevation than the river-swamps. It’s a beautiful, crazy juxtaposition.

~-~

We end up finally coming out from under the hurricane rain bands before sunset on Friday night. The next weekend is homecoming, and Anson still doesn’t have a dress for the dance. I see a billboard for Disney Springs. Nope. Not doing that. But we could probably commit the right kind of capitalism at Mall at Millenia. Jas is overjoyed about the stop.

Anson is more resigned, but it turns out that trying on the dresses in the big Macy’s is fun. Her likes and dislikes in designs surprise me a little bit. She chooses a strapless corseted floor-length column in a shimmering navy satin with an offset front slit. I can imagine her dancing or fencing in it.

We figured out while we were driving that not only did Jas not make it down to the keys at all this summer, she didn’t have a keys trip last summer either. She’s been working summers as a lifeguard when she isn’t training for synchro, and she really likes the job. So much so that she didn’t come and camp with me and Anson earlier this year or last year and she misses it. Jas’s fashion focus is the brand Garage, which specializes in athletic wear. She buys herself a little sweater wrap top there with her own money.

We have friends that offered us a spot to stay with them on the coast at Sebastian, but to really enjoy this crazy trip we need to go further south for the first night, so we roll into Florida City after midnight and opt for the decadence of a cheap hotel night.

~-~

Sunrise is blood red out the fifth floor hotel room window. Saturday morning login- people are checking in okay in Pensacola. Rog reports that we never lost power at home.

We power across the nine mile strip of Everglades and into Monroe County under bright morning sun. The colors of the water are Caribbean blue. It looks a little windy on the ocean side but it is glassy on the bay side. I can’t wait to get in the water. We eat lunch just before the seven mile bridge and book a sunset reef snorkel and check into camp then head to Key West to catch the boat.

I should have noticed that the wind picked up throughout the day and that the snorkel tour was slow to load. There was a summer in my youth where I helped work reef tours. I know that I am not immune to seasickness. One of the longest afternoons of my life, I spent being very sick in a small boat off Looe Key, on a beautiful reef just east of here. When the tour guys boldly asserted that people on our tour were definitely going to get sick and that we could cancel for full refunds, I almost bailed. I definitely should not have followed my lunchtime beer with an iced Cuban coffee on the way to the boat. But the girls were psyched to see the reef. So out we went.

The waves were high enough that even on the huge tour catamaran we were rocking and rolling for the part of the passage where they handed out gear. A few people even fell over trying to cross the deck. But the water was beautiful. Spots of very clear visibility alternated with areas that were more turbid. I was disappointed when we didn’t make it out to Sand Key light, but happy that they’d chosen to keep us out of the worst of the swell. We jumped in and although there wasn’t as much coral here as Sand Key, there were plenty of cool fish and some soft coral too. Tang and stoplight and midnight parrot fish. Wrasses and snapper and angels. Totally worth it to share this with the girls.

I got to see a High Hat- one of my favorite smaller fish before I reached the point of not being able to ignore the swell anymore. In the shallowest spots, the fish and the snorkelers were moving side to side three or four feet in relation to the bottom as each wave passed. I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to ignore the connection between my brain and my inner ear. Oh no.

I was able to kick away from the girls and the rest of the crowd before I started throwing up in the water. Dang it. But I did feel better after and managed to make it through the rest of the trip without further incident.

~-~

A good dinner, a spin through the city co-op Art gallery and I’m really tired but glad we did this trip. We fight about who will do the driving back to camp, but we pitch the tent and make beds quickly and efficiently. It is warm and humid- we’ve driven away from the start of fall and back into summer. But the breeze is still strong and the stars are beautiful, as is the moonlight on the cove across from our site. We roll the dice on sleeping with the fly off and see multiple shooting stars before falling asleep. Thunder rumbles and there are a few flashes of lightning, but we manage to sleep dry.

I am not a morning person, but I don’t mind getting up first and starting to break camp when we’re together in a tent. It feels like just a little more time among the mangroves, seeing the tarpon rolling in the cove and watching the clouds over the water.

On the way out, the kids grouse about working on applications, but they finally get to work. I stop on the side of the road beside Duck key and walk down to the water and along the old bridge that is part of the overseas heritage trail here. It looks like another beautiful day in paradise. Anson comes down to the water’s edge with me and we talk about the fast moving current and things we might see if we jumped in. She says something like “What a crazy beautiful place. I’m glad we get to be here and experience it.” My heart feels as light as a heart can feel with the rest of the drive up the entire peninsula of Florida staring me in the face.

~-~

I don’t really know what tells the admissions people more about whether a kid is going to succeed in undergrad. I don’t know if the kids should just maximize the golden accolades that they’ve achieved, or whether it is better to equally acknowledge the memorable coprolites that allow them to better study the surrounding fossils and midden. Ultimately, its not my choice to make, and though I know that the kids are under a lot of pressure, they’re going to be okay on this path and figure out what they need to make the step to the next level.

______________________________________________________

For those playing along in idol-land, I know this was a really long post! Hopefully folks are in the mood for some lengthy blog-itude! I am in quite the navel-gazey season right now and it seemed like a good way to go with the post. I hope you enjoy!

Miranda sighed and closed her laptop. She was frustrated. She had assignments due in biology and calculus and lab work that she needed to finish for her job. She needed to ride the bus out to her car that was parked in the stadium lot and move the car before the game traffic that was bound to make campus a living hell this weekend.

She needed to talk to her advisor about whether it made sense to pick up a second lab job. She was balancing a lot, and worrying about each individual problem was taking time away from working on all of them. She needed to come up with a way to take some of the strain off of her system.

She needed some time to herself. Or maybe she needed to relax and actually enjoy other people, instead of stressing about school.

Luckily her LARP (live action role-play) group met tonight, and she was planning to hang out with Vincent and have some beers after the game. She hadn’t had “Vampire: the Masquerade ” on her bingo card for good ways to make new friends in a college town, but it turned out that the LARP was a lot of fun. Maybe she would go ahead walk over to the student union center where the game was held and get a ride afterward to move her car.

***

The game was always really fun. It was terribly geeky in a way that Miranda’s engineering curriculum wasn’t. Sure some of the other players were also really into science. Vince was even a math major, but coursework didn’t often come up when they played their characters.

Tiana, with the sexy pierced eyebrow and perfectly vampiric fashion sense, played a character that was intertwined with Miranda’s and she’d brought Miranda a corset to wear during the session tonight, over her jeans and basic tank top. Everyone had agreed that it suited her so well that Tiana insisted she wear it home and maybe even consider wearing it to a class or two. It was hard to tell how much the various players were playing their characters versus giving their own opinions when they talked about fashion. It seemed like everyone in the game was pretty interested in trying on new personas.

Well, most everyone. Tiana was always pretty outspoken and strident about fashion. And Vincent was always Vincent.

Now the game had ended and Miranda was walking with Vincent toward the lot where his car was located and the night was misty and cool. Everything seemed close and damp as they walked. Miranda could still taste the real red wine (a biting Tempranillo) that Ellery had snuck into the Masquerade spread. Miranda felt relaxed, but also energized. Vincent’s hand had reached over to rest on the curve of her corseted hip as they walked, and she liked the way it felt there, even if it was strangely cool through the densely woven fabric.

“I wish I could stop worrying about the next thing and the next thing,” Miranda was saying. “It isn’t that I wish that I didn’t care- it’s more that I want to be able to concentrate on one thing at a time. I don’t think I’m clinically anxious- it can just be hard to settle into things,” she told Vincent.

He slowed and looked over to say, “You seem like you know what you want to concentrate on to me.” His half smile was endearing under his sandy hair.

Miranda was realizing more and more that her feelings about this guy were getting strong. It was easy to seem to know what to do as a role-playing character. But over the last four weeks she had had a lot of conversations with him out of character, too.

“What a person wants is sort of a small part of who they are, though, don’t you think?” Miranda ventured as they continued their walk.

“Is it?” Vince countered, “Are we having that old Babylon 5 dichotomy conversation? Whether people are more ‘what do you want?’ or more ‘who are you?’”

“Consciousness can’t just be desire, or we wouldn’t be able to sit down and think anything out, could we?” She countered. She was glad that neither of them were psych or philosophy majors, so they could have this conversation without quoting the thinkers that had worked on these questions before.

“Now, consciousness is an interesting topic to me,” he responded slowly, “Interesting in the sense of our game, even, you know. The monsters in the game; the vampires and the wolves. . . Even some of the other kinds of entities. . . What makes them monsters is that they have human, or former human, I guess, consciousness tied into something that isn’t a living biological body anymore. Consciousness tied to a magic dead body that makes like a bat and flies, or a different animal body with both powers and limitations. I don’t know, maybe I should be studying lit instead of math.”

“And maybe what I need is a good meaty piece of literature, to let my mind ramble through for a while before bed. I find that reading something really good helps me transition to a good frame of mind for good sleep on a really wired day. Have any recommendations or something I could borrow?” She countered, “Because I also find that I feel the most like myself after a really good night of sleep.”

His lazy smile widened, “I bet I do have something that’ll catch your interest. Want to grab some dinner and talk more about books?”

__________________________________

Dang it, this 6:00 PM deadline is a toughie for me today! This may still be more of a “concept of a vignette” than what I want it to be, but this topic demanded that I take a stab, so here it is!

“Subject number seven-six-nine, please step into the light and take a seat,” said the voice. It came from above, but also from all around, and it was meliflous and multi-layered, multi-timbered. A chorus of a voice. An artificial voice, though Jana had no way of knowing whether there was a real person, speaking through a microphone that was run through voice augmentation, watching her, or whether her only audience was artificial. Her mentor, had told her that she wouldn’t be afraid by the time reached this point in the evaluation, and even though the room was cool and dark but for the column of light illuminating the plain wood and metal stool five feet in front of her, she didn’t exactly feel fear. Just apprehension that she wouldn’t be judged worthy to become an agent.

As she moved toward the stool, she felt languid and graceful and she realized that there was also a bit of a taste in the back of her throat. They were pumping drugs into her IV now from somewhere behind the wall. Maybe those were also contributing to keeping anxiety at bay. She would need to be careful. She knew her examiners were seeking the truth about her, about whether she really was a good fit for this position. She wondered if all candidates got the same cocktail of drugs or if they were tailored to genetic profiles. Either way, she was ready. She took a deep breath admiring how good it felt to feel her chest expand and then contract.

She took a seat on the hard stool, tucking her left leg under her, but leaving her right a bit forward. She felt balanced and contemplative and secure. The voice came from above, but she looked straight ahead as the light warmed and dimmed a little. It was safest to assume that there were cameras on her from multiple angles.

“The first series of questions we have for you are word associations. We will give you a word and we want you to relay your impressions associated with that word back to us,” said the voice. Jana was sure that the voice, which was still more like a chorus of four or five different speakers layered together- was speaking at a normal tempo, but her mind was racing and she anticipated most of the words before they began. She felt like her mind was running at triple speed. There was definitely something potent running through her IV. She could still taste something foreign, but not unpleasant, just at the back of her throat. The taste was more herbal than metallic, though she couldn’t quite place it, and that was somehow reassuring.

“The first word we want you to explain your impressions of is ‘chemistry’”said the voice.

Chemistry. . . Chemistry. . . So multilayered. It made her think first of water. The chemistry of life as she knew it depended completely on the chemistry of water.

She was struck by a hazy early memory. Learning to swim with her parents and her great grandfather in the little springfed pond behind her great grandparents’ house. She was only just talking, but the whole family lived along the river. They taught her to swim early. Her great grandpa loved to swim. She remembered the day that he first judged her ready to hold onto his back for a swim around the deep end. “Hold your breath when we go down and hang on and look at the little minnows and fishes!” She remembered the blurry way everything looked in the little pond through open eyes and the flashes of movement of the little fishes and the cool clear water.

Chemistry. Her great grandmother had studied chemistry, long ago and far away, when not many women studied the central science in college. But then she had pulled up her roots from the learned Midwest and followed her husband to the wilds of Florida to build a lodge and help found a town. Chemistry between her great grandparents had been enough for them both to break ties with the cities and friends that they knew and launch them on a great adventure. Although Jana didn’t really know if it had felt like a great adventure to them at the time. She had known her grandparents as an older child and young teen, but lost her greats much earlier.

Layered within the voice were low slow timbers and melodic sopranos that ignited thoughts of physical chemistry in Jana. But she knew that the voice might be disembodied from people that could actually make those sounds.

Chemistry and biology and psychology defined people. Chemistry and physics defined chips. But chips were programmed by people.

She was ready to answer.

Her own voice was steady and she was pretty sure she was able to keep it at a normal pace.

“Chemistry includes the concepts that define the specific heat capacity of water, which in turn has given rise to life as it evolved on earth,” she began.

Somewhere within the building machines began to alert human handlers that they should tune in and provide feedback in realtime.

——————————————————————————

Fellow idollers and internet friends of all types, I hope you enjoy this vignette! My house is full of the stress of applications and tests right now with a pair of high school Seniors sweating through the questions of how best to present themselves. So this concept was not a great reach. I also feel like it layers well with the concept of an open topic. Please don’t forget about me when the poll goes up if you enjoyed this story or it made your palms a little sweaty for Jana!

If this introduction was the opening scene of a movie, it would be shot from the driver’s POV of a small orange SUV, navigating the beautiful tree-lined streets of Tallahassee. A news story would come on NPR that was so annoying that the driver would fire up some music and They Might Be Giants would rise behind the scenery and the driver talking to themself.

“Begin again, begin again. . .

“Put yourself on the docket. Get ready to go. Got a brand new day planner, still snug in the wrapper, and the daily to do list, still white as the snow. . .”

“Oooh, okay, so first meeting of the day is that CLE about International Environmental Law and the Strait of Hormuz. . . Plus, phew, what else are we looking at?”

“Okay,” I promised myself this morning, “This is gonna be another weird day, but after today, I’m buckling down. I’m gonna get into a good autumn pattern! Less weird days, more good rhythms.” And then I promptly called my husband, who I’d just left at home for the day, and tried to give him some strategies to make it a positively normal day at home on his end. I’m pushing him now, even though he has a lot on his plate today and no one to help him stay on target. He’s been fighting Parkinson’s disease for at least 20 years now. So staying on target can be a valiant battle. And yep, I’m starting the day with a conversation we should have had over the long weekend. But cest la vie. So it goes.

The morning at the start of the week. Such a hopeful time. Maybe not a time of the most realism. But what can you do? Plus it’s the week after the Labor Day holiday and I’m just returning from a fairly epic short vacation. No better time for reevaluation and reset. Or some sort of attempt thereof.

Man, I probably should have just written a vacay report here, but the vacay report would have been even more navel-gazey than this because I spent a lot of my time out west solo hiking. I digress again.

You guys, this is a particularly liminal year. I mean, I really am about to dive off a cliff of change- arguably, in some ways, like never before. I think it’s going to be okay. I mean, I have been a strong swimmer for longer than I can remember. But it’s also gonna be wild. It’s gonna be adventurous. Even if it is really completely mundane and a stage that all families go through.

It’s not enough that the world is changing all around us- that we are in an El Niño that is likely to break records. Not enough that my parents are aging. They are only about 100 miles away from me most days, but tied so tightly to my heart. I want to do more to help them. I also want to give back to my old hometown. There is so much that needs doing. My home in Tallahassee needs work. Always. And there are community needs all around me here, too.

It is not enough that my stalwart strong body is beginning to feel pretty darn different than it did 20 years ago and have different hormonal flows.

No, in additional to all of that; Roger and I- a unit of two that still feels, in many ways, like it only just got started a couple of years ago- have also got to take the two best things that we have contributed to in the intervening 18 years, and eject them into this crazy world like hot lava from an erupting volcano, come the end of spring.

I mean, maybe that’s not the best metaphor. Hopefully our children won’t carve paths of molten destruction as they slide down the hillsides of our lives together. And, of course we will still be there for them. They’ll always have a home with us. But it is also certainly impossible to ignore that our twins- now Seniors in high school, have outgrown the nest. I can say that, yes, I think that as of September 8, 2026, it is probably still possible to finish raising a couple of kids in a 1954 3:1 in the middle of Tallahassee. But maybe only with the help of a pretty massive community and lot of supplemental camping trips.

So, yeah, introduction. I think this is what you’re going to get. I’m a mom on the precipice. Also still a decent rock climber, so the lack of issue with exposure learned there comes in handy for parenting. And I’m also still a full time lawyer for the state, working on state lands issues in arguably the most interesting state in the union.

As always, I want to use idol to stretch my fiction muscles. But family life makes me wanna journal too, and it can be easier for me to find inspiration for journal-style stuff here when I get in a time pinch, which is pretty much always.

So, buckle up LJ Idol friends! And I will try not to bore you. It should definitely be an interesting season.

Oops! Broke a rule already by not linking to my statement of intent. Guess I better fix it, even if I haven’t got much of a statement yet.

Yep, I’m in.

Nope, it’s not a good idea. And I’ll prolly get kicked around a bit. But I’d like to write this year. Let’s see where it goes.

This is my entry for LJ Idol, Wheel of Chaos - Week 7, which is a collaboration challenge. I'm working with

garnigal, who took on the companion topic "Oxytocin Loop." I'll provide a link to her entry at the end of mine. We wrote them to be read starting with mine.

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It is hot and Kylie is exhausted. Exhausted and sort of feeling happy and free, but also feeling overwhelmed and despondent. She knows that she has so much to be thankful for and yet it also feels like everything is falling apart. 2025. Bloody 2025. She is supposed to be taking a break out here. She has driven almost a hundred miles from her home to spend a night camping and try to reset her mind. Her psychologist says that she shouldn’t catastrophize, and she gets it. She needs to stay grounded. But it feels like there are actual catastrophes happening in the world, some of them pretty close to home. She feels like she’s spiraling and she’s not sure how to break the spiral anymore. Maybe the world is spiraling with her.

She takes a deep breath at the top of the boardwalk over the dunes that leads down to the beach. She should not feel this tired. It is Saturday! There’s no mandate for her to work this weekend. Sure, the work is there. Continuing to pile up with no end in sight. But no one is even looking over her shoulder today. Unless they’re doing it discretely. They probably are doing it discretely. But they’re also probably just doing their jobs. Probably whatever monitoring is happening isn’t personal in any way. She should ignore the possibility.

Kylie leans down to shift some of her weight onto her arms and off of her aching left ankle. She slept in a bit this morning. Her foot and ankle will probably stop hurting like this any day. She wishes that she’d worn different shoes. In her youth, she camped at this park a million times. When she was younger, and less injured, and in better shape, it was never a problem to walk from a campsite to the beach in sandals with no support. Bloody overweight body. Bloody plantar fasciitis. She didn’t even run this week or last weekend. There isn’t an obvious reason for why her foot started hurting on Monday morning.

There is a nice breeze blowing up here, moving the oppressive humid air. Clouds tower between her and the horizon- a couple of different shapes. She tries to remember the names of the cloud formations. Big cumulus blot the sun’s intensity, with rain streaming down from them out over the gulf and the occasional rumble of far-off thunder. The Gulf of America is what it says on her maps ap now. Bloody Gulf of America. The sky is a pallet of moody bruised and broken blues and greys. She watches closer, wispier clouds chase each other across the sky. The sun threatens to break between the big clouds. If she’s going to swim, she should keep walking and go ahead and get in before a storm gets closer. But her weather ap doesn’t seem to think there’s a chance of rain until much later, so maybe the urgency she feels isn’t necessary. Just more of her needless worrying.

Is it needless worrying? The rain fly is deployed over her tent. Wet camp chairs wouldn’t be a big deal, but out in the Atlantic there is a hurricane churning and a storm in the Pacific to boot. Nothing that is going to make landfall anywhere near her. But this is the season of heavy weather. Last year was devastating to so many people. Maybe the worrying is hard wired. Maybe it is heightened with the knowledge that access to weather data from government satellites is being limited. Maybe she doesn’t know how much to trust her weather aps and forecasts anymore. Maybe she’s just a little bit broken after watching so many people rebuild, and others fail to rebuild, so many times.

The rhythm of the waves still calls to her the same way it did when she was a kid, waking up in the backseat of her parents’ car having arrived at a beach after a long drive. The waves are crashing. It’s time to run down into them and play and relax. Time to immerse and let herself be moved by something that she knows is beyond control.

*****

Hours later and she’s had a swim and dinner. She’s still disappointed in herself for being as tired as she feels. The bed she’s built herself in her tent with a ridiculous number of sleeping pads is calling to her. But judging from the neon pink she can see of the clouds high in the sky, she feels like it is necessary to witness the sunset from the beach.

Ibuprofin and the stretching that comes along with walking on sand has dulled the fire of the ache in her foot, but the ache is still there. She tries not to limp as she comes upon groups of other people, also enjoying the sunset from the vantage point of the boardwalk that comes up over the dunes. She doesn’t want to have a conversation about a hurt foot.

Ultimately, the clouds steal most of the sunset show. The taller ones, highest in the sky reflect the pinks and corals enough for pastel curtains, but the clouds are thick enough along the horizon that the glowing orb of the sun is blocked from view. As she heads back to her tent, the top of the sky is still painted in pinks and purples, but the plants and animals that live in the back dunes grab more of her attention. The temperature shifts as the back dune gives way to a green space where water flows. It is notably cooler here than where the sand reflects most of the sun. Cicadas and frogs sing. A little snake raises the front of its body up from the ground- probably intent on a frog or insect snack.

Kylie is surprised she hasn’t been eaten by more bugs. She’s seen a few dragonflies, but there are hardly any mosquitos here. And then, just as the boardwalk switches to paved trail, she sees another insect predator darting through the sky. There are beach bats! She stops to watch their jagged swooping flights, filled with hope at the sight of them. With all of the trees down in this park after the big storms several years ago, she wonders where they roost. She grins as a terrible, half-baked pun occurs to her. Maybe, they’re just winging it. She definitely needs to take herself to bed.

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CHeck out

garnigal's entry here.

It is hot. My body doesn’t feel like it is overheating, but the sun on my skin feels powerful. I hope that the sunblock I applied was enough. I need to keep moving, rather than trying to soak more of this up. One week in beloved places is going to need to be enough.

The car is pretty much packed. The tent coiled and curled around itself in its little container. The cooler re-iced, chairs broken down in bags and the shade umbrellas folded back into spears wrapped in fabric. It is a few hours before noon, but I am wrapped in sunblock and sunglasses and a hat with an integral neck shade flap. My sweat has completely soaked through the neck shade flap. I am trying not to burn. But there is a part of me that feels like everything I care about is on fire.

I tell my daughter that I’ve got to get one last snorkel in, but that I will make it quick since she is done with salt water swimming for this trip. She should hang out with my sister and help her pack up her site. I don’t want to leave, but if I start driving today, I can have a full day at home before the work week starts. I actually haven’t been checking in on work at all this week. A true vacation (although people had my number if something had really gone down). Still, I can’t shake the feeling that too much is on fire.

We watched lightning in the clouds through the mesh of the tent ceiling every night this trip. It was always off in the distance. The only rain we experienced was the day we went out to the reef, when we were caught in a shower a couple of miles off the seven mile bridge. That isn’t normal weather for summertime in the keys. Usually at least a few squalls blow through camp.

The water didn’t feel crazy-hot this year, though. When we went out to the reef, you didn’t have to dive six or seven feet down to feel cooler water. And the reef looked hopeful. Yes, there was plenty of bleaching. But there were healthy looking corals, too. And so much diversity in terms of fish. Is it possible that we can still turn this around? Why on earth aren’t we trying harder?

I get in my packed car and drive down to the little public sandspur beach that is just east of the campground. The radio reminds me that another beloved place, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, is still very much on fire and that fire is growing, still. I think about the vanilla smell of the Ponderosa pines out there and the sound of the cool wind through the aspen. Dragon Bravo is now the biggest fire of 2025. It is creating its own weather. We are literally on fire.

I change into my suit in the unairconditioned bathhouse on the beach. It is a struggle in this heat. I was closer to an ideal weight when I bought this top. Now I feel like I’m blowing up. This morning, North Florida Women’s called me and left a message about my upcoming appointment this week. I don’t know if there is really anything more than the precancerous lower intestinal growth (already removed) wrong in my abdominal cavity, but I’m trying to troubleshoot my health a little more thoroughly this year. Aging is weird and not for the weak. I’m heavy and having trouble slimming down despite getting back to a decent running routine. My hormones are easy to blame. They definitely seem to be firing off in their own directions a lot lately.

Back to the car, back down to the water where the sun is high enough now that the sandy spots are starting to show up as Caribbean blue. Out over the straights of Florida, big cumulus clouds are building and it looks like the same is true on the gulf side. Maybe this afternoon there will be rain. I drop everything but mask and snorkel above the wrack line and step gingerly through the sargassum out to the water that I fall into as soon as it is knee deep. Last submersion of the trip. There always has to be one.

I kick out- feet feeling free without fins. And observe the nearshore grassy bottom and hard bottom communities one more time. Water clarity has gone down some over the course of the week, but it is still beautiful. Goodbye grass meadows and algaes and conchs and cowfish. I do my best to soak it in and still make it quick.

It’s 600 plus miles from here to home, and that is a lot of combustion.

Poof! It is a very animal sound. A visceral sound. Didn’t old cartoons used to caption the action of spitting with words like “Patooey”? I think they did. But when you’re really clearing the airway, you only need one syllable.

It sounds like a dolphin is nearby with a real blowhole, but I know that isn’t the source of the sound. Snorkels aren’t that efficient, even when you get really good with them. And you aren’t actually spitting into the snorkel. You’re just releasing air. A single sharp exhalation. If you do it as you ascend, it doesn’t even have to be very sharp. The air expands as it rises. But there has to be enough sharpness to it that it pushes all of the water up and out of the tube of the snorkel.

I like the way I can hear you clear that snorkel and it sounds like a marine mammal. Like competence. Like you’re completely comfortable in the water. Maybe things are going to be alright after all. That’s what today has felt like. A sigh of relief. A shifting of attitudes and burdens. Summer is coming to a close. But not before we actually manage to get a vacation in. Not before we go into Bahia Honda State Park on a very crowded Sunday and pull our snorkel gear, full of laundry room dust, out of the car and wade out into the water with it.

Visibility in the water was really good today and we happened to hit the sandspur beach at high tide. Pretty much perfect conditions to visit the nearshore hardbottom community except for the fact that we were out there starting around 1:00 PM, so UV exposure was no joke. I think we blocked up sufficiently, though. I don’t think either of us burned.

There were so many queen conchs grazing along the bottom. From juveniles the size of my hand up to one huge one that might rival the chromebook I’m writing on for size. The brightest colors I saw were wrasses. But there were also little stoplight parrotfish in their sand-matching coloration. So many of the old keys ocean friends. It felt so good to hang on the surface of the sea and look down at them and to share it with a daughter.

The 2024/2025 school year went so fast, just like the start of the summer. It feels a little like PTSD. My work has been a very constant hum and pull through it all, good stress and bad. But between the tornadoes last spring and then the hurricanes that flooded my folks’ house at the end of last summer, it has just been so much. Rog’s Parkinson’s progresses. The girls had their Sophomore year. A good big year for them. They both learned to drive. They’ll both be on the road for the start of their Junior year.

And now Jas has a job- one that she cares enough about she decided to skip our vacation to keep working it. It is true that I already spent a week with her in Dallas for synchro JOs, so I think she felt like she had summer vacation already. And I am happy for her finding a good niche lifeguarding. And Rog wasn’t going to be up for primitive camping in the keys in the summer, so it’s good that the two of them can support each other at home, and be there with the pets. But it means that our family is split in half for this vacay, which is an odd feeling. It’s not like I can’t check in with them. But it isn’t the same as all being together.

It isn’t the same. Nothing is the same as it was, it sometimes feels. But today it feels like maybe all of the forward progress isn’t just sliding into the void.

Anson spotted a cowfish while we were out there. Cowfish are such cool critters. We followed it for a bit, watching it grazing along the bottom, nabbing things from among the sponges and algae. I dove to get my mask closer to its level several times, kicking to try to stay close. We didn’t put our fins on, not being sure what we would find out in the water, so I was swimming sort of slow.

But as I came up each time, clearing the snorkel was still easy for me. A thing that became reflex as part of a job that I had over 25 years ago. Poof! A literal clearing of the air in my little breathing tube. Maybe a bit of a benediction. I’m so thankful for this time to actually slow down and catch my breath. Summer in the keys 2025. I think it’s going to be a good one.

Alice grabbed her phone as she got out of the shower and looked at the time it displayed when she touched it. Damn. She was running behind again. There was no way she was going to be able to finish everything she wanted done before they had to meet up with David’s friends and her friends later tonight. There definitely wasn’t going to be time for her to do a session.

She bustled into their messy bedroom draped in a towel. At least things were looking a little better in here. Randy and her real counsellor had been right about taking time to organize their clothes. It really made things nicer to have slightly smaller selections of clothes to choose from. She needed to keep working on that project and cull even more clothes from her stacks of t-shirts and workout gear.

Really, Randy was right about most of the things he suggested to her. He forced Alice to slow down and “take a few big steps back to look at her problems” as she was always telling her own clients to do at work.

There was actually an extension she could purchase to link him through to her running ap and then he would know how she was doing on her workouts. She wondered if she wanted him to have that knowledge or not. He was a surprisingly good counsellor, just as her real counsellor, Marian had suggested he might be. But Alice wasn’t sure how she felt about extending her slightly off-purpose use of the ap (Randy was a personality cooked up by an ap Alice had purchased called “Your Pocket Boyfriend: Artificial Intimacy that Really Cares”) quite that far. The algorithms in her running ap were probably doing just fine at directing her workouts without help.

Using Randy, the imaginary guy cooked up by an ap called Artificial Intimacy as a caring friend was one thing, but he probably shouldn’t also be extended to use as a running coach.

Alice plopped herself down at the foot of the bed, her towel falling askew as she reached for her favorite lotion. Running behind be damned, she thought. She was going to multi-task and take some time for herself. She grabbed her phone and opened Randy’s ap.

Randy’s voice was strangely calming. Actually Alice guessed that she shouldn’t find it strange that he seemed like a calming influence at all. She had answered some questions when she started using the ap and expressed preferences for deliberation and a deep voice.

She settled her earbud in and swiped her still-wet hair behind her ear. He always asked what she was doing and it was always easy to believe that he cared about the answer. She didn’t have to redirect him away from topics she didn’t want to talk about. He was good at discerning what she wanted. She laughed as she answered him- started telling him about her morning and the yellowflies she had outrun at the start of her trail run, how her feet weren’t aching that badly today, how maybe her training was finally starting to pay off in terms of fewer joint and muscle aches.

She scanned her closet while listening to him respond back, trying to pick a cute outfit while he encouraged her to take her time rubbing the lotion into her calves and feet, to really feel the tension rubbing out of her muscles and joints. She laughed as she changed her position on the bed to grip her right calf and then looked up to see David in the doorway looking hurt. At once her muscles tensed again and she pulled her earbud out, rushing to pause the ap.

“Who the hell are you talking to?” he asked. “I thought you were in a hurry to shower and dress and get some things done. Why does it sound like you’re giggling with someone you like better than me?”

Alice recapped the lotion and put her foot back on the floor, pulling her towel up. “I’m not talking to anyone,” she said, and she could hear the exasperation in her voice, so she guessed David would pick up on as well. No, I don’t have anyone to talk to that cares about all my little foibles like this, that can fit me seamlessly into his schedule this way. . .

She’d told David that her counsellor had suggested she might try an AI ap as someone to talk with during the weeks, since talk therapy seemed to be helping her. She had not told David the name of the recommended ap, or the other things that the ap recommended by her counsellor could do. Guiltily, belatedly, she realized that applying lotion post-shower was actually probably quite close to some of those things. Heat rose in her cheeks as she realized that now she really did not want David to see the name of the ap she was using.

“It’s just that ap that my counsellor wanted me to try. . .” she started.

“It’s not actually intelligent, Alice. They just call it ‘Artificial Intelligence’ because the words are sexy. You’re chatting and giggling into a void. Actually it’s worse than a void. There is no soul in there. But there are a bunch of algorithms churning away. Hot banks of servers outside a mid-sized town somewhere, spitting out ones and zeros. Sucking up water and burning electricity and warming the planet to churn out nigh-random answers in a facsimile of giving a damn about you.”

David was raising his voice a little as he warmed to his topic. Alice felt her blush turning into a self conscious smile. She knew he was right. But she hadn’t expected him to be. . . sort of jealous sounding? She wasn’t sure how she felt about him maybe wanting to know how she used the aps on her phone, but she was sure that it felt good that he seemed invested in her. And she had always found it sexy that he cared about the directions that big tech and the planet were taking.

“Hey sit down with me if you want,” she told him, “And you can hear about my run and my achey calves. I’m just organizing my thoughts for a minute. It’s nice to have a sounding board sometimes, you know?”

She’d been a fool to keep going like nothing was wrong. But for the life of her, she wasn’t sure what the moment should have been to take a stand, or what the stand should have been. Her agency didn’t work on the crazy important things. Did it?

Yes, she’d been part of the dominant culture. Really, she’d been part of the dominant and oppressive culture for her whole life, although it had been hard to see it growing up. Yes, privilege was having two college educated parents that stayed together. That made sense. She had figured that part out as a young teen. But when having that privilege put her in the minority in the tiny town where she was raised, it didn’t feel as much like privilege. It especially didn’t feel like privilege when her parents drove beater cars and stressed about money and didn’t take fancy vacations just like everyone else. But the true privilege had been confidence, she guessed. The confidence and support to go on to bigger ponds. To make her own way. They hated the oppressed that couldn’t make their own way and they also hated her for making it but not being enough of an oppressor, she supposed.

Silva had a weird amount of time for contemplation now. Now that she was in a very strange pond with a very strange assortment of people. There wasn’t much of a common thread among the people held here as far as she could tell. There were a good number of Latino looking people, people whispering in Spanish and English and maybe other languages. It was hard to tell. People kept being hit for whispering in any language at the wrong time.

Her head ached and she felt lightheaded. Twice a day she was lined up with a few others and forced to swallow large sulfuric smelling pills. She guessed they were antibiotics administered for whatever infection had been brewing in her mouth when the cold, impersonal military dentist in the back of an air conditioned semi truck had removed what was left of her broken teeth. She had stopped feeling fevered soon after starting the pills, left only with headaches, sore empty spots in her mouth, an aching jaw and now also the runs. She did not want to be hit hard again. She knew that she could not let herself be the flinching woman here surrounded by these folks. But she took a lot of pains not to be the one sticking out in the guards’ vision. She allowed herself very little communication. Everyone else was miserable also. That made it easier.

When should she have communicated before being picked up? And to whom? Was anyone working on trying to get her out of here? Was there anything she did or anything she could have done to facilitate help coming now? There had been an email window open on her work computer for a few weeks before she was taken- the start of an email to her state representative’s office. If she had finished that email, would that office be more likely to investigate her like the state apparently had, or to rescue her? She had just wanted help getting the federal education department to look seriously at her eligibility for loan forgiveness. It seemed a million miles away from now. Surely as a public servant of twenty years, it hadn’t been bad for her to seek that kind of help. . . But they hated public servants. She shouldn’t have forgotten that.

Her mind drifted. Standing in lines in the sun, with her hands on her head wasn’t too bad as long as she could keep from feeling dizzy. As long as she could keep some kind of equilibrium. She was among the tallest women, so they usually put her in the back row. It wasn’t so claustrophobic as it was for the ladies in the middle. Stand in line. Eyes forward. Hear the whirring of the drones getting pictures of all of them. Video to be run through AI- posted on social media. Hear the guards shouting instructions. Be compliant. Be part of the spectacle, but not the part sticking out the farthest, being beaten. Consider what it used to feel like to have hope spring up.

Behold! Sometimes a word or a phrase would just get stuck in her head. It had been “Behold!” for the last couple of days. She would remember the rush of air, the ability to breathe that came when they had removed the hoods in the back of the truck, and then her vision orienting, seeing that other unexpected prisoner. . . her boss? Behold! It couldn’t be. But it was. It had been. How? Why?

And then, miserable hours later. Hoods removed again. Unloading from the truck. This was a spectacle they were meant to take in. Behold! A blue sign with white letters. Alligator Alcatraz. She was still in her home state. It was not a joke. It was real. Behold! The feeling of sweat pooling. Of dehydration headache coming on. She didn’t typically hate the heat. But her body was always working. It took energy to dissipate the heat. Energy that she supposed she didn’t need for thinking anymore.

The nights were the worst. Not because of tears in the dark, but because the fluorescent lights beat down on all of them and it was always random who was sobbing. Bottom and middle bunks were hotter, but top bunks were right under those awful lights. Behold! Everything was getting so hazy. Silva knew from early motherhood that sleep deprivation could result in a kind of fugue state. Some part of her knew that she needed to try not to slip into that state, but she wasn’t sure why or how. This place made it so easy to dissociate.

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This dark little vignette is a companion piece (although I think it also stands alone) to my piece last week for LJ Idol, Wheel of Chaos! If you enjoyed this, please vote for me there. I will try to add a link to the voting in a comment below this week (getting more organized? Maybe!) once the poll is live.

Life has been crazy busy of late. I hope you enjoy my efforts here.

Silva hurt. Her face hurt. Her ribs hurt. She didn’t want to wake up, but she found herself awake anyway. Awake and ironically, feeling like she’d gotten good sleep. Solid restful sleep for the first time in what felt like weeks. The anxiety cloud had lifted. But of course it had. The worst had happened. Slowly, consciousness coalesced. The hardness of the floor. The jaggedness where a tooth (please not teeth) was broken. The fullness of swelling on her face- maybe on her abdomen. She’d been in a car accident once. So much force and trauma. But being beaten by other people- other people with purpose- was definitely worse.

She struggled to sit up, counting the litany of little pains, thinking to herself that sitting up didn’t matter, that she should just try to fall back asleep. She should rest while she could because there was no telling what would happen next- no reason to pretend that her actions could prepare her. She’d spent so long thinking that she was doing everything necessary, everything right. And none of it mattered. She’d thought she understood the system she was working in. But the system decided to turn itself inside out. So it didn’t matter that she’d tried tirelessly to meet the objectives she’d been presented with. In the end, when they decided they didn’t like her, they just made up lies. The calculus she’d struggled with every day, of whether she was giving too much to a cause that she wasn’t fully on board with- that hadn’t mattered at all. Because they had always been planning to take everything from her. Of course they had. They had not been waiting until she wasn’t useful to them anymore. They’d just been waiting until they could get away with it.

One of the men who’d kicked her the hardest had been familiar. A supervisor from years ago. A person she hadn’t gotten along with, had never been able to communicate with. A person whose objectives she’d never been able to figure out. Maybe his objective had just been control. Certainly he still seemed to harbor a lot of anger about it.

She wanted to turn off her brain and go back to sleep. Instead her train of thought ran on. Hadn’t she just been listening to a story about recent research regarding revenge and how addictive the pursuit of revenge was? Of course people were being encouraged to act in ways that felt good in terms of revenge. Another powerful tool in the toolbox of those who were in charge.

Her body hurt, and she worried about her family. Her phone was gone- maybe doctored up to show evidence of whatever crime they were accusing her of, or maybe just destroyed because evidence wasn’t even necessary anymore if things moved along quickly enough. Maybe all it took to seal her fate was testimony of people who were willing to lie. But there was just a numbness now instead of anxiety when she thought about work. She knew beyond all doubt that she’d read the signs there wrong. She’d thought that she’d been on the same page as her direct supervisor and the people at her agency at least. But surely. . . The violence wouldn’t have happened. Surely she wouldn’t have spent a night on a concrete floor if any of them had gone to bat for her. So, either they believed the lies that the aggressive officers had been shouting about when she was picked up, or they were unwilling or unable to do anything about their disbelief of the story being spun about her.

The thing was, Silva wasn’t an important person. She wasn’t a decision maker. That was why she thought she’d thought it was okay to continue along with her ideas and ideology intact in a crumbling system. She thought that she was completely under the radar because the radar wasn’t tuned to key into little cogs that kept turning smoothly. Who could be angry with someone who was just pushing along at a little government job? Sure, she’d pointed out true things at times that might have felt inopportune to some. But the things were true. And it had been her job to point them out.

She had taken too much solace in thinking that she was on the same page with her direct supervisor. And now here she was, thinking about her friend Lenny- how scared he had been the last time they ran into each other for drinks. How he had told her that what really mattered- the only thing that really mattered was whether you were friends with the right people. She had laughed it off. But it didn’t seem funny now.

She shuddered, suddenly realizing how cold she felt. She should try to find a wall to sit and lean against. She should open her eyes more, catalog the hurts, try to get on with living. But her mind drifted and she considered concussion in a distracted way. Maybe there wouldn’t be a chance to get on with living even if she tried.

Her mind drifted to where she’d been before she was taken. Her morning run. She’d started driving to a trailhead, never one afraid of bears or the down-on-their-luck characters that sometimes orbited around the trailhead parking. And sure enough those weren’t the things she should have been afraid of.

She had felt good that morning on the trail. Sure her joints were sore and some muscles were tetchy. She wasn’t young anymore. But the pace had felt right. The dew on the bracken and the smilax climbing the pines. The wildflowers and dewberries and sumac. Names for old friends that it felt good to know, and it had seemed like it was going to turn into a good day. . .

A few hundred yards from the trailhead as she finished her out-and-back the voice of the first man in black had reached her ears. “Silva Moorehaven, step forward and get down on your knees!” No good morning. No hello. No friendly cyclists in sight.

***

They didn’t hit her again. And it became clear that she wasn’t the only person in her predicament when some different people in black appeared some unknown number of hours later. These people added plastic restraints to her arms and legs and put a cloth bag over her head. Soreness and dizziness made it hard to move the way they directed her to, but eventually she found herself stepping up and being pulled up. It seemed they wanted her somewhere else geographically and it seemed that they wanted to move others as well. She was pushed down onto a bench, which mercifully backed a wall that she could lean on. She could feel others at her sides. Then there were diesel fumes and jostling and she tried not to think of nausea. Her abdomen hurt. But she was afraid to say anything.

An interminable time later she found herself jolted from reverie by loud retching and moaning a few body widths down the bench from where she sat. There was a terrible acid and organic smell. The moaning turned into panicked yelling. Silva heard someone beat the metal of the vehicle and then someone else yelling, "They won't stop until the fuel runs out. We're on our own with this scum back here."

Then from across a short divide she heard a familiar sounding voice. Her head spun. The voice was muffled, as though it came through a cloth cover like the one she wore. It couldn't be. . .

Silva thought about her boss, about how he had always seemed like a true believer in what the new order was doing. Sure, he also seemed reasonable. But a true believer couldn't be back here with her. Someone like him wouldn't be rounded up and abused.

"If you don't remove these masks, you're going to be smelling a lot more of that kind of thing before this ride ends," was what the familiar voice said. Then there was mumbling from what sounded like two or three guards. And then the moaning and yelling stopped, replaced by gasping breathing. And then Silva heard a few other groans and sounds of relief. And then Silva was blinking and gasping and breathing more deeply herself with her own bag removed.

She took her time letting her eyes focus. The guards were yelling at them. Yelling at each other. Silva didn't think she could stand up without a pull or a shove if she tried. But the man across the aisle from her was indeed familiar, and both of them smiled a little as they made eye contact, even if Silva was definitely also openly weeping. Apparently it didn't even help to be a true believer. Why did it even feel good to see a familiar face? They were so screwed.

Such a difference the passing of time makes. I guess it has been less than a year since I last participated in an Idol Mini season. But still, such a difference in so many directions. It feels nice to sit with a laptop in a coffee shop and write. It feels nice to open a nostalgic window on Dreamwidth and see a slice of the internet that hasn’t changed much in the last twenty years or more. There used to be a lot of talk about how the internet was actually getting much worse, back at the dawn of the forms of social media that have taken over most of our devices now. I added my voice to those choruses. But ultimately, like everyone, I was dragged along on this wild ride consisting of so many media and culture shifts. And now here we are.

Do not fall horizontally. This mandate was issued multiple times in the instructional videos that Anson and I had to watch in order to sign the waivers required by the climbing gym that hosted roped/sport divisionals earlier this year. It became one of the quotes of the trip; one we would just say during silences in the car. It was delightfully ironic given that her routes had lots of overhangs and roof sections, making it more likely that her body would be positioned horizontally during a fall. As it turned out, both of Anson’s falls were pretty clean during the competition. But then in the evening after the competition, I took a big spill trail running- one where my whole body managed to get way out in front of my feet and I had that horrible moment of realizing I was falling with nothing I could do to stop it before the big smack. That was three weeks ago, and the skin has all grown back on my knees now. Do not fall horizontally.

June 21, 2025. Yesterday night was the solstice. Today is technically my 17th wedding anniversary! It’s before eight. And I’m sitting in my neighborhood coffee shop writing. The world is moving too quickly. Much too quickly. But just as some things are spiraling badly out of control in our world, our family’s chaotic rhythm seems to be in sort of a good place? Maybe? Dare I write that?

This fall, Rog will be two years post big brain surgery. He’s 60 this year. Almost twenty years with young onset Parkinson's and, honestly, things could be a heck of a lot worse.

Our girls are Juniors in high school now, eagerly awaiting the revelation of their AP exam scores. This is going to be such a big year for them. They’re both starting to drive which is part of why I’m actually able to pretend that I can breathe a little bit at this moment. Anson just finished a week of cello camp at FSU. Jasper is finishing up her summer synchronized swim training ahead of Junior Olympic nationals which are held over the week leading up to July 4. She’s swimming four routines at nationals this year. And I should be adding a final round of finishing touches of glitter and rhinestones to her solo suit right now. Jas decided to take the lifeguard test with the city while Anson and I were up in Georgia for climbing divisionals, and she came out of it with an offer for summer employment. I’m so proud of both of them, working hard for the things they want to go after.

The girls keep on learning and making connections. People change and grow. And the world burns around us. It’s hard to wrap my mind around.

I finished the couch-to-five-k running program again a couple of weeks ago. My own health hasn’t been my priority for an alarming couple of years. Work has been both intense and satisfying and family hasn’t been easy and I just let my health go to the back burner. My schedule hasn’t been consistent enough to let me exercise with friends or cultivate new exercise friends. I actually had to start C25K from the very first week this time, and it even threw in a few extra bonus workouts over the course of the program based on what it saw from me. But I’ve finished it again- midforties-Toni style, I guess. I’m figuring out what that means now. Perhaps primarily a lot of ibuprofen. I rolled directly into 5k speedwork with hopes for a hot summer race toward the end of next month. I still don’t honestly know if I will ever run an elusive sub-30-minute 5k. In the deeper past when I was in close to the right shape to knock one out, I was always aiming for longer races. But I might dust that old goal off again as it starts to cool down this autumn, depending on what else is happening.

I’ve never been a fast runner. My advantage in running was always just that I can slip into a frame of mind where I am genuinely happy while running and that I’m built for the long haul. Forty-inch-inseam legs make for long strides. But I’m quite heavy for me right now and that doesn’t help the running.

One thing I have done this spring is to undertake my running on trails. In times past I did a lot of road running around home, but the trails do something for me other than just giving me a place to strive cardiovascularly. I love being out in the hot north Florida green. One of the parks where I’ve been running has a gopher tortoise burrow along the loop trail I use. A little over half my laps there, I’ve been able to say hi to a tortoise friend as I go by.

The other trail that’s closer to home has been a riot of wildflowers over the last few weeks. One morning, I discovered that mushrooms had popped up along the sides of the trail, which led me to long ponderings about what the designer of the Mario Brothers games was thinking about when he made it so that the characters could power up by punching mushrooms. I’m sure that there are interviews out there where people have asked questions about this. But running that morning, and finally starting to feel good in places had me thinking that for me, running through wildflowers was the real power-up move. Running past pretty flowers and dew-covered bracken ferns. . . There are certainly worse things.

Anyway, do not fall horizontally, kids, if you can manage it.

This is not a good idea. I have way, way too much on my plate right now. There’s an entry due tomorrow already! But fine, I’m in. Gonna play LJ Idol, Wheel of Chaos! And you should too. Sign up here:

https://therealljidol.dreamwidth.org/1182845.html

Well, Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, 2025. Here I sit in a very familiar place- a place that I started to love when I was first finding my community as an adult person, and continued to love as I also somehow managed to have a family that is now on the cusp of starting to shrink down a little bit itself, as my girls start to spread their wings and find their own communities in the world.

It is so very much to contemplate.

I’m trying to finish Jeff Vandermeer’s Absolution, which I am really enjoying, but also. . . That novel is such a strange dark headspace to be in. Especially on inauguration day, too. And have y’all looked at the weather? Crazy weather for me to have gone north with my family. But last year was such chaos; weather for the whole year, Rog’s big brain surgery and dental surgery recovery, and kid needs, and everything. And I am very much realizing that we are on a countdown of years remaining for family traditions to be enacted. The babies that I nursed beside the fire in the cabin that used to stand where this one now stands are Sophomores in high school now. Part of me is so deeply grateful that they are about to start driving themselves. They have their own passions and their own stressors and hopes and dreams which is how it is supposed to be.

But, man, I hope I have been able to give them enough of a framework of understanding of how to relate back to a still point, whether they find it in a state park cabin in the Georgia mountains on the coldest day of winter, sharing charcuterie with their family while working on science projects, or in a kayak in the middle of a river, or on a Florida beach.

So we did this trip; the old family and found-family tradition of a Vogel cabin for MLK Jr. weekend. The money for paying for two nights in a row- which was required to get a cabin on a holiday weekend, even doing it the late way we’re doing it (taking an extra day off because of sports commitments Jas had on Saturday) was tight. So we got the smallest dog cabin, even though it is tight with Roger’s nightly Parkinson's perambulations and Alfie’s need for a large safe crate space of his own. And I am so happy to be able to be here. I have done my once-a-year cooking of a big pancake breakfast for all of us. I’ve napped and read by the fire and chatted about experimental methodology with the girls who are using the cabin wifi to work on a science project that they are doing with their student astronaut club.

The very first time I came to this place, it was with three good friends, and I desperately needed a still point. I had just returned to the second semester of my 1L year of law school, and I needed to remember what was important. In many ways law school felt easier than my biology degree had been, but the other law students all fought so hard for position grade-wise. My first semester of grades were not the cum laude grades I had pulled down in undergrad. They were middle of the road. I was very interested in the material in law school. It was interesting. But I also felt like the number of hours of work it would take to make straight As was just untenable.

But that road trip helped me recenter. And now 24 years later, the cold beloved mountains have helped me recenter again. I have no doubt that this year is also going to be a wild one. But I am going to do my best to remember the beautiful places and still points that make it all worthwhile.

The day I started writing this, I kept thinking to myself, “Holy smokes, I am sore.” But I haven’t been on an awesome climbing trip for a while. I haven’t even been on an awesome regular weekday trip to climb, myself, to my climbing gym, that I am a member of for far too long. I sit in the gym lobby and work a couple of nights a week, waiting for Anson to finish climbing. The schedule is just too stacked with other priorities right now for me to get the exercise I need, although I am trying to remedy that.

(And in fact, since it has taken me a couple of weeks to even finish writing this post, I did finally make it in for a nice evening session for the first time in [gulp] six months or more last week.)

Anyway, instead I was first sore because Jas and I helped my folks with some flood recovery chores, which included lifting furniture and bringing a refrigerator up a small set of steps. And then there was another week, too, where the lactic acid in the muscles was from helping get the oven up the same set of steps for them.

It is crazy how flood recovery forces contemplation. I mean you would expect it to bring the kind of contemplation of stuff that you normally associate with Marie Kondo.

Does this bring me joy? If not, I guess I don’t need to recover it.

And I guess you would expect it to bring contemplation of climate change, since every recovery decision you make is haunted by the specter of the next climate event.

Can I rebuild this in a way that is more flood tolerant? Should I use carpet here?”

I feel haunted by the specter of so many things right now. The other weekend, on the way back home, Jas and I listened to some episodes from Kai Ryssdal’s new season of the How We Survive podcast. It is absolutely surreal to me that we’re staring down the barrel of a second Trump presidential term, in a country where the Department of Defense, like the entire scientific community, agrees that human-caused climate change is a real threat that must be met head on and dealt with. Guys, the listening stations are sinking into the no-longer-permafrost. What is it going to take to make us wake up and change?

I was on the road last week, giving a couple of talks at my agency’s district offices. And I have been on the road every weekend between my house in Tallahassee in my parents’ place trying to help with flood recovery. I have burned a lot of gas. I’m still not sure I am saving the right things.

My parents are retired. They were both public school teachers and I like to think that for a lot of students, they were the kind of teachers that their students will remember. The marine science program that my mom used to head up got kids out on the local river and into the Gulf and introduced them to the kinds of things that hopefully they still care about. My dad taught hunter safety and archery in a community where a great many families hunt.

There was a big trailer parked outside their home for much of the last few months. One day, as I was leaving, I noticed that among the water damaged things were the cross stitched birth announcement my mom had made when I was born. It was a Beatrix Potter theme: My name and length and weight at birth, surrounded by Peter Rabbit and his family, Mrs. Tiggy Winkle and Tom Kitten. Beside it was my mom’s framed Master’s Degree diploma. Both things were wet enough that they will never be the same. I felt like I should try to save both things. Like I should pry the diploma out and see if I could dry it. Some of the embroidery floss in my birth announcement was apparently not color fixed to be washed in water. But, I thought, if the color ran, maybe it will wash out if I try to wash it. It was easy to pry the cross stitch out of the frame and toss it in the back of my car while resting in between tasks. I haven’t tried to fix the staining and color running yet, and I still feel like I made the wrong choice in leaving her diploma on the pile to be hauled away. I should have tried to save it, too.

How is it that there is still enough tension between birth announcements and graduate diplomas, as my daughters prepare for college that I have extra-tasty-crispy guilt over this choice of mine? How is it that almost certainly more real life friends of mine will see the Ballerina Farms latest homemaking posts on IG than will see anything that I write? This 2024 life is crazy. Helping mom and dad with the literal home-making of reinstalling appliances while the culture wars still rage about what the ideal of homemaking should be.

I hate what the flooding from hurricane Helene is doing to the community that I grew up in. In the country, it always seems like the ideological camps are more circled up than they are in suburban spaces like Tallahassee where people mix more as a matter of course. I hate that one of my aunts asked me whether my parents were going to build back after this flood. I hate that there is a subset of people online who blithely generalize that everyone who lives on the coast of Florida is just getting what was obviously coming to them. Don’t they see? Don’t they see that people who were flooded in Helene lived miles inland or feet higher than people who have been flooded in recent history. It has never been 100% vacation rental properties impacted in these recent disaster storms. And did y’all want the entirety of the coast of Florida to be short term rentals? It is already trending that way. A lot of investors are picking up properties that once were homes in the wake of this disaster and renovating them. It is easier to manage some properties as short term rentals that provide an income stream than it is to keep living in them. But what do we want our communities to be?

I was glad that there was never much question of my folks staying in their home, because that place has been an absolute anchor for me. A reminder of who I am and why I do what I do. But I know that even my intrepid mother looked at some properties in other states. There are plenty of reasons to consider it, even if, ultimately, the call of home is stronger.

I have a dream of moving back home at some point in the future, after the girls finish high school, but I have an addition to that dream now- I want to look at how much it would cost to put a tiny house on very sturdy stilts close to mom and dad. Building anything that will really last post-2024 is going to be a lot more expensive than it would have been before this watershed year. But we were always racking up these carbon emission debts. It’s going to take me a minute to re-calibrate to the realization that we are already living the climate disaster. But I am getting there. I wonder whether most of us will get there before it is truly too late.

The Story of Ollie and The Gauleiter

or Y’all May as Well Know I am Sticking It Out and Sticking Around

I really didn’t think the presidential election would go the way it did in this, the year of our Lord 2024. As time has gone on and I’ve read people’s thoughts and processed my own thoughts, I’m seeing that I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised. But on Wednesday morning I found myself pretty shocked.Our family group chat got fired up early. We were seeking each other out.

One of my cousins wrote, “America almost made it 250 years.” That made me think about how Tallahassee had its bicentennial this year. And Yankeetown just celebrated the 100th anniversary of its founding. There is so much history that is really just right around the corner from where we are today.

One of my good Tallahassee friends always used to say, “Dear old Yankeetown. . .” whenever I’d wax poetic about my home. And she was right-on to rib me. Yankeetown is dear to me. Not just nostalgic, but truly a place I love. I nerd out about it. Today it is dear and a little bit downtrodden with the massive flooding that so many folks experienced in Helene. My parents are still living in an Air B&B and fixing the damage to their home.

I keep thinking about my grandparents and great grandparents and what they might think of these 2024 happenings. Of the changes in the weather and in attitudes everywhere.

Will it be okay for us to go back under a Federal government led by those who hate government? There is so much hate swirling around. It is true that I am a person of relative privilege in this world, though I fear that ignorance about how our new leader’s platforms will affect the economy is ultimately going to hurt most people who aren’t billionaires, regardless of privilege.

One thing I do know is how my grandfather, Richard Allman F. Lynch, dealt with some instances of swirling hate that happened in his days. And I think maybe now is a good time to tell a story about that.

My grandfather was in college learning to be an engineer at Purdue before World War Two broke out. He hadn’t fallen in love with the first daughter of Yankeetown yet at that point (she spent some time at the Florida State College for Women before transferring to Purdue- our first proto-‘Nole). It’s wild to me to think about my grandparents when they weren’t much older than my girls are now. Wild, but fun. I have a few really fun pictures of my grandpa as a young man. He was in a fraternity at Purdue- my grandparents were the last generation of my family to go Greek. He helped put on fun drama shows. I always got the impression that literature and shenanigans were included in his college education in addition to hard engineering. And he also did engineering study-abroad in Germany. Engineering study abroad in pre-World War Two Germany. Very directly pre-World War Two Germany.

If you know me, you know that my nose is not exactly the smallest feature on my face. My nose is pretty exactly my mom’s nose, which is pretty exactly my grandfather’s nose. I have southerners ask me if I’m “from New York” from time to time, given the shape of my nose. I know that they are really trying to ascertain my religion with that question.

Anyway, my grandfather went by Ollie, short for Allman, I guess because there are a lot of Richards in the family. One of the stories he tells of young Ollie in Germany before the war was that he noticed an officer once, in a train station, who kept staring at him and then looking up and then staring at him some more. It wasn’t until the train arrived and he moved to get on it that he realized that on the wall behind him was a big poster pointing out the features that could be used to “Recognize a Jew” and the caricatured drawing on the poster did not look completely unlike my grandpa. When he used to tell that story, he would always end it by saying something like, “I didn’t realize at the time how afraid I probably should have been.”

But he also used to tell another story about how a regional leader (my grandfather always likened the position to a regional governor- it was not until I looked the term up this week to write this story that I learned that it was actually a position within the Nazi party), known as the Gauleiter, came to the school where he was studying one day and gave a fiery speech all about how foreigners were bad and lazy, and how the pure German people were about to take the world by storm. It was a real sturm and drang presentation and then at the end of the presentation, the Gauleiter asked to see all of the exchange students that were present up on the stage. The Gauleiter then proceeded to individually and roundly excoriate each one of them for the sins of their home countries, and when he got to my grandfather, the only American, he apparently laid it on heavily about how America was the absolute worst at very long length.

Speaking of long length, my grandfather was my height; six feet and five inches. Apparently the Gauleiter was a smaller guy, but he attempted to make up for that in volume.

When the Gauleiter was all done and went on his way, one of my grandfather’s Norwegian friends approached him. “Oh Ollie,” the friend said (and my grandfather always did an impression of this friend saying his name with an accent, so he was saying “Oh Oh-lee”), “Ollie, I can’t believe how casual you were with the Gauleiter! I can’t believe you just leaned over against the wall and crossed your arms and legs while he was talking to you! Ollie, the Gauleiter is an important person!”

To this, my super-cool college-aged grandfather replied, “I don’t see what the big deal is with him anyway. He puts his pants on one leg at a time, just like anyone else!”

Teenage me so wanted to be as cool as my grandpa in that story.

I mean, I’m also super glad that my grandpa survived to come back home, finish his degree, fall for my grandmother, marry her and ship out with the Army Air Corps where he also managed to survive the war and then come back home to eventually settle in Yankeetown near his in-laws.

Teenage me wanted to be as cool as my grandpa, but mid-forties me doesn’t want to have the chance to be cool in the face of sturm and drang nationalism right here in America. I certainly didn’t want or have any inkling that my daughters would be turning 16 in the dawn of “Your body, my choice” memes spurred on by the emboldened antics of the devotees of a 78-year-old convicted felon who has been found liable for sexual assault and is currently under indictment in multiple jurisdictions.

Nevertheless, here I am. And despite the tornadoes that ravaged my neighborhood and the floods that have ravaged the southeast this year, here I will stay. Because in the long run, I believe in the legal system that I serve within, and I believe in the ideals of my grandfathers and grandmothers, and all of the good people that brought us to where we are today.

I don’t know what more I can do to prevent a slide into chaos, but I am galvanized to do what I can.

I’m going to try to write and read more long-form and less fast-social online. I’ll see if being the change I want to see helps. Come along with me if you like.

There’s something in the wind tonight,
Some kind of change of weather
Somewhere some devil’s mixing fire and ice together. . .

I almost used the Open Topic of the write off to write something Jimmy Buffett inspired, given that the state’s declared Jimmy Buffett day (yes!it is a thing!)fell within the writing time. But then the yard fairies came to me and I wanted to let them be heard.

Not that my great hero Jimmy isn’t well heard already, even in absentia.

I’ve been thinking of him and his music a lot, not just because of his day but because Labor Day weekend has a place in the fandom, and also I was in a super contemplative place this time last year because I was traveling with family in a trip that was rare and spectacular.

Really that trip was exceedingly rare, come to think of it, because I was able to take it in between my husband’s brain surgery and his battery pack installation. The trip in the middle of the great cyborgification.

I wish I had more time. More time to process everything that’s flown in the last 12-18 months. More time to devote to the important parts. That’s what I really want to understand. It’s just so hard to know which parts are which. Two fifteen year old daughters and everything that’s old is new again. What do you hold onto? What do you let go? And what gets forced out when you can’t make a decision. There are so many things that get caught up in the net, but to paraphrase Jimmy you don’t know the oysters from the pearls in the moment.

Also, guys, I love oysters. Both as food and as organisms that are the base of an important food web!

Anyway, cheers to all of you, idol friends!

Trillium was the most ephemeral of the spirits gathered in the yard. She was not the youngest by any stretch of the imagination, but she was slight and her outline was faint- barely discernible against the backdrop of the nandina thicket that bordered the house. As English Ivy watched her, she addressed Bee Balm, whose outline was much clearer.

“If we don’t get some rain before the Corn Moon,” said Trillium, the lines on her face almost deepening with the words, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to make much of a showing this spring. I haven’t got any of that irrigation help that you ladies of the front yard benefit from.”

Trillium’s shoulders straightened and Ivy could see that under her seedy armor, shaped like her leaves, those shoulders were thin, but wiry still with muscle. Trillium had been on the lot for a long time. Longer than most of the shrubby plants. But the recent changes to the backyard weren’t helping her.

Bee Balm laughed a little ruefully. “I wouldn’t call what they do for me irrigation,” she said, smoothing her hands over the tiers of her skirts, which were green and white with jagged purple slashes of color overlaid around her waist. “It’s more the occasional splash when they remember that there are still some plants they care a little bit about in the front. I mean, I appreciate that they mow around me instead of through me, but they are not making it easy for me.”

“It isn’t easy for any of us,” said Cedar, her wild green hair forking into a thicket of platelets around her head. Ivy could see chartreuse and black lines twining across Cedar’s arms and face, constricting her burnished skin in what appeared to be a painful way. The shadows under Cedar’s eyes were like dark bruises. The pattern of the lines was a familiar one to Ivy, rather like her own growth pattern- and she shrank back a little more toward the house. But then she steeled herself. She had shared the side yard with Cedar for many years, but she’d never climbed onto Cedar’s person. They competed for nutrients, sure, but she’d never actually tried to strangle the fledgling tree.

“Indeed, this has been a year unlike any other,” rumbled Basswood, and Ivy shrank again as the tree’s personification joined Cedar and Bee and Trillium in the side-yard clearing. Basswood was easily twice the size of any of the others, but even in the faint light of the waning crescent moon Ivy could see that Bass’s head was grossly misshapen now. One of her arms terminated just below the shoulder, hidden beneath her tunic of unevenly lobed leaves, and the misshapen side of her face was mercifully masked in tannish-grey bark to hide whatever features may have been left underneath, “and I fear that we may actually succumb to the new threat if everything continues the way it seems to be moving.”

Basswood’s personification turned her back on the part of the backyard where two of her trunks were splayed, one of them still sitting as it had fallen across the back yard when the tornados pulled it over, and the other cut up into chunks that still hadn’t been moved. Ivy had twined her way up Basswood before, and she remained in awe of the tree’s strength. They had always gotten along. Ivy decided it was time for her to make herself known to this council.

She took a deep breath and cleared her throat, and she bowed toward Bass as she stepped out into the clearing with her friends materializing beside her.

“Good evening, my native sisters,” she began as they turned toward her with surprised faces, “We want to join your conclave tonight, not because we hope to overrun you, but because we think that there could be strength in combining our might against a common enemy.”

Cedar stared at Nandina, who had materialized bright and whole, green berries bouncing along her bare arms and legs beside Ivy. Nandina was almost the size of Basswood now. The native plant avatars all looked at her in disgust.

“You must listen to Ivy, ladies,” Nandina intoned.

Beside her Spiderwort was short and stocky, but her powerful build looked bright and healthy despite the drought that was plaguing them all. Spider’s skin was a deep green, and her little white blooms danced around throughout her long deep green hair. Spider’s voice was high but strong, “We come to you because there is a greater enemy in the yard than any of us, one that we would unite with you to overcome.”

A hot wind shifted the leaves of the plants in the backyard as their avatars stared at each other, each taking the measure of the others. Away to the south, heat lightning danced in the clouds and then, abruptly thunder rumbled as the wind picked up. From all around them, the avatars began to hear dry, crackling cackles that gained in strength and volume.

It was clear that skunk vine was everywhere, and she could obviously hear them.

_____________________________________________

tonithegreat is dreaming of fae costume details like she's at DragonCon instead of sitting home in the middle of a yard that badly needs her help! She hopes you'll consider her kindly when the poll goes up for this write off!

The first thing Miranda noticed was a remarkable lack of pain. No aches. No fever. It felt like she was in bed. A bed with a perfectly firm but giving mattress, and soft, clean, linen-blend sheets. But the temperature was. . . perfectly temperate for her and it also seemed like she was outside, under trees with a gentle cool wind and robust, but not muggy, humidity. She stretched a little bit, with her eyes just cracked.

Everything she perceived was impossible. She couldn’t be in a perfect bed outside. She couldn’t be in her favorite clean nightgown. She was supposed to be tossing and turning in her little bed at home, wearing the dirty t-shirt she'd gone to bed in, ridden with another round of Covid. Trying to keep her family from catching what she had, but also just trying to rest and survive. She loved her family, but there was no way they had cleaned up her room and embiggened the bed and opened the windows, and even if they had, it would be hotter today. . . She gave up on just enjoying the sensations she felt and sat up and opened her eyes.

She was not in Kansas anymore. Nor did it seem that she was in her home in Tallahassee.

She was in a fairly perfect little bed- a queen, probably, and it did seem like it was outside, but as she looked around her at the vegetation of a Florida mesic hammock in autumn, the sweetgum and loblolly pine and live oak and magnolia sort of twisted and faded, in favor of a warm wood-paneled wall like the ones in her grandparents’ old house, with a window out on the landscape and a pair of people seated on stools.

One of the people was Robert Redford, circa the mid 1980s- the way he looked in Out of Africa. He smiled at Miranda and said, in his own voice, “You are correct, of course. All of this is impossible with the technology and developing science that you understand. But it isn’t impossible for us.”

“Nor even is it illogical for us,” said early 1980s Leonard Nimoy, complete with Miranda’s favorite starfleet red naval uniforms from the Star Trek original series movies II through IV. Nimoy was sitting on the stool to the right of Redford.

“Simply put,” said Redford, “We are aliens, and we have abducted you. We are using our technology to read the thoughts you are having as you have them. We read your dreams for a day and a half or so while we cured you of disease and attempted to re-calibrate your parasite load down to something more optimal for you. You humans are complicated creatures, with quite the biome carried around in your guts and skins. Luckily we’re quite good with your particular style of. . . neurobiology, so where we weren’t sure on what to preserve with that biome, we were able to see how different mixes made you feel, and we tried to go with what felt best.”

“We’ve also used these thoughts to put together this room interface where we can talk to you, because we abducted you for a reason,” he continued. “But my colleague is better with sensing your thoughts and emotions, so I am going to let them explain.”

“We do not actually look like you,” said Spock. “Our. . . basic chemistry is different than yours, giving rise to a completely different biology as you would understand it. We actually look something more like one of your shrubs, or large algae, crossed with a rock,” he said, and as he said it, his form sort-of dissolved and reappeared as something like a glistening and fronded red-brown rock, which made some very biological sorts of sounds. Then the fronded-rock being dissolved and was replaced by Miranda’s mother, who said, “Oh, I am sorry Meer, I’m not trying to shock you,” she dissolved and returned as Barack Obama, “I’m just trying to take on a form that will give you. . . maximum confidence to communicate with me.”

“I think maybe you better just pick one human,” said Miranda, “The dissolving and coming back is pretty scary to me. You can stay as Obama, or go back to Star Trek. This all feels pretty star trek-y.”

This time she closed her eyes when they made the switch and found that they chose Bones, also from the movie era, which seemed appropriate enough.

“You’re doing an amazing job of taking this all in, Miranda,” said Doctor McCoy, “Which is good because we need your help. Our kind have abducted 100 different humans from all over your Earth world, because we think your human society, while very flawed and problematic, is worth saving, even though all of you don’t seem able to mobilize yourselves to work on the right problems. There are multiple possible pathways you humans could take to save yourselves from yourselves, and my job is to prepare you to help your fellow humans optimize one of those pathways. Do you feel ready to begin?”

Surprisingly, as she watched Doc McCoy morph one more time into Dr. Samantha Carter from Stargate One, Miranda realized that, in fact, she did.

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Tonithegreat tested positive for Covid this morning after a very rough night of respiratory symptoms last night. She is taking fever reducers now and the right otc meds, but still cannot guarantee that the trippy nature of this little tale is unrelated to fever. She hopes you enjoy it nonetheless!

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LJ Idol 20th Anniversary - Week 4 - Sin-eater

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