Fort Canning Tree Tunnel, Singapore ( Via )

lonely people are like nooooo i love the silence i love being by myself and then you ask them how their day has been and they tear up a bit

I will never stop talking about how messed up it is that in North America, short, mown grass surfaces in outdoor urban/suburban environments are seen everywhere and feel right, intuitive, and natural, when plant communities that could be described as "low grassy turf" straight-up did not exist in most of North America prior to European colonization.

Everywhere millions of acres of neglected curbs, swaths of ground separating fast food places or gas stations, spaces surrounding churches, roadsides, ditches, parks, yards, are maintained using carbon-emitting machinery as flat grass surfaces for reasons so obvious to us, we've forgotten them.

It is a labor-intensive, wasteful, effortful ritual of contempt and neglect for the land. A space of mowed grass between a gas station and a road is so utterly empty, so utterly identical to every other space of mowed grass, that the human mind doesn't even process it as "something," it's just space. No one would rest here, no one would sit here, no one uses this space, there is nothing beautiful or life-giving or important or worthy of conscious register here. It may not even occur to the mind that there is "something" in between the gas station and the road.

So many thousands and thousands of acres of space are nothingified like this. Even just a single square foot of space can be so RICH and exploding with life, if you love it. If you tend to it and give it your heart. How much land is never glanced at, hardly walked upon, except to have a lawn mower driven over it. How much life-giving habitat razed into a cruel, butchered parody of a murkily remembered European landscape.

Think how priceless a tiny little garden, a patch of sunbeams in a forest, a small trickle of stream, a single mossy log, can be! A person in communion with nature can love a place by the square inch! No place on Earth ever was "nothing!"

But all around me I see the flat carpets maintained by machines. I see so many precious square inches of Earth ignored and treated as nothing instead of loved and listened to closely and cared for.

How many strawberries could have grown here? How many little mushrooms could have popped out of this soil? How many kinds of lichen and moss could have fit on a medium-size boulder here, before it was all destroyed and made into nothing but a surface to be run over with a lawn mower?

Me, after forgetting to cut the top off an onion before dicing it: “Aw dammit”

The Gordon Ramsey that lives in my head: “Don’t worry there, this mistake isn’t going to ruin anything. No need to be too hard on yourself”

Me: “Wow, that’s…not what I was expecting”

Gordon: “Of course, you ought to know by now that I don’t shout at cooks just to do so. I do it because the people in hit television show Kitchen Nightmares are putting their services out into the public and claim to be good enough to have the title of head chef. You’re just some guy in your twenties making beef stroganoff for yourself and your roommate. I’m kind of a dick, yeah, but I’m not gonna scream at you for a minor mistake like this”

Me: “Oh….well…thanks”

Gordon: “You’re welcome…cunt…”

No they're right actually and they should say it.

The lefts descent into obsession with identity politics means all these boys get from these spaces is essentially being told they're inherently monstrous or will grow up to be so.

12 year old boys are not evil. They're children. And they're susceptible to manipulation from these fucks on the right who have sadly correctly identified that large swathes of the left will ignore and shun them. People turn to extremist factions when they feel ignored and dehumanised.

A 12 year old boy online isn't going to be able to read the nuances in your uber ironic but not really actually ironic "all white men are inherently trash" hot takes. They're going to take that at face value because they're 12 and that's what 12 year olds do. And they're going to feel angry, rejected and judged by your words. And then fucks like Andrew Tate get to swoop in and tell them that you're wrong and start the ball rolling on that indoctrination.

If you're an adult leftist and you honestly think teenage boys possess the wherewithal to purposefully follow dangerous Misogynists like Andrew Tate in order to "preserve their own privilege long term" then I'm sorry to say you're too far gone and I'd suggest logging off and actually trying to have a conversation with a kid who is vulnerable to the grooming of these uber misogynists and treat them as a human being instead of a reflection of an identity you've boxed them into.

You may tick more diversity boxes but you are still the adult. Start acting like it.

by pierreportolano

Art by Ma-ko

Saint Olga by Milhail Nesterov

Oil on canvas, (1892-1893)

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)

Untitled, 1959

Gelatin silver print

date idea; you and me in a immersive monet exhibition