Same shtick as yesterday, sorry. This one is more about what I’m thinking and less of what I’m doing.
1.) The beer I’ve been drinking was apparently brewed in Cullman, I didn’t know they had industry there. Besides driving through on occasion, I’ve only stopped in Cullman once at a gas station Wendy’s.
2.) At dinner today, I sat at a table outside that had one of those sun umbrellas in the middle. There was a small spider dangling from the bottom, presumably trying to find a meal so we can eat together. It didn’t take her long (I assume she, I think most spiderwebs are made by the lady-spiders, will research)
3.) I’d like to think the spider feels gratitude, hopefully the gnat doesn’t feel much
4.) Lots of couples walking out and about tonight. Lots of young, lots of old. They’re nice to look at.
5.) I like the feeling of being under an awning while it’s storming.
6.) Two beers is ideal wander around town territory. Not buzzed enough to get a PI, but just enough to really open the pores.
7.) And Jet, I thought the only lonely place was on the moon!
8.) Cemeteries at dusk are nice, just me and the stones, there’s a pretty good one about a child bride but I can’t get a good photo
9.) Don’t bury me seems lonely. Insert that Taoist proverb about being preferential
10.)I would really like to climb a tree soon. Last time I did was at my dad’s house, maybe a year ago.
I will expand upon all of these when I’m done walking.
Expanded
1.) It was on a drive back from Kentucky, I told my partner at the time that Cullman was a sundown town and they had probably never seen someone like her in town before. She believed me and got pretty spooked. It’s funny to think about her being gullible but I think it’s probably more indicative that the South is a pretty rough place for some people, at least reputationally. The Wendy’s was uninspiring, we both got chicken nuggets.
2.) I read up on this for the rest of dinner. So, both sexes of spiders will weave webs. However, male spiders predominately do it in their adolescence because they need to eat. At some point, the male spider is sated and then his focus shifts on finding a nice spider girl and getting one off. I mean, it’s way more complicated. Web-weaving behaviors varies between species, especially in the case of males. Some will weave very rudimentary webs, specifically for the purpose of eating enough to get to his final molt and thus, sexual maturity. Others, like wolf spiders, aren’t likely to build webs, they hunt on their toes, eat enough, then go searching for pheromones. Spider mating is weird too, I didn’t really want to learn about it but it seemed important for learning about who exactly was eating dinner with me. So, like in all life, the dude goes and searches out a mate. This sort of sucks for him because spiders don’t really settle close to one another, relative to their size I suppose. Once the girl reaches maturity and has her final molt, she’ll begin emitting pheromones into the air, letting all the mature guys around know that there is indeed a hot single in their area who wants to meet. So, the male spiders all make their move, sometimes this involves them attacking each other. Once the male spider makes it to the girl’s house, he has to impress her. Some spiders do this by lightly strumming the strings of her web, to let her know that he isn’t prey and wants to give it a shot with her. Others who have more developed eyesight will do little dances. Now, if the lady isn’t into whatever he’s doing, she’ll just like, walk away. Or shake her web back at him. Some male spiders think she’s playing hard to get and try anyways, most get eaten. If she likes what he’s putting down, she’ll invite him onto the web, he’ll weave his sperm web (what the fuck don’t look up how male spiders get ready to impregnate lady spiders it’s wild), and they’ll do what they have to do. A lot of the times, that means our guy gets eaten. Though in some spider species, the guy will spin a web around the girl before doing the deed so she won’t eat him. I saw some post that said male tarantulas are really good at not getting eaten, they simply run away after. Really good in this case means 80% survival rate.
Girl spiders are cool, though. When I first lived in Birmingham, we had an orbweaver that would spin her web across our outdoor stairwell every single night. It was really intricate and seemed to always be full of unlucky bugs. I liked her a lot. We also had one when I was a young, young child. Maybe four or five, it was pre-divorce. In the living room, there was a window which began a couple inches off the ground and probably ended around… I actually don’t know, both memory and relative scale are betraying me. It probably ended above my head, but I was four, so I don’t know how tall that is. Regardless, a big yellow spider would sit on the outside of this window, which would place it in the backyard behind the air conditioner. She might be one of my strongest memories from the nuclear family days. She was beautiful and it felt like she had been there forever. I dunno, I also liked her a lot. Spiders scare me sometimes but some of them are just really cool.
3.) So, this spider at my dinner table did indeed get its meal. I say it, I don’t know what its sex was, too small to tell and I’m not a spider guy. I’m going to assume it was a girl because why not. So, I watched her run up to the little guy in her web and move her legs really fast, the web was vibrating intensely but I’m not sure if that was her work, his struggle, or the wind. Either way, it seemed violent. Once the shaking subsided, she returned to the center of her web and hung out for a bit, I guess she wasn’t hungry. It’s kind of rude to not eat and just get food to-go when you’re eating with someone, but I won’t complain, I liked the company. Well, I wanted to take a picture of her, but she was just so small, the contrast just wasn’t working out, she looked like a black blob. I grabbed my napkin and tried to avoid her web and put it behind her to hopefully get a good picture. I don’t know why everyone praises this iPhone camera, it wouldn’t even give me good pictures of a tiny spider. I ended up fucking up her web, which is also quite rude to do on a date. She first rushed to her little meal and wiggled her legs some more, then ran to the umbrella, then back to the guy, then down a bit, then back. I guess she was reweaving or making sure he was staying tied up? Maybe she was hungry but was self-conscious about eating in front of me. I can’t say. But it got me thinking about the very general predator-prey relationship. I wondered if it’d be a good thing if either of them had the capacity for regret or remorse or guilt or whatever. My general understanding of tiny creatures like this is that they know fear, probably, and know hunger, probably. I think it’d be a bad thing for them to be able to think. The gnat would probably just be lamenting that he should’ve taken a different path today, the spider might feel bad upon hearing this. Or maybe the gnat would be relieved and would hope for a better roll on the Samsara slot machine, maybe the spider is all naturalistic about it and thanks the gnat deeply for its contribution. I don’t know. It’s funny that humans do this, instead of weaving webs of silk, we’ve got webs of belief and emotion and thought and all that. That makes me a human orbweaver because I’m really good at it, y’know. I think it’d be okay if the spider could think, not so much the gnat.
See, iPhone cameras suck.
4.) When I wasn’t spider-watching, I was people-watching. It must have been date night downtown today (which would explain my dinner guest) because everyone was all coupled up. Mostly old folks too, which was nice to see. This is going to sound weird, but I like to look at how they touch each other. What’s it mean? The couple holding hands, the girl wrapped around the boy’s arm, the man behind the woman with his hand on her waist, slightly pushing her forward. I dunno, there’s not much here, it was just fun to imagine the internal lives of others.
5.) Not much to say, it’s a good feeling.
6.) Not much to say, it’s a good feeling.
7.)
8.) On my walk, I somehow pathed to the cemetery on Armstrong. I used to park next to this when I worked at the library and I drove past it as a mailman, but I don’t think I’ve walked on that street in years. It was really, really pretty at dusk. The two brown cobblestone pillars with warm lights on top and an iron gate slightly open between them. I felt invited so I walked in. I never really go to cemeteries, one I’m a very skittish person by nature and two I’ve been lucky enough to not have many significant deaths in my life. But, it seemed cool and the vibe was right, I can’t remember what was playing on my phone at the time, but it certainly helped the mood. I looked around a bit at the graves that were close to 200 years old, read some plaques. One of which was about a 16 year old girl who got married to some newspaper big shot who had to be at least 30 or 40. They got married when she was 15 and she died a year later. Apparently, this destroyed him and he buried her in his front yard and planted a tree on top. But he moved on quick and married her sister who made him move her grave to the place I was standing. Men, am I right. I feel bad for her, I mean contextually I’m sure the marriage was fine, but to only be 16 in a college town seems rough.
9.) I would prefer not to be buried. A couple of reasons. One, it seems lonely, just laying there forever. Two, it puts some undue pressure on people to come visit my grave, at least in the beginning. I don’t want that. Three, I read some little proverb or parable or whatever from the Zhuangzi, which is one of the two foundational books of Taoism. It goes like this:
“When Master Zhuang was about to die, his disciples wanted to give him a lavish funeral. Master Zhuang said: “I take heaven and earth as my inner and outer coffins, the sun and moon as my pair of jade disks, the stars and constellations as my pearls and beads, the ten thousand things as my funerary gifts. With my burial complete, how is there anything left unprepared? What shall be added to it?”
The disciples said: “We are afraid that the crows and kites will eat you, Master!” Master Zhuang said: “Above ground I’d be eaten by crows and kites, below ground I’d be eaten by mole crickets and ants. You rob the one and give to the other—how skewed would that be?””
I don’t know, this made me laugh. If I die, and on my honor as a notary I want this to be legally binding, eat me. Or cremate me and throw me in a little creek with some nice shade and stones around. I’d be happy with either.
10.) I saw a really climbable tree on my walk. I used to love climbing trees, at my father’s first house post-divorce, there was a beautiful maple tree with one branch that was about three feet off the ground and completely horizontal at the start. This branch was basically a trunk, it could easily support the weight of both my sister and I at the time. We’d sit on this branch a lot, though we weren’t allowed to climb much higher because the branch took a pretty sharp turn, both in elevation and in width. It narrowed to a twig that couldn’t even support one of us and ran above the roof. But I liked that tree a lot and sitting there with my sister. The last time I climbed a tree was also at my dad’s house, this time his newest one. I have no idea what kind of tree it was, but I had a fun time climbing it, though when I jumped down, my knees hurt a little. That’s getting old I guess. Apparently, that tree is now dying, so my dad had an arborist come out and frack minerals into the soil around it to hopefully get it going again. Crazy what people can do these days. I would like to climb a tree soon though, it feels amazing getting to and sitting at a place you don’t usually.
That was my day. I also went to work and went to the gym but both were uneventful. Thank you, have a happy Saturday night. I’m trying to get back into the swing of actual long-form essay kind of stuff, but I just feel too scatterbrained at the moment. Writing things like this is fun, but it’s not really what I want to do when I think of writing as a hobby and an outlet. But I’m trying to form a habit here so I’ll take what I can get. Sorry for the literal journal posting, it’ll end soon.
jeez, louise 