S Eli Johnson

writer, bookbinder, vegetable breeding hobbyist, and SFF enthusiast. appalachian and queer. all pronouns good. please ask me about Asimina triloba: there's so much I want to tell you about North America's largest native species of fruit. (banner photo: "They Watch the Moon" by Trevor Paglen)

[memewhore]

[ramdomcitizen]

A dad joke and a haïku? What a treat.

[suburbanscrimshaw]

[garadinervi]

Octavia E. Butler, Notes on writing, (‘Use detail…’), ca. 1970-1995 [The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA. © Estate of Octavia E. Butler]

[prokopetz]

I think those goofy little mugs with the handle and all that are made up to vaguely resemble mason jars actually make me angry. Like, you don't drink out of a jar for the aesthetic – you drink out of a jar because you don't own a stein and it was the first vaguely stein-shaped container you could lay hands on. If your drinking jar doesn't have a crudely hand-written label reading "RELISH" stuck to the side in spite of the fact that it hasn't contained actual relish in nearly four years because it turns out that the adhesive is waterproof and scraping it off feels too much like work, you're doing it wrong.

[churchrummagesale]

Small town summer - a strange little half abandoned rural town in North Carolina captured on a broken point and shoot camera

[drownedinmoonlight]

Curved sticks laid around a river boulder. Took longer to find the sticks than to make the work. Woody creek, Colorado. 16 September 2006. © Andy Goldsworthy

[ymutate]

Farm in Winter by Moonlight by Peter Sculthorpe (American, b. 1948), oil on canvas, 72.25 x 71.5 in

[esspurrr]

[darkearthsuggestions]

Letters from the Sun by lorwell

The sun writes a letter to its absent child.

Hey guys! If you have a minute, I would love it if you guys checked out this piece of interactive fiction I’ve written from the point of view of the sun. Let me know what you think! 

[tunashei]

Caves are weirder and more varied than you think

[weaselle]

my followers can have some cave pics, as a treat

[letterful]

Octavia Butler’s list of concepts that are sexy, via LA Review.

[fraise-impossible]

12/8/22: decomposing deer vertebrae harboring algal growth.

[derangedrhythms]

Gregory Orr, from ‘Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence’

[leviathan-supersystem]

I get how the whole "listening to music as a dick-measuring contest for who can listen to the most obscure band" thing can get grating sometimes but I don't think people realize just how vital that phenomenon is for new up and coming bands to get a foot in the door. it's understandable to be annoyed by hipsterism but unless you want all music to be industry plants and former child stars you're just going to have to accept it as part of the social ecosystem.

[leviathan-supersystem]

most of your friends probably won't go around hyping up your amateurish self-released bandcamp project, but you know who will? the most insufferable hipster jackass you'll ever meet.

[leviathan-supersystem]

[your best friend playing your music in front of someone else]: yeah haha this is my friend's band... i know it's kinda weird and rough around the edges but i'm kinda into it... if you're not tho i'll turn it off.

[pretentious music guy you've never met before playing your music in front of someone else]: yeah so i found this on bandcamp and it completely blew me away, no one is making music like this today, it's so raw and experimental and interesting, i can't believe they only have 3 listeners on spotify, they're brilliant, frankly if you don't like this music you should kill yourself,

[botaniqueer]

More grafting practice! Featuring the pepper and hibiscus!

My plans for the season assuming I don’t get executive dysfunction like last year are to try and graft together multi-variety plants to try and safe space while having more cultivars of things like tomatoes and tomatillos and peppers.

Idk if Crassulacaea can be grafted or if they want to callus and root too quickly at any hint of injury bc they’re xerophytes, but I’m seeing if I can try and graft my favorite Cotyledon orbiculata onto the more vigorous one.

I love how in gardening you can do Mad Science but it’s just accepted practice to chop stuff apart and sometimes graft em back together! Plants are so weird.

[boykeats]

Rural Boys Watch The Apocalypse (rough draft) by Keaton Michael

[bettsfic]

IT'S PUBLICATION DAY!

it's finally here! the short story i never thought would get published because it's long and it's about bank robberies and anime and nearly unfathomable grief. but it's my favorite thing i've ever written and normally i'm very critical of my original work but i'm so proud of this one, and i'm so happy it found a good home. it was important to me to find a place that would appreciate its length and would also make it available for free, because mostly i just want people to be able to read it. here's the opening paragraph!

I first met Caleb Allen at the twenty-four-hour Kroger where he stocked shelves third shift. He was only twenty-one and had failed out of college the year before because he found it beneath him and told me “the services rendered were not worth the costs incurred.” I was an insomniac, and near nightly went to Kroger at three in the morning to meander among the concentrated fruit juices and cans of condensed soup, under fluorescent lights that tricked me into believing I should be awake anyway. I often found Caleb on his knees, deftly tugging items to the front of the shelf, face-forward, while he sang old blues songs and occasionally broke into bursts of air trumpet. He was the only living thing in a dead place. Over several months we got to know one another, me stuffing roast chicken and Oreos into my basket, him trudging along beside me, telling me fish facts, monologuing about Marxism. He was always chewing gum, snapping it between his teeth, blowing bubbles. I found him annoying and told him so, frequently, yet he was never deterred, probably because I sought him out every time I showed up, pajama-clad and melancholic, begging for a distraction. When one of my tellers quit to tend to her vintage typewriter eBay store full-time, I suggested that Caleb apply for her position.

you can read the rest at the write launch!