Notabilia

Snowy Tree Cricket

Oecanthus fultoni, snowy tree cricket, dominant frequency 2.9 kHz

This species occurs in dooryards and open stands of hardwoods throughout the United States except in the Southeast. Its song is memorable in at least three respects:

1. Especially at low temperatures, the song is melodious and haunting. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, If moonlight could be heard, it would sound just like that.

2. Because its chirps are produced regularly and at rates that are easy to count, the pace of the song can be used to estimate the temperature at which the cricket is singing.

3. Neighboring individuals synchronize their chirps so that a shrub or tree with many individuals throbs with the same rhythm as that of a solitary singer.

Click on the image below to listen to the songs of numerous crickets, including the snowy tree cricket.



Yesterday, I somehow managed to make one OK three-part poem out of what started as a single absolutely hideous poem. It was like fashioning one of those do-it-yourself wire tree sculptures that were all the rage in the ’80s. You had to keep twisting and untwisting until something at least passably treelike emerged, then you had to hang little leaves from the wire branches, which was its own surgical undertaking. I was the only one in my family who had the patience for that kind of thing. It wasn’t patience, though. It was something else: the need to destroy and create, to pare and repair, to make what I saw in my mind a reality in the world, not a poor approximation of my mindplay.

Compulsion was on my side as well, not just with the tree sculpture, but in all aspects of my childhood. I loved picking the tar bubbles in the road that formed on hot summer days and solving complicated puzzle games everyone else gave up on and memorizing impossibly long Simon tonal and light sequences because there’s no stopping, ever, until you absolutely can’t continue—maybe you’re out of tar bubbles and have to wait for the sun to make more or you can’t crack the stupid puzzle’s stupid code or your infuriating working memory deficits won’t allow your brain to hold onto any more BEEP BEEP BOOP BOOP BEEP BEEPs.

I stuck with that hideous poem yesterday because I’m an adult version of the child I once was: stubborn, driven, perhaps a little dysfunctional. That poem was a pig, and I put some better-than-Walmart earrings on it, dressed it up a little by tearing it apart line by line and reattaching those lines to create a different creature entirely. Half of it lay on the table by the time I was done. Word, words, words. So many words. Sometimes words are too much with us. They’re like metal tree branches that need to be trimmed or tar bubbles that need to be picked or puzzles and toys that need to be put away and silenced.

Oil

My brother spent years locating crude oil, first in Oklahoma, then in Texas, then in the Black Sea.

Lake oil. Sand oil. Animal oil. Plant oil.

Oil with a Southern accent. Oil beneath troubled waters.

Oil in another tongue is still oil, oiled and oiling.

Oil on the lips that bite you. I mean me.

I mean father oil, mother oil, oiled mouths, oiled skin, oiled hours, oiled days.

I mean the coffin. I mean the verb. I mean the action.

Run, oil, run. Run from brother oil, from big brother, oiled.

He will draw you up from your dark earth with his skipjack pump and sell you to the highest bidder. A cop. A friend of your father’s. A man. A man.

Or he’ll keep you in a little bottle on an oak shelf until he can refine you, until you brighten, until you slink back and forth in the little jar like the little golden child you were supposed to be, oiled and oiling, body like an O.

O, brother, O brother, hallowed be your O.

My brother spent years locating crude oil, first in Oklahoma, then in Texas, then in the Black Sea. But, long before that, in me.

Ableist Culture, Go Fuck Yourself

Folks with mental-health issues are encouraged to create emergency plans for when things go wrong, but scant attention is given to wellness plans that prevent things from going wrong in the first place. To make matters worse, emergency plans are behavior-driven, when we should instead focus on the dozens of easily trackable biomarkers that indicate the presence or absence of metabolic/circadian homeostasis and that precede behavioral issues by days if not weeks.

Why don’t we do that? Because those with mental health issues are routinely dehumanized, discriminated against, abused, maligned, written off, and seen as incapable of attaining health, wellness, and happiness. The system doesn’t even try to help us be fully human and to live full, productive, creative, enriching lives.

We aren’t as far away from locked rooms, back wards, lobotomies, electric shock, insulin shock, and chemical lobotomies as we think. The medical establishment still treats us like that’s where we belong and that’s what we deserve. (And in the case of electroconvulsive therapy and chemical lobotomies, they’re still happening, just not as barbarically, one could argue.)

So when I resigned from my role at the University of Arizona and passed a vehicle on my way out with a bumper sticker that read Ask Me About My Lobotomy, I was understandably livid. That sticker encapsulates all the sanist* comments I heard while working at UA, from library customers being called meth heads and trash humans to the word crazy routinely being used to describe people and situations to the phrase homeless people being used with derision.

Fuck all of that. UA culture, go fuck yourself.

—

* Sanism is a subset of ableism, so these are more examples of the ableism I witnessed or that was directed at me while employed at UA.

Weird

I’m disappointed that Kamala Harris and those who support her are using the word weird to describe Donald Trump and JD Vance. Why? Because it’s ableist, normative language that’s long been deployed against folks who are different in any way, especially young people who are neurodivergent, who have values that differ from their peers, or who don’t fit neatly into the ready-made boxes that are used to define and limit them.

I turned off an NPR interview earlier today because the person being interviewed kept saying JD Vance was weird each time the interviewer asked legitimate questions about his positions and statements over the years, including inquiries about his sexism and racism. There was so much more to say than labeling him as weird and shutting the conversation down.

We have critical issues to discuss that can’t be captured by the word weird, and making it part of an attack line at once diminishes the issues at hand and encourages voters, especially younger voters, to call anyone they don’t like weird, which isn’t progress and doesn’t encourage people to avoid using language that dehumanizes and others their fellow human beings.

Here

Where are your friends?
Dead and buried.

Where are your friends?
Dead and buried.

Where are your friends?
Dead and buried.

Do you ever see them?
Every day in every sunrise, every songbird, every sand, every silt.

Where are your friends?
Here and here.

Where are your friends?
Here and here.

Where are your friends?
Here and here.

Where are you now?
In the light, in the bird, in the sand, in the silt.

New Doves

Two mourning doves just landed on my porch light. They have the adorable, bewildered look of fledglings. Hello, Rosencrantz! Hello, Guildenstern! I don’t think they know what to do next. Where to go? What to eat? When to rest?

Oopsie, Rosencrantz almost slipped off the light. And poor Guildenstern is trying to eat stucco. Now they’re preening. Now they’re looking up down updown downup down down down down.

This is the world, little birds. I hope you like your time here. I’m sorry the Earth is in such shabby condition. There’s water two doors down. There’s food pretty much everywhere because much of this land is still wild. Stay cool. Live smart. Watch out for the Cooper’s hawks.

Post-Monsoon Bloom

I have a Mojave Desert wardrobe, but I’m a Sonoran Desert dweller now.

I need to be more columnar cactus, less Joshua tree. More legume tree, less pinyon-juniper.

More post-monsoon bloom of annual flowers, less monotony of Mormon tea.

More thornscrub, more upland, more plains. Less ecotone, less basin, less mountain.

More swelling tropical air, less strained, stolen aquifer water.

More desert, less golf course, less water park, less carwash.

More diversity, equity, and inclusion, less banning of diversity, equity, and inclusion.*

I don’t want to walk around like that old desert, its desiccated husk wrapped around my body, though the desert’s not to blame. No desert is ever to blame. As Samuel Green writes in his poem “Convenant: Saying Hello to the Land We Will Love”:

              We have only
              the compass of how we walk here
              how our feet move
              over the soil that will feed us.

Let us feed our lands, not feed on them. Here in the Sonoran Desert. There in the Mojave Desert.

Let the lands guide us. Let us honor them. Let us save them and in turn be saved by them. Let us not always destroy everything and everywhere and everyone.

Give me that wardrobe. I’ll suit up.

—

* Utah recently banned diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on campuses and in government.

Dalexina

My husband is more than halfway back to our house in Utah, where he’ll stay for at least a month before returning to Tucson. Since he left this morning, I’ve made social plans for next week, cleaned and organized the house, written a prose poem, worked a small puzzle depicting Zion National Park, and made nectar so I can feed the local hummingbirds.

It’s important for writers to have time alone. It’s important for everyone to have time alone, but writers need it to produce work, which is what we’re compelled to do during our time on Earth. Have you ever been around a writer who’s not writing? Probably not for long. We’re intolerable.

My husband and I love each other and also need time away from each other. That’s been impossible since the pandemic, which is when his company went remote and there was no workplace for him to go to anymore. I was largely doing freelance and remote volunteer work, so I was also home most of the time.

From late 2019 onward, we’ve been one thing, a single entity. I have the antique typesetting letters to prove it. They sit on our kitchen shelf declaring that we are either Dajonna or Jodanna, not Dana and Jon or Jon and Dana.

For the next month, we will be Jon and Dana. I may eventually become one-half of the entity known as Dalexina, since Lexi is staying here with me. That’s fine. Lexi sleeps most of the day and doesn’t interfere with my thoughts and feelings, both of which need to be unfettered when I write. I might even get in on some of those naps. Dalexina has been busy lately. She’s accomplished a lot. She has big plans. She may be a tad bit overextended. Dalexina needs to curl up in her favorite bed with her favorite blanket and get some rest with her better half.

Did I just call my dog my better half? So be it.

Toads

Dozens of spadefoot and Sonoran toads died in my area after the monsoon rains last night. They’d come out onto Old Spanish Trail, which has a speed limit of 50 miles per hour in most places and is becoming more heavily traveled as dense developments transform the area.

Fifty miles is way too fast, in my opinion. There’s too much wildlife out here to be tearing through the area at top speed. A fox crossed the road when we set out yesterday evening. Fortunately, we and other drivers stopped, and the fox passed safely.

But the toads were a different story. It was dark as we made our way home, which is the least safe time to be driving. It’s when wildlife is especially active and much less visible.

We shouldn’t have been out at all. I don’t like driving at night because of the danger it poses. I should say the danger I pose when driving in the dark. We had an errand we couldn’t do earlier in the day, so we made an exception.

Other drivers either weren’t aware of the toads or didn’t care about avoiding them. Or maybe they simply couldn’t react in time, especially when driving so fast. To be fair, there were a lot of toads on the road. It reminded me of summer nights in Oklahoma down by the Canadian River when I was a teenager. Hundreds of toads would gather on the gravel road next to the river. You couldn’t even move your car if you stayed too late, unless you didn’t care about killing them.

I’m having several dozen funerals in my heart today thinking about those toads whose last act was coming out to enjoy the rain.