February 2025

For What It's Worth

Posted February 24, 2025 at 8:30pm

Like a lot of us in the USA, I’m pissed about multitudes of stuff and I need to holler about it for a minute into the internet void, because the people who need to hear it aren’t listening. I know a lot of this is highly-specific to my region and lived experience, but I hope somebody reads this and can nod along.

A distrust of politicians and businessmen is ingrained into your very core if you are Appalachian. We do not trust them, because we’ve been hurt by them in the (not-so-distant) past. They exploit our labor, destroy our mountains, indebt us to their coal towns, and seek to divide us by stoking racial division. They then point at us as the problem—you know, you wouldn’t be poor if you worked harder; being rich is a virtue! So, there must be something inherently wrong with you that you’re not. “It’s your own fault that you’re struggling,” is the implicit thesis statement of a certain veep’s book: one who is from suburban Ohio when he wants to run for office, and rural Kentucky when he wants sympathy points.

The distrust of these authority figures runs deep. Our economies and educational attainment rates suffer because of decades of pointed policymaking. The coal companies that tore our green hills asunder and turned our waters black were active not long ago; I know many people whose grandparents or great-grandparents had black lung, emphysema, or some sort of ailment from working those mines. We know that the devil wears a suit and tie.

So, I do not know why THEE slimiest, carpetbagging, fork-tongued, city-slicking New York conman who lies as easy as he breathes and makes promises as empty as his head is the exception to this rule.

We should know better.

(And, I mean, I do know why a little bit. It’s combination of at least two -isms and three -phobias.)

The most frustrating part of it all is the role of religion in all of this. Appalachia is predominantly Christian. To be raised on the teachings of Jesus—love thy neighbor, show mercy and forgiveness, do unto others as you would have done unto you—and then to have your friends, family, and neighbors vote in a way that does not reflect those values you were jointly raised to believe is head-spinning. I was raised to love others, help the needy, and show compassion; and now that the way I vote does not align with your personal politics, you act like I’m in the wrong? Telling me that empathy is a sin, even? And the Appalachians who cover their houses in signs and flags of their candidate; how is that not making your home a shrine to a false idol? When and why did we, the mountain folk who pride ourselves on being rich in love even if we’re poor in money, take to this prosperity gospel?

All of this past month has been exhausting—new horrors every day. But by God, the part of it that keeps my teeth gritted and hands clenched, white-knuckled ‘til my bones ache: it’s the hypocrisy.

Thanks for bearing with me. I've been thinking a lot about protest folk from the 1960s, so here’s some songs for you. I think they’re relevant.

✦ "For What It's Worth", Buffalo Springfield
✦ "The Sound of Silence", Simon & Garfunkel
✦ "Paradise", John Prine

Chey

Dust Motes

Posted February 10, 2025 at 11:00pm

There's an extremely specific feeling I experience about once a month.

Sometimes, when driving around or just out in the world under the big, blue sky—I feel small. Suddenly and out of nowhere.

There’s something about seeing the endless expanse of blue of a cloudless sky, stretching out forever until it kisses the horizon that just makes me feel tiny. . It’ll hit me, and I’m suddenly aware of the scale of things. How the Earth is SO big that its curves are imperceivable to us on the ground. How we have to defy gravity to get a sense of that curve and the planet’s largeness. That there are millions of other people just beyond that imperceivable edge. How in the state I live in, it would take half a day to drive from its eastern side to the western side, and that already feels so big—and that somehow, the Earth is even bigger than that.

And beyond that blueness above us is the inky darkness of the rest of the universe, occasionally peppered by stars like our Sun and rocks like the one we’re standing on, also spinning and hurtling through space at thousands of miles an hour. How that space is, truly, space; so much of it doesn’t have anything in it. And it stretches on, as far as we know, for infinity. And infinity is already a hard concept to tackle. Our brains are built in a way that we struggle to visualize big numbers, like the multiple zeroes of a billionaire’s bank account. All of it, suddenly and simultaneously, makes me feel impossibly small.

I think if other folks also experienced this feeling about once a month, we’d probably be better off as a species. Astronauts probably know what I mean.

I am not a paragon of goodness. I’ve been selfish before; most people have. But that smallness makes me feel two things: the importance of kindness and empathy and thoughtfulness… as well as painfully aware about how much we do on a global scale doesn’t matter. We could be hit by a meteor, swallowed by an earthquake, flooded out, ice-aged—vaporized by aliens from outer space, I don’t know. Why would I want my ‘leaders’ to waste so much time and energy on “othering” people to hurt them, when what I really care about is my well-being, and the well-being of my neighbor? That she and her children are fed, and are free to laugh and play and grow. That he has somewhere safe and warm to sleep at night. That they (singular! and plural!) are free to be whoever they want to be. And then that their neighbors are also fed/safe/happy/free. Other critters don’t seem to struggle with altruism and get by just fine without the concept of an “economy” or whatever.

Ultimately, we’re little blips in time and on Earth’s surface. If we raze her to the ground, the dirt will still be there orbiting the sun (but, hopefully, other plants and animals will take over and take care of her better than we did). The world can be terrible, but often the worst part is how we treat the world. So that sense of smallness is always a reminder to me to just be good to people, and to fight for that goodness if need be.

Miscellaneous Stuff I Had Open While I Wrote:

✦ The Overview Effect (required reading, I think)
✦ Why big numbers break our brains
✦ Altruism (biology)
✦ Valley of the Drums

Cheers,
Chey

Cougar Huntin'

Posted February 3, 2025 at 11:00pm

I went to a curiosities expo in a city near me recently. My partner and I went for the first time several years ago (2021, I think?) and have been going every year since.

We usually wind up hauling home a ton of art and/or trinkets, but we really go hoping to find one thing…

A taxidermized mountain lion.

Discussion of taxidermy / some death below. Scroll ‘til you see the little bee+flower divider below to skip it and read about what I bought instead—nothing gruesome!

So, normally I’m a bit skeeved out by taxidermy. According to the expo, they take care to make sure their vendors are using only ethically sourced critters, which makes me feel a little better (even if I have a little smidgen of doubt that every vendor is being totally honest about their sourcing). In a way, it’s also kind of a weird, sentimental memento mori. These critters that would normally be forgotten to time, carefully preserved for someone to keep appreciating in their home, even if its in a weird way I don’t totally understand the appeal of. At the same time, I don’t know if I’d appreciate having my former body displayed after death? But then again, I’m not using it anymore, so… anyway, I have a lot of conflicting feelings about this.

On to the mountain lion.

Our first year at the expo, I hadn’t been out of college very long and was still struggling to be an adult on her own, paying taxes, making a budget, etc., etc. (read: not much money). But we turned a corner and there was the motherlode of mammalian specimens, stuffed and/or mounted. A giraffe, antelope, a skunk, lots of possums and squirrels—all of them an extravagant décor choice for a home, but somehow not as extravagant as the one on the very end.

So, we looked at this mountain lion from a distance. We chuckled to ourselves a little bit; “What kind of person would put a cougar in their house? Or an apartment even? Oh my God, imagine if guests come over and it’s just on your couch. If we bought a house, we’d keep it in the guest room… or move it into the guest room overnight to prank friends/family.” We walked up to it to get a better look… it wasn’t in perfect condition, but maybe it’s been around for a few years. We then look at the price tag. It’s $750 USD.

Obviously, $750 is a lot of money. It was definitely money we didn’t have. But, we were kind of stunned by the price. We kept saying to each other, doesn’t that sound like a reasonable price for a mountain lion? I mean, what’s the typical going price for a cougar? You’d think it’d be quite a bit more for a major North American apex predator… we left the expo, but we kept thinking about it on the way home. And a week later. And by the time the next expo rolled around.

Now, we’re relatively financial stable. We own a home, we keep a careful budget, and we can set aside a bit of funding for large, reasonable purchases like furniture. Or large, kind-of-stupid purchases like a literal mountain lion. So, with that earmarked, we keep going back to the expo on cougar patrol, in the hope we’ll find another $750 mountain lion. So far, no dice. Just a $1500 one a few years back (in better condition… but whew! double the price, absolutely not). But, it’s been a fun thing to be on the lookout for while we peruse art from the other vendors. I’m trying to convince my partner to let me make us ball caps that say Cougar Huntin’ on them for us to wear next year.

Speaking of, here’s some of the folks we bought from. I’ll try to link directly to the pieces we bought; I think they’re pretty cool!

✦ Annabelle Lewis. So many lovely pieces, but a mini print called "Stargazer" stopped me in my tracks. I'm excited to put it on my living room curio shelf!

✦ Bonespell. Etsy shop is currently on hiatus, but I bought a pretty print of moths! Home office, maybe? (Warning: Instagram link)

✦ Lauren Marx. My partner grabbed a few postcards; and I got this beautiful unicorn with strawberries print called "Sweet Abundance." Lots of places I could fit it; still undecided!

✦ Callie Barbas. I had choice paralysis at the expo, but I plan to grab something online soon! I need to limit myself, but I especially love the linocut prints; Moon Calendars, The Unicorn, Toad+Clover, and lots of the botanical prints.

✦ I also bought a small copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own because I want to get back into my childhood habit of absolutely voracious reading, and I’m concerned that its contents might be very pertinent in the US in the coming year.

Cheers,
Chey