24Feb / 2023

Important announcement regarding apocaplexia et al.

The current simulation has exhausted its allotment of disk space and will be running in reverse until this is sorted; as a consequence, reality is temporarily suspended.
For participants, this may result in chronological dysphoria, including the sensation that time is running backwards, or along multiple vectors, or not at all.
For example, this blog, metamorphosism.com, is now older than both twitter and facebook, as pointed out by Joeri in a recent tweet.
Not only that, it is now more important and influential than either of the aforementioned former media powerhouses, which have abruptly been reduced to a mess by a billionaire* and a site for selling used furniture (not my joke), respectively.
It can be expected that someone will soon invent the RSS feed and we will be able to satisfy our need for virtual human contact through commenting on one another’s “blogs” (short for Web Logs).
__________
*in his diapers, amirite?

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10Feb / 2023

Morning routine

I had planned to go bouldering with my daughter so I ate a lighter-than-usual breakfast so I would be lighter than usual while climbing, so by the time I got into town I was hungry and went into a bakery and as I stood there waiting my turn and deciding whether to get a slice of pizza or a sausage baked into what looks like a croissant* I felt for my wallet and it was missing.
I started patting all my pockets and realized i was blocking traffic so I went outside and did a more thorough search of myself – suit jacket, pants, and winter coat and although the spare notebook, crow snacks, various receipts and two random small candles were present and accounted for, because they live in my coat, everything else was missing – wallet, card holder, pens, various ID cards, spare elastic hair thing, cleaning rag for spectacles (the small one), emergency USB stick, spare lighter (in case I need to light a candle or, should the apocalypse or final uprising occur while I am out and about, a camp fire or a barricade).
Pickpocket OMG! I thought, before dismissing that theory on the basis of no pickpocket is that thorough.
What that leaves is I am a moron as usual.
That reminds me my wife is doing genealogical research and noticed a question on one old census, “Are there any idiots or lunatics in your household?”.
She did not tell me how my ancestors answered that but I know how I would.
But interesting, how those words used to be, like, scientific expressions.
I knew at once why I forgot everything (barring OCD pickpockets) – I had short-circuited my morning routine. After breakfast I was upset because my wife said, “you realize you are not telling me this for the first time” as I explained that black rye is not a different sort of rye but simply a more roughly-milled rye flour (something I explain every time I bake rye bread and someone compliments it and I say, oh, you think so? well I used some black rye flour) and I went upstairs to get dressed and my mind was busy thinking about how dumping information is a love language and time to put my pajamas into the clothes hamper and I did that and got dressed and put my phone into my pocket and went downstairs because my brain read “pajamas in hamper and phone in pocket” as “putting things away/into pockets” with the result that it did not feel weird to go directly downstairs instead of – as usual – standing by my nightstand and putting everything into my pockets (wallet, cards, hair thing, lighter, USB stick, pens, glasses cloth, IDs, etc).
Putting on shoes, I even had a hunch – some distant clump of synapses trying to warn me – that I might be forgetting something so I checked if I had crow feed (yes) and a face mask (no! good thing I checked!).
Anyway. Morning routine. Very important.
__________
*by this i of course mean “whether to purchase a slice of pizza, or a sausage baked into a croissant,” and not “whether to have the baker bake into a croissant one of two things – a slice of pizza or a sausage.”

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17Jan / 2023

2023 metamorphosism.com International St. Valentine’s Day Limerick Contest

Welcome to the something-something-th edition of the metamorphosism.com St. Valentine’s Day Limerick Contest.
2023 already.
Remember when 2001 was, like, the distant future?
The years just keep getting weirder, don’t they.
So weird, so fast, it’s hard to keep up.
2022 ended well, with Greta Thunberg owning that “alpha male”. Teenaged girls FTW. They have my genuine respect. I used to have 2 teenaged girls, I know whereof I speak, they are the future and don’t pick fights with them.
Used to have as in, they are all grown up now doing other stuff.
And 2023 started well, with the Mud Wizard, whom we will probably forget before the end of this contest (entries must be submitted prior to Valentine’s day i.e. February 13 is the deadline), but it was great seeing him taunt those police officers stuck in the mud, gosh.
Here are useful facts about the contest:
There is no prize this year. Don’t ask why. I can’t be arsed, I could offer a jar of marmalade or mostarda but it turns out I am very bad at sending food through the mail. ORP has a fine new album out but if you want that you have to go buy it.
So your prize is the honor of winning.
Can’t take that away from you.
Rules: As usual, entries have to be in proper limerick form.
Language: dirty words are acceptable, these are limericks after all. No hate speech. I reserve teh right to delete without explanation posts I find objectionable (including trouble-makey, complainy or trollish stuff), by posting here you agree to that. Just keep it light and fun okay? Life is short.
Make entries as a comment below this post.
Enter as often as you like.

Rules may be changed, updated, deleted, etc. without notice.

Themes: You get extra points and your chance of winning goes up if you incorporate some or all of the random themes, which also change without warning.
Themes this year include: The town of Cork. Waterfowl. A flag. Grass. A grunt. Angina. Venus. A chorus. A clock. Sailors. Something heinous. Anatomy. The planet Uranus. Baking shows. Paths to enlightenment. Microdosing vs. just dosing psychedelics. The fact that everything is interconnected and we are all manifestations of the universe experiencing itself. Spooky action at a distance and quantum entanglement.~~Ideas for new inventions. Alternatives to capitalism.~~ Synonyms for “horny”. Baking competitions. Spy balloons. Good news on the environmental front. Sleeping disorders. Anatomy of the skull. Medieval music notation. Varieties of bagpipe. Yoga injuries. Varieties of oranges (the citrus fruit). Interesting animal behavior facts. Life hacks. Limericks written in the style of a famous author. ~~Problems caused by boomers.~~ Hopeful facts. Something happy. Bacteria in sourdough and cheese. Your personal apocalypse theory. Are cats better than dogs? The most unusual place you or someone you know has had sex. English words combining Greek and Latin roots. Bouldering. Marmalade recipes. Mud Wizards and other humorous pies in the face of the patriarchy, guillotines, pitchforks, pie recipes, Covid brain and other potential causes of future zombieism, legal and socially-acceptable sexual perversions, popular music genres, and parasites and parasitism.
More will be added so check this space.

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24Dec / 2022

Ruby Beach

I will always remember
going down into the kitchen
one morning and my daughter
is grumbling at the table
angry over string theory
i mean she wanted to slap somebody
I will always remember
sunset at the beach, we were in Florence,
and in Cannon Beach, and up north in Washington
my daughters sitting in camping
chairs at a bonfire
when i am honest, this year has been
hard
for many of us
my mom froze to death in January
under sad circumstances
she didn’t have coming
my photo app sent me a memory
this morning
a collage of pictures of the beach,
my daughters from 2019
my wife and me from earlier this year
over for the funeral
I had momentarily forgotten we went
to the beach
but I had wanted to show her places
i went to with our kids because I had wanted
to show our kids where I had been
with their mother when we were young
when i am honest, it’s kind of a mush
in my memory banks
i see ruby beach, I see a tent
cobbled together from laundry
line and plastic tarps
and driftwood
I see a skunk lured back out of
our tent with cookies
they ask me what do you
want to do now
i want to live, i want
to experiment, i want
to make more memories
i want to love and be
kind but sometimes I also
want to slap a physicist
So it was a hard year
in some ways for
some of us
be kind to yourselves
be kind to each other
make good memories
this is what we got
this right here
this swirling galaxy
swirling in a snail shell

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30Aug / 2022

Show and tell

It’s one of those days, one of those late-summer days where it is still summer but fall already has your heart by the back of the neck like a fox stealing a goose so I took a walk to fend off melancholy. I filled up the plastic bag in my pocket with a few handfuls of crow treats and went to the park.
There were new crows on the way to the park, some new anyway, and some regulars but they all knew me. How do they describe you to each other? They recognize me no matter what I am wearing, even hats and umbrellas. They leave other people alone, but they haze me when I try to pass through their territory without treats. They swoop me and if that doesn’t work they swoop closer and whack me on the head with their wing. Or touch me with their wing, I don’t know how the gesture is intended, but I love it.
How does a crow describe a human? How does their language work?
Same thing in the park. Some new, some old crows, the ones in the territories where I feed them all knew me. Two sentry crows in the beginning, more as I passed through the trees near the benches, then a lot more over by the ponds. Relaxing off to the sides, higher up in trees, pretending they are not watching but definitely watching because when you toss the first treat to a crow they all swoop down.
I walked to the far side of the pond, surrounded by perambulating crows, some stepping, some hopping, all of us nonchalantly not acknowledging each other’s existence.
I sat on a bench and they surrounded me, waiting. Watching. I look at my watch. I’ll wait two more minutes for stragglers then we’ll start the lecture, I felt like saying. I toss them a few to keep their attention. That works. I feed several of them by hand. They hop up onto the back of the park bench and I stretch out my arms and they eat from my hands.
When people walk by we all pretend not to know each other again.
What do you guys think of this, I say. I pull a black crow feather out of an inner pocket of my suit jacket and show it to them.
They’re all like, whoa! Their eyes get big and they take a few steps back, the whole bunch of them. A few leave entirely.
I’m like, it’s ok, I didn’t pluck it from someone, I found it on the sidewalk!
They were wary after that. No one wanted to eat from my hand anymore, for the rest of my lunch break.
They still followed me around though, so I had to budget the remaining treats to see me through to the edge of their territory.

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21Aug / 2022

Let me tell you something

what was it
there was something
what was it though
dang
dang
was it something about a crow?
no
death maybe?
no
i stuck my nose in a spider web
while watering the thistles
that is how i discovered the
writing spider in the back yard
that wasn’t it, either
although it was the biggest and most
beautiful spider i have ever seen up close
and i mean up close
hm
i rode my bike to the train station
i will be retiring some day and
to save money i have been considering
getting rid of my car and riding a bike.
maybe that was it.
my bike is very old.
for a bike.
i used to run my daughters around on it
in a little child’s seat.
they’re all grown up now.
it needed new tires because the old ones
had rotted off
and kept going flat.
so i got cool new tires that never go flat.
and i checked the sky before
going to the train station
because it always rains when i ride my bike
but the skies were blue.
the first thing that happened
the chain fell off the front gear
i got that back on
then the tail light cover
fell off and clacked along
the street
i got that back on too.
my bike is a three speed now
because i can only shift the front gears
the back thing
no longer works.
but that’s okay bc it’s flat
where i live, the landscape.
when i told my family about it
my daughter asked
were you leaving a trail of parts
so you could find your way home?
was that it?
was it that my wife had to give me a ride home
from the station that night
because it was raining so hard?
?
i don’t think that was it either.
this is driving me nuts.

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02Aug / 2022

No one is upset and nothing hurts

I was dreaming this morning when a cat woke me with a bladder massage.
In the dream, my extended family was celebrating my birthday at my childhood home, around a redwood picnic table my father had built, on a sunny summer day, in the shade of a cherry tree, a maple and some redwoods.
There was picnic food on the table, no animals were trying to steal it, the sun was warm but gentle and not blinding, the way summer sun used to be.
Everyone was happy at the same time, but not excited, there was no drama, no one was sad or mad at someone, everyone got along.
My grandmother was not there. I imagine she was in Montana, as a teenager, riding horses.
My uncle, who sometimes felt compelled to be weird at gatherings, I suppose due to anxiety, was not there. He might have been in the hills filling his green and white Ford pickup with scavenged firewood.
My parents (whom I remember missing yesterday) were there. They were younger than they had been when they died. 30s or 40s. My father looked fit and was not wearing a shirt, which was typical of him in the summer at that age. I talked to my mother.
I talked to my father. I asked him how Heaven was.
No one is upset and nothing hurts, he said.
My sister gave me a letter she had written for my birthday. It was written with a wide calligraphy pen in several colors. Each color said something else, and the colors intertwined, and tangled, and she had written it in her normal handwriting not calligraphy despite the nib she was using so I was unable to read it.
I asked her to read it for me.
She was about to read it when I woke up.

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Metamorphosism

Category Archives: Feral Living

Important announcement regarding apocaplexia et al.

Morning routine

2023 metamorphosism.com International St. Valentine’s Day Limerick Contest

Ruby Beach

Show and tell

Let me tell you something

No one is upset and nothing hurts