I once had occasion to eat mincemeat from a Ball jar processed eight years before my birth. The dubiousness with which I approached that experience says volumes about our ability to preserve things. Even preservation has it’s limits, you must agree. A ship, replaced board by board over five hundred years will, at some point not be an exercise in preservation, but change. The slow inevitability of change that causes mountains to fall and entire ecosystems to die. ...

Traveling ice that builds up on the bows of living organisms I didn’t see until just now, and I’m wondering now how trees got to be here. Certain species are moving. The North is warmer and they know and are moving. Closer to the warmth they go, but not the one here, covered in ice. It’s stuck, stoic, standing its ground. Water drawn up to dizzying heights, to each little branch until a thin paper-like sheet of living cells that turns sunlight into sugar receives exactly as much as it needs to do it’s work. Yes. We are extraordinary machines. ...

It’s that sinking feeling you get, when all things being equal you’d just rather give up. ...

When sunk costs dig holes in your yard And rampant words stand vigil over your house, You will be done in your domain As his haven turned out all but the best of us. ...

Writing is a technology. Writing improves information density. Writing creates a moral hazard of intention. Writing remembers what we forget. Writing destroys relationships. Writing cannot replace thought. Writing is not often true. ...

And in the end, we were just supposed to get our work done. But our work was hidden from us, so first we had to discover what our work was. Upon discovering where our work was, it turned out we had the wrong work in mind at the start and so we begin to plumb the depths of our found work. While plumbing, we resolve to do the right work this time. No more time to mess around. We haul up our new work and find that it wasn’t what we expected. No one wants this work do be done at all. ...

A wire carries can carry a certain load before the molecular bonds holding the material together are weighted down too much. Is it unreasonable, then, to imagine the tapestry of our lives, held together by invisible bonds, molecules of constitution. And is it not possible that our constitutional bonds carry a certain load? What are we do to when we need a wire to carry more load? Faced with the upper bounds of physical laws, we need more wires to share the load. We share the load. ...

Today the winds shifted abruptly to come from the Northeast, which means cold, and snow, and clouds. The sky is a flat, slate gray with wisps of contrast ripped into it by the sheering of the win. They sky occupies half of our world view on any given day. Is it any wonder our moods should rise and fall by the contents? ...

To be the parent node, or the source of life For something beyond what you yourself contain, Is a special position, in a world of relationship. The reason for existence for something so small, And the source of a desperate persistence in the world, Soon strong enough to declare itself independent. Of the source of life, only the parent knows How fragile the connection can feel sometimes— How tenuous the lines that draw the child node back. No parent can insure life against tragedy, and no child node can escape the truth of it's source. This is all we're given to go on, and yet we go. ...

If we were in a simulation, everything would be an interface. Modify this, get this response, adjust and modify the next things. If we were in a simulation, everything would be relative. Gravity would depend on the flow of time and light would bend and warp. If we were in a simulation we would be stuck waiting for the next step to run, unable to go forward at different rates, or ever backwards. ...