We do not know how the hell the Gay Pirate Plate was first acquired. This being a point of contention is actually pretty plot-relevant; the saga of the Gay Pirate Plate began with my grandmother and her sister, who, for some ungodly reason, both BADLY wanted the Gay Pirate Plate and believed it to be rightfully theirs.
I should back up, firstly, to establish: The Gay Pirate Plate is the cheapest, tackiest, ugliest plate in existence.
It is in no way a collector’s item. It is physically impossible for it to complement anyone’s decor, because the colors in it are garish. It’s just a ceramic plate with a gay pirate painted on it, and the painting is, this cannot be emphasized enough, extremely bad.
(How do we know the pirate is gay if he’s just posing on a plate? Listen. Fully 100% to stereotype, but he is. He is gay. There’s an energy. That pirate is a flaming homosexual. That pirate has sex with men and does it frequently. That pirate is fucking gay, all right, he just is.)
Anyway. The point is that this is an extremely cheap and ugly plate with a poorly-executed painting of pirate on it who is like a nine on the Kinsey scale.
My grandmother and her sister fought a blood feud over this plate for their entire lives. It would be on the wall in my grandma’s house, and then her sister would visit, and then it would be gone. She’d visit her sister and the plate would be on the wall and her sister would pretend it had always been there. She would steal it back, hang it up, and, when her sister visited, pretend it had always been there. This continued for DECADES.
When the sister died, the Gay Pirate Plate lived triumphantly in my grandmother’s house. And then my grandmother died. And my aunt, who had lived with her and been her carer throughout her life, rightfully inherited their house.
We visit my aunt after the funeral and stay with her for a week or two.
Me, my sister, and our dad. Her brother.
The three of us look at each other. We don’t say anything. We studiously avoid making eye contact with the Gay Pirate Plate mounted proud and ugly on the wall. We notice one another studiously avoiding looking at it. We notice one another noticing. We say nothing. We come to a silent consensus. We pack up to leave. We get in the van. Our aunt comes out to say goodbye. I loudly announce I need to use the restroom before we leave. She obviously stays outside to continue talking to my dad.
I take down the Gay Pirate Plate, stuff it under my oversized sweatshirt, go outside, and get in the van. She happily waves goodbye as we drive off.
Two days later my dad gets a phone call that opens with hysterical laughter and “You FUCKING ASSHOLE did you seriously STEAL THE PLATE–”
Anyway. The gay pirate plate lives in my dad’s house currently.
But he’s trying to get me and my sister out to visit him. And plate mounts are cheap.
The rules of Gay Pirate Plate are simple by the way.
The plate must be clearly and openly displayed in a place of great prominence whenever it is in your possession. When it is not in your possession, the display piece must remain in place. This is where you would put your gay pirate plate, IF YOU HAD ONE.
No active steps may be taken to prevent the theft of the Gay Pirate Plate. That goes against the spirit of the game, as does attempting to hide it.
The plate MUST be stolen and cannot be gifted or removed with permission. Should you witness attempted theft of the Gay Pirate Plate you are required to intervene and return it to its place.
Every time your sibling successfully absconds with the Gay Pirate Plate, you must respond with indignant fury, as if you have not also repeatedly and blatantly stolen the Gay Pirate Plate.
When I did wrestling, my grandpa showed up to most of my wrestling meets. Wrestling was fairly exciting, and it had a lot of action, so I understood why he did this.
When I did cross country, my grandpa showed up to most of the races. That made less sense to me, as cross country is not very exciting to watch. It is like NASCAR if the cars had an absolute maximum top speed of 12 MPH and could throw up. But my dad pointed out that watching long distance running was sort of like watching people volunteer to torture themselves, and if you were the right kind of deranged you could get really into that. Which led me to believe that my grandpa maybe just liked watching people run until they puked.
Then I did Academic Decathlon, which is standardized testing as a sport, and I cannot emphasize enough how boring it was to attend. We'd all go into big, monitored rooms and fill out scantrons and then go back and stress eat for an hour while the sheets got fed into an auto-grader. And my grandpa would show up to that. He'd sit in the hall outside the test room, and he'd wait for me to leave, and then he'd be very enthusiastic about however I said it went. If I said the test was hard, he'd go ah, so then imagine how hard it must have been hard for everyone else. That's good! And if I said it was easy, he'd go, ah, of course it was easy for you Babs. Of course it was. But for everyone else, surely, it was a challenge.
It was actually very sweet, albeit, quite confusing, because I didn't really see what he was getting out of it. And I just kind of left it as one of life's mysteries until the big state meet in my senior year, and then I did ask him, point blank, why he showed up when it was so clearly incredibly boring to watch. And he just looked at me confused because of course it was boring, but what did that matter?
"It's just where I'm supposed to be," he said. "I like being where I'm supposed to be."
My grandpa had always had this sort of alien quality to him that I didn't know how to describe as a kid. I still struggle with it as an adult. But I got part of it then, part of what made him feel so strange, and it was that he found meaning in duty. He liked having fun, but it wasn't why he existed. He wasn't trying to have fun. He was trying to do what he was supposed to do, be where he was supposed to be, and if there was any fun in it, that was just a sort of pleasant byproduct. But doing things for fun seemed as strange to him as sawing boards to make sawdust. Peeling oranges to get orange peel. There is enough work to be done. Fun will make itself along the way.
You would not believe how much I've envied him for that. To be blessed with such an incredible sense of purpose. The Boomers never found anything like it. They saw responsibility as a weight holding them down, an unwelcome burden, and they shrugged it off every chance they got. Now they're old, and the only thing I see them doing is amusing themselves to death. Stuffing their faces full of orange peels and sawdust.
I was still processing that when he gave me a good thump on the back, and asked how the test was. Hard, I said. Good, he replied. Then imagine how hard it must have been for everyone else!
---
My grandpa remained, frankly, in great health up until his late 70s. Even in his 60s, he could hike with me for 10 miles without really worrying about it, or throw a football twice the distance I could. He'd grown up on a farm, and it had made him strangely invincible.
But sometime in those later years, time caught up to him and it was. I don't know how to describe it. It was like he'd aged a year a decade, starting from age 50. Then, he started aging a decade a year, starting at 75. He got tired just walking around the neighborhood. He had to sit a lot. We could sit and talk pleasantly, but he wasn't the machine I'd known growing up.
Then that started falling too. He slept more. If you talked to him, he'd start to get tired just from thinking. He still had his moments. My grandma is frankly one of the few non-autistic people in my family, and she's deeply tied to her communities. She joined the Republicans when that meant being staunchly anti-racism. She participated in the Civil Rights movement, went to protests, took risks. She didn't want to leave the Republicans just because they were "temporarily in the wilderness."
But he talked her into it in a way I don't think anyone else could.
I graduated college in the middle of that. I knew he wasn't doing great, but my first year out, I just kind of jumped into my job and lost contact with the world around me. It's very easy to lose track of things in your first year of being an adult. I don't want to make excuses, I could have talked with him more but it was a fair year for being busy. I scrimped like a maniac to make an emergency fund, to build a safety net for myself, but after that first year I got a job offer in Utah that came with a frankly enormous pay bump. So I went. The downside was that moving was going to eat into my emergency fund.
And… it did. It took my wife longer than she thought to find a new job. The move cost more than I predicted. Things added up. And then, one day, I got a call from my dad, telling me that his dad wasn't doing well. My grandpa had only ever had one kidney (just born that way), and it had been slowing down as he aged. Then, from nowhere, it just turned off. He could've extended things with dialysis, but he was okay with just dying. He just wanted to do it gracefully.
He was only semi-lucid at the time of the call. My dad told me there was a good chance he wouldn't be lucid at all by the time I arrived. He was surrounded by his kids. His wife was there. He already had a small army of grandchildren present. My dad wanted me to know so it wouldn't blindside me, but he wanted me to also know that I didn't have to be there. That I wasn't expected to be there.
I wasn't a full time hire yet. I was still a contractor. I could have taken the time off, but it would've been unpaid, and my savings had been shrinking at an alarming rate since the move. I eyeballed it, and I listened, and I went: Okay. I won't go. I'll sit this one out. Thanks for letting me know.
I didn't feel great about it. But I made my choice. And then something really, really weird happened: My grandpa's kidney restarted. Better function than it had in years. He went unconscious, started dying, then woke up okay.
I was so relieved. We'd both been given a second chance.
I made it back to Arizona for the holidays that year. Grateful as hell for that. Got the chance to see everyone, but especially got the chance to see him. He was still old, and still tired, but he was fighting it extra hard. Made the effort to sit next to me and chat for a bit. I'd never seen him that unfiltered before. I think it was too tiring for him to think about what he was saying. He just had to say it.
When he got married to my grandma, her family was a mess. It's not exactly my story to talk about, but he came from a loving, caring, functional home, and she came from an impoverished, abusive, chaotic one, and he worked hard to show her what a better life could look like. And I'd made a similar choice with my wife. I cannot overstate how horrific the home she grew up in was. Her father belongs in prison. He's currently being prosecuted for it. And my grandpa just sat down with me and said that working with that background was hard, but it was worth it, and he was proud of me. That one day, I would be surrounded with as much love as he was at that moment, based on the choices I was making today.
My grandpa had the kind of autism where he didn't much like physical contact or shows of emotion. But he hugged me for almost a minute when I saw him last. I think he knew we wouldn't get another chance. I think I did too.
---
It was not totally unexpected. I called my dad frequently, and he'd give me updates on his dad every time. My dad retired early, and was able to do a lot with his dad in those final years. My grandpa never had to spend time in a nursing home because my dad was there anytime he needed help.
But he needed a fair amount of help.
He had some falls. Had his kidney slow down again, enough that he started getting major swelling in his legs. He got oddly anxious. His whole life, he'd been almost unnaturally calm and then at the end he started getting afraid.
One day, that kidney just went off. He went to the hospital. I got a call from my dad. Similar to the time before: He's likely to be unconscious when you get there. He has an army of people around him. You don't have to drop everything to be here. He's a very loved person.
And I took him up on it again. I'd rebuilt my safety net, but my dad was serious when he said that he didn't think my grandpa was ever going to wake up, that he probably wasn't conscious, that there just wasn't much to do. My dad was a former ER doc, he'd seen a lot of people die. It wasn't a mystic moment to him. If you lived your life right, the last day or two didn't matter a whole lot. Like the last twenty seconds of a test. He'd told me this many times. I thought I believed it. I went to bed, and tried ignoring how odd I felt. Repeated that the whole next day. It wasn't until I got a call from my dad the day after telling me that my grandpa had passed that I realized what the feeling was.
It was the feeling of not being where I was supposed to be.
---
For a fairly long time that was the story. My grandpa died surrounded by his loved ones. I could have been there. I wasn't. It was okay. I didn't feel okay about it, but it was okay, and the feelings were bound to match that eventually. I could wait for that eventually.
I waited a very long time. It turns out that eventually is not particularly fast.
I thought about it a lot. There was a lesson in it, you know? Sometimes you don't get do-overs. Sometimes, being right isn't enough. Sometimes, intellectualizing doesn't work. These were all important things to learn. I think my grandpa would be proud to see me learn them. I hoped at least. And coped.
Then, around a year ago, my job gave me a chance to do a business trip to Germany.
Apparently, the normal thing to do on business trips is to visit a lot of restaurants. But the trip was for education purposes at a conference, and the conference was an intensely social experience, and by the time it ended every day I didn't want to see another human for several hours. So I wound up going to the corner grocery store and buying snacks I could hide in my hotel room so that I would not need to leave for dinner. I could stay in and snack and recover from the horrifying ordeal of interacting with academics.
It turns out that fancy cheese is quite cheap in Germany. Cheap enough for me to buy several large wedges of gorgonzola. Cheap enough for me to get back to my hotel room after one particularly strange day of feeling both oversocialized from the conference, and undersocialized from the language barrier, and eat all the cheese in one sitting. Maybe I was also eating some grief away too. I don't know.
Then I fell asleep.
I truly don't remember the dream very well. I remember running, and it feeling like I was running at freeway speeds. I ran all the way down Utah, then back to Arizona, then into a hospital, and I pressed a button, and the elevator went to a floor, and it opened, and there, predictably, was my grandpa.
I don't know what I'd expected in a hospital, but I hadn't expected to see him.
My grandpa had this thing in real life, where he seemed to anchor the world. I often have this sort of waking-dreaming feeling, and it always went away around him. Like the dream either ended, or at least became his dream. And it felt like that there. All the fuzzy logic of running to Utah and going to a floor that was entirely just one man's hospital room just went out the window.
I asked him something along the lines of Where is everyone else? and he answered something along the lines of Already gone. It's just you and me now, and I am tired of sitting in this bed.
So I picked him up, which I could never have managed in real life, and I carried him into the elevator, and we left the hospital to go walk along a canal. I've had a lot of important talks along canals. They're part of my internal iconography at this point.
And we just talked. I talked with him about how proud I was of him for powering through those last months, and how much his goodbye had meant to me, and how much I was gonna miss him, and how much I wanted to never feel like I had missed my chance to be where I was supposed to be, ever again, and he listened, because he was always good at that, and at some point I stopped and I said that I didn't know what else to say but that I didn't want it to stop.
And he said, very kindly, that he was glad he'd had a chance to put all of those last trailing emotions to rest, but that he was also ready for me to put him down. And he gestured at the canal for that too. There's some deep symbolism in the brain, tying the flow of rivers to the everafter.
So I walked down some stairs carved into the concrete walls of the canal, and I lowered him in, and I watched him drift down the canal until he went out of sight. And when I woke up my pillow was wet with tears. I actually don't think I've cried that hard at any other point in my adult life. It was like all of my guilt and shame and grief was moved through in one night. In my head, I know that it was the cheese. But in my heart, somehow, I got my chance to say goodbye for real. I got my second, second chance. I don't know if I even deserved the first one.
But I have tried very, very hard to pay it back. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I'm supposed to be doing, where I'm supposed to be doing it. Trying to be like Hank.
And while it has not gone perfect, I do have a lot of time left to learn.
Thanks for reading! This was made a response to this post which I made while I was very sleep deprived.
Another story about Grandpa Hank for those interested.
A fictional piece I wrote shortly after his death.
“It’s funny,” I told Flewin. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.”
The husband was writing an article on classic video game records, was surprised to find out that holding the Tetris record is a bit of a big deal, and mentions how good his wife is at it.
The guy he’s talking to mentions that the record is 327, way lower than his wifes usual scores of 500-600.
They travel to a tournament, and she goes to do her attempt. Just after she beats 327, and is climbing higher, a judge brings up to the husband that the specific version she’s playing actually has a different record of 545.
She overhears that she needs to beat 500-something, and keeps going, setting the record at 841.
There was a decent but ultimately forgettable fantasy novel I read a long time ago that had a single moment that stuck with me.
The protagonist has just won the world famous sword fighting competition in the big, rich capital and is talking to his mentor, and says something about being the best swordsman in the world. The mentor frowns and tells him that no, he isn't. He is the best swordsman out of the people that could afford to show up to this tournament. There could be a mercenary way out in the mountains, patrolling a snow encrusted fort's walls that could kick his ass and there was no way to know until he was already losing to the guy.
I think about that a lot, and how for every apparently dominant competitor, there might be a fucking ronin out there somewhere capable of destroying them.
today I am making my great-grandmother’s oatmeal raisin cookie recipe. they’re my favorite cookies in the world, and as a kid they lead to me being immeasurably disappointed by every other oatmeal raisin cookie I ever had when I discovered that they weren’t the same. I was given this by my mom, who was given this by her mom, who was given this by her mom; the recipe calls for margarine, which means the current version passed down on recipe cards probably can’t go more than another generation back just because margarine changed recipes due to WWII rationing here—but it might.
I have another cookie recipe from my grandparents on my other side; my grammy’s “chewy ooie gooey” chocolate chip cookies. I don’t try to make these at home as often; they aren’t the same if they aren’t in the kitchen she always made them with us in, and she’s sold that house now. maybe I’ll try again sometime.
I wonder how far that recipe goes back; I wonder if it matters.
the other day I read about bread. there’s evidence that humans were making leavened bread, baking, long before we invented agriculture, or writing, or “society” as humanity understands it now. I wonder if their grandmothers and mothers and great-grandmothers taught them how to do that, too, generations on generations. I wonder if baking is one of the most fundamental ways humans express love we have, built into us the same way as all the others.
I wonder how many other families have cookie recipes that lead to the kids getting immeasurably disappointed when they realize it’s not quite the same when you get it anywhere else, and use margarine and a lot of brown sugar and the collective wisdom of at least three generations. and I wonder how many feel lost when a house is sold.
you know what, just for you: the cookie recipe in question:
great gigi's oatmeal raisin cookies - makes around 5 dozen cookies
1 cup margarine (make sure it’s margarine, so 80% fat, and not butter or vegetable oil spread with a lower fat content!)
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda (possibly more? they keep on turning out flat for me and this may be the culprit.)
3 cups quick cooking oats
1 cup raisins
1/2 cup crushed pecans
steps:
1. preheat the oven to 350.
2. mix margarine, sugars, egg, and vanilla with an electric mixer until smooth.
3. add flour, salt, baking soda, oatmeal and pecans, mix.
4. stir in the raisins (you don't use the mixer for this, though you can)
5. drop rounded tablespoons of dough onto cookie sheets (a little smaller than a ping-pong ball)
6. bake for 9-10 minutes. do not cook until brown - the middle will look raw and that's correct. instead, cook until the edges are just barely pale tan. if you cook until the edges are brown you've overcooked them. this is the hard part of the recipe for people so i've bolded it.
7. cool on the cookie sheet for a few minutes, then, once they've firmed up a bit more, transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling. they will finish cooking like this.
8. eat some cookies, then store the rest in ziplock bags and freeze them. these cookies are delicious frozen and last a good long while in the freezer so don't be afraid to freeze a lot of them!
above is a picture of what the finished cookies look like! they’re very delicious, and much more moist than a lot of oatmeal cookies.
In archeology there are artifacts, which are items made or modified by humans, but there are also manuports, which haven't been modified but are found far from any possible origin point and there's no explanation besides somebody carried it there. Manuports include things like stones, fossils, and seashells, and have been found in deposits as much as three million years old.
So yeah, apparently the oldest human activity for which we have evidence is Picking Up Cool Rocks.
One beloved summer ritual I've had for years was taking my various summer guests on the picturesque walk up the hill, through the woods and cow pastures, to go buy a cheese wheel at the small farm on the plateau. But in early June I went by myself and learnt that there would be no cheese this summer; the farm owners just had a baby. Cheesemaking is only part of their activity and as they're understandably very busy now, they've decided to pause this part of the operation for the time being.
I've been re-reading Camus to cope with this. "You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit.” Yes. I've gone on this walk up the hill many times since, because the body remembers the pattern even as the world rescinds its offerings. I climb the hill because I used to. I climb it because unanswered prayer is still prayer. Some part of me knows I shouldn't treat a wheel of cheese like it's the divine Logos withdrawn from the material plane, but I find meaning in continuing the ritual in full awareness of its futility. "The absurd man takes no refuge in the illusions of hope; but he is not resigned. He continues."
“Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent."
Same. This is where my absurd condition crystallises. I trudge back down the hill, cheeseless, not deluded, not desperate, but conscious.
Then I go up again.
"Nostalgia is stronger here than knowledge. Reason is an instrument of thought and not thought itself. Above all, a man’s thought is his nostalgia."
Reason tells me they've had a baby. Nostalgia whispers that the cheese remains. It's not a belief, just the memory of hope in a world emptied of its promise.
“There is so much stubborn hope in a human heart.”
I still hope they might start making cheese again in September.
In the meantime, I have tried to convert my summer guests—friends and relatives—to the belief that the rite is sacred because it outlasts meaning; they reacted with varying degrees of metaphysical commitment. When I said we should now walk to the cheese farm not in expectation of cheese, but in lucid confrontation with its absence, my aunt pointed out that there are other farms; a friend accused me of weaponising philosophy against reasonable decision-making again. I understand that you can't convince everyone. You can only climb your hill, and carry your truth. I tried to explain it better to other guests, to say that we do not resign ourselves, or naively hope; we walk past hope then choose to keep walking, not toward meaning but through its ruins.
Cousin: "What if I actually want to buy cheese?"
Then you are not ready.
But you will be.
Until then, I will climb for both of us.
Then my best friend brought me a cheese (the "same" cheese) that she'd bought from another farm on her way to my place. It was really nice of her, even though it violated the covenant of absence. We ate some of it, had a sunny picnic in the pasture, and I quietly observed her as she began to perceive the problem. She could taste it. This cheese was philosophically inert. It lived outside the myth, content just to be edible. It was here, it was good, and incapable of signifying.
She told me that her first reaction upon learning about my existential cheese pilgrimage was to think I needed a puzzle feeder, but now she was beginning to see my point—she said this in the weary tone of someone who realises that the bit has, regrettably, achieved structural coherence and now demands to be treated as a belief system.
She said, "I'm starting to regret having brought that cheese."
That's because you committed an act of metaphysical substitution.
"That’s exactly what I thought you’d say."
😔 I just mean you tried to replace the sign with the thing itself.
"I brought cheese to a picnic."
And it's good cheese! With bad ontology. It's just pure referent. The human spirit craves a cheese that can gesture beyond itself; or else it can't feed anything but hunger.
She admitted that I had a point. Well, to be exact she said this sentence shouldn't exist, but she accepted that she now lived in a world where it is, somehow, true, and she was ready to contemplate its implications.
Which meant going up the hill. To the cheeseless farm.
"So—you don't want cheese anymore?"
No, I want it. That's what makes it absurd.
“The absurd man catches sight of a transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given (except cheese) and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.”
She walked up the hill with me, interested in the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation. She was trying to understand. We talked about how Camus said that the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols.
Friend: "The idol is the baby?"
Right; that makes sense. And the parents are the priests.
"That's ridiculous but coherent. The cheese is the lamb. Sacrificed to absorb disruption."
Exactly. The cheese was the most innocent being in this scenario, the most marginal and voiceless. It had to die. Its makers chose procreation over fermentation (which some would argue produces more lasting cultures.)
"So we're sure there won't be cheese at the end of our walk?"
Quite certain.
"And we're climbing anyway."
I saw it—her thoughtful nod. A crack in her worldview where cheese must be the answer rather than the question. She had touched the rind of the absurd.
We reached the farm, but didn't knock at the door. We stood outside near the cheese cellar like Vladimir and Estragon. The cows looked at us peaceably. The wind smelled like fresh hay. The wildflowers buzzed faintly with truth.
"The absurd is born of this confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."
Friend: "So we're... visiting the absence of cheese. Of meaning."
Yes!
"And we accept it?"
We don’t just accept it. We follow the contours of meaninglessness until they resemble a path.
"It is during that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn."
#i might be missing something but that looks very fine grained and thoroughly oxodized #so like #ferruginous mudstone #you used to be a floodplain maybe
I'm applying to field tech positions right now and I was wondering how to phrase my level of physical fitness for the cover letter.Because I'm out of shape and i have excersise induced asthma but historically i have been athletic track cross country fencing and more and we did a small field of STPs at my field school and i was slow but not the slowest by far.
I’m not sure if I have a good answer for this. Anyone? I am also not very fit, but I haven’t had to exert myself in the field in a while. Most of what I do these days is archaeological monitoring, which is a lot of standing around. Best of luck. There is a job out there for you!
As long as you are able to do the work I would not mention it in the cover letter. Since you said you kept up with everyone else at your field school you should be perfectly fine.
What you could do if you still have doubts is observe the speed of your colleagues on your first contract and then if you notice that you are not keeping up by far (I would expect a beginner to be slower, so it's normal if you're a bit behind) you should tell your supervisor what you said above and that you will work on it (if you are able). Do not forget that "speed" comes from technique in most cases. For example, when you observe your more experienced colleagues, pay attention to which arm they use and I can guarantee you that most of them are ambidextrous with all their main tools so they can work continuously by switching arms.
Frillies love being up high and feel safe there. They also love biting and general agression. The third and most important aspect of their nature is that they're very very very dumb.
These three things combine into a situation where the frillie goes "hey fuck off mate, hey fuck off! Hey I wanna be tall so I'm not scared why is my tree running away. Come back tree! But the guy can Fuck off! gotta climb the tree! WHOA THERES A GUY IN MY TREE??? FUCK OFF!!!"
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