#18: Fungus humongous

Actual Updates

Let me just tell you up front: I’m about to talk about fungus. Skip past the bullet points if that gives you the willies.

Ok, so I recently watched this documentary called Fantastic Fungi - it’s on Amazon Prime, I think, and maybe some other places too? - and first of all, the real-life mycologist Paul Stamets is very different from his namesake on Star Trek: Discovery1, and furthermore:

• Apparently it’s been pronounced fun-ji, with a soft G, all along? This is going to really wreak havoc on pun work.

• There’s a whole-ass mountain covered in (or made out of? It’s been a few days) fungus. Fungus Mountain. I’m… guys, I’m not sure how I feel about this.

• That’s because I am a person who has a Problem with mold. For some reason, mushrooms don’t bother me one bit, but if there’s a superannuated Tupperware in the back of the fridge with mold growing on the contents, my entire skin wants to crawl off rather than pick the thing up. Yes, I know the mold won’t leap out of the container and touch me. But… are you sure, though? AND YET, here I was, watching this movie and finding it fascinating. There were some especially moldy bits that did make me squirm a little, though.

• Things took a turn for the psychedelic partway through the documentary, and you know, I went through a mushrooms phase in college, and I never really had an unpleasant time ever. I did have to shepherd someone else through a rough one, but for myself, it was just always very weird and fun and visual and didn’t even make my stomach hurt. I never had a transcendent experience or anything, but then again I never climbed a tree in the middle of a thunderstorm while high either (watch the movie!).

• The absolute Pacific Northwest of it all! Just about every forest scene looks like home. Look, I’m as anxiety-riddled and self-defeating as any normal person would be when faced with a big move like this one, but I can’t deny it’s going to be nice to be able to go out the door and have that at my fingertips. May the prospect of ferns get me through the onslaught of forms (and packing and having to phone plumbers and so on).

• We all know about the mycelial network already, both real and on Discovery, so I won’t beat anyone over the head with it, but it hasn’t gotten old for me yet.

• One thing the movie didn’t cover was the Nicole Cliffe axiom that you should only eat foraged mushrooms if they were foraged by a Russian. That’s just sound safety practices.

Ok, mushroom interlude over! Welcome back, people with a low fungus tolerance.

The other big thing in my life right now (yes, a mushroom movie counts as a big thing in my life! I have literally nothing going on!) is that my office is reopening soon. I’m fully vaccinated, I live in a highly-vaccinated state, and everyone’s being very careful, and I’m still going full Jessie Spano about going back in. More I’m so excited than I’m so scared, though. I can’t wait to see people. I can’t wait to… hug some people??? With enthusiastic consent only, obviously! And yes it’s a little weird to talk about a platonic form of contact in language that’s usually specific to sex, but on the other hand why wouldn’t we want to seek enthusiastic consent for any kind of interaction? I don’t want people to be putting up with me! I want them to want to be around me!2 If someone’s attitude towards some interaction is “ehhh… fine,” then I don’t want to put them through it.

But ok, before I wandered off into sexy digressions, I was thinking about how excited I am to go back into the office, and then realizing that I am getting excited about a workplace. That should set alarm bells off. Internalized capitalism! Work won’t love you back! But at the same time I really do love the human people I work with3, and I’m at the phase in my life where that’s a major locus of making friends, and also I’m a big old extrovert and I’m dying of loneliness. So we’ll see how long I stay excited about this once the human-contact batteries are recharged.

Speaking of human contact, we just went on a little early-anniversary trip, just overnight, down to the Lizzie Borden house in Fall River, which is a B&B. This is because the anniversary in question is our 13th, so a spooky interlude was required. And look, we mostly spent it sitting on the floor of the room, drinking and playing trivia games - we’re very exciting - but in the morning we sat around a table and ate breakfast with all the other guests, and then we did a tour, and no one was wearing masks anymore and it was all very weird and new. But we are having faith in our vaccinations and that means we have to stop being nervous about catching it and transmitting it asymptomatically - research is showing that the risk of transmission is lowered significantly, as well as just the risk of catching it. And yes, it feels weird and like we’re throwing caution to the winds, but of course it does, and it will feel more and more normal in time. I have lots of thoughts about the place itself and the trip and the other guests, but this has already gotten pretty long, so… another time. Or just talk to me.

Some links

I teased this on Twitter the other day so I’d better not make you wait around for it any longer. I give you: The Body’s Most Embarrassing Organ Is an Evolutionary Marvel (it’s the butt!)

And this was the “tangentially about butts” one, insofar as it is about a porn theatre where you could, presumably, go look at a butt in a movie: How Canada’s Most Glamorous Adult Theatre Has Survived

And I guess this place probably had butts in it, in the sense of being a spa, but that’s not really the point: The Ruins of a Swinging Seventies Spa that Kept a Siberian Tiger Behind the Bar

Ok ok ok, we’re 100% out of the Butt Zone. This is a Twitter thread about bird names and I’m pretty sure it’s just about entirely butt-free.

I love Bim Adewunmi; I encountered her first on her dearly-missed podcast Thirst Aid Kit, but time continues to move along and she and Nichole Perkins have both gone on to other things. I love reading Grub Street Diets of people I enjoy - there’s nothing in it if the person is someone I know nothing about or don’t like - although every time I read one, I think about how it would take me a major anxiety spiral before I could even consider writing down everything I ate in a week and then telling people about it. Hers is, of course, fantastic: Bim Adewunmi Runs on Tea and Biscuits

Ok, bear with me on this one. Yes this is a history of the humble file cabinet, but nothing is ever only one thing; it’s also got a fairly big part to play in the role of women in workplaces, as well as (rather less surprisingly) the management of information in capitalism: The Filing Cabinet

Hey, just in case you’re one of the handful of people who subscribe to this newsletter who doesn’t also subscribe to Amy Newell’s, get that fixed, ok? We used to work together, if by “together” you understand it to mean “for the same employer, at the same time, but our work nearly never intersected and it just provided a fortuitous way for us to meet and become friends.” Anyway, her writing is spectacular. The most recent issue contains, among other things, an explanation of why your eye doesn’t notice things that your brain does not deem to be important. Get into it: Amy Writes Words

What I’m about to do here is link to an oral history of a gif, and not even post that gif here, and you’re all still going to call it up in your mind, because we’re all Very Online and also it’s legendary enough to have an article written about the history of the scene. Fun fact: I have only watched one (1) episode of Dawson’s Creek, and that was under duress. The Day Dawson Cried

Ooh! Late addition - I had written most of the post already when I came across this fun little link. Draw an iceberg and watch it even out to how it would actually look floating! Iceberger

Tunes I’ve Been Listening to Lately

Why does this Toadies song stick with me so much? It’s almost overwrought, but I feel like it stops short of that - although it’s got that 90s “if the lyrics make no sense that means it’s deep” vibe (despite being from a 2001 album). Anyway, I wander my house murmuring “she’s the… spitting image” on repeat and thinking about how this would have been a go-to slow-dance song if it had existed when I was in high school. We loved it when they got dramatic towards the end.

Alright so listen. We recently watched this documentary about the California low desert scene, which includes our beloved Throw Rag as well as like, Queens of the Stone Age and Kyuss, and I wanted to do a set on the work internal radio station of bands from that area, but it turns out that only Throw Rag’s first and fourth albums are on Spotify (which we use to play songs on our radio station). So the same problem will exist here for when I’m making the end-of-year playlist, hence my choice of songs being Hang Up. Hang Up is good! But there are so many other good options. For instance, we were listening to Bobby Wayne the other day and Hap caught wind of the “don’t give a fuck!” chorus and asked why he was saying “Romy the bug!” But that’s not on Spotify. Neither is Rule Maker, which I include here since the video is a live show and Captain Sean Doe is an iconic frontman and the inspiration for most of Captain Airhab. I don’t know, I guess I came to evangelize Throw Rag today.

I was also trying to work through Motörhead’s entire discography but gave up not too long after this album, because… you know… it gets a bit samey, doesn’t it? And some of it is about teenage groupies or similarly alarming material and I don’t care if that makes me an old bore, I don’t rock with it. But Ace of Spades is a classic for a reason, also an air guitar classic (and the reason that Left Hand brewery gave us a bunch of cases of beer for free when we visited during 2012 Nationals), and if you don’t spontaneously start rocking out when listening to Ace of Spades, you may be legally dead.

This month’s top 5: Where did this bruise come from?

1. Regular bumping into stuff

2. Being used as a trampoline by a child

3. Being used as a punching bag by a child

4. Being used as a sidewalk by a 20-lb cat (particularly when I’m sleeping)

5. ???MYSTERY???

Well! That was a wordy one! I wonder if this issue hit the Gmail cutoff; if it did, I guess you’re not seeing this part unless you clicked through to the site. In which case, hello, special friend. I like you the best of all, but don’t tell any of the others.