I lived near Asheville for a year, and visited a bunch of times. On Fridays there was usually a big drum circle in the center of town near the bus stop. I thought they were embarrassing--I was cringe back then. I remember the sound of it coming up out of this big concrete basin that looked depressing except on Fridays when it was stuffed with the drummers who ran a spectrum of rich city kids enjoying college away from their stifling parents to barefoot, legitimate artists who smelled like shitty weed. The whole town would basically close down at like 8 PM.

Once I had an assignment from uni to interview someone doing public art, so I tried to get one with some folk musicians who played on the street in the evenings. They ignored me for hours and I remember being royally pissed at them before leaving as the shop lights started going off at 7:30. The street I sat on for all that time had surprisingly nice-looking cobblestones for some reason.

It hit me today that it's gone. Maybe the streets will be fixed, maybe some of the cooler barefoot drummers will still meet there on Fridays, maybe those fucking washboard playing douchebags are still in a band, I don't know, I haven't been there in a decade. But at least a couple weeks ago I could almost pretend that Asheville is exactly the way I remember it being.

Now I understand that those memories are of something dead, to get mulched into the same layer of mental soil as everything else I know is gone. It'll get flattened with the rest as I put new memories on top, pulped into the same stuff as the trees my neighbor cut down so he could have a big green lawn, the technicolor coral I saw when I went snorkeling at the great barrier reef as a kid, the cigarette-smoke-wreathed couple with missing teeth that I saw in Rome whose now-empty home is part of a tourist "experience," the tiny school that I went to where you got in trouble for saying "the R word" which has been closed down by a dipshit senator looking to make the world worse for a few bucks more, and the blinking cloud of fireflies over the empty fields that I used to see driving home from nighttime events hosted there. They are beautiful memories, and I feel like I need to keep them beautiful in a way that is very much unlike what has become of them.

This funky-looking snake is the Tentacled Snake

To answer your question, the tentacles are little sensory organs. They hunt fish underwater, so maybe they help? They have a better tool than those tentacles for hunting fish, though, and it's behavioral.

For context, fish have a few extremely quick "starts" that are deeply embedded instinctive responses to threats. They happen quicker than a larger animal can really even think, and they start with a specific bend of the body. The most studied (and the most common I think?) is the "C-start", so named because it involves the fish bending its body into a C-shape away from a threat before they start swimming away.

Snakes have quick predatory reflexes, but a fish small enough for them to eat will be quicker. To overcome this fact, tentacled snakes have an incredibly simple and elegant trick.

To put it simply, the snake "herds" the fish into its mouth. It will slide in alongside the fish out of striking range, and suddenly flick a few vertebrae down the length of its body, on the opposite side of the fish from where the snake's head is. When the fish then instinctively "c-starts" away from the movement, it flees directly into the snake's waiting mouth.

Yes, this snake abuses the fish's aggro mechanics for maximum farm efficiency

(I don't know what level of abstraction still needs a CW tbh sorry)

On the twentieth of the Red-flower Days, when the trees made bare by the Bird-crossing days were making their first clothes for their branches , the weatherwatcher came down from her high basket afraid. The clicker monkeys scattered when she crashed through their bowers, and the many who listen to them were then also afraid. There was a word behind the weatherwatcher's lips that had a foul taste but which she would never spit without terror's tang to deliver it.

"Storm!" she said to the Short House People who had come around her, and she did not do it gently. Some could not stand then, while others stood by a stiffness that gripped them, and they all suffered a bitter taste. They were then all dead, and they envied the Short House People of the nineteenth of the Red-flower Days who had not had their plans and their hopes taken.

The Big Speaker stepped quickly from behind his screen of snakefisher feathers. His face was flat, because fear was familiar to him, but now he was not alone with his, and his eyes that were known to be heavy for him were lifted. He called for the smallest drums and the shortest pipes that were sharp enough to cut wind. He called for the goose feather blankets that would repel the rain. He gathered the strongest arms for holding the ropes, and the finest fingers for tying them. He made a circle of the oldest and the youngest, to whom many listen, and gave to each a pinch of singing salt.

Food was gathered, and it came from every house. Mothers brought their lecberries in baskets and in their folded clothes. The drying pits were opened, and the clay was shaken free from the bushels of redreeds in a soft rhythm. Clouds of steam parted around the red faces of those who carried racks of buanpa meat, and for each there was another to wave away the eager glass flies. Much food that had been saved was piled, because the Short House People were dead and much would rot.

They were all watched by the Stealer, whose legs were tied so that he could not leave his house. To him, things were only given, because then they could not be taken from another. Much was kept from him also, and this is because he took a child on her first day. He had been dead since he had returned without the child in his arms, and so he was happy that the Short House People were then all dead with him.

The air went still, and the light was amber. The weatherwatcher trembled, knowing that the sky was taking its first breaths. The Big Speaker watched her, because her trembling was familiar to him.

The winds came then, and it pulled the youngest trees flat, and the world began to sway. The drums became the heartbeat of the Short House People, and the flutes their voice, and these were heard by many who do not speak. The rains enclosed them, and struck their backs with thunder, and it was the trust of the young and the knowledge of the old that repelled the sky's hatreds.

But the Short House People were not winning. Mud covered their feet, and the rain was too cold. The Big Speaker roused their spirits and made their circle a stone that was deeply buried. But his fear was not their fear, and his death was not theirs, because his had happened many days ago. With the singing salts to open the ways between them, the young and the old broke the circle, for the beat of their drums and the chirp of their pipes was louder than any speaking.

To the cave they went, where they could die and be reborn tomorrow. They said goodbye to their houses, and goodbye to what they had drawn on the walls. Bitterest of all was their goodbye to the weatherwatcher, who refused to follow them, and went instead to her basket where she would not be reborn tomorrow. And because they were all dead, the Short House People freed the Stealer from his bindings, so that they would not have killed him. The Stealer, who had watched the Big Speaker with a still gaze, ran then into the rain and the wind, and from the cave the Short House People saw his back in the thunder, thinking they would never see his face again.

In the cave, with the flickering firelight upon his smile, the Big Speaker was a worry to the old and to the young, because he was happy in an evil moment. The breaking of great trees sent a shock through the Short House People, and they knew then that much they had built was gone. They went to the cave's mouth, and they watched the whirling sky, and the black branches in bursts of white. There were no days then, no seasons, and no lifetimes, for each flash was a death, and they lived many lives together in the cave.

A child with keen eyes pointed then, because he had seen a person apart in the flashes. And with many eyes to join the child's, the Short House People saw the Stealer, who had taken the weatherwatcher from her basket.

The Stealer was then among the Short House People in the cave, and the weatherwatcher had been taken from her death to be reborn with them. The Stealer's gaze was then upon the Big Speaker again, who was no longer smiling, and who was most afraid of all in the cave.

(This was fun to write, leave a comment if you liked it so I can get some of that precious dopamine)

Briston Smokehouse, sipping his morning coffee, offered his wife the expression he had developed over his many years of highly functional marriage. His eyebrows both sloped upwards towards the middle, suggesting the Peak of Concern. His mouth curled downwards at the edges, forming the Empathy Crescent. And on this particular morning, Briston had deemed it necessary to call across the topography of his expression with the Song of Sympathy, a short sliding note that starts high and ends low. Thus was Mrs. Smokehouse assured that she had not just splashed her worries futilely against the mind of her husband like an ocean wave against a boulder.

Briston had honed this expression over many mornings just like this one. It was a masterful technique of the conversational arts, a frictionless touch that could placate his opponent while slipping past without losing precious momentum. Briston did not consider himself to be an unkind man, but mornings were times for preparation. The psychic accumulations of sleep needed to be wiped away, and there could be no unnecessary weight taken on.

Once he had finished his coffee, the first of his body's many potential distractions had been addressed. Soon, he would need sustained focus, and each of these was a danger to it. Having placated his stomach with food and stretched out the kinks from his muscles, he dressed himself in clothes that had no itchy seams and no tight corners. A short spark of terror erupted within him when he couldn't find his sunglasses, but this was quickly soothed when he recognized their blue-gold shine sticking out from under the couch. He was ready.

Briston kissed his wife, walked out the door and began. He took his place in line. He was more experienced than some, and so he didn't press against the people in front like others did. He didn't tap his foot or let his eyes wander. Consistency was everything.

The line faced the monster, the killer. Everyone in line looked at it, one by one, in their own way, as they passed. It could, in an instant, grab someone, twist them and pulverize them before they could realize what had happened. Some people had said to Briston that there was really no way to manage it, that the monster was too quick to react to, too inscrutable to be predicted. Briston hated those people, more than anyone else in the world, more than even the monster that he was rapidly approaching. Until there was proof, he would leave nothing to chance.

Some of them were distracted, and Briston pitied them. After passing the monster a hundred times without danger, their eyes wandered, and so they wouldn't see the pounce coming. But he would, he was no sucker.

It was Briston's turn. The monster ignored him. It would get someone else today.

I'm the fucking master, he said to himself, and the evidence was behind him.

(can't sleep, here's some writing. CW: death)

I got to go home early today. They do that when someone dies at work. It doesn't happen often. Well it does happen often, but not where I work, which is why they just sent us all home. It seemed like they were just confused. Most of us would have kept working if the security guard hadn't come around to our stations and told us the news. He was shrugging, everyone was. Someone upstairs was angry, but it was that bewildered kind of anger you hear from someone whose dog just walked across the tiles after rolling in shit.

Her name was Letitia, I think. I don't know what her job was, but she wasn't one of the sitting people like me. She had to walk from station to station, but not the way people in charge do. She looked backwards too much for that. I don't want to think about her any more, but maybe I'm supposed to? I hope not.

Someone from my station got interviewed by the news. I think his name is Reginald. His friend always says "Ready, Reginald?" when they meet up to leave, but that's also a line from a TV show. His friend always says it in this sing-song voice, and they don't say it that way on TV, so that's why I think it's really his name. TV is so shit now, I think.

The news guy was asking the guy I think is called Reginald (can I call him Reg?) about the woman who I think is called Letitia. Well, not really about her, the reporter was doing some kind of segment about safety, and I'm guessing it's yet another piece about Legitimate Steel. It gets a lot of bad press.

Not everyone is using Legitimate Steel yet, so I should probably explain. Legitimate Steel is unbreakable, right? Regular steel is pretty strong already, but sometimes it breaks and bends and stuff falls down. The way they explained it to me was that regular steel is always getting tested and scrutinized before it breaks apart, so they made Legitimate Steel, which is unbreakable because nobody looks at it.

You have to pass a few little tests before you get to work in my building, since it's the first workplace constructed entirely out of Legitimate Steel. They have to make sure you can walk on it without looking at it first, but that's not too hard. The one most people fail is the second test, where they hold up a plate of it in front of you and you have to be able to not see it. It's not too hard to do, but that's just my experience. The younger hires don't always pass that one.

Some people, like the reporter who was interviewing Reg (I think?), really just don't get it. He kept asking how we can work in a "place like this." Like I said, he just didn't get it. It would have been worth a laugh if someone hadn't just died.

Again, I think her name was Letitia. I really shouldn't be thinking about her this much. I definitely should not be thinking about how she was getting phone calls a lot over the last week, or how pale she looked when she was on the phone for the fifth time today. And I really fucking don't need to be thinking about that moment when I saw her looking down, right through six floors of pure Legitimate Steel, before she dropped.

Title is a relationship I see brought up a lot when people are trying to figure out what individual compulsions or tendencies might be at the root of fascism, conservatism, etc. I remember Matt Christman bringing up the trauma of WW1 when describing the rise of European fascism and also describing Glenn Beck's awful Xmas special coming from a trauma-inspired hyper-sentimentality. (The state of Israel seems relevant here too but it feels super obvious and uninteresting to add it)

It makes a kind of intuitive sense to me, this idea that wounded people who lack the emotional vocabulary understand how they are hurt would propagate their trauma onto others and let this drive their politics. But I'm also annoying and therefore cautious of things that make intuitive sense, and this feels a little too "just-so."

I dunno, this site has a bunch of smarty pantses who have read about more things than funny-looking animals, which is all I know. Has anyone read anything or have anything to share about this relationship? I like a good narrative and it is a very compelling one

It is morning, and the sky is frozen. I began my waiting when the cold came, and now I must go to where I can become wholly living. I leave the downward dark where many others hide. I will go to a meeting which will make me all alive. I am bringing all of me, beneath every eye that is above me, to where life will meet me and all of me will be made living.

It is morning, and the sky is melting. The eyes above me are fleeing, because they will not live. A tiny life is touching me. I am carrying all of me, and it is a dead walking. I have always come to this meeting. Life is coming to meet me, life is coming to make so much of me into living things. I see it bleeding from the line across all things where I cannot reach. Life is coming! Life is coming for me to meet it!

It is morning, and the sky is stained. The eyes above me are washed away, and I am trying. I am squeezing, I am pushing, and I am falling between efforts. It is all of it heavy, and I am carrying some of me. The meeting will be above me, and this morning I will reach it. Life is erupting to me. I have so little left from our last meeting. All of me wants to live, and none of me will be beneath the rest.

It is morning, and the sky is fire! I am wide atop a thing more dead than any other, because it will be most alive in our meeting. I have come to the meeting, and all of me is waiting! Life is rising over me, life is here, life is striking all of me!

It is morning, and the sky is bulging. Where I was folded, I open. Where I was tightened, I loosen. Where I was sinking, I rise, and all of me is lightened, all of me is living! Life has come to meet me, life has come for me to steal away what it always gives! Now I am alive, now all of me is life-hungry, and I take enough for all of me! All things that are not me are taking life also, because life has come to meet me here on the rock which sits upon the death that reaches to the line across all things. With life I can see the rock that is pale, upon dust that is red, upon the safe dark that is beneath it where the cold hides from life's coming. I open myself, my teeth touch the life from above, and I balance it all, and this is the meeting that I came to.

It is morning, and the sky is touching me, and it comes with me. Now I do not carry me, and all of me is pulling itself. Life has come into where I am opened, because I came to this meeting.

Morning is ending, and I leave this living rock, and I am alive again!