Seam & Destroy @seam-and-destroy - Tumblr Blog

Time is the real currency of life

Not so long ago, the land encompassed by the Little Canaan Wildlife Management Area, which adjoins the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge, was a timbered-out, burned-over wasteland. Today, the WMA is in full-scale recovery and provides a home to a diverse collection of wildlife, including black bears, fishers, porcupines, northern goshawks, ruffed grouse, and saw-whet owls.

queergraffiti

“gays rule”

found at Gas Works Park in Seattle, Washington, USA

queensofnoize

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Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ by Loretta Lynn

A US Country classic from 1967

J x

vandaliatraveler

For those who’ve grown up in Appalachia, this gangly, bushy perennial herb with bright red stems, broad, crinkled leaves, and iridescent purple-blue berries needs no introduction. The young leaves and shoots of American pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) have historically been harvested by mountain folk in the spring and sauteed with bacon grease to make poke sallet. But the leaves and shoots must be properly cleaned and rinsed to remove their toxins. As pokeweed grows, it becomes increasingly more toxic - ingesting any part of the mature plant can cause respiratory failure and death in humans and livestock. The flowers and berries, which start out green and gradually turn purple-blue by late summer, have some wildlife value, but many people in the east consider the plant to be weedy. However, as it occasionally turns out, one person’s weed is another person’s ornamental - pokeweed has reportedly become a popular garden plant in Europe.

rustbeltjessie

Chuckie Betz, the last surviving member of Wisconsin’s Gay Liberation Front, tells all.

Everyone, stop what you’re doing right now and read this beautiful article about the life of Chuckie Betz, the last surviving member of Wisconsin’s Gay Liberation Front.

In fall 1971, Chuckie and two other GLF members (Angelo Peaches and Connie Worm) created the Radical Queens. The Queens had a very extensive manifesto, which included the threat “we’re angry queens that are out to get you. And when we do, we’re going to set your hair aflame and scratch your eyes out, fuckers!” However, Chuckie insists they weren’t a very formal or even organized group, and there was never a formal membership or charter. Chuckie is also very clear that he was never trying to be female, or even very effeminate, in his drag appearance.

“This was street drag, as they called it in New York,” said Chuckie. “It was genderfuck drag. Drag as terrorism. Drag as confrontation. We weren’t trying to be pretty. We weren’t trying to be women. We were trying to scare the fuck out of straight people. It was one part woman, one part man, some jewelry, some fur, and some glitter. Huge hats. High heels. Fur purses. Maybe a little acid here and there. We’d crash events dressed up like this, just to shake things up and leave people guessing. Was it worth it? Of course. It was worth every minute to be seen.”

rustbeltjessie

“The sounds of August—cicada screech, cricket chirrup, and that distant whistle. And the near-full Sturgeon Moon, her ruined, beautiful face, looking down.”

— from some random musings I wrote today, this might not even turn into anything but what it is (30 Days, 30 Lines Challenge / August 10)

vandaliatraveler

Speaking of pawpaw (Asimina triloba), Blake and I made a visit to Friendship Hill National Historic Site earlier this morning, where the only temperate member of the soursop family (Annonaceae) grows in abundance in the floodplain forest along the Monongahela River. Pawpaw is an attractive understory tree with lush-green, broadly-obovate foliage reminiscent of that of yellow buckeye; it adds an almost tropical look and feel to a riparian habitat. As an interesting aside, the larvae of the zebra swallowtail butterfly feed on the young leaves of pawpaw, whose naturally-occurring insecticidal chemicals are passed on in trace amounts through adulthood and makes the butterfly unpalatable to would-be predators.

Note: The edible fruit, which has a custard-like texture with notes of banana and mango when ripe, needs a few more weeks to mature and ripen. It turns yellow-brown when it’s ready to eat.

sosuperawesome

Botanical Knives

Pocono Mountains Forge on Etsy

See our #Etsy or #Botanical tags

farmcontent

POCONO MOUNTAINS FORGE I FUCKING SCREAMED

rockincountryblues

The young Dolly Parton

vandaliatraveler

North American mushroom hunters circle August on their calendars, when the sheer proliferation of fungi reaches its peak in the mid to late summer woods. In a healthy Appalachian forest, fungi emerge in a mind-boggling procession of forms and colors from every square inch of dead and living matter: patches of leaf litter, the mossy crooks and crannies of boulders, dead tree stumps, and nearly everything else fixed in place. And underlying all these magical fruiting bodies is an extraordinary network of filaments (”hyphae”) that binds all life in the forest, metabolizing proteins into soluble nitrates essential to plant life and even sending signals to divert resources to plants in distress: the Mycelium Network . Indeed, a forest cannot exist without fungi.

Above is just a small sampling of those extraordinary beings - not quite plant and not quite animal - that give life to our forests, photographed during a hike yesterday at Coopers Rock State Forest. Earthballs, chanterelles, corals, amanitas, boletes, and so on. Collectively, nature’s version of the world-wide web.

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As I emerged from alcoholism, I had to face down a terrifying question.

“While I was studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I spent my nights at the writers’ bars on Market Street, and I spent my days reading the other writers who had gotten drunk in that town before I’d gotten drunk there: John Berryman, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson. The myths of their drinking ran like subterranean rivers underneath all the drinking I was doing. Their drinking seemed like proof of their proximity to the terror and profundity of psychic darkness. As Patricia Highsmith argued, drinking allowed the artist to “see the truth, the simplicity and the primitive emotions once more.” Jack London wrote about the “imaginative” drunk for whom the “white light of alcohol” granted access to bleak truths about the human conditions — what he called “the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic.” Booze was illumination and consolation. It helped you see, and then it helped you survive the sight.

Denis Johnson’s short-story collection “Jesus’ Son” was our bible of beauty and damage, a hallucinated vision of how and where we lived. Half the book took place in Iowa City bars; its stories were full of farmhouse parties and hungover mornings. There was a dilapidated old house where people smoked pharmaceutical opium and said things like: “McInnes isn’t feeling too good today. I just shot him.” Johnson’s protagonist looked at the giant screen of a drive-in theater in the cornfields and saw a sacred vision: “The sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity.” He had mistaken the ordinary Iowa around us for something sacred, and drugs and booze had helped him do it. One of Johnson’s poems described being “just a poor mortal human having stumbled onto/the glen where the failed gods are drinking.” That’s what it felt like to drink in Iowa. This sense of affinity had been passed down like a half-glorious, half-absurd inheritance.

But if mythic intoxication was an inheritance, who had the right to claim it? It seemed like a family tree composed almost entirely of men. Women rarely got to strike the same roguish silhouettes. “When a woman drinks it’s as if an animal were drinking, or a child,” Marguerite Duras wrote. A woman’s drinking is often understood less as the necessary antidote to her own staggering wisdom and more as self-indulgence or melodrama, hysteria, an unpardonable affliction.”

kentuckwitch

Same photo, black and white.

vandaliatraveler

Appalachian Summer, 2018, Volume Thirty: Cardinal Flower. The most striking and beautiful of Appalachia’s summer Lobelias, cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis) is a tall perennial herb with a special appeal to hummingbirds. The plant’s radiant red, double-lipped flower forms a narrow, tubular corolla framed by three swooping petals on the bottom and two on the top; the corolla’s thin neck can only be penetrated by hummingbirds and butterflies. The incandescent flowers grow from a terminal spike at the end of the plant’s erect stem, whose lance-like, finely-toothed, and deeply-veined leaves form in an alternate pattern. Cardinal flower grows in the moist soil of stream banks, wet meadows, and seeps in full sun to part shade. The plant is easily grown as an ornamental in woodland gardens, but the soil must be kept constantly moist for it to thrive. As with the closely related Indian tobacco (Lobelia inflata), Native Americans smoked and chewed the plant’s leaves. They also made a medicinal tea from the roots to treat a variety of ailments, including stomach aches, venereal disease, and worms. However, all parts of the plant are poisonous and internal use is risky at best.