A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon.
Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, “A healed femur.”
A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend.
Mead explained that where the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.
— Ira Byock, The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life
I have a fondness for graffiti, the tags that crop up around your street, the names you see over and over. It’s like hello stranger. I don’t know you, but I’ve seen your name on postboxes my whole life. I know you print your own stickers and believe in aliens. Sometimes I’ll be on the other side of town and see a tag that’s local to my parents house and I think, oh it’s you! Still carving your name into bus shelter glass. I love the sharpie scrawled blabber and the toilet stall drama, the nick is a bitch doodled on a fence post.
When I was a kid someone had spray painted miss piggy on the side of a bridge that we would pass to get to my grandmas house. I loved her, I used to make my parents drive back around so I could see her if I forgot. One day when I was older they sandblasted piggy away and I was pretty sad. She wasn’t hurting anyone, she was just the little guardian of the bridge.
I was reminded of miss piggy recently when a new piece appeared on my bus route from college. Scratched in white paint over brick it said ‘Why Not?’. Everyday I would get on my bus in the dark and I would travel for an hour and everyday I would think, I can’t do this. And then I would see the tag I would feel a little bit less alone, like at least someone is out there and wants me to be brave. And I would, every day, even though it was the most depressed and anxious point my life.
Suddenly cave paintings made sense to me. Living alone in a world where you know there are others, but you don’t know where they are or how to find them. And then you see a painting of a bear on a cave wall and think yes. People have touched here.
My point is, even if you sandblast, paint over, fine and erase you can’t take away the fact that we are all just humans living together in a mess of colour and language. All throughout our existence too. I think it’s pretty cool.
i think the thing that makes me the most emotional in life is the realization that everything i have and everything i see has been touched by other people. someone designed the logo of my favorite tea bags and someone decided which paintings should go in the calendar hanging on my wall. someone built the roof above my head and someone paved the street outside my house. someone made this pair of glasses specific for me, someone picked the pear i ate with my lunch and someone designed my favorite sweater. every book i read, every song i listen to, every film i watch, tens, if not hundreds of people had to be there to make it happen. even if i am alone, i am always surrounded by other human beings - a fact that makes my heart squeeze in on itself everytime i remember it.
Reading a report on the Guardian website of the death of the Argentine footballer Diego Maradona, I was much struck by two phrases: “addiction to cocaine took hold” and “his private life spiralled out of control”.
This way of putting it suggested that both his addiction and his private life had an existence independent of anything that he himself did: that addiction, for example, was like Parkinson’s Disease, an illness that could reasonably be said to “take hold” of someone. This is the official, but nonetheless false and simplified, view of addiction, as something that just happens to a person.
Why this strange way of putting things? I suspect it is because of the great fear that haunts all modern intellectuals, that of being considered censorious, at least about individuals who bring unhappiness on themselves (and often to others). There is, of course, a certain class of person about whom it is de rigueur to be censorious, even ultra-censorious, but Maradona, being an idol of the populace, and of humble origin, was not a member of that class.
He was a tragic figure, a man who did not put the fruits of his natural talent to a use that brought him much happiness. The tragedy was in the choices he made and in their consequences, by comparison with the choices that he might have made. The fact that they were his choices is what made his life tragic. If he had contributed nothing to his addiction or to his private life, he would no more be a tragic figure than is a broken vase or a punctured tire.
But we have no sense of the tragic, only of victimhood.
v tired of people simply portraying or perceiving well-written and complete character arcs considering a character’s context, natural progression, plot line everything for the majority of the fandom or people to write it off, criticise it immediately or not take the time to understand it purely because it doesn’t align with their fantasy.
“So far the most powerful human beings have still bowed worshipfully before the saint as the riddle of self-conquest and deliberate final renunciation. Why did they bow? They honored something in themselves when they honored the saint. It was the will to power.”
—F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §51 (edited excerpt).
A person on the train I still think about was this woman a few years back–pre COVID. Maybe mid-late twenties. She was holding a wrapped present so tightly to her chest and was blushing. She would put the present in her lap and look at it, touching the ribbon gently with her fingers, then would hold it to herself again, just smiling so brightly. It was such an intimate snapshot of a person. She was so happy and excited. Fidgety but not nervous. It was such a genuinely joyful moment this woman could barely contain in public, and it stuck with me all this time later. It makes me wonder what moments in my life stuck with someone else that I had no idea would be ingrained in their minds. My guess would be the time I ate shit on a patch of ice outside the 7/11 and had to go in and the cashier pretended not to have seen.
I’m spreading the word as far as I can that all of the photography that I’ve posted on the internet is for sale. For the most part, very decently sized prints (think one cubit) are available for under $100, and I’ve got all sorts of super appealing ideas for printing on rare and luxurious materials and installing in unusual and thought-provoking ways. There’s a lot to choose from, and the majority of it is spread across these three venues:
if you’re interested please drop me a line through a DM here on tumblr, or via [email protected], and we can talk about how I can adorn your space ~~~~~ and ~~~~~ time ~~~~~~~.*･｡ﾟ҉̛
Fedbook keeps giving me these video ads for the latest shelf-stable meal kit scam. I haven’t been able bring myself to block them b/c they fascinate me.
The whole prepper food industry in general is deeply fascinating to me. Whenever I see grifters using paranoia to trick people into paying too much money for terrible food a part of me feels mad that I didn’t think of it first.
Like obviously I’m me and I spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about disaster preparedness but also there’s this store called Costco you might have heard about
This is why I’m heading your way in the event of a nuclear apocalypse. Radioactive Costco adventures and someone to talk vampire shit with.
Also, this is your reminder to read The Last Girl Scoutby@natalieironside if you haven’t already. I’m rereading it right now and it is *chef kiss.* It’s like a post-apocalyptic fairytale meets classic horror genre and stunningly queer.
I’m just sitting here dumbfounded that there IS a prepper food industry selling prepackaged foods. Like, why invest a bunch of money in a finite resource as your apocalypse backup plan? Garden. Forage. Throw some potatoes in that flower bed you don’t use for anything and let them do their thing. Get taken over by zucchini. Pick some curly dock seeds growing wild in the vacant lot and make crackers out of them. It’s free or near-free food, and knowledge that no supply chain breakdown can separate you from. And, you know, a fun hobby to engage in during the pre-apocalypse too.
Because the prepper movement is a consumer identity that’s sort of like a deeply paranoid and politically reactionary equivalent to being a juggalo or being way too into Marvel movies except that they have an added level of (at least self-imposed) legitimacy since the thing they’re obsessed with is arguably real and their fandom swag is more corporeal.
It’s hard to turn building relationships with your neighbors and learning practical skills (or anything else that would actually help you survive a disaster) into an easily-monetized aesthetic to sell cool faux-milspec gear to scared suburban dads with inferiority complexes.
(I say this as both a survivalist and a juggalette)
the last sentence deals an unfathomable level of psychic damage
You came to the cringe website of your own knowing volition. That’s like taking psychic damage from seeing sand on the beach.
![live from the ants’ world, a comic about having thumbs and gaming[ patringo ]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/124ebee26c72402fbb0d72307f5f0edb/66a489a9e3b7bdc5-fa/s640x960/659ba292b2673bdc84070bb55b9bbca68d886abf.png "live from the ants’ world, a comic about having thumbs and gaming[ patringo ]")
