Y’all know I like to dabble. I do be dabbling. It’s been like that since I was little. I get obsessed with a thing until I feel like I’ve figured it out and then I drop it like a hot ball of, um, something, like metal probably, like something that you don’t want to touch when it’s hot.

I know a lot of you do this too because a lot of you are people that I love dearly. I think I have a tonic. It has certainly helped me stick to things better over the years.

It’s twofold but it’s disguised as onefold.

The Disguise

The issue appears to be that every single skill goes unfathomably deep.

You could devote a lifetime to mastering each one.

But we are dabblers, we can’t just pick one. That’s crazy talk. If each one is infinity deep what’s the point.

The True Twofold

The truth is we don’t have to master everything because we have the law of diminishing returns on our side. You learn less as time goes on.

If I took up blacksmithing and just worked every day at it, I would learn 80% in the first year, 90% by 5-10 years, and 99% in 30-50 years. Or something like that, idk.

Well I’m not tryin’ to build the space shuttle or nothin I just want a sweet sword and like some throwing daggers.

All I need is the 80%.

I’m not devoted to metal-craft, I just want to understand how it works and play with it a little bit.

But we need to pick something to go deep in, so we can make the money. The money can grant you the ability to go deep in all your projects. But you need one to hit first.

The twofold is that it’s important to dabble in everything but if you want to do what you love for money you gotta pick one thing to dabble in hard. The hard part is knowing when and where to draw the line and what to do.

This is my hypothesis, I have no sources but I do have some interesting data points.

So how do you pick which one?

Dabble - serious mode.

Every skill you learn goes back to that freakin’ Charlie Parker quote.

“First you learn the instrument, then you learn the music, then you forget all that shit and just play”

All you gotta do is get to the point where we CAN play with it. That way it’s an option. We are here to taste every nectar that life has to offer. Everything is so fun, we don’t have time to master things.

But the difference between an artist, and a professional artist, is where we need to be wise about what we devote ourselves to.

For example

There is practically no overlap between the skills involved in writing a book and the skills involved in printing and selling one. But if you can’t afford/find a publisher, you gotta go that deep if you’re trying to ride this dragon into the sun.

The issue is that no matter how deep you think you can go when you start out, you’ve likely just scratched the surface.

This is why so many of our best scientists are riddled with imposter syndrome, they know this.

This is also why flat-earthers exist, they don’t know this.

That’s the Dunning Kruger Affect in a nutshell.

Basically be humble and patient with the things you choose to spend your time on.

A student’s mindset is your best friend in the journey toward contentment and enlightenment.

The ego’s job is to keep you alive, if it’s doing anything else, it’s doing too much, and likely needs a good spanking. Egos these days, so spoiled…

Once you go deep enough and get good enough, society will start pressuring you to sell your work. They want it and you have to learn new skills to get it to them. You may choose to turn them down, but if you do not, there are sidechain skills that artists NEED if they want to make it as an artist.

Talkin’ sales, websites, P.R., marketing, budgeting, planning trips, team management

If you can afford it, it’s best put to someone else in charge of that stuff asap, but most artists cannot do such a thing. They’re worried about groceries and making cool stuff, not google search console listings and social media and hiring editors and and and.

I’ve met a lot of people this year that make art but they don’t sell their work because they are worried “it will take the soul out of it and make it no fun anymore.”

This is a valid fear. Maybe. Either way the answer is sustainable play.

Sustainable play is a concept I got from the mad genius painter Carl Ortman.

The people who lose their sense of art to the business are the ones that let the business take over. They let their play die. That is never sustainable. We cannot live without play.

Carl is a master at this. He doesn’t have a closed sign. His sign says OPEN on one side and ‘GONE CLIMBING again…’ on the other side.

‘If it’s not fun we don’t do it’ is one of his mantras.

Oh man how did we get here?

Right

SO um

where were we

OH!

yes

I do be dabblin’

Dabbling so hard, 30 years dabbling. WwwwwWW.Dabbling.com, 100 years dabblin’

The point is, I’ve got 3 albums out, one Haiku book, 2 photography books with another on the way probably next month, and a website with more than 150 prints available on it, and a lot of people have asked me how I did it all.

SIDE NOTE AGAIN oh my cows can you believe how distractible today. I’m almost embarrassed.

bradyiverson.com

I just spent 3 months relaunching my website and it dropped a few days ago. I built it from the ground up with MY story in mind and I’m really really proud of it. I’ve had a website since 2018 but this is the first time I’ve ever felt proud of my website. I’m writing a whole thing about the process because I think anyone could do it with a little grit and determination.

But for now, it is also at the bottom of this article so you can check it out when you finish reading.

OKAY no more distractions for at least half a page.

For real.

I BE FUCKIN’ DABBLIN, DUDE

And a lot of people ask me how I be dabbling so hard and doing so much.

A lot of people believe that they can’t do the stuff I’m doing.

They TRULY believe that!

I can’t fathom it.

It makes me nauseous and sad at the same time.

I am of the firm belief that nothing is too complicated to figure out if you set your mind to it and approach your learning with an abundance of patience. Plus it keeps the mind sharp and the new things get easier each time!

Youtube taught me how to make my photobooks on InDesign

My first album was recorded on Apple’s free audio software (Garageband ftw) and uploaded to all the streaming services via Distrokid for like 20 bucks a year.

The only actual hard part is giving yourself, and the project, the time it needs to be good.

I’m able to do all these things for 2 reasons.

I try to finish the project no matter what

Especially if I stop liking it, because I know that fighting through the ugly phase will teach me WAY MORE than I could ever have hoped for in just starting a new project.

It’s like at the gym, your least favorite exercises are usually the ones you need to do most.

This is more of an affirmation than a hard truth right now. I’m still practicing. But I’m getting better every day. It’s the perfectionism that causes it. My greatest battle as an artist has been the one with perfectionism. But over the years, with training, it has become an very fun sparring partner.

Carl always says you can’t make a great painting unless it goes through an ugly phase that SCARES you. I think about that a lot. I think the same applies to many art forms, if not all of them.

I am mindful about what I consume and how I consume it.

This practice changed my entire life.

It all started in 2017. I realized once again that I hated my job with a burning passion and that in general, I did not want to work for anyone but myself. My brain prefers want-to’s over have-to’s.

So I resolved to become a successful photographer, travel the world taking photos and sell enough to at least make a teacher’s salary.

Naturally, this led me to analyze the path I would have to take, and lifestyle changes I would have to make, to achieve this awesome goal.

Quickly I realized I had no idea what that path looked like, and it’s not a common one, so it was hard to find data on. But there was one thing I discovered that shook me.

I was wasting most of my time in consumption instead of creation.

This wouldn’t be too bad if it was responsible consumption but I’m talking video games and TV and Reddit like all the time. I was addicted to video games. I would spend the whole day playing Skyrim, or League of Legends, without even giving it a second thought.

If I wanted to be an artist, I needed to swap these cycles of consumption with cycles of creation. I needed to fill my time with making cool stuff.

I was not building anything playing video games except maybe some hand eye coordination and problem solving skills.

My habits of consumption were limiting me from achieving the life that I wanted, and that they would continue to do so until I cut them out of my daily routine.

I quit video games entirely and replaced them with music studio time, watercolor, hiking, ANYTHING that would result in more growth than planting myself on the couch for 3 hours.

Even in this unfocused state of dabbling, the results were dramatic. My life was instantly more fulfilling. Suddenly I found myself with a dozen things to be excited about at any given moment. All from cutting mindless consumerism from my life.

Side note

My brain still adores video games so I can’t really go anywhere near them or I get sucked in too easily. The closest I get on a daily basis is Chess.com.

I have one exception: When I get sick as a dog and CANNOT do anything else I play Minecraft to pass the time. Once I get feeling better I go to my little chest with a sign above it that says ‘welcome back, read this.’ In the chest is a book that says “sorry you’re feeling shitty dude, here’s all you need to know about this place” - and then notes on everything I need to know about the world that I probably forgot, like the location of my end portal, or my mountain fortress that’s 3k blocks away, stuff like that. It’s a fun little project and it gives me something to be stoked about when I feel like I’m dying.

That’s my video game rules. Anything else is too risky.

My TV rules are I can only put it on if I’m doing something productive like laundry or dishes or whatnot. That works wonders. I don’t even remember how to watch TV while sitting down anymore.

ANYWAY

We are living in a world in which the old ways people spent their time are being replaced with consumption that doesn’t encourage growth or learning.

I think that’s a shame. Maybe even a crisis but I don’t have enough data to say that confidently.

Instead of gardening, exploring, making things, we are freaking going to the mall to buy clothes made in sweatshops in Cambodia for 35 cents a pop and sold to us for 25 dollars. People are making botox and plastic surgery into a hobby.

Especially in Utah, we’re number 1!

We are forfeiting our powers of creation.

Trading them for fandom, Pokemon Cards, Taylor Swift, Coachella, Marvel Movies, you name it… Shopping does not help you grow, worrying about your looks does not help you grow. They just serve to pass the time and undermine your art

I could watch a movie, and have some fun things to think about for a while, or I could read a book and immerse myself in an entirely different perspective in an entirely different world for a week.

I could go to the mall and buy a good looking bag for $120. But it’s made of pleather and in a few years it will be flaking off everywhere and falling apart.

I could take that $120, buy a real hunk of leather for 80 bucks and leatherworking tools for 40 and make my own version of that bag. And if I’m patient with the process, it will turn out so sturdy and well-made that I’ll be able to pass it on to my grandchildren.

Same spend either way, but in one you learn a skill that can benefit the rest of your life, and in the other you are buying a headache that will hit in a few years.

This is, I think, one of the biggest problems that modern society presents us.

We live in an age of consumption

Consumption steals from you almost every time you let it in the house.
There may be exceptions, but once consumption is beneficial we call it learning. The great writer reads a lot, etc.

The artist cannot let the consumption win if they want to live an artful life. It is the root of almost every problem on the planet, and the artist’s job is to be part of the antidote for those problems.

Okay quick recap.

• Dabbling is good for the soul.

• It promotes whimsy, excitement, and passion.

• Consumption is bad for the soul.

• It steals opportunities to grow and learn.

• If you want to work for yourself and live the life you dream of, you CANNOT afford consumption. It is the greatest enemy of achieving one’s dreams.

• Your consumption does not have to be eradicated entirely, It just needs to be contained and constricted by rulesets so they are not allowed to steal from you.

• You can watch TV, but if you do it while just sitting on the couch, you’re being robbed. If having TV on makes doing dishes more fun, you are winning.

So there’s your Dr. Swamp prescription for the month.

1. Choose dabbling/creating over consumption every chance you get.

2. Once you’ve found the thing you want to dabble in for a good long while, if you don’t already know what this is:

   1. Get hyper specific about your goals. Start with a 5 year plan and work backward, getting more specific each year toward 1. You need to know what you’re working toward.

   2. Take an honest look at how you’re spending your time and ask yourself if your consumption is stealing growth opportunities from you.

   3. If so, adjust.

   4. Rinse and repeat.

I’ve been moving out of the dabbling phase and into my hyper specific goals phase in the biggest way I’ve ever managed in the last 3 months.

I’ve got a plan. I’m stoked about it, and I hope maybe it might help you find your plan.

SO here is my 5 year plan. Feel free to steal any aspect of this to help make your own.

Year 1.

Get a job, make enough money to build out a really nice art fest booth and start taking big steps to selling photography full time (this is why I just rebuilt my entire website.)

Take on as many side gigs as possible, rake it in, work hard, the goal of year one is to get the festival setup, van and trailer to take it places, motorbike for exploring once I get to places, and art inventory for selling at art festivals across the American West.

Year one Icing on the cake- Sign up for and get accepted into the St George Art Festival and use that as an opportunity to really kick things off. Use the profits to apply for other art festivals all over the American west.

Year 2.

First year of the festival circuit. Apply to as many as possible, take 6 months with my badass art festival rig and travel all over selling photography. The more I sell, the more collectors I can collect, and the easier the rest of my career will be.

Also Along the way I can stop in every gallery I can find and get into them ALL and that turns into a passive income, though consignment doesn’t ever sell at the rate I want it to. It’s worth a shot I suppose!

Phase two. Out of the festival circuit.

Festivals should have put a bunch of money in the pockets, we are going to use this to compound wins in a big way.

Send your photo books to publishers, same with haiku books, get some power on your side, you can’t take on the bookselling world yourself.

Apply to every gDang photography contest that you can find. It’s like 30-50 bucks per but the benefits outweigh the risks in a very big way. All I need to do is win ONE and my career could be put on cruise control.

Hire the homies that like marketing and web design and shit on at top dollar to help manage things.

Year 3.

Same as year 2 but this time it’s about lifting up the homies.

I’ve had the luck of being surrounded by brilliant artists for years that are a $20,000 investment away from a very successful career in their field.

I’m going to outfit the homies with festival rigs of their own. Then we can caravan the festivals!

That is really the reason I want to make money, so I can lift up those around me until we are ALL living our ultimate dream. I’m tired of seeing my loved ones struggle. I’m going to do something about it.

Year 4.

The artist’s commune.

Once the homies and I have a comfortable amount of money, we are buying land, and inviting every beautiful hippie in our life to come live and create on it. Artists working together to create something greater than themselves.

We will have beautiful gardens and we will help each other build houses and workshops and we will have all the space we need to create the finest works of our lives.

We can help each other with projects, and every aspect of business, until we are totally free to create in the purest sense because money won’t be tainting the creativity any more.

Year 5.

Make another 5 year plan, this time with bigger goals like buying up a million acres to make into nature preserve Steve Irwin style, or starting a rock band and riding that wave all the way to Coachella. Whatever it is, it’s going to be epic, of this i’m sure.

I want the power to have a real impact on this world. I want to be able to protect our wild spaces. I want the time to write novels and do band tours and expeditions to the far reaches of the globe. I want success so that I can maximize my impact on the world in the best and biggest way possible.

The best way to do this is to create an extraordinary life, because extraordinary art is the product of an extraordinary life.

In the end, I’m just trying to make as big an impact on the lives of as many people as possible.

Also I want to do all this work so I can live up to the words of the great Tyler the Creator:

“Get a bunch of bikes, and ride’m around with your friends. It’s the shit.”

So that’s my dream. My five year plan to become an established artist so that I can share my perspective and wonder with the world, and help to realize the dreams of my artist friends.

I’ve already taken the first few steps.

I’m still in Colorado but in the next few days I will be starting my pilgrimage back to St George, Utah. I’m really just trying to wait until the high dips below 100.

I’ve applied to a lot of cool jobs but my favorite one is for a naturalist position at Snow Canyon State Park. It’s basically Free Tours Outside but sponsored by the government. Totally perfect. Cross your fingers for me.

If all goes to plan, I will have a booth set up at the farmer’s market by December. There I will be selling photography books and prints on paper or aluminum!

If you would like to help me achieve this dream

you can do a few things:

1. Go to BradyIverson.com and get yourself some fine wall art, or a luxurious coffee table book.

   1. Even if you just go there and look around a little bit, that will help me achieve higher ranks in search engines which will help me more than any of us know.

2. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack. If every one of my readers donated just a dollar or two a month, I’d be on track to the art festivals in no time.

   1. If it’s not in the budget I get it, trust me, preaching to the choir. You can also have an impact by just sharing my favorite post on social media.

Whatever you do, know that I am grateful beyond words.

I’ve realized in the last few years that it takes a village to raise an artist. Steven Anzardo (@adventurepainter) taught me that.

Last year we got talking philosophical one day and he told me the only advice he could offer me was to not be an island, I don’t have to carry all the weight on my shoulders alone. People love me and I shouldn’t feel guilty when they want to help me achieve my dreams.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. It brings tears to my eyes. He’s always right about that kind of stuff. SO fu***n annoying.

Ultimately, this last part is an exercise in not being an island. I’ve laid my dream bare at your feet.

Not in hopes that you will do anything at all with them, but in hopes that in doing this exercise you and I both can see how simple it can be. Half the battle of making a dream come true is telling people about it and sometimes all it takes is a reminder.

My hope is, if you’re not already living your dream, it will inspire you to start chasing it and making your own 5 year plan, if you haven’t got one.

I was put on this earth to make cool stuff and help my loved ones achieve their dreams.

What’s your dream?

What’s stopping you from achieving it?

Weekly things

ALBUM OF THE WEEK

Just like every album of the week; I adore this album. It’s perfect through and through. I listened to it yesterday and was shocked I hadn’t shared it with you all yet. It’s a journey, it’s exciting in some parts and beautiful and peaceful in others. It’s funky and musically complex, it never loses my attention. I can listen to this one anytime and be just headbanging the whole time.

Plus there’s just something about his voice that tickles my brain in a wonderful way.

Without further ado

GOMPH OF THE WEEK

I’m in a very Hectic time, planning my new life and all, I haven’t taken the time to record anything new for you this week. I pick up my guitar for about 20 minutes a day to de-stress but that’s about all i got in me right now. But you’d best believe that once I get back to the Geezy I’ll have about a thousand new pieces of music to share with you.

If you really need your Hideous Gomphideous fix for the week, might I suggest my first album? It’s cozy and chill and great for studying or taking a nice calming drive at night.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

To make up for no Gomphideous this week we are doing a beastly quote of the week.

It’s from one of the greatest psychedelic explorers and philosophoers of all time - Terence McKenna.

If you’re not familiar with McKenna, I need you to become familiar. But this quote goes so hard that If I need to convince you further, you probably aren’t ready for him. And that’s okay. I still love you.

“We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”

Terence McKenna

Gdang that actually sums up this article so well I feel like I could have just posted this and called it a day hahaha.

ONE MORE THING.

A while ago, I was walking around Salida Co. I spotted a dude with impeccable vibes. Just so good, you could tell he was a homie

I said to him
“Man, you’re cool as shit huh?”

His response has haunted me ever since. He said

“Pshhhhhhhh, shut up baby, I know it!”

Chase your dreams with the confidence of this random man I never saw again, and you cannot fail.

Until next week!

Here’s your mantras:

Best day ever.

Don’t ever attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

You are capable of more than you know.

You are loved.

You don’t need to be an island.
You’re doing great, keep up the good work.

<3 Brady

About half a decade ago I met a person that would change my life.

I was at the first Friday event in Downtown St. George, Utah. roaming around with my film camera doing some street photography. I came across this magnificent, lively blonde fellow with a great big labradoodle with the same hair.

I took a picture of him. It didn’t turn out GREat on account a’ it was dark and all and I was shooting 400 ISO film probably.

(this photo took me like a day to find, I’m still refining the systems, I suspect this to be a Sisyphean task but it is MY Sisyphean task…)

This is Ty

And Bodhi

In this moment I was unaware that these two would become my brothers within a year or two. That thought makes me smile.

However, this post is not about Ty, though he is an absolute legend, I just could not do his stories justice.

He is the luckiest and most coordinated man on the planet.

Seriously we need to bug him to put out a whole video or something on his crazy lucky stories. They’re ridiculous.

For example, sneak peek, my first time going out to take photos with him was one of his secret flash flood waterfall spots, and he told me one that happened the day before.

(yes he is obsessed with flash flood waterfalls, and waterfalls in general, his photography is insane like absolute bonkers nuts I think instagram is the easiest way to see it right now, the link is 2 paragraphs down.).

Anyway, around that time, I think a few days before, he lost his keys in the flash flood cascading through this canyon, looked around couldn’t find them, went home and went through his photos from the day AND FOUND HIS KEYS IN A PHOTO HE TOOK. Went back next day snagged’m boom bam. It’s such a better story than that, I just didn’t want to give any spoilers

And he’s got at least a half dozen other stories that are on that level of ridiculous lucky. Send him a DM saying he needs to do a story time on Instagram @wild.away.with.me

Anyway what were we talking about?

OH YEAH

This post is about just one or two of the important things Ty taught me about living and happiness.

Ty changed my life.

I learned a lot from him, including some rituals that have improved my life tenfold.

1. Go on an adventure every day.

2. Sunrise and sunset are the best time for adventure.

There has been perhaps no greater boon to my mental health and sense of wonder than applying this rule to my life.

All it takes is an hour, it gets the heart pumpin’, it gets the hormones and endorphins pumpin’, it gets the imagination pumpin’, PLUS it forces you to get out of the house at least once a day which is very important in my experience.

So let’s define adventure.

Firstly, if you want THE DEEP DIVE I put out a banger on this subject about a month ago. You can find it here:

Adventure Recipe Article

Basically an adventure is an outing that challenges you in some way or another.

This is why I bring my camera everywhere. It’s free adventure. I can play the picture game anywhere I go and it’s always a fun challenge. My painter buddies do the same with a sketchpad, musicians do it a lot of ways but mostly it’s a lot of walking around going:

duhduhduhduhBOWBOWBOW-witkikahdugidigidigidigidigiBOWBOWdoodooBOOBAdoodoodooBOOBOOBOW doodoodoodoodoowachawawadoodoodoodoowaaaaaaaaaaaBOWBOWBOWTSHHHH

(^actual live stream of what was going on in my head while writing this^)

(also idk if you can hear it but it’s giving Master of Puppets)

OKAY

So we need adventure every day.

But sometimes we ignore the alarm that goes off on our phone at 6:45 p.m. every day with the caption “Sunset is coming!”

This happened to me yesterday.

I had a marvelous adventure idea. I found some places nearby that are world class rockhounding spots with sapphire and garnet and quartz crystals and all that fun stuff.

So the idea was to head out at about 7 so I’d have an hour and a half of decent light.

Then I got tinkering with my headphones at about 6:45 to figure out why the left one was so quiet.

45 minutes later, after some experiments I had the problem licked, my headphones work great again. But now it’s 7:30 and I have an hour until it’s dark and only 25 minutes until sunset colors AND it’s looking like the sunset is going to be a BANGER?!

GDANGIT

Where does the time slip off to?

Time for emergency adventure protocols.

EMERGENCY ADVENTURE PROTOCOLS:

Step 1: Prepare ahead of time,

-Have your spots lined up so you can jump and GO.

-Have your adventure go bag ready.

1. Have your spots planned out, Ty calls this Homework.

   1. If you don’t do your homework you don’t learn your options and then you won’t know where to go when you procrastinate on an adventure.

   2. Sometimes an adventure just totally bombs and fails and fails and bombs and if you label it homework then it just means you learned something no matter what happened.

   3. Homework is fun because it means you go get to explore and FIND cool spots that are nearby.

   4. This can serve as your adventure of the day any time. Homework is always valid, though if the sunset is off the chain you’ll want to go somewhere more reliable.

      1. I made this mistake exactly yesterday. 10/10 sunset, procrastinated a little, no time, decide to go find that rock spot. Turns out the map in that book was NOT to scale and it was actually a 45 minute drive and i only had 35 minutes of light.

      2. SO I headed up that way anyway and found a GORGEOUS marble quarry that’s all full of water reflecting like a mirror. But it was too dark to photograph.

      3. AT LEAST I know where it is now!! Homework is full of surprises and delights.

         

2. If the sunset is going to be dank - this is no time for homework. Go to a trusty reliable spot - find your Dixie Rock. Ideally find a dozen Dixie Rocks so you can look where the clouds are and triangulate your best odds at a view with minimal driving time and maximal wandering and wondering time.

   1. My readers in St. George Ut. know about the Dixie Rock but to the uninitiated. Above downtown St George there is a cliff that towers over the town and has the word ‘DIXIE’ on it because the church wanted to grow cotton there at one point so they started calling it ‘the Dixie of the West.’ It’s a marvelous park that’s just a web of Navajo sandstone and slot canyons and cool lizards, and EXCELLENT 360 views all the way to Zion. it’s awesome.

   2. The best part is it’s 5 minutes from your house if you live downtown so it’s a primo world class emergency adventure spot.

   3. You need to decide what you value in a good emergency adventure spot but close proximity is one of the few things that is not optional because that would defeat the whole purpose.

   4. In deciding what you value in your Dixie Rock, 10 things I would recommend considering:

      1. Good views (360* if you can get it)

      2. Cool rocks

      3. Cool trees

      4. Cool flowers

      5. Cool bugs

      6. Cool birds

      7. Good people watching if you’re into that sort of thing.

      8. Good quiet and nature sounds if you’re into that sort of thing.

      9. Water and waterfowl and semi-aquatic mammals, especially pelicans and beavers.

         1. Pelicans and beavers rock

      10. Good places to sit and take it all in. Esp. if you have a good view of the sunset.

          

3. Adventure Go-Bag

   1. I’ve got a little satchel that I grab each time I go out. It’s got all my adventure tools. There’s always a knife, some pens, a little baby first aid kit, a lighter, 6 test tubes with lids, my Hand Lens for looking realllly close at rocks, and a little notebook in there.

   2. The name kind of tells the whole story. Its a bag you can grab so you can go on an adventure. Any questions?

      1. Side note, for you hiking stick enthusiasts, I also keep a first aid kit and lighter on my hiking stick using this clever thing that I found in an old boyscouts handbook called a ‘ranger band.’

      2. You can buy them, they’re basically oversized rubber bands that go on your hiking stick and you can stretch them away from the stick and put little stuff in there

      3. You really don’t need to buy them though, just go into any ol’ bike shop and ask if they have any inner-tubes they’re throwing away. Cut that bad boy up boom bam free ranger band!

      4. Plus it’s nice to have a rubberized surface on your stick for if you get wet or for some other reason really just need that extreme grip!

      5. It took forever to figure out how to get these shabby pictures of my stick but I couldn’t let you go without a visual!

      6. You can see my ranger band, with the outline of the stuff inside it, as well as some string because you never know, and my rock sling tied on there just in case I ever feel like throwing a rock an ungodly distance. The top is covered in carvings of critters and plants and mushrooms, it took me about 3 years to finish carving this stick. I love it to death.

      7. Also if you’re not a hiking stick enthusiast, freakin, why?

         

         

         

         I thought the panorama might be clever but I couldn’t get it to slide across the top straight so it got all wiggly, I promise my stick is much straighter than this hahaha.

         

Step 2: GO

1. Look at the clock, panic just a TEENY bit.

2. Grab go-bag, water, stick, camera, binoculars, whatever other tools the adventure may call for, Idk ur situation I’m not ur mom.

3. Go.

4. Get there

5. Start walking,

   1. look around,

   2. check the flowers for cool beetles,

   3. watch the crab spiders in the yucca flowers as they try to hide from you,

   4. spot a bird far away and wonder what it is for 10 minutes just for it to never get close enough for you to ID it.

   5. Pick a hilltop within view and set out to get to the top of it

   6. You get the point.

So that’s it. Emergency adventure gameplan.

Your brain and body will thank you.

Also, just because you have the go-bag doesn’t mean every day has to entail a go-bag level adventure. Sometimes the best move is to put your shoes on and go for a good long walk around the neighborhood, or meeting with a friend to play chess at the park, or just going for a drive somewhere you’ve never gone. There’s a million ways to have a mini adventure.

Just get out of the house on a non-work mission, that’s the actual goal.

With each venture into the unknown, the weight that society piles on our shoulders in the form of ‘responsibilities’ becomes lighter.

Society is just a game we made up to help us pass the time here on this big beautiful blue planet.

Adventure reminds us of that.

Get out there and do some homework if you don’t have your spots down, get your adventure plan ready, go-bag and all. Get surprised. Feel the Awe. Smell the smells.

Best day ever every dang day.

That’s all this week!

You know what that means!!

It’s time for

Weekly Things!

Album of the Week

This week we are doing a double album of the week.

The reason is this:

I know some of Y’all don’t f*** with Hip hop

(Tom - looking at you)

The first album of the week is a Hip Hop album. It is one of the most visionary, cutting edge albums I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s spectacular. Every single moment has been carefully attended to. Some of it transcends music altogether. It borders on opera and musical theater and slam poetry all at the same time. It’s musically and lyrically complex, much of it beyond my understanding. I get chills over and over every time I listen to it. It’s perfect.

The Independent called this album a “tender opus from the defining poet of his generation.”

It received 8 grammy nominations and won 3.

Why am I hyping it up so much? Because when I tell you this is a Kendrick Lamar album I don’t want you to just write it off.

It transcends hiphop. It’s RnB and Bebop and Soul and so much more. It’s a concept album about his journey through life and the process of therapy and healing and it’s raw and powerful and beautiful.

ANYWAY

I humbly present

“Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers” By the defining poet of our generation - Kendrick Lamar:

Sidenote I quit Spotify last week and switched over to Deezer because they pay artists double what Spotify does and also they block AI generated music from being promoted on the platform. Plus Spotify has gotten into some SKETCHY stuff in the last year or so and I can’t support it.

If you’ve been thinking of doing something similar, it was dead simple, they have a tool that imports all your playlists!

That said I don’t know what the preferred way of sharing music is on here. Deezer doesn’t make a pretty little iframe box in Substack like Spotify does. I would love some feedback. Pls help.

(Editor’s side note [editor is also Brady] this problem may have worked itself out because I can’t put custom HTML in Substack as far as I can tell and the only services that make cute little iframes like you see above are Spotify and Youtube so…)

ANYWAY

Album of the week part two if Kendrick didn’t do it for you.

This one is like the opposite of Mr Morale. It’s chill and beautiful, like sitting on the beach on some beautiful island in the sun with a freakin daiquiri in one hand and a very mellow joint in the other.

EVERYONE likes this album.
Even if you never heard it I know you’re going to like it. Stan Getz is a genius. This is one of the great gateway albums to get into jazz.

It’s a definitive Bossa Nova album. Great guitars, sax, vocals, It’s brilliant. I never get tired of it.

I present to you

Getz/Gilberto by Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto

What’s Hideous Gomphideous been up to?

This week we are going to do it a little different. I haven’t been recording much but I HAVE been playing with my loop pedal every day. So today the hideous gomphideous of the day is a video!! It’s about a 20 minute ambient lofi jam with the wurlitzer and guitar and bass drums and all that.

I think It would be fun to live stream a loop pedal session every day, this was my first experiment in that because the hard part is getting good audio but I got one step closer today!!

I didn’t expect it to turn into 20 minutes. I was shooting for 4. Oh how the time flies when you’re having fun.

Anyway I humbly present

Molasses Pancakes Jam by Hideous Gomphideous

(for those of you who don’t know I just hate naming instrumentals, it’s too hard, so I always just name them after the last thing I ate.)

Quote of the week

This is a quote I must have heard a decade ago but it’s stuck with me ever since. I didn’t know where it came from until I looked it up just now, I don’t know the guy that said it, but I heard it on a podcast and the message impacted me.

“But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”

―Bill Bryson,Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

Fun Fact of the week

NEW SEGMENT!! I’m just gonna keep doing different things for this last one until we find something mad fun.

As a science nerd I have about a million fun facts on hand so it seems like a good option.

I was going to start posting my favorite Haiku of the week but I already post my favorite one every day in Substack notes so it seemed redundant.

Okay ready?

This one blew my mind for months.

10 years ago they discovered a new species of carpenter bee in Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument.

Like a lot of other carpenter bees, it makes tunnels to live and raise their young in.

UNLIKE perhaps any other carpenter bee, this one makes tunnels in the Navajo Sandstone!!

These tunnels take forever to make compared to making one in a tree, so they pass the tunnels on to their offspring and each generation their little tunnel houses get a little bigger!

They do this by taking a mouthful of water from nearby, flying up, spitting it on the rock they are trying to excavate, and then scraping it with their little teeth.

SO NEAT!!!

Here’s a lovely little article on it from entomology today

Entomology Today

And here’s the original paper publishing the discovery if you wanna go REAL deep into that rabbit hole.

It even has VIDEO of them!! That’s crazy rare for a science paper.

Current Biology Journal

THAT’S ALL FOR THIS WEEK!

Until next week remember.

You are loved and worthy of love,

You are brave,

you are powerful,

you are so cute,

You are capable of more than you could imagine.

I love you so! Thank you for being here with me. See you next week!

At age 11 I got my first film camera.

I took bad pictures for about 4 years but I was completely fascinated with the art form. Being able to freeze a moment in time is a magical superpower.

At 14 I got a digital camera. This really ramped things up. I could take thousands of pictures now instead of 24 at a time.

The digital camera set me on a path to become an absolutely obsessed composition nerd. I started seeing the math behind a good photo and being able to reproduce it.

(Crash Course if you’re interested.

Man we are getting distracted early on into this one! New record?!

Composition is actually about how the brain processes a new image. So it’s really more about psychology than anything. Evolution drives how we process new info, and nature sculped our evolution, so if you can look at how nature composes things and emulate that, you’ve got nice composition.

It’s about predicting attention and it turns out that mostly comes down to fractions and Fibonacci. The key is the point where those fractions intersect. For example, if you put the subject right at the intersection of the halves, that’s all the brain will see. You can’t really get any more info into that photo, so your subject better be extremely powerful, and even then it will feel simple.

You can do multiple subjects if you do thirds, 4ths, 5ths, etc but the attention at the intersections gets weaker. Generally speaking when you look at a piece of art you scan the 4 corners about 1/3 of the way down and the very center first, probably not in that order. I think that Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio are responsible for this phenomenon because about halfway between the corner intersections of the 3rd and 4th is where the golden ratio spirals out from.

Like this

I know it’s a business card but I didn’t want to build the shape again from scratch. The point is the shape the card is built into. See the squares? See the two little ones down toward the bottom right third? That’s where the eye goes when it meets a new piece of art unless you tell it to do otherwise with strong composition.

K now compare where your eye goes in that shape to where your eye goes in this photo:

Just about the dang same right?!

This kind of math can be found everywhere outside. From flowers to trees to snails and even the shape of our ears?!

So my hypothesis is creating art in accordance with this math is the cheat codes to making satisfying art.

That said, let’s do a little experiment to see if that hypothesis holds up real quick.

Have a look at these photos and NOTICE where your eye goes when you very first look at them. Notice the path they take and what points you check first:

This one is like our baseline because there’s not a subject per se, but did you notice that you looked dead center and then bounced around the 4 corners? Interesting right?

Okay now look at these, they have the subject on the important fractions to override that center - corner - corner - corner - corner reflex. This makes them less work and thus, more fun to look at.

If I get even a single comment on asking about my composition theory I’ll write a whole post about my theory on composition.)

ALso shameless plug, all photos you may see in any of my substacks are available as wall art through me or at bradyiverson.com!

Also bradyiverson.com may or may not be working right when you go to see it, I’ve been tinkering and coding and I’m about to drop an entirely new website but I think I broke some things on the old one in the process…

Anyway

Where were we?

Oh yeah I started taking thousands of pictures.

But even up to this point I was not an artist, just a camera nerd, maybe a photographer at best, but not an artist.

I didn’t really feel like an artist with a camera until last year. After 18 years of shooting.

I’ve been thinking for a long time about what it means to be an artist. I got obsessed with the topic because one of my ultimate dreams is to travel the world taking beautiful photographs and sharing them any way I can.

Two years ago in December, an amazing opportunity fell into my lap.

My roommate and wizard level painter, Steven Anzardo, invited one of his painter friends to our house.

His name is Carl. He has a gallery in Colorado and travels the country selling his great big oil paintings. He drives and lives out of a rad Mercedes Sprinter van with a trailer on the back for hauling paintings and tents for art festivals.

He was living my dream. And he’s a genius.

I decided I was going to learn as much from him as possible.

He took over our garage and turned it into a studio for almost the entire month of December. He hung out with us, taught us about art and emotional intelligence and social dynamics and people. I was completely absorbed in every conversation i had with him. He had it all figured out and I had to figure out how he got here so I could do the same.

Then came the aforementioned opportunity.
He announced he was leaving tomorrow and told us he was going down to phoenix to take part in a handful of big art festivals down there.
Then he invited any of us that wanted to join him to ‘come and play.’

Well, I’d already committed to learning as much from him as I could so I told him I was in.

Basically I spent two months out there and we did 6 shows and I met all sorts of wonderful people and got my first real glimpse into the art world from the artist’s point of view. It was like a masterclass crash course on how to make art for a living and how to make an extrordinary style of living for art.

When I got back to normal life my roommates and I were told our lease was up and they' would be selling the house we lived in.

So we decided to go on the road.

Which led to the collision of my world with Carl’s again a few months later.

Which, surprisingly, led me to learn about the other side of the art world entirely - Galleries.

We opened a gallery in Taos, New Mexico.

But the landlord was a demon so we got out of there.

Then we opened a gallery in Santa Fe.

But the landlord was a demon so we got out of there too.

We opened another in Santa Fe and the landlord is an angel so everything is working out.

All the while, working on galleries and rubbing shoulders with Carl’s friends - some of whom are among the most accomplished painters in the United States, I was learning more than I could have possible hoped for when I jumped into all this.

In total, I’ve spent nearly a year total in the last two years working with and learning from Carl everything I could about the art world, and perhaps more importantly, what it means to be an artist.

The art world, firstly, is fascinating. Nobody knows what’s going on. It’s like professional gambling. Sometimes you don’t sell anything for a month. Sometimes you sell more in a day than you did in the last six months.

Literally my main takeaway from all this experience is nobody knows how any of this works and half the people in the business are trust fund babies and the other half have lived extraordinary lives and their art is successful because of that .

But

The point is I’ve gotten a lot closer to the truth in the last year on what it actually means to be an artist, and what art actually is, and I’m excited to share.

I’ve taken to calling it the Jazz Hypothesis.

Actually in the process of writing this I stumbled upon a Charlie Parker quote that pretty much sums it up better than I can.

“First you learn the instrument, then you learn the music, then you forget all that shit and just play”

The path to becoming an artist is almost the same no matter what art form you are practicing. Learn your tools, learn the theory, forget all that shit and just play. They have to go in that order. I don’t make the rules I just describe them.

(Side note if you are not familiar with Charlie Parker, he’s one of the most influential and highly technical saxophone players that ever existed. Half the east coast jazz scene is named after him. He played so light and fast that they named him The Bird. He is like the opposite of beginner jazz though, be warned.)

Phase 1 - Learn the Instrument

You cannot make great art if you are not great at using your tools. You can’t take good pichers if you don’t know how the camera work. Can’t play good geetar if you don’t get your fingers on the geetar. Etc.

When I started, I was just trying to copy the greats. Both in photography and music.

As a baby musician, I thought learning to play a song that someone else wrote is playing music.

This is wrong. This is just playing at music.

As a baby photographer I used to think that I couldn’t take good photos without going to the most incredible places on earth.

This is horribly, desperately, expensively wrong.

One of the greatest most magical things in photography is that it unfolds the wonder of the world right in front of your eyes. Grand Canyon in your backyard type sh**.

However

Phase 1 requires rampant consumption of the finest forms of the art you’re working in. If you’re a musician you listen to ridiculous amounts of good music, if you’re a visual artist you buy art books and go to galleries and museums, all with the intent of soaking up every little thing you can like a sponge.

You must develop your taste to a level far beyond your ability so you have something to strive for. It’s a terribly frustrating stage to be in but in the long run it is essential to making great art. Plus I’m convinced that' it’s a state that no artist ever really gets out of…

If you don’t consume the medium you can get stuck in phase 1 for a life time. It’s like a trap. The real goal is to get out of phase 1 as quickly as possible so you can get to play.

You need to figure out what is good and why. Or else you risk getting stuck in the amateur artist stage, and what’s worse, you might end up copying someone else’s thing, selling it as your own, and never exploring and experimenting with the medium that you doth proclaim to love so dearly.

Not to be trusted. It’s too easy to get stuck in this phase but if you do you’ll lose your love for your art.

This is how cover bands are born. They get stuck in phase 1.

No shade, that’s plenty fun for some people.

But to me It’s like going to all the effort of learning French and then never going to France to put it to good use, or even going to a French restaurant. What was all the work for then?

This happens because they are approaching the learn the instrument phase without an intent to reach phase 2, which is learning how the music works.

The problem with this is you need to know how the music works to have the building blocks to play with it. You need to know color theory interpret how to lay down the paint. You need to understand how light works to capture realistic perspective.

Etc.

Some people just have no interest in phase 2, but I find that most either don’t know phase 2 exists, or are scared of phase 2.

But I think phase 2 is where things actually start getting fun.

Once you stop thinking about what your body is doing can you start thinking about what the art is doing. That’s how you git it in yer’ soul.

Art comes from the muscles and the soul.

Whatever that means.

Phase 2 - Learn the Music

The great writer reads a lot, the great musician listens a lot, the great painters, photographers, sculptors, look and see a lot.

You must tune in to the theory of your art to get it in your soul. You have to notice the patterns and act on them until they become second nature. Expanding your knowledge of the mechanisms of your art form will give you more tools to play with.

For example, musicians seem to go two routes on this.

The first group is the ‘classical school’ of music. Learn about sound and harmony and music theory and why music does what it does and then experiment with it until you can predict it.

The other group just experiment endlessly and obsessively until their fingers and ears create a connection. They learn what sound the instrument is going to make before they even hit a note or pluck a string. They don’t put words to anything, that takes too much time.

It’s a brain-type thing, though it seems to me a happy medium between the two is ideal

Both groups figure out the music to great success. I don’t know enough about painting to paint the analogy on that but I imagine it’s very similar.

Some photographers just shoot until they figure it out. Some study the greats and analyze intensively and make their own versions of their work until they internalize it. Both groups get to the point where good composition is second nature.

Are you seeing this pattern develop? It seems there’s two types of great artist: Intuitive and trained.

They both learn the same thing but the trained one does it with words and the intuitive one does it all internally.

The intuitive is no less capable of an artist but has a hard time talking about it.

(Depending on your art form this could be a hinderance. For a photographer or a painter it’s practically a non-issue because those aren’t team sports. Same for a solo singer songwriter but the second you join a band and don’t know how to talk about what you’re doing, the value of the word learning becomes apparent, same with cooking or any other art form that requires playing with others. )

No matter how you get there, you need to tinker with the art until you figure out what makes it tick. THEN and only then, can you play in your creation.

Artist nirvana achieved.

Not like the band Nirvana, like ultimate boundless freedom in your art. Oh whatever.

Phase 3 - Forget All that Shit and Just Play

Play is the real end goal in art. But you can’t do it until you understand the mechanisms of the art form you’re working with.

Once you understand the ‘rules’, you will learn less and less from copying the greats. It’s the law of diminishing returns.

Alternately you will learn more and more from experimentation and exploration because phase 2 honed your pattern recognition.

Your muscle memory and understanding are at the level now where the art can flow freely from you. This is the best part. The creation and the flow state. And nobody can ever take it away from you. You will have this art by your side for the rest of your life.

This is what all the work was for.

This is why it makes me sad to see a cover band. They put in all that work and never get to actually PLAY. Even the best cover bands in the world make me sad because I want to hear what is in the soul of the musicians playing the music.

I think it’s a sin to build a career copying a masterful artist without learning what that artist knew and using it to push the state of art forward.

Yet it’s all too common.

There’s a reason it’s called ‘Playing’ music, and it breaks my heart that most people think playing music is the copying phase when it’s actually the creation phase.

Okay that’s my art hypothesis. The true artist is one who has achieved such fluency in their medium that they can play with it without a second thought. No calculations or planning, just action and reaction. Flow and Freedom.

I see this illustrated in my photography journey.

Looking back I notice a handful of discoveries that led to different eras of my photos. When I started, I was just figuring out how the camera worked. I took it everywhere and took pictures. I Idolized Peter Lik and other landscape photographers like him. I compared myself to them constantly and tried to copy their photos.

If you’ve been reading a while, you know of my fascination with Lik.

If you’re not familiar, here’s a quick crash course on Peter Lik. For our analogy today however, you could replace him with whoever is the top performing artist in your field.

He’s like, a metaphor, man…

Since like 2008 he has held the record for the highest price a photographic print ever sold for (though this is debatable because it was a private sale and we never saw proof or something?) Anyway it was reportedly 6.3 million for

THIS ONE.

He has galleries in all the hottest rich people spots - Miami, Honolulu, Vegas, San Diego, Paris, etc. He’s been the model for success in the landscape photography world for a long time.

He sells prints for $20-100k.

(The spooky part that I can’t figure out is the second you buy a Peter Lik piece it loses almost all of its value. You’d be lucky to sell that $100k piece for $5k. That’s what I hear at least.

Rumor has it his net worth is like 400 million.

Like I said, nobody has any idea what’s going on in the art world…)

Wow wait what are we doing here?!

Okay focus.

Looking back at my time living in a van and traveling the country for the first time, I notice that almost everywhere I stopped to take photographs were places that were already LEGENDARY photograph spots. Places that had been photographed 1000 times, probably because Peter Lik photographed it like 40 years ago and people been copying him ever since.

You know some of the photos I’m talking about, everyone does. That crazy rainbow Japanese maple at that arboretum in Oregon, Antelope Canyon, that dang pier that goes off into the sunset I think on Hawaii...

In fact i’m POSITIVE these knockoffs exist in substack’s stock photos and how perfectly would that illustrate my concept?

Here’s the knock-off versions of these epic legendary scenes.

All 5 of these images have been ripped off a million times. I think Lik took the original on all of them except horseshoe bend, but the system is so messed up even that feels hard to tell.

That Japanese maple at the Portland Arboretum is one of the most famous trees of all time.

THE POINT IS

Every landscape photographer starts off by copying other landscape photographer. Same with painters, musicians, songwriters, poets, you name it.

It’s an unavoidable part of the process of becoming an artist.

SO I went through my phase of copying the greats and I learned some incredible life changing things about landscape photography in the process.

Then I hit phase 2 and just started experimenting constantly and discovering all sorts of mind blowing things. I learned photography very much ‘by ear.’

I remember the day that I realized the more layers a photo has, the more interesting it is.

For example

I remember the day that I realized I could use the landscape to frame my photos up to make a cozy contained feeling.

I remember learning about the rule of 3rds, and the golden ratio, and even the day that I realized the rule of 3rds applies to 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, etc, and they just got less powerful as you moved to more complex fractions.

The Mill and fibonacci?!

THE POINT IS

Did I get some great photos out of this phase? Yes.

But none of very few of them are MY photos, because the discovery of those places was not my own story.

I didn’t earn the view, I didn’t adventure or explore for it, I copied it, and If I wanted to be a great photographer I’d have to quit doing that asap.

The moment I began to realize this was the moment I entered phase 3 of photography: Play.

I had all the rules figured out and I had shot so much that I forgot a lot of them, they became muscle memory, I got good enough at composition that I could see the frames without having to look through the camera, I was set free from what my expectations of a good photographer was. I stopped collecting SPOTS and unlocked the true magic of photography: the ability to tell a whole story in a single image.

It took me forever to realize this was the goal. Ever since I did, I can take photos that I think are fun and interesting ANYWHERE. Drop me in a field or the middle of a city and I’ll have just about the same amount of fun with a camera.

I stopped being a ‘landscape photographer’ and became a storyteller. That’s where the thrill comes from now, and that has set me free.

This same analogy works in music, learn all the songs, get all the licks, figure out chord progressions, but all paths in music lead to jazz because jazz is the ultimate in PLAY that a musician can get.

This is my jazz theory.

This applies to every art form and it’s a stunning fun question. How does the painter evolve? Painters learn realism to master the rules and end up doing abstract works because that is the purest application of those rules with no goofy nonsense to get in the way, just like jazz.

For photographers, I suspect that the ultimate peak of play is street photography. It’s fast-paced, there’s a MILLION stories out there in the street, and you really have to focus on what story you’re telling with so many options. It’s spontaneous and at the really high level it’s FAST. Sometimes the perfect frame is only there for a moment. For example you see a beautiful girl in a beautiful red dress and it matches the color of the sign of the store she’s about to walk into. In theory you have one single moment to take that photo. Any earlier or later and she will not be in the right spot to balance out the sign in the frame.

The point is the pinnacle/peak/whatever the word is of any art form is jazz. That is to say, it’s the activity or the version of that art form that allows you to channel everything you’ve ever seen/heard/practiced in your art into the ultimate flow state, and thus, the maximal play.

The artist bares their entire life and soul to the audience in that moment. That is what makes great art.

The ultimate goal of art is to create with as much freedom as possible, and the ultimate art, if there is such a thing, is made with maximal freedom.

Look at just about any great painter. Picasso for example, though I’ve heard people argue he’s overrated, I’m not getting in the middle of that. Picasso started with technical portraits and still life and by the end, well, he was doing this stuff -

https://www.pablopicasso.org/final-years.jsp

It’s really really so beautiful I could cry. Spend a lifetime learning art just to realize that the point all along was to do it like you did when you were a child.
Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse, look into any of them and you’ll notice that pieces they did in their older years are downright whimsical. They look effortless and sometimes even silly.

My hell Matisse went from this

http://art-matisse.com/image/artworks/7%20The%20Maid%201896.jpg

To this

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/490000

He called the process ‘drawing with scissors’

He was having too much dang fun. He realized that was the point all along.

In terms of music, Herbie Hancock went from Mozart concertos to freakin WATERMELON MAN.

If you have never heard watermelon man, it’s one of the finest pieces of music in human history. Do yourself a favor.

Yes, that crazy sound at the beginning is the drummer blowing into beer bottles. Like I said, it’s genius.

Here’s what I really want you to take away from this.

If you want to become an ARTIST rather than just a painter, musician, photographer, architect, sculptor, ceramicist, etc -

Look at your art form, figure out what the jazz is, and work toward that. Copy the masters but be sure to study the underlying mechanisms while you do it so you can get out of that phase and into PLAY as quickly as possible. The faster you can get to play, the more likely you are to make this art form a part of you and your life.

Rules in art are like training wheels on a bike. They keep you from eating shit when you’re learning but once you figure out how to ride, all they do is get you made fun of and worse, limit your growth.

The best artists know all the rules well enough to know when and where they can be broken.

The artist that strives to learn and grow constantly will always end up at their art’s version of jazz.

Find your jazz.

In the meantime

Here’s some of the best jazz I ever heard to help inspire.

You guessed it, it’s time for

WEEKLY THINGS

Album of the week - Herbie Hancock - Head Hunters

If you listened to Watermelon man you’ve already heard a good chunk of this one. It’s just one of the best albums ever and anyone that disagrees with that is probably a weenie. Peak Herbie Hancock. Chameleon is 16 minutes of raunchy funky insanity.

Quote of the week -

Another banger from Charlie Parker that feels like it sums things up here real nice…

“Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you that music has boundaries. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.”

Sadly, It’s been a terribly hectic week and I don’t have any new music to share with you from Hideous Gomphideous. I’ve started a half dozen projects but they keep ending up sounding like a dumpster fire so I don’t want to put you through that.

Get’m next time tiger!!

BUT I do have a poem of the day.

Multiple actually!

This is haiku from the legendary master that made me fall in love with haiku in the first place.

He’s the cheekiest and funniest haiku poet I’ve ever read. I cannot recommend his work highly enough.

His name is Kobayashi Issa

I think he found the jazz in Haiku like no other.

Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

I really had a hell of a time just picking one. I love all his work.

Another that came to mind goes something like

Just outside the back gate

A neat yellow hole

Someone peed in the snow

IF you want to go down that rabbit hole here’s a link to a bunch of his on the Best Poems Encyclopedia.

Anyway that’s all for this week!

Until next week

Find your jazz. Chase your jazz.

Remember that you are loved and capable of more than you could possible imagine.

See you next week!

Love - Brady

If you’ve been reading for a while, you probably know that I am completely fascinated and infatuated with photography. I try my best to take at least one photo a day.

This obsession as guided and sculpted my life.
Photography led me to travel. Photography turned me into a hiker. Photography led me to some of the best friends of my life.
It feels like every great adventure I can recall in my life has been in pursuit of a great photo, or has been made into a great adventure BY a great photo. If you need a recap I have just the thing, it’s the guide to making awesome adventures published just a short while ago-

Swampy's Adventure Guide

The TLDR is the best adventures have inherent risk. You have to apply your skills and grow and that’s what makes them great.

Photography also has risk and it’s on a spectrum. From just risking your afternoon taking photos of cats in the yard to whatever the heck Ty has been getting up to any given Thursday.

If you are not familiar with Ty or his work let me turn you onto this real quick.

Firstly he’s the guy standing on that big ol radio reflector in the first picture.

Secondly

He’s the most strategic photographer I’ve ever seen. He plans photos like heists.

Here’s the kicker

He’s obsessed with dramatic natural events. Flash floods, lightning, wildfires, tornadoes. He brings up turning his Subaru into a tornado chaser just about every time I talk to him.

He is also the most coordinated person I’ve ever met but that’s beside the point.

I can’t link to his profile but here’s his top post if you want to check him out.

That one gives me stank face every time.

The point is

Photography rewards risk and that’s what I love about it.

(applicable to all art forms probably)

All great photography is about the story.

Sometimes the story is beautifully self contained in the image and no further information is needed. In fact any further information would only hurt the magic of the photo.

I think this photo here is a good example of that. I want to know so badly what’s going on here, but I’m sure if I found out I would be disappointed because the actual story is probably a series of somewhat mundane decisions by someone kinda weird. The questions are better than the answers.

Why is the futon outside with the dresser and table? Why did this person decide to put that poster in their window and what purpose is the duct tape serving? What is the word between “an” and “evening” that the duct tape is covering?

It’s just a terribly intriguing scene. It’s not pretty at or anything but the fact that it raises so many questions is what gave this very strange photo a special place in my heart.

This one also does not need any further info, its the chillest seal in the world waving at you, what else could you want.

Other photos can be MADE great by the story that accompanies them. National Geographic and TIME and LIFE have built entire industries on this.

This photo needs context to be worth just about anything. This is not a particularly good photo, the light is bad, the composition makes him feel squished in the frame. But the story of how I got this photo is what I love about it.

This young gentleman in the frame, surrounded by 5 gallon buckets of semi-precious gemstones and other cool rocks, is called Sunny Topaz.

I met him at open mic. He was in town rockhounding. He had been traveling for years rockhounding everywhere he went.

At this open mic he swing danced with some random girl like he was the star of a movie, gave me about a dozen EPIC rockhounding spots, and recited TWO German epic poems in the original German, full throated to the audience with as much gusto as I’ve ever seen.

Absolute legend.

After the open mic he asked me if I had any gigglebush (aka the ganga, the lord’s lettuce) that I could share with him.

It just so happened that I did and gave it to him. In return he brought me over to his 80s era chevyvan. The inside had no furniture or anything, just a sleeping pad completely surrounded by 5 gallon buckets full of cool rocks and big pretty wood boxes.

He pulled out a box from the mess and gave me a turquoise ring from it. He had made it with stones he had found around the mines in Nevada.

It only fits on my pinky finger but I still have it to this day, 8 years later.

This photo has been completely useless to me until this moment. Nobody else has ever even seen it.

ANYWAY

I think good photography is about storytelling. Whether it tells the story itself or you tell the story for it. Again, this likely applies to all visual art forms but I’ve not the expertise to speak confidently

Every once in a while you get a rare white whale photo with BOTH. The photo tells enough of a story to stand up itself and be a great photo, but once you hear the actual story behind it, it becomes an EPIC photo.

The first example that comes to mind of this. It’s another Kieth Ladzinski photo, you know I love him if you read two posts ago.

Here’s the photo:

Pretty nuts by itself right? What a great photo.

THEN you learn that it’s actually a leopard seal, which can grow up to like 700 pounds and 11 feet in length, and is one of the most affective killers in the arctic.

Ladzinski said he knew this leopard seal was in the water when he jumped in. He found out very quickly that there was another one behind him. The worst possible kind. A baby.

Which meant he was right between the two.

Leopard seals are like bears. Overall they’re chill, they don’t want any trouble, but you can’t get between the momma and the baby if you want to live.

Well there he was, big camera in an underwater housing in hand, and an angry mother leopard seal attacking him for getting between her and her baby.

This photo was taken while Ladzinski used the camera to jam up the momma’s mouth, thus very likely saving his life.

THAT’s the scene: shoving a 30 thousand dollar camera into the mouth of one of the most fearsome predators in the whole ocean to keep her from shredding you into little bits ALL WHILE A BABY LEOPARD SEAL SITS AND WATCHES?! Not to mention the dudes on the boat freaking the freak out watching this trying to get over to our boy Kieth to pull him out as he’s fending off this absolute unit of a seal.

They got him out. What an experience.

Now for something completely different.

Some photos don’t really have good stories.

This one, for example, felt like luck.
Keeping in mind that luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
I saw the storm coming in and I had missed the one the week before so this time I was prepared.

Went up to my spot with a beer and a jazz stick and my camera and just sat there pressing the shutter button on my remote over and over for like 4 hours. This was one 1,000 photos I took that night. Only 7 of them had any lightning in them at all.

Some photos only need a one-sentence story:

I took this in Amsterdam the morning after my first mushroom trip.

Sometimes a photo can only exist without a story. The photo needs space for the viewer to put their own story in there. Nothing I could tell you about this photo would make it more interesting. Here, I’ll try just to see -

The girl in the picture is my friend from photography class and we went on a walk during class to take photos because we didn’t have anything to develop.

But why is her shoe off?

Why is she sitting all alone?

Nobody knows.

That’s the magic.

Here’s another where the story is so obvious that it doesn’t do anybody any good.

I suspect because this photo is about the juxtaposition of the 7 eleven with that stunning old clock tower. Basically the story is “modern times, man…”

Finally, in our analysis of story before we just jump into full blown storytime we are going to look at one more thing. This one is the case with probably 98% of photos in the modern day. It’s a photo that is valuable for the story BUT the story is mostly if not only valuable to the person that took the photo or a close circle like grandparents to baby pictures.

(side note I do not want to see pictures of your baby. It’s not that I don’t want to care, I don’t know how to care. I was not trained for this.)

This one kind of feels a photo that’s more valuable to me than the general public. Don’t get me wrong I love the lights reflecting and all the little stories to be found in the people, but it’s by no means an exceptional photo. there’s too much blank space and it doesn’t tell you where to look. Yet I’ve just always loved this one.

This photo was taken somewhere around the southeast corner of Colorado. The train pictured is called The Southwest Chief. You can take it all the way from Los Angeles to Chicago, I know because I did it.

When I took this photo, I had already been on the train for a full 24 hours. I was on my way to Chicago so I could get on another train to get to New York and eventually a plane that would take me to Iceland and on to Europe.

That train was my home for three days. I rode it with one of my best friends - Rob. We were poor so we didn’t get beds, we just slept in the seats, which was a bit gnarly. We went through Flagstaff and Albuquerque and then up through Colorado to the Great Plains.

The Plains gave me the heebie jeebies. I’m a Western boy, if I can’t see a mountain on the horizon I start to get nervous. I didn’t see a mountain for like a day and a half on that train. I remember feeling nauseous the first time sat to look at the plains. The just go on like that forever.

Once we got out of the Great Plains we got to go across the Mississippi river at Fort Madison Iowa. This was easily the most impressive part of the entire train ride for me.

Like I said, I’m a desert boy. My idea of a river growing up was most people’s idea of a stream or a creek?

I could not fathom the scale of the Mississippi. I still can’t.

At Fort Madison, where the Southwest Chief crosses, the Mississippi is literally A FREAKING MILE ACROSS. 5,280 feet.

It makes me giddy just thinking about it. Up to that point I’d never seen a river more than like 60 feet across.

It’s literally so wide that when you try to look up pictures of the river at that spot it just looks like a lake. There’s not a picture I can find that actually gives appropriate scale but this one is close:

Anyway if you ever are looking for QUITE the adventure you can take this train across the country for like $150 as long as you don’t want a bed.

Also if you ride that bad boy all the way to Chicago the first thing you should do as you roll into the station is call up a Chicago pizzeria and get a deep dish ordered. They take like an hour to make so it’ll be ready when you get into town! That’s what I did anyway and It still feels like one of the best decisions I ever made.

(Side note, as a pizza nerd I was completely ready to dismiss the Chicago style pie. It’s so far departed from the original it just seemed like it couldn’t make sense, it’s too thick to eat like a pizza, it’s more like a cassarole, the sauce is on top of the cheese like it all just seems so backward.

I am not too proud to admit that I could not have been more wrong. Chicago pizza is not departed from the original, it’s evolved, it’s taken the medium that is pizza and pushed it to its absolute limits. It makes me feel a little euphoric just thinking about it. It’s really a beautiful thing and I think everyone needs to try it at least once.)

Anyway

Heres another photo!

I was vagabonding around Montana the summer I took this and found myself in Yellowstone one morning at dawn, unable to sleep.

I knew sunrise light is the best light you can get, and as I have a hard time getting up for it usually, I decided to not let this opportunity go to waste and decided to head out.

I didn’t get a mile from the campground before I saw her.

Yes it’s a her, I met a bison nerd later that day and she confirmed it based on the shape of her head.

Needless to say I stopped about dead in my tracks once I realized what was in the road.

I know bison like their space and not even a van can intimidate them if they’re in a bad mood.

Eventually she moved over and let me pass and not another half mile before I ran into another one!!

This one was an ANCIENT male. He seemed to be going blind as you can see better in this photo, which was featured in last week’s post.

I love how much tree debris is on his face. I guess If I was blind I’d probably have at least that much tree debris in my beard at all times. Sometimes I do anyway.

Anyway that was one of the most exciting mornings in all my dang life.

Another of the most exciting mornings of my life was maybe 4 days before bison day.

That morning, I again found myself restless in the wee hours of the morning.

I was on the outskirts of Glacier National Park sleeping in a truck stop parking lot.

I saw on the map that there was an entrance to the park nearby that didn’t connect to any of the other major roads.

I decided that road must go somewhere real nice or they wouldn’t have built it.

I took the winding canyon road and was rewarded at the top with this insane view:

The perfect mirror lake?! Landscape photographer’s dream. I couldn’t believe. I took my photos and set about making breakfast in a picnic area on the lakeshore.

Not 2 minutes into enjoying my eggs and hash I got an unexpected visit.

There were too many to count! A half dozen babies and a score of adults.

It was nerve-wracking. They had me surrounded. I just sat still and took pictures.
They had come to eat the charcoal out of the campfires. They went from campsite to campsite and ate it all up.

Maybe they had tummy troubles.

Anyway then I went on a hike to a nearby waterfall. It was lovely.

While I took the above photo I felt a scary type of gurgle in the ol’ tum-tum which sent me immediately, at top-speed into the forest, jumping 6 feet lengthwise over bushes to get as far away as possible from the nice families that were enjoying the waterfall.

Side note if you ever need a wild source of toilet paper in a pinch, common mullien has big fluffy leaves that are perfect for the job.

All I had nearby was mountain maple. You gotta work with what you got.

Anyway I decided to not let this dampen my spirits or my hike and continued onward down the trail.

What I saw next made me think maybe it was a good thing my bowels were already empty.

I turned a corner in the trail to find a bull moose not 12 feet off the side of the trail.

Do you have any idea how big a bull moose can get?! I sure as heck didn’t!

They get up to 7 feet tall AT THE SHOULDER! This one must have stood 9 feet if you measured to the top of his antlers.

So I quietly said

oh SHIT

and scurried down the trail about 30 feet to where I could still see him with my zoom lens.

Turns out he was just vibing so hard -

THEN THE FREAKING BEST PART OF THE WHOLE THING

a quarter mile past the moose was the most magnificent patch of perfectly ripe huckleberries that seemed to go on for miles.

I feasted. I love huckleberries. I couldn’t stop. I ate them all the way to the end of the lake and then took a ferry back to my trusty ol’ Fat Mama June(a 2008 ford e250.)

Here’s a picture of her:

Can’t even remember what I did the rest of that day. There’s no record on my photos. Must’ve napped.

That’s all this week!!!

If this post does half decent I have lots more stories like this prepared.
Also all photos in this post are available for sale at very reasonable prices! If you are interested you can reach out on bradyiverson.com or @the_swampmonster on the social medias or here on substack.

NOW

It’s time for

Weekly Things!!

Album of the Week

A terrible realization dawned on me just now.

I’ve never shared an album from my favorite band for album of the week.

I love this band because they are having more fun than anybody else and you can hear it. The groove is insane. They are not afraid to really push the envelope of what music can do. My heck this album opens up with a clarinet solo (don’t worry it’s dank.) Also the bass player is my favorite alive or dead.

May I present

Vulfpeck - The Beautiful Game

What’s Hideous Gomphideous Been up to?

Idk just goofin mostly. Sometimes too much goofin? Is that a thing?

I like this one a lot I think it’s neat!

Quote of the week!

“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”

-Elliot Erwitt

That is all for this week!!

I know some of you were expecting mean girls music theory pert two but it got too complicated to pull off in time this week! It’s coming!

Until then. You are awesome and beautiful and I think you are capable of more than you know.

See you next week!

This post has been in the making for 3 months. It’s the most monumental concept I’ve ever tackled on Substack. It’s currently at 19 pages in my document editor and still growing.

First things first, a bit of housekeeping.

This post is about music to the photo theme this week is photos from my archive that I think would make banger album covers, so that’s why they’re all square.

Secondly -

If you’ve been here a while, you may have noticed that the pace of releases has slowed to once every 2 weeks and the articles take like 30-40 minutes to read instead of the 15-20.

I want to get the pace back up and the reading time back down. Divide both numbers by two and you get the same number. Constant quotient principle!!

SO

This article will be posted in 2-3 parts, depending on how it plays out. And the posts will be coming out weekly on Tuesday except this one because it’s Wednesday Thursday now because I had the gnarliest writer’s block on Sunday and Monday.

That said, If I can manage to do what I’m setting out to do here, it will change not only how you think about music, but how you think about sound in general and maybe even the whole world.

Bold claim right?

Lets freakin go.

A few years ago

I was sitting in the back shed of our cute, weird, old house in downtown St. George talking to the best musician I’ve had the privilege of calling a friend. He said something that still haunts me to this day.

His name is Jake Shepard. He currently plays guitar for a few bands, most notably this raunchy classic-country one:

(Literally every song this band puts out is so excellent. It’s insane to me how underrated they are.)

He made one of my favorite EPs of all time.

Spoiler alert - it’s the album of the wrrk.

It’s damn perfect, my only issue with it is it’s 4 songs when I want it to be at least 16.

Anyway

I cannot overstate how much this shook my reality and how mad I am that it took me nearly 20 years to hear it.

“Music Theory is really kinda underwhelming when you think about it” he started.

He had my attention.

I was living under the oppressive assumption that it was terribly difficult and complicated construct. I regarded it as high as the other fine high-brow mathematics like calculus or trigonometry.

But then he said

To my dang face

“Harmony is just the major scale but modified.”

Dude.

For real

Earth-shattering, revelatory.

I shall never be able to repay the debt of the wisdom he bestowed upon me in that moment.

But what does that mean and why did it shake me to my core?

I had been thinking about harmony as all the different scales being disconnected and having to learn each one separately and then figure out how they work together and blah blah blah. It was a horrible maze that I was sure I’d never escape from

That illusion blew up in front of me. Good thing too, it was keeping me shackled and slowing my learning.

It’s just that simple

There’s one scale. Every other scale is just changing the notes of the one true scale.

If that doesn’t sound earth shattering yet, let me explain.

Like I said earlier, I’ve been working on this for months.

To explain why this rocked my world, we have to go back to basics and then we are gonna extrapolate into a weird fun metaphor.

Ready?

Sound is a wave of pressure moving through the air.

The key to that is the word wave.

Literally if you take a note and graph it it goes:

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

Shoot that’s silly here’s a picture of it

The middle line is the 0 line. That’s where there’s no volume.

You can hear this in real life when a piece of shit Honda Civic with a 1500 watt subwoofer that’s worth more than the car rolls by your house. You know the feeling. The bass is blasting and shaking every single thing in or on that car, not to mention the windows of whatever room you’re in.

Each vibration is a wave! Bass waves move comparatively slow so it’s easier to feel/hear the individual waves.

The speed of the wave is measured in cycles per second or Hertz (Hz). It’s true that music is math you can hear and Hz gives us the numbers to do the math with.

Let’s talk about Hz real quick because they provide the bedrock of the entire concept of music theory, as far as I understand.

Most People can hear about 20Hz all the way up to 20,000 as kids, but by adulthood we lose 4-8 thousand off the top there and can hear about 12,000-16,000Hz before the pitch gets too high.

That loss off the top probably fluctuates depending on how many loud concerts you’ve gone to or guns you’ve shot without proper ear protection, though there are other factors.

ANYWAY

If you put two of these waves together, they can interact in some surprising ways. Sometimes they will cancel each other out and sometimes they build volume together.

You can see this in the way the waves interact.

Here’s a 440Hz wave

(This is a volume against time graph where volume is the y axis and you can hear both negative and positive integers. )

And here’s a 480Hz wave

They look the same right? But when you play them together you can see the difference that extra 40Hz makes

Notice how theres loud parts and quiet parts? Each one of those little loudness bubbles are going in and out at a rate of 40Hz!

What do you think that sounds like?!

Ok this part is crazy are you even ready. I’m gonna show you! Same frequencies. This blew my mind when I found out about it.

Here’s a 440Hz wave

And here’s a 480Hz wave

Here’s what it sounds like when you play them together.

If you’re an American you probably recognize that sound.

It’s our FREAKIN dial tone!!

That 40Hz difference is what makes it go doodloodloodloodloodloodloo .

It’s 40 doos or dloos per second because the waves cancel each other and augment each other as they arrive to your ears at the same time.

The quiet part is the pressure of the two notes counteracting each other and the loud part is the pressure waves lining up.

In fact here’s an AWESOME example of that, which is called destructive interference or phase cancellation.

Below there are two tones. They’re exactly the same notes as you’ll hear if you play each one individually.

HOWEVER on the second one I flipped the crests and troughs to make it look exactly the opposite of the first one.

So play each one and then play both at the same time and you’ll notice something crazy happens

OKKAYYYY I just found out Substack wont let you play them both at the same time. That would have been way cooler because you could tell I wasn’t pulling a fast one but here’s my solution. I’ve done it on my computer and recorded it for you.

This recording starts with one of them on and then after about a second or two I turn the flipped one on and then I turn off the one that was on in the first place and then repeat that cycle because I was fascinated. But because they’re flipped the result is unexpected. Check it out:

They’re on maximum volume but because they are exact opposite waves they completely cancel out when I turn on the flipped one!!

This is the same thing that’s happening in the dial tone but instead of them being 40 cycles per second off they are exactly off and therefore completely destructive to the original sound wave.

You feel me?

Ok

Deep breaths

That got just a teeny bit hairy but it’s the core principle of all harmony (debatably all music) so like I think we have a little leeway.

Ok we got our wits together? Minds un-blown?

Sweet

Let’s play with the concept some more.

What if instead of 480 like the dial tone we did some prettier math to harmonize with 440. What if we did 440 and 880? Simply multiplying our Hz by 2

440 vs 880

Okay those are the same note but one is an octave up.

Which means ALL the notes are between those two notes.

(this pattern repeats all the way up and down to the furthest extents of what we can hear)

What if we did the next simplest fraction between 1 and 2?

What if we add ½ of the Hz and see how they interact?!

440 vs 660

Wow. Harmonious huh?! Just about as harmonious as possible in fact!

Side note: this happens because of the overtones.

When you hear a note, you actually hear more than just that one note. You also hear the note at double the speed, and double that speed, and double that speed, so on to infinity. Those extra notes are known as overtones.

It’s actually a symphony of notes and along the way it hits every note, you just can’t hear most of them because they’re too quiet.

The target note is the loudest but then each subsequent fraction also plays, each one quieter than the last.

If you take just one wave and you zoom in and probably use an oscilloscope that’s worth triple my car you can see these overtones in action. They look like this!

(I’m gonna tattoo this on me)

The point is that some notes, like the perfect 5th we just played, are an audible part of that overtone series, so it’s already being played when we play the root note! So when we add it on top it sounds cute instead of spicy!

This is what makes pretty notes and ugly notes in harmony.

Every note is pretty until you add context (aka another note or so.)

It’s like, a metaphor man…

/side note

OKAY FOCUS

Let’s play with more sounds. Pretty fractions just like Fibonacci intended.

What if I add ⅓ of 440 to 440Hz?

440 vs 586.66666666Hz

Less harmonious but still pretty! Maybe a bit of an air of mystery to it like deep forest early in the morning…

¼?

440 vs 550

Less harmonious still and maybe a little less consonant but really seems to go well with our root note like it lifts it up maybe?

⅕?

440 vs 528

This is one of those notes that was too ornery to make the cut to get into the major scale. We will talk about in a minute but doesn’t it just sound like Dracula is gonna jump out from around the corner or something?

⅙?

440 vs 513.33333333

Even spookier! This one is so spooky that it didn’t even make the cut to become a real note. We’ve gone off the deep end it’s downhill from here. Strap in!!!

1/7?

440 vs 502.85714

DANG that’s raunchy but not like in a good way.

⅛?

440 vs 495

This one IS a note, it’s the second note of our major scale!! That said certainly not the most harmonious

Notice how they’re getting uglier the more complex the numbers in the fraction is?

Okay lets skip a couple to the smallest fraction we can multiply by and still have it work in the framework of western harmony. In theory this is our most dissonant interval between two notes. Musicians, you know this as the half-step or m2.

We are going to add 1/15 of 440 to 440!

440/466.162

Sound familiar?

It’s the Jaws theme! These two notes are as close to one another as possible in western music theory, they are approximately 5.85% different and you can hear that they are uncomfortable! Hear it wiggling? In fact here it is an octave down to get closer to the real thing

220/233.0812

Compare that to our perfect 5th (3/2) and it’s like night and day.

440 vs 660

In fact don’t it just sound just like the first two notes of the Star Wars theme?

Okay that concludes our sound wave experiments except I have one more thing. I wanted to put two GNARLY close notes side by side and see what happened. I was not disappointed, it’s a wild sound. Check it out:

495/488.8888

Those sound waves are so close together you can hear the waves colliding! AND because it’s a 6.1Hz difference we know it’s doing it 6.1 times a second! How nuts right?!

Okay actually I lied I got one more crazy one. Here’s every frequency mentioned up to now all playing at the same time. I slowly turn them on and off, notice how the rhythms change as I add and remove frequencies!! Insane!

(also turn your volume down for this one if you’re the volume got totally out of control and no matter what I tried it just kept doing it.

Side note for musicians - this is why I don’t believe in tuning an instrument to A=432 or 442 or any’of’m instead of 440 for maximum-vibrational-attunement and connection to the universe and all that mumbojumbo.

Firstly it’s the same dang ratios no matter what you start on because it’s math.

Secondly the system you’re changing the pitch of by 8 CENTS is out of tune anyway!! Most people can’t even tell a difference until you hit 10 cents difference unless they’ve done serious ear training.

If anything, if you want maximum vibrational attunement you should ditch the 12-tone equal tempered system altogether and use just intonation on your instrument to the key you want to play in!

But that means you have to retune if you ever want to change keys.

I do know that some of the best orchestras in the world tune up or down a few cents and it’s like their whole trademark and they swear it makes stuff sparkle so what do I know? I think its something about the resonance of the brass section or something? Can’t quite remember.

That said unless you’re a world-class conductor, don’t ask me to tune down 8 cents or up 2 or 4 or whatever the crystal hippie musicians are doing nowadays.

/rant

WOw that got out of hand a little. I get a little spicy when I think about A=432. If you haven’t heard of that and want to spend some time in a rabbit hole, it’s a fun one. Just be careful, there’s conspiracy theories abound in that area.

I’m going to go on a brief walk and we will dive back in fresh.

Okay

hoowee

What’s the 12-toned equal-tempered system you ask?

Well. There are 12 notes in our ‘Western’ system of music theory. But back in the day before the 1900s, instruments were tuned around a root note to perfect fractions like that experiment we just did up there. This is called just intonation.

Yes we just discovered just intonation first hand. Science B****!

HOWEVER. This made some keys sound perfectly in tune and some keys sound absolutely out of tune. So it limited our musicians to playing a few select keys instead of all 12! If you strayed too far from the key your instrument was tuned to it started sounding very dissonant.

Well back in like the 20s…

Austrian Arnold Schoenberg had a crazy idea.

What if we just divided up all the notes between two octaves perfectly (equally temper them?)

For you math nerds, the formula is 2^1/12. Or multiply your current note by the 12th root of 2 to get the next note.

If you want to go down this rabbit hole, the wikipedia page on the twelfth root of two is fascinating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_root_of_two

If you don’t want to read that here’s a violent crash course.

Equally tempering the notes actually makes every key just a little bit out of tune. It’s a compromise but the trade off is you can play in every key now without your guitar/piano/bass/whatever sounding totally seasick.

So it’s got some problems but the problems it solved were bigger.

Ok skip forward in time!

So it’s the 50s now and everyone has adopted this equal tempered system because it let’s all the musicians play together more easily.

This is the set of 12 notes that you and I and just about everyone we know are familiar with today, but that doesn’t mean everything changed in music, it just changed tuning a little bit.

Apparently some people believe the Illuminati did it to ruin music for us, man…

From Beethoven to Bad Bunny they’re working with the same 12 notes with or without equal temperament.

anyway

FOCUS

This is what our notes sound like.

CHROMATIC SCALE

Cool! 12 notes is way less overwhelming than infinite notes! It’s nice that they just start over and keep going up. We are on to something!

BUT

Here’s the kicker

Strap in this is where what Jake Shepard said all starts making sense.

THE MAJOR SCALE takes 5 of those notes and tosses them out because they don’t play very nice with some of the other notes.

It sounds like this

MAJOR SCALE.

That’s sounding a lot more like music eh?!

What happened? Why did we take out those 5?

Good question!! You are an astute student.

Notes get spicy when you put them right next to each other. They don’t love it and they tell you so by trashing and wiggling against each other just like we heard in our Hz waveform experiment!! This is what makes the dial tone “ring.”

So those clever greeks or whoever came up with this system (there’s no consensus) took a good hard look at the notes and they took out the spicy ones

Sometimes this is just what you need though. For example - the JAWS theme is just two notes right next to each other and that’s why it sounds so spooky. That’s also why it’s the first of the group that got removed. And from our experiment earlier we know it’s a 1/15 of the note added on top. That’s not a lot of wiggle room.

The point is

AND THIS what Jake Shepard was saying

Is all you have to do is replace notes in the major scale with the notes you took out and in doing so, you have every scale at your fingertips BECAUSE you learned the major scale.

That’s it. That’s how music works in a nutshell. I love music because the principles are so accessible. It’s not physics or chemistry where you need to keep dozens of equations on hand to even have a chance at understanding what’s going on.

It’s actually quite underwhelming when you finally get to the bottom of it.

But you already understand this because you live in a society and music mirrors society.

The math gets uglier as the relationship with a specific person gets uglier.

AKA….

Music harmony and high school social dynamics work on the same set of rules.

Ok we finally have enough background knowledge to get to my ultimate music thesis.
Music theory is just Mean Girls.

It’s cliquey and dramatic and can range from placid to volatile and change from one to another quickly. Some girls don’t get along, each girl has a best friend and they always share a common enemy.

Before we sign off today let’s meet our core cast of characters.

12 notes, 12 girls in this high school. It’s rural af and makes examples easier.

Our main character has 7 friends in her standard circle

We are going to call them

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

And give them proper introductions as we go.

So our main character

She’s the most popular girl in school, captain of the cheerleaders, she gets invited to all the parties and she knows just about EVERYBODY.

She is the queen bee of the Jocks.

Let’s call her Lyndsay Lohan. (No relation)

She is our 1.

Her best friend is 5. (1/2) followed closely by the 3 (1/4) followed less closely by the 4 (1/3)

These guys are her rocks. But especially 5 - Becky (1/2). They are very similar and get along well because they have similar overtone series. Everybody in the jocks loves becky, she’s the life of the party and so easy to get along with.

When Lyndsay Lohan(no relation) and Becky get together everything is just swell and happy-go-lucky. Robin Hood and Little John walkin’ through the forest type S***.

3 is the shot caller. We will call her Kendra. The mom of the group. When she gets hanging out with Lyndsay Lohan(no relation) and Becky the dynamic changes for the better. She lights up the room, especially when she gets to hang out with Lyndsay Lohan(no relation) and Becky. Without Kendra Lyndsay Lohan(no relation) and Becky would just goof off all day and never get anything done.

Here’s what they sound like when the three of them are together

MAJOR CHORD

Her extended circle is 2, 6, and 7. Lyndsay Lohan doesn’t really like 7 but 7 is 3’s best friend so Lyndsay Lohan tolerates her. She doesn’t like 2 that much either but she is 5’s best friend so it’s the same story. She’s pretty neutral on 6 and she suspects because 6 is just exactly like her but a bit more pessimistic. But we will get into ALL that next week.

For now-

This is the sound of Lyndsay Lohan’s perfect little popular friend group

(yes it’s the same clip again it’s THE scale I’m allowed to do it)

Okay that’s full circle, we did it. Now we have the knowledge to understand why music theory is the same as high school and we introduced our main character and her besties. Next week we are going to dive into the other notes, the cliques, the main characters, and the DRAMA. All in hopes of getting to the core truths of music.
What a time to be alive.

If you want to fully prepare and do some studying to get ready for next week, I’m prescribing 3 movies in order of importance.

1. Mean Girls

2. The Breakfast Club

3. Heathers

Ok that’s all for this week!!
If you have any questions please leave them in the comments so I can address them in next week’s post! I know this concept is a little bit daunting, it’s sure felt like a feat to even organize it this far. I had it written 3 days ago but getting it readable was a whole other challenge.
anyway

Until then it’s time for:

Weekly Things!!!

ALBUM OF THE WEEK

As promised, this week’s album is by the legend that is Jake Shepard, working under the moniker “Pooch Funk”

Pooch like the Dog, Funk like the smell

He used to say that every time and I’ll never not live in my head rent free.

Anyway, he’s the best guitarist I’ve ever known personally. In fact I bet he’s probably the best musician I’ve ever known personally. Every time I see him play I learn a ridiculous amount of cool stuff. He is a beast, I cannot overstate this. If you ever get the chance to see him around Vegas or St. George you gotta do yourself a favor and do it. It could change your life. It sure changed mine.

I adore this EP and can’t remember the last time I just put it on one time. Usually it ends and I just start it over because I didn’t get my fill. In fact I must have listened to it 20 times this week.

I just love every moment and everyone I know that’s heard it seems to be just as obsessed as I am.

Another preposterously underrated project.

Tell everybody.

Without further ado, I humbly present

Mellow Demos by Pooch Funk

HIDEOUS SOUNDS OF THE WEEK

I’ve noticed my music tends to act like a pendulum. Sometimes it’s all electronic and I’m obsessed with synthesizers and keyboards and drum machines. Eventually I get bored of that and go back to acoustic instruments. Rinse and repeat.
This week I’ve been tinkering with my mandolin. I Play it every day. It’s a marvelous instrument. I’m quite enamored.

Anyway here’s a transition piece that’s mostly mandolin but with some glitchy drum machine stuff on it. It’s a fun sound! I really like how spacey the first bit is, the drums are too uppity for me right now but this segment isn’t about sharing finished music, that’s what streaming is for. This segment is about the magic in the PROCESS!

That said I hate the way the drums come in and they’re too loud and they sound too much like a club to go with mandolin

But we have no time this post is already a day late!!

Anyway

This is “Three Cups of Coffee and a Mandolino”

Yes that’s too much coffee. That’s probably why the drums got so out of hand.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

Our quote of the week had to come from a famous musician right?

I found two great ones for you. One from antiquity and one from modern times

Who knows if these people actually said these things. Does it really make a difference anyway?

Anyway they’re both thinkers, give yourself some time to chew on’m.

“People are Flowers. Music is water. Musicians are the hose.”

-Carlos Santana

“Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.”

- Ludwig van Beethoven

POEM OF THE WEEK

I’ve been reading poetry instead of short stories this week so we are going to do poems instead of short stories for a while.

This one has been a favorite of mine since I first read it 10 years ago. It gives me chills. It fills to overflowing me with all sorts of feelings.

by Ezra Pound

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.

-Ezra Pound

WE DID IT!!! We made it to the end of the article.

Thank you so much for being here with me. I feel so lucky to have such a loving audience for my silly little musings on the world. I get choked up if I think about it for more than about 8 seconds.

I’ll see you next week!! Go watch Mean Girls.

Until then. You are amazing, you are powerful, you are so cute, and you are loved.

<3 — Swampy

Adventures are something that I’ve spent a lot of time studying and tinkering with.

I grew up reading adventure books, playing DnD, and living in an adventuring household.

When I look back at all my adventures, in the real world or DnD, I find that the ones that affected me the most and that I remember the most fondly were the ones that were challenging, where I had to use skills (sometimes just dumb luck) to get out of a pinch.

So I got curious about it and started thinking about why and of course, there’s a scientifically-proven link between adventure and general well-being.

Adventure is good for you. Like REALLY good.

I could ramble on about endorphins and hormones which are just free drugs your brain makes when you do difficult stuff (think runner’s high but with risk added on which adds like a 10x to the result.)

Or about how it helps clear the mind and lend perspective, which leads to mindfulness and a more peaceful headspace with long-term results

Or about how adventure develops resilience and grit in those that undertake them.

Or how adventurers make fast friends and strong community around them.

Or how much you can learn and grow on a good adventure.

Or how just the SMELLS outside can affect our brains and stress levels specifically.

If you want to go down this rabbit hole, I’ve found a 2023 paper titled Conceptualising the power of outdoor adventure activities for subjective well-being: A systematic literature review that does a nice thorough dive into the state of the science of adventure.

If that sounds up your alley you can get to it HERE on Sciencedirect!

If you want to go further down the rabbit hole I’ve got a whole textbook for you. We will talk about it in a minute.

SO ANYWAY

What I’m getting at is this

As a person of the 21st century, odds are need more adventure in your life.

You don’t need to be Kieth Ladzinski or Jimmy Chin to be an adventurer. Just because you aren’t camping in Antarctica for a month and skiing to the mountains to pull off a first ascent on a GNARLY rock fin doesn’t mean you can’t have all the benefits of adventure for yourself!

(Sidenote if you don’t know who Ladzinski or Chin are, they’re some of the best adventures alive. Jimmy Chin shot Free Solo. Ladzinski has done a million cool projects, This is documentary that I’m referencing. It’s mindblowing. I want to be just like Ladzinski when I grow up. )

Also HERE is the photo logs from that trip on his website.

Cannot even freaking imagine.

So you need more and/or better adventure in your life?

Not to fear! Your friendly local neighborhood adventure enthusiast is here and I have a system I’ve been working on that will guarantee you good adventures or your money back!

Best of all I’m giving it away for FREE because you are just so nice and cute and I can’t afford to give your money back.

But before we dive into all that, we need to try to define adventure.

Adventure is a construct. It can mean a million different things to a million different people. Depends on where you’re at. We can’t all be Ladzinski.

That said, I have been perusing a textbook about adventure published a few years ago called Adventure and Society by Simon Beames, Chris Mackie, and Matthew Atencio.

It’s fascinating and looks at adventure from every perspective from sociology to ecology, and maybe just a little bit too much emphasis on tourism for my taste but like, I get it… You know? The system, man…

BUT THE POINT IS

This book gives the best definition I’ve seen.

Adventures are planned, challenging experiences that feature a degree of unpredictability and which demand certain physical and mental skills to undertake.

(Also if you are interested. This book is available on SciHub. I’m not sure I’m allowed to promote SciHub even though it literally got me through college but IYKYK and if you don’t know and find yourself having issues with paywalls on science papers you should find out.)

Adventure is more than your average stroll around the neighborhood. But that’s good because the mental-emotional payoffs are exponentially more powerful.

The key to a gold-tier adventure is the task at hand on HAS to be difficult to make it a good adventure. A good adventure leaves you bigger at the end and shows you how much you are capable of.

Adventures build grit and self confidence, and make the world seem less big and scary.

Increasingly, it seems to me, people are scared and their little bubbles just keep getting smaller. It’s so easy in modern society to fall into a daily pattern with no risk at all, yet alone intrinsically rewarding risk.

So I started chewing on the idea of how I can help inject the spirit of adventure into anyone willing to listen. After chewing on this for a year or more I feel like I’m finally onto something.

You guys know I love systems.

I’ve been working on a template for all the ingredients of an excellent adventure.

Yesterday I had a realization.

All I was doing was rebuilding the well-established concept of the Hero’s Journey.

As a Dungeon Master you KNOW I’m a Hero’s Journey fan, I love any system that helps make a good juicy story, especially for my players.

I realized that the closer an adventure can emulate the Hero’s journey, the better the adventure it is, and the more intrinsically rewarding to the adventurer.

In case you’re not aware, here’s a quick recap on the Hero’s Journey.

There are two main models for the hero’s journey but the most famous one comes from Joseph Campbell. He mostly got his ideas from other authors (including Carl Jung and that whole gang) and pieced them together. Standing on the shoulders of giants type stuff.

Campbell published the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces In 1949 and in it he laid the framework for the hero’s journey as we know it.

He describes it like this -

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

This is the monomyth. The framework that made every great hero story from The Odyssey to Star Wars.

This is not a popular concept with some people. Seemingly because it makes storytelling feel formulaic. The hero’s journey is built on observations of great stories. But now that we have it people treat it like a prescription for making a good story. This gets pretty philosophically messy so we are not going to go any deeper into that one right now..

What we ARE going to do today is treat it like a prescription even though I just said that’s not the best idea.

We aren’t writing epic stories today so I think it’s going to be okay. We are going to use it to help us romanticize our adventures and more importantly, our lives.

Before we dive in, we need to address that Campbell’s original hero’s journey concept had 17 steps.

Not all adventures have all 17 steps but it seems to me that the more steps they DO feature, the better (more rewarding and memorable) the adventure is.

In fact we are going to simplify it to 12 steps because I’m halfway through the 17 step list and I feel like I’m bashing my head into a wall hoping it’ll bust open before I get too seriously concussed.

That said if you want to go deeper you can get a copy of The Hero with a Thousand Faces for only $7 on Thriftbooks!

I’m not allowed to go on Thriftbooks because somehow I always order 20 dang books when I showed up only looking for 1.

ANYWAY

Our 12 steps come in 3 phases:

Phase 1 -Departure

1. The Call to adventure

2. The refusal of the call

3. Meeting the Mentor (AKA Supernatural Aid)

4. Crossing the Threshold (AKA Belly of the Whale)

Phase 2 - Initiation

5. Tests, Allies, Enemies

6. The Approach to the Innermost Cave

7. The Ordeal

8. The Reward

Phase 3 - The Return

9. The Road Back

10. The Resurrection

11. The Return

12. The Freedom to Live

Okay so that’s a little overwhelming. 12 steps is a lot. But we are going to break it down! Also, to help us really grasp the concepts, I’ll be drawing examples in each step from three of the greatest adventure stories of all time - The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and The Big Lebowski.

Plus most of the steps happen naturally so really you only gotta worry about like 4 steps and you’re well on your way to a lifetime of excellent adventure.

In fact if you only read Steps 1 and 3 you’d get about 85% of the way there.

In fact if you only read step 1 you’d get about 76% of the way there!

Step one is the most important part. That’s what I’m saying. So lets dive into it.

Phase I. - Departure

The Call To Adventure

• The call to the unknown. Some information shows up that pulls our hero (YOU!) off into the wild blue yonder

  • Frodo and the gang get some real weird news about Bilbo and his magic ring. The world is falling into darkness - into the hands of the evil Sauron.

  • Lebowski gets home to german thugs that give him a swirly and pee on his rug. Somebody owes him a new rug, man…

  • Luke Skywalker finds R2-D2 and he’s got a crazy hologram from a pretty girl on it asking for help. But the message is for Obi Wan Kenobi. Wonder who that could be?

In our modern day, this step is probably the most important because we just have so many options. So we are going to spend some time on it.

Every good adventure needs a good solid goal. Something to strive toward. Gandalf shows up and tells Bilbo he needs a thief to help the dwarves reclaim their homeland from the biggest baddest dragon in the world.

Boom bam there you go that’s one helluva goal!

Thing is, Gandalf isn’t just going to show up with all sorts of issues about the descent of the world into the clutches of darkness and whatnot and drop them in your lap.

It happens but it’s very rare and not to be relied upon.

So you’ll need to make your own call to adventure. This is easier than it seems, especially now that we got computers and automobiles.

The trick is to get fascinated.

The world is practically overflowing with wonder and we cannot afford to forget this fact.

This musing has become one of my favorites over the years. Sometimes the difference between a good mood and a bad one is as simple as going outside and noticing how beautiful a tree is.

Firstly, if you’ve not read my recent post about how to find wonder in the great outdoors and see the stories in nature everywhere you go, you should consider checking it out and come back to this one. It’s basically a crash course on finding wonder which naturally leads to fun adventure goals.

How to See the Stories in Nature

Basically the TLDR is there’s 5 apps that I use very regularly when I am out in the wilderness to enhance my adventures. They are:

• Rockd- an interactive geologic survey map and rock guide that is free and wonderful.

• Merlin and eBird - the best birdwatching tools on the planet. Ebird is like a pokedex for birding and Merlin listens to the calls around and tells you what birds to look for.

• Seek and iNaturalist - Same thing as Merlin and Ebird but they are for plants and bugs and stuff you can take pictures of. iNaturalist is the Pokedex in this scenario and Seek helps you ID and log your finds

(A Pokedex, in case you didn’t grow up playing video games like I did, is a little computer that can log and identify any pokemon that you may stumble upon out there in the wild. It’s like an encyclopedia that takes data and it totally revolutionized Prof. Oak’s pokemon research.)

anyway

So we have tools for setting adventure goals.

Now here’s a brainstorm for weird, fun, and challenging adventure ideas that I’ve been building up for you since my last post.

• Use Rockd to find cool rocks on nearby BLM land and go rockhounding for some crystals or fossils or obsidian or turquoise or whatever sounds cool! There’s entire rockbeds that span for miles around St George, Utah that are chock full of fossilized shells from an ocean that was there like 300 million years ago!

• Use eBird and Merlin to find what rare birds have been spotted in the area and where and go try to spot’m! Go see if you can’t find that barn owl that’s reported on eBird to live under the bridge downtown!

• Do something similar with Seek and iNaturalist. Both iNaturalist and eBird provide maps that show every spotting in that area. Try and find a bunch of blackberries and go snack on’m! Or you could go on a tour in the desert to find very rare desert-adapted ferns that only grow on rocks that are weeping water. Let the Fascination be your guide! Or go find the big golden beetles that are only around in April by the river. You get the idea…

• Go storm chasing! Bring a camera if you have one and do some long exposure lightning photos or just sit and watch the storm.

  • PRO TIP. Count the seconds between the lightning flash and the thunder and if it’s less than 5 seconds that means it struck less than a mile away and you should get down from your vantage point ASAP.

    • This is on account of light moves at like 186,000 miles per second (670,000,000 mph) and sound moves at a measly 0.2 miles per second (761 mph) so you see the light almost instantly.

      • I actually do 7 seconds because that little 0.4 mile cushion is comforting.

        • That’s my only lightning chasing rule but if my mom asks there is a whole 12-point safety protocol.

• Go out and record a full dawn chorus. The sounds at the crack of dawn are amazing. This is when the natural world is most alive and iNaturalist has a program where volunteer scientists submit audio recordings of these dawn choruses and the bird nerds use them to track species populations and migration patterns and all sorts of fun stuff!

• Go on the USGS topographic maps website and poke around! You never know what you’ll find there! Abandoned buildings, wild rock formations, the possibilities are endless. Then go out and try to find whatever cool thing you discovered and document it! Photograph it or paint it or write songs about it or whatever tickles the ol’ fancy!

• You can do similar stuff that’s even crazier now that LIDAR data is available. They’re discovering entire lost civilizations with that stuff, though you might just find the foundation of a building something. I wouldn’t head out in hopes of finding new pyramids…

• Dig into peer-reviewed archaeological records and go track down petroglyphs in your local area. You might have to Submit a Freedom of Information Act request but that could be part of the fun? Who doesn’t love interacting with our government?

• Get real weird with it and set totally arbitrary goals - find the highest point in the county that DOESN’T have a trail to it and figure out how to get there using satellites.

  • (To my desert homies, just be sure not to step on the cryptobiotic crust as it takes like 100 years to grow an inch thick and it’s a big pioneer species so it’s the reason everything else grows there!)

• Visit every named canyon or named peak in the county.

• Visit every mountain peak named “Mollie’s Nipple” in the American West. I hear theres like 12 of them. Actually I just looked it up and the Wikipedia Page is wild. Good ol’ John Kitchen really missed his wife.

• Find the oldest living thing within a day’s drive! Could be Pando the great aspen clone, or a 6,000 year old bristlecone pine, or an ancient stand of creosote, or the Humongous Fungus in the Pacific Northwest that’s estimated to be somewhere between 2,500 and 8,500 years old!

  • There’s no end to the possibilities. It’s almost definitely going to be some sort of plant or fungus unless you live in the ocean arctic where the Greenland sharks live (500 years old?! They don’t even reach sexual maturity until 150!)

• If you’re in Washington County as I know a lot of you are: Here’s a free one. Go see the Giant Sequoia tree on the Browse side of the Pine Malley Mountains.

  • A forest ranger planted it there in like the 30s and it has been thriving!

    • It sure hasn’t grown to any impressive size compared to its coastal siblings because it doesn’t have that Sierra Nevada fog that gets water to the very high leaves but it’s a marvelous tree nonetheless. It is reportedly about 108 feet tall and 11.5 feet around!

      • WARNING THOUGH there’s an abandoned ranger station right nearby that is condemned because theres anthrax bacteria growing in there.

        • If you breathe in anthrax spores you’ll find that soon you are not able to breathe. No fun. Ruin your day surely.

      

If these all sound a bit too involved or you just don’t feel like using your imagination today, thats FINE we have options for that too!

• Geocaching is an EXCELLENT and easy option for getting out into the great unknown. This was one of our favorite adventures for years with my dad. I’ve seen geocaches that are 40 miles from civilization. Whatever challenge level you want you can find it in geocaching. The gold standard for this is Geocaching.com

  • Geocaching adventures can get as serious as you could ever want them to.

    • For example THIS geocache is ALMOST 8000 FEET under the ocean in the middle of the dang Pacific.

    • THIS ONE is is literally in space on the ISS.

    • THIS ONE in Norway and is a 2 day walk across stones to get to it.

• Atlas Obscura - documents all the weirdest coolest stuff around. For example. I’ve just looked up the little Colorado mountain town I’m in and apparently there’s a trout that has FUR mounted somewhere in town!?! There’s also a half dozen ghost towns nearby and some really impressive tunnels and bridges that were built for the once-booming railroad industry.

• Last but not least, if you are looking for a real challenge you should look into treasure hunts. People been hiding treasures out there and making insane puzzles that you have to solve to find it but the payoff can be IMPRESSIVE. Utah has an annual treasure hunt every year, the $25,000 chest was just found on June 13 near Farmington but we will get’m next year!

Whatever your adventure goal, it has to be real enough to fail at.

If there’s no chance of failure then you’re not taking on enough risk for it to be a proper adventure and you won’t reap all the benefits.

This is literally the most important step so take your time and be thoughtful. Once you figure out a few awesome adventure ideas you’ll get so good at it that you’ll find yourself drowning in them.

Refusal of the call

• “You got the wrong hobbit, man! I’m no adventurer, I just want my rug back…

• If I go save princess Leia who’s gonna watch the farm?!

This step you don’t have to try at. In fact if there is effort involved in this step it’s in convincing your brain that it’s going to be fun and we should not, in fact, sit around watching TV and eating cookies all day.

“It’s a long drive” “I’m tired, I’m going to nap instead”

Don’t buy it. The brain is stupid, you can’t trust it to make life decisions because it will almost always choose the cookies and cartoons.

The brain wants certainty but theres too much certainty in the world nowadays. Certainty is the enemy on a good adventure.

If your adventure is full of certainty, it’s not an adventure. It’s tourism.

Supernatural Aid

The hero is committed to the quest, knowingly or unknowingly. A guide or magical helper shows up and usually gives them a magic artifact that will aid them in their quest

• The hobbits are running from the Nazgul and end up in a tavern and Strider (Aragorn) shows up and saves them from being murdered and takes them under his wing.

• Also in the books they Meet Tom Bombadil on the way there and he gives them some epic swords and gets them out of some pretty serious trouble. I want to be just like Tom Bombadil when I grow up.

• Obi Wan Shows up and gives Luke his father’s lightsaber and introduces him to the force.

• The Dude calls up the Big Lebowski in hopes of getting a replacement of his rug. They meet and The Dude gets his rug through some clever trickery. Little does he know that Lebowski will soon call him to help get his ‘kidnapped’ wife back. (The money is the magic in this one)

This one can be a make-or-break for a world class adventure. You need Sherpa Guides if you want to climb Everest. However, if you’re just climbing your local 10k foot peak, a Gandalf is not necessary.

You don’t NEED a Gandalf but g’dang if it won’t 10x your adventure.

In fact if you want or need a Gandalf, you’d probably be best starting with this step.

You’ll know if you need a Gandalf if you’ve got a real good chance of dying on this adventure without one…

Think about it. You wanna learn rock climbing, but if you go out there and try to learn to rock climb by yourself you’ll probably die. You need a climbing Gandalf.

There’s always someone that’s better at it than you and their presence can enrich an adventure beyond words.

Even if it’s not dangerous it’s so nice to have someone with deep knowledge when you’re out birdwatching or rockhounding. If you don’t know anything about the subject (and don’t want to learn for some reason,) you’ll need to put in work or find a Gandalf.

The thing is it’s dang hard to find a Gandalf. You have to be VERY lucky.

Be your own Gandalf if you can’t find one. Put in the work. Learn how to find the pretty rocks. Learn to identify bird calls by ear. It’s challenging but extremely fulfilling and you get to learn all sorts of new stuff!

PLUS once you’ve learned all this cool stuff you get to share it with other people and before you know it YOU are someone else’s Gandalf, just out there changing lives and sh...

Sometimes your Supernatural aid isn’t even a person. Sometimes it’s Rockd or iNaturalist or Ebird! Sometimes it’s a facebook post about people seeing fireflies around town so you spend the week going out after sunset to look for them (true story that’s what I’ve been doing all week, haven’t seen a single one.)

Everyone is waiting around waiting for Gandalf to plop an adventure in their laps, not enough people are striving to BE a Gandalf. Choose your path wisely.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

-Robert Frost

The crossing of the first threshold

This is where we finally get into the unknown all the way in the deep end. Danger is all around, limits are unknown, there’s likely no turning back now…

• The Nazgul catch up with Frodo and stab him with the Morgul blade and all of a sudden things are looking bad. He’s gonna need some serious help, lucky thing Aragorn is friends with the elves and they are nearby! Frodo got taken to the elven city of Rivendell. The elves nurse him back to health and then hold a meeting on what needs to be done to get rid of this g’dang RING. Everyone who is anybody shows up and turns out Frodo is the only one that can do it. The dang ring will drive anyone else nuts.

• The Big Lebowski hired the Dude to deliver the ransom money to the kidnappers. It goes bad. Then a different group of thugs show up and steal the Dude’s NEW RUG?! The Dude keeps the money because Walter is an idiot and ruins everything. He leaves it in his car while they go bowling and go back out to the parking lot to find his car has been stolen!!

• Skywalker Leaves Tatooine to head into space and become a rebel and Jedi, though he doesn’t know it yet. Also the storm troopers show up and kill his whole family so…

  At this point you’ve done what is at least to me, the hardest part. Getting out of the world of the known and transitioning into the world of the unknown. Now you’re out here. Might as well at least try to see it through.

  Just keep swimmin’.

  This is where your grit and resilience grows. This is where you find out what you are made of and what you can handle. Push the envelope. The self confidence that’s at stake here is worth every drop of effort.

Phase II. - Initiation

Tests, allies, and enemies

• All sorts of tests and trials and challenges that start off the hero’s transformation. Our hero usually has some immense spiritual revelation (meeting with the goddess as Campbell put it) and is usually tempted some way to not fulfill his mission. This part is where our hero starts to become a hero.

  • Bilbo saves the dwarves from the trolls, and the spiders, and the elves.

  • Frodo and the gang set off to deliver the ring but Saruman keeps casting dark magics at them causing storms and rock fights between giants in the mountains, which drives the party to go underground to get across the mountains. This leads to meeting the balrog and Gandalf sacrificing himself by throwing himself and the fire demon off a cliff to save the fellowship.

    • Shitshow bud.

    • Then Frodo meets Galadriel and she gives him the magic Phial and she turns all green and spooky for a minute and nearly succumbs to the power of the ring.

  • Lebowski shows up at the Dude’s house with a severed toe which supposedly belongs to his wife. Maude, Lebowski’s daughter, tells the Dude that Lebowski stole from their nonprofit to get the ransom money and wants the Dude to help her recover it.

  • Skywalker gets into all sorts of trouble at Mos Eisly and meets Chewy and Han Solo and they escape all sorts of peril!

  The trail is steep. The pretty rocks are in the next valley over, or on top of the mountain, there’s a rattlesnake on the trail. You’re in the thick of adventure at this point and you need to be flexible and focused. Things might start getting hard but this is the part you’ll remember and grow from. Don’t panic and don’t forget your towel.

Approaching the innermost cave

• The hero prepares to go to the heart of darkness. Suit up for the ultimate challenge.

  • Skywalker becomes a rebel and they infiltrate the death star and end up in a trash compactor and all that.

  • The Dude gets kidnapped and brought to the porn kingpin.

  • Frodo gets separated from the fellowship except Sam and they prepare to head into Mordor by themselves.

    • Basically the entire Two Towers movie is this phase for Frodo and Sam

  • Bilbo literally approaches and infiltrates the innermost cave - the lair of the mighty Smaug.

This is the part where you need to go off trail to get to the pretty rocks and turns out off trail is very slippery here and covered in scree that keeps making you fall over and carries you 5 feet down the mountain with every step.

The Ordeal

• The ultimate challenge. The climax. The universe-saving moment.

  • Obi Wan Sacrifices himself as Luke watches and all he can do is keep swimmin’.

  • The ring has a hella grip on Frodo and he finally gets into mount doom and can’t bear to part with it. Luckily Gollum is around to help

  • The Kingpin drugs The Dude and he’s found meandering around Malibu and gets arrested. This is where The Big Lebowski loses me, it’s like they ran out of money and had to wrap up the whole movie in 5 minutes. but we will keep trying to stick it on the hero’s journey cork board just to see what happens.

YOU FOUND THE PRETTIEST GIANT ROCK and it’s sticking out of the dang dirt and you have no idea how long it’s going to take to dig out but you gotta start a’movin’ because the sun is setting soon.

The Reward (Seizing the sword)

• Skywalker gets out with his life and Princess Leia AND the plans for the death star. Though he grieves the death of Obi Wan he has a newfound sense of responsibility to the rebels and they have a glimmer of hope now.

• Frodo bout dang dies and succumbs to the ring in the last moment but his pity toward gollum earlier means he is still alive and he shows up and bites frodo’s finger off to take the ring for his own.

• The Dude confronts Lebowski about the fact that his wife wasn’t kidnapped, it was all a ploy to extort Lebowski though he doesn’t actually have any money.

  • The Big Lebowski starts to fall apart here as a hero’s journey, they really mailed it in at the end here and it just keeps going downhill.

YOU GOT THE DANG PRETTY ROCK OUT OF THE DANG SIDE OF THE DANG HILL and it’s covered in crystals

Or you finally reached the waterfall, or saw the bird, or ate the blackberries. The pretty rock is like, a metaphor, man.

Phase III. - The Return

The Road Back

• Gandalf shows up with the freakin eagles and saves Sam and Frodo just as the lava is about to dang swallow’m up!

• The Death star is coming to blow up the planet the rebel base is on. There’s no time.

• The Big Lebowski kind of falls off the rails here as far as the hero’s journey. The German nihilists show up and they burn The Dude’s car and Donnie dies of a heart attack. It’s kind of a terrible ending but that’s the magic. It subverts the expectation of the hero’s journey.

Now you gotta hike back out. You’re exhausted but there are still trials (and probably trails) ahead. Eventually you can see the car! You’re on the last push. Your legs are jelly. It’s madness but you make it! Gandalf is here with the eagles in the form of a YOUR CAR!! It’s like, a metaphor, man.

Now it’s time for one of my favorite parts.

You know the feeling. The drive home after a good adventure. The body is tired and the mind is clear and satisfied. And hopefully you got some cool rocks in your pocket, or an awesome photo of that waterfall, or whatever else magic you set out to get. If you’re not driving you will almost definitely fall asleep. It’s unavoidable.

The Resurrection

Gotta get home and clean the rocks, edit the photos, update your ‘bird’s spotted’ spreadsheet, post it on social media, whatever it is wrap it up in a pretty little bow!

• Luke ignores the targeting computer and listens to the force and Obi Wan helps him shoot the missile to destroy the death star.

• Frodo wakes up again at Rivendell everyone thought he was dead. He doesn’t know Legolas’ name.

  

• Donnie gets Walter’s goat one more time by covering Walter in his ashes (I’m really stretching on this one.)

The Return

You’re back to your regular life and though everything is the same, you have changed, and that makes all the difference.

• Luke returns to the rebel base and is a hero. The Death star is destroyed and we are safe.

• Frodo returns to the shire and is elected mayor. But the horrors of the ring still haunt him and he can no longer be at peace in the shire or even middle earth.

• Walter and the Dude go to spread Donnie’s ashes and Walter throws them into the wind and him and the dude get COVERED in in the ashes and the Dude chews Walter out for being an idiot but you can tell he loves him anyway.

  • I don’t really think The Big Lebowski concerned itself too much with character development…

You know the feeling. The drive home after a good adventure. The body is tired and the mind is clear and satisfied. And hopefully you got some cool rocks in your pocket, or an awesome photo of that waterfall, or whatever else magic you set out to get. If you’re not driving you will almost definitely fall asleep. It’s unavoidable.

The Freedom to Live

You get to tell people about your adventure. Share your newfound excellent cool rock spot with homies that you know will appreciate it. You’ve got a new favorite photo and it’s printed and hung on the wall.

You see the landscape differently now. Your world has expanded.

• Skywalker lives happily ever after. I assume(?) NO SPOILERS I haven’t seen the second one yet I just heard about Star Wars this week!

• Frodo goes to the undying lands with the elves and hopefully finds peace but maybe not, hard to tell, he got pretty messed up. At least Sam lives happily ever after. Gets the girl, gets the farm, bunch of little hobbit babies running around, what else could you possibly want?

• Walter and the Dude go bowling which is all they wanted to do the entire time anyway. The Dude’s character is DEVELOPED already you can’t expect character development from THE Dude.

  • Honestly I should have watched this movie again before writing this, it’s been like 6 months since I saw it last. I didn’t really expect to end up writing about The Big Lebowski. Sometimes these things just happen.

Lordy me that got outta hand. I didn’t expect to map out the hero’s journey on four different stories, it just went that way okay. If you haven’t seen or read the Lord of the Rings (you know who you are) it’s the best adventure story every told and you gotta get it together dude…

Same thing with The Big Lebowski. Just while we are here

SO GET SOME ADVENTURE INTO YOUR LIFE

Do something that scares you.

Do something you never thought you’d do.

Grow, get gritty, learn what you’re capable of.

Whatever you do, just don’t forget how huge and full of wonder the world is and how much there is to be explored. You only have one life, you need to make the most of it because what else are we even doing here?

Drink deep the cup of life; take it’s dark wine into your soul. For it passes round the table only once.

-Jack McDevitt

That’s all for this week!!!

Hoooowee what a doozy. These posts keep starting out as 2,000 word concepts in my head but turn into 6,000 word concepts on “paper”.

There’s one more thing we gotta do before we can sign off.

WEEKLY THINGS!!!

Album of the Week

This week I realized that I have failed you guys. I’ve been doing album of the week for like 6 months and I never shared this album with you.

This album changed my life. Almost every band on this album became a favorite of mine. It absolutely sculpted me as a musician and music listener.

I could gush about it forever, like it’s even got Benedict Cumberbuns at the end reading a short story. It’s wild. Each track flows flawless into the next one. It dips its toes into classic and modern jazz, big brass band, house, psychedelia, folk, RnB, you name it. It’s a perfect album and one that you have to listen to from start to finish.

Anyway without further ado. I present Late Night Tales by Bonobo.

What’s Hideous Gomphideous been up to?!

I got my hands on an old electronic Wurlitzer keyboard and I’ve been playing with the sounds like every day. Seems like every time I get playing, it just wants to go ambient. So heres a very rough-cut ambient piece that needs some development but has a lot of potential. I’m quite excited about it but maybe that’s because I know what’s coming next for it. Anyway. It’s called Chocolate chip pancakes and here it is!

(I don’t know what happened to the drums, they weren’t stuttering like that when I played it in digital audio workspace, but it’s kind of a vibe so I’m leaving it.)

Short story of the week!

This week’s short story is from my favorite short story collection and favorite author. Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt is just a gem. Every single story in there is a banger and half of them live in my head rent free.

This one probably haunts me the most. The concept is insane and makes me so happy but I don’t want to spoil anything so I’ll just drop it here. I hope you like it as much as I do!

Unready to Wear by Kurt Vonnegut Public Domain PDF Download via AliceandBooks.com

Quote of the Week

The quote of the week is actually an excerpt from The Fellowship of the Ring because how could I not?

“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens,’said Gimli.
‘Maybe,’said Elrond,’but let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.”

―J.R.R. Tolkien

That’s all for this week for real this time!

Until next time, don’t forget that you are powerful and capable and beautiful and loved. Also don’t forget to Hydrate and try to go outside every day at least for a little while.

I love you so and I think you’re so wonderful.

Thank you for being here with me.

-Brady

AAAAAND

WE ARE BACK BABY!!!

I know you haven’t heard from me in a while. I went through a gnarly bout of writers block. In the last month I started 6 new posts and got stuck on each one in a unique way. So I just procrastinated on and on.

I was so not in the mood to write that I decided to procrastinate by taking on my entire mess of a photo catalog.

(So far it’s been a roaring success by the way. I deleted 36,000 duplicates from that time I copied my hard drive onto my hard drive. I merged over 1,000 new panoramas. On top of that I deleted 25,000 photos and freed up almost 800Gb of data on my no-longer-overflowing 4tb ssd. The plan is a big one but I think we are halfway.)

That said I am far from finished organizing so the photo theme for this week’s post is just random grab bag from my travels around the world. Hopefully by next week I’ll have such a wrangle on my catalog that there will be cohesive themes in the future…

Anyway

Where were we?

(Wow ain’t that a beautiful thing? A whole sentence constructed using only 3 letters.)

Anyway

So I started 6 posts. One of them is almost done, 2 are more than halfway. Shoot, I’ve even tried writing this one already.

I had to figure out what had me stuck and why this kept happening. I felt bad, I got into a pretty gnarly funk for a week or two there which certainly did not help things.

Then one day I remembered something crucial. I felt like an idiot. I had just let something core to my life slip away unnoticed and THAT’S why I felt like shit!

I literally just forgot to do my anti-feel-like-shit rituals and that’s why I felt like shit. My heck.

I have systems for this. Protocols. I’ve been in the hole before, I know how to get out. Like come on what are we even doing…

So I started climing out of the funk. Here’s how I did it —

I went into emergency protocol until I got a wrangle on things and then settled into standard protocols and within a day or two I was out of the hole.

Once I figured my shit out I realized that these systems that I’ve developed for managing my silly weird brain are quite valuable and need to be shared with the world. They certainly work for me and if they work for ANYONE else I feel like that’s worth it. Being in the hole sucks, I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.

Well maybe not anybody, I could think of some politicians that need to be in the hole for a while to think about things.

The hole is like, a metaphor, man.

Anyway

(dang ain’t we distractible this morning?)

So I’m going to give you my system.

For free!

Can you even believe it?

Sometimes it takes a little time to work, sometimes it’s exactly what your brain needs to get going again and the effects are nearly instantaneous. Depends on how gnarly your funk is.

What’s more, should you maintain this ritual or something similar to it, it keeps the funk away for the low low cost of 20-40 minutes a day and gives your creative brain a boost to help you take on anything the world wants to throw at you!

Ok are you hyped? I’m hyped?

I humbly present to you

The Swampmonster’s Guide to Brain Maintenance and Funk Removal.

Sometimes life just hits you like a 245 lb linebacker.

I don’t actually know anything about baseball.

That’s not the point anyway.

The point is this

Happiness is an art form. It’s a delicate and beautiful dance. A well-adjusted and well-managed brain can find joy in even the bleakest scenarios.

You just have to keep your brain focused on the right stuff. You are what you eat. Your thoughts change the color of your soul. Oh or my favorite iteration of this concept from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden -

“The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.”

I think that was the quote of the week once before but dang if I don’t think about it just about every day.

So how do you keep your brain focused on the right stuff and keep from making footpaths that lead directly to the dead marshes?

Simple pimple.

There’s 2 stages to this. Emergency protocols and maintenance protocols. If you haven’t been doing your maintenance protocols you can do the emergency protocols to get you back on track.

Emergency protocols address the range of the most common funk-causing catalysts.

Emergency protocol:

Water

This is almost always the answer. It’s kind of ridiculous. AND it’s kind of embarrassing that I can let myself get all ornery and exhausted because I FORGOT that water is essential to basically every cellular process in the body and that’s why it is almost always the answer.

In fact lets all take a pause for a water break right now. I’ll be right back

{INTERMISSION}

Ok everyone all good and hydrated? Let’s move on then.

Outside

Go on a walk. Get the body moving. Endorphins are a hell of a drug and your body will make them for you for free if you make it do things, especially difficult things like hiking uphill. When you say it like that it sounds ridiculous but it seems to be the scientific consensus and I sure can’t dispute it.

PLUS your brain is hardwired to regulate things like cortisol (a stress hormone) when you hang around trees and smell the outside. If you want more info on this, I really cannot recommend The Nature Fix by Florence Williams.

However, if you want to get down into the data and go down the rabbit hole immediately-

Here is an awesome review paper from The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health that’ll get you caught right up!

Brain Dump

Ok so you hydrated and exercised and smelled the flowers. You’ve gotten perspective and probably feel at least a little better. This step is the one that really gets stuff moving and starts to build a little holding cell for the funk where it can’t get out and wreak havoc again.

The goal of the brain dump is to buy the brain bandwidth to focus on the right stuff. If you’re stressed or worried or ornery or anxious or any of those other nasty emotions that the brain likes to chew on sometimes, maybe all you need is to get your thoughts out of your head and safely onto paper where they won’t escape and you won’t have to spend time wrangling them. Literally anything that pops into your head goes on the paper and frees up space for your brain to focus on more present thoughts.

No idea is too silly to write down. I often find that they start serious and they end silly and once you’re out of silly thoughts you know you’re done!

So for example, some bullet points from my past brain dumps -

• Website is not doing what it’s supposed to - need to relist products and organize it pretty

• Need to eat more VEGGIES

• Insurance bill

• Should get a sweet old bike for cheap to cruise around town

• Morgan needs an oil change in 500 miles

• I miss playing DnD with my buddies

• Need to learn how to sell more photos

  • Consignments?

  • Online advertising?

  • Small business loans?

  • Art Festivals?

• Figure out if Morgan’s brakes feel funny or if you’re just being paranoid on account of them blowing up a couple months ago.

• Find friends to play music with around here.

• Photo hard drive is out of storage space and cards are full so I can’t take pictures.

• Would crazy train with jazz chords and RnB vocals make a good cover?

• Can I offer digital scanning services to artists and just show up w/my camera and digitizes art pieces? I’d have to get some good lights. How much can I charge for that? Could be a sweet little side hustle

• I heard that there’s labradorite ‘round these parts. Gotta find some.

• What are those big reddish brown squirrels at the park called?

• I miss posting on instagram. Another dang reason to get my dang photo catalog organized.

• Gotta find a good breakfast burrito around here.

• Things I should be doing every day

  • Hike or at least a good long walk.

  • Morning rituals back on point

  • Substack

  • Play music

  • Play chess

  • Write haiku

  • Take at least 1 photo

  • Streeeeeeeeeeetch

Ok maybe I overshared there but you get the point.

Sit down with your paper and a nice comfortable pen and write down every little thought that comes to you for like 20 minutes. You’ll be surprised at how much more actionable and less overwhelming it all feels once it’s on paper.

Side note. I’ve tried this on the phone but there’s just too many fun distractions a couple taps away. Maybe you can pull it off but I just don’t have the willpower or attention span or something so I gotta go old school.

Usually I like a legal pad and a pilot v5 on account of the v5 writes smooth and slippery and has just a thin enough line that I can get a little fancy if I’m feeling frisky. I like the legal pad on account of this is not a permanent document, it’s more like a checklist. It will not be useful for long. Everything that ends up on there will either be a task that will get finished or an idea that needs expanding in your notebook.

Ok. You got your braindump done. Now it’s all on paper you can see how much has been itching at you that you could do in 10 minutes, or that is actually fun, you just needed to lay down the bones of the project and starting is the hardest part.

In reality this is your bare minimum emergency protocol but if you really want to put the icing on the cake and finish off your emergency protocols in style there’s 3 more things you can do.

1. Have a very veggie-full meal - sometimes a bad mood can come down to not feeling good due to improper nutrition. The body is an unspeakably complex machine and sometimes all it takes to get you feeling good is a little extra iron or magnesium. If you have a monster salad with all the colors of the rainbow there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be able to supplement whatever it is your body, and by extension your brain, is ornery about.

2. Tidy up your space - not only is this a little win for some free dopamine, it can help to further declutter the mind and free up bandwidth for the brain to chew on cooler stuff. Showering and taking some time for self care also falls in this category.

3. Finally, create - create ANYTHING. Play music, do collage, paint, write, take photos, build a computer program, or a cute little table, or a sweater for your grandma. The brain is MUCH happier with a clear and present goal and creativity is the ultimate and most satisfying form of that. A creative brain is a happy brain and vice versa.

OKAY NOW WE ARE DONE with emergency protocols.

Do you feel any better? If not, don’t worry, sometimes it takes time.

Sometimes it takes the next part to really drive it home.

Now that you got a good brain reset lets set our daily rituals up for success so you can keep the brain fresh and STOKED.

The Swampmonster’s Guide to Ultra-Powerful Super-Saiyan Uber-Mondo Morning Rituals

To be perfectly honest. My life was a mess before I got my morning rituals locked in. I was even MORE prone to distraction and to forgetting everything. I was anxious and disorganized and overall ineffective. Plus I was a terrible student. I didn’t have to try in high school and college kicked the crap outta me for neglecting to learn proper study skills.

Anyway.

This concept is not new. I got all the ideas from books I’ve read and incorporated. The base model comes from one of the most life changing books I’ve ever read - Cal Newport’s How to become a Straight A Student: The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less.

We don’t really have time to get into this today but basically Cal was a cool Ivy league nerd that got invited to some ivy league nerd party and was expective everyone but him to look like Urkel but they turned out to be freakin cool and confident AND the top achievers in the ivy league colleges. So he set out to figure out why and found that they all maintain very similar strategies.

I’ve also pulled inspiration from songwriting books, podcasts, Tim Ferris books, and everything in between. This system has been developing for nearly 5 years now.

So ANYWAY.

Here’s the morning ritual system to keep the blues away and the brain locked in on more flowers and less dogshit (it’s like a metaphor man.)

There’s 3 things that are non-negotiable and a WHOLE MESS of fun things that can be added onto this system to suit your specific lifestyle.

The 3 non-negotiables to starting your day off right and keeping the brain gremlins away:

Make your dang bed

This one is so simple and SO VITAL. Admiral William H. McRaven Said this in THIS AWESOME SPEECH at a commencement ceremony at the University of Texas and once I started doing it I could never go back.

“If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter. If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.

And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made — that you made — and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.”

It’s a free win and can become the start to a productivity cascade. It’s almost ridiculous that something so little can impact your life in such a big way.

10 Reps

This is very similar to making your bed but it’s for the body instead of the brain. It wakes everything up and gets it going. Doesn’t matter what the reps are, pushups, situps, jumping jacks, whatever! The real point is sending a signal to the body that its time to CRUSH THE DAY BROH. Get moving!

Morning Journal

This is maybe the most important thing I do on the daily. If I do JUST THIS there’s like an 85% chance I’m going to have an awesome day. I’ve been doing it since that semester in college where I failed almost every class. This system, as well as my study guide system (we will get to that one further down) went from being a D-C student to a straight-A student in the course of a couple months.

Morning journal consists of 1 journal page with four sections:

1. What would make today awesome

2. What am I grateful for

3. Affirmations

4. Ideas/thoughts/mini braindump

Sometimes 1-3 is all you need, sometimes 4 is all you need. Generally I find myself doing all 4 and just keeping #4 to half a page or so.

So let’s go through these one at a time and examine the power in each. Plus i’m going to flip through my book and pull out examples of each.

What would make today awesome?!

This one is CRAZY powerful. You write down 3 things that if you just accomplished ONE of them today, it would make it an awesome day. This helps you realize how attainable awesome is and that sometimes small wins are just as crucial as big ones.

So for example, opening to a random page in my book, here’s some things that would have made the day awesome on Saturday March 6, 2024=

1. Get the house TIDY

2. Have a good Sunday Funday

3. Finish ONE track for the album

I find that a lot of my WWMTA entries revolve around making photographs, recording music, organizing my space and spending time with loved ones. But there are certainly some wildcards in there like “harvest the plums from the trees in the yard and make them into 8 gallons of wine” or these very ominous ones I just saw that says “Plan for impending life shit” and“develop a system for this existence.”

Idk what those mean but sounds like I was going through it that week…

I am Grateful For…

I can’t remember who said it for the life of me and the internet can’t seem to tell me either but I once heard a standup comedian say

“the most annoying part about gratitude journaling is that it works.”

That idea has lived in my head rent free for longer than I can remember. It often feels silly to make a little list of things that make you happy. But G’Dang it flips off any ornery part in my brain just about immediately and makes me notice how pretty things are all around me and how much I have to be thankful for.

All you gotta do is write 3 things you’re grateful for.

Some examples out of my Morning Journal include:

1. Adventure buddies

2. The mockingbird that lives in the backyard

3. Fresh Roasted Coffee

4. Jam Night

5. My Momma

6. My truck

7. The Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, And sometimes Antarctica

8. PEMDAS

9. Speedwalking

10. Shotguns?

11. Grackles

12. The people that love me

13. Sunglasses

14. Birdies

15. Kitties

16. The internet

17. All my Clothes

18. Slippery Smooth Ballpoint Pens

19. Puppies

20. Gertrude my motorcycle

You get the point. No gratitude too small. Even just pulling those from my journal to here put me in a better mood. That’s insane.

All it takes is 3 a day to help you notice how freakin’ SWEET life can be.

Affirmations

Like many American Men, I sometimes struggle with accessing my feelings, feeling proud of myself, communicating well with others, self esteem, and a whole mess of other complexes that are built into the psyche of this country and its inhabitants.

That is to say this part is hard for me and I rarely look forward to it.

But it’s like that old saying at the gym - if you hate doing an exercise it just means you NEED to do that exercise because it has exposed a weakness in your system.

So I do it. I don’t like it but I put the effort in, and it almost always makes my heart happy.

The most annoying part about self affirmations is that they work.

SO for example, here’s 20 random affirmations from my morning journal:

1. I am so cute

2. I am incredibly capable

3. I am kind and caring

4. I smile in the face of the unknown

5. I take care of my body

6. I am so brave

7. I am a powerhouse

8. I work hard

9. I’m creative as shit

10. I am talented as shit

11. My life is ridiculously fun

12. I am happy

13. I am thoughtful and patient

14. I do not need to sacrifice myself to be loved

15. I can love without fear of hurt

16. I am strong

17. I can do anything I set my mind to

18. I hold no animosity to those in my past

19. I am a loving partner and friend

20. I am loved and worthy of so much love.

My favorite part about this one is that it really quickly reveals things that the brain has been worrying about and sometimes they surprise me! Like I said, still learning to access my emotions affectively.

Not to mention this exercise gives you a little mantra to meditate on for the day and helps you explore your feelings from a more objective point of view.

Affirmations - Very uncomfortable for me but g’dang if the result isn’t worth every second.

IDEA

This one is a wild grab bag. It’s like a mini brain dump. It gives you a chance to organize your thoughts on whatever your brain has been chewing on.

This is my favorite part about morning journal.

Sometimes the idea of the day is very serious and leads to some hardcore project progress, other times it’s about the silliest thing in the world. For example, this page that just says:

Redneck Fables

-The Tortoise and the Hare A.K.A the Camry and the El Camino

-(the El Camino goes 180mph but breaks down every 60 miles)

Redneck Sangria

-Box wine and cool-aid

Redneck History

-Gearge Warshton and the Siege on Vayleh Farge

Do I know what this means? No. Did it make me giggle? Absolutely.

It’s cool some of my best friends are Rednecks.

Oh my heck I just keep flipping through and laughing my butt off

Here’s another:

“My pens keep exploding. One day it happened again but the cap was off and it was pointed at the floor. When the tip popped off and the ink splattered, a perfectly legible message was at my feet.

‘HELP’ it read, ‘We are aliens being held hostage at the pen factory. Please save us. In return we will end world hunger, drought, war, and show you how to make infinite energy!
Turns out they suck (?)’

Really mailed it in on the ending there but that’s the beauty of this. You can only use the rest of the page for your idea dump. If it warrants a bigger area you gotta move it to your idea notebook so as to maintain the integrity of the morning journal.

It’s not all goofy thoughts though. I use this section to work out things that are bugging me, Brainstorm music I want to learn, work out confusing conversations, plan things, analyze things, ANYTHING that my brain wants to chew on it just gets free rein for half a page. Lyrics, million-dollar ideas, conspiracy theories, nothing is off limits as long as you work an idea out.

That’s it!! That’s a lot of info for something that takes 20 minutes max. I seriously cannot recommend it enough though. If you start your day off with those 3 things, you will find it VERY hard to have a bad day.

However, maybe you have a little more time this morning and want to do a little more. Maybe you have a LOT of stuff to get done that day, or want to work on your art just a little bit every day.

Bonus Ritual Options

There’s a lot you can add to your morning rituals that make them even MORE fun/effective/impactful. Here are a handful that I use regularly, depending on what I’m working on at the time:

The List, Calendar, and Progress Journal

This one is for when you need to be a hyper-productive machine. This one got me through college. In fact this was the adjustment that turned me into a straight A student. You need 3 things to make it work: A calendar, a notebook, and a pocket notebook that stays on your person at all times.

(This system is straight out of How to Become a Straight-A Student if i’m not mistaken)

The Calendar

The calendar goes with you to meetings and stuff like that. Its job is to keep track of deadlines and to-do items. You add these action items to the calendar as much as possible throughout the day without driving yourself nuts. Don’t worry if you miss some things, the list has a redundancy to take care of that.

Basically the point is to keep all the stuff you gotta do in one notebook so you don’t have to keep it all in your head. This increases productivity and decreases stuckness.

The List

The list contains 2 things and you do them in the morning with your journal

Firstly, our to-do redundancy. Write down everything that needs doing, stuff from the day before or just things you’ve been putting off, pull everything from your calendar and from your brain and get them down. Pull them from yesterday’s list too, get it all updated.

You have to pull from the list the day before and transfer them over and over until they are done. This way nothing slips through the cracks.

If you want to get really wild keep a page in your calendar with a big fat running to do list and add everything from here to there as you go, boom bam double redundancy.

Once you know what you gotta do, and you know what would make today awesome on account a you did your morning journal, you’re ready to make the schedule.

The schedule is literally what it sounds. Look at all the stuff you gotta do, pick the most important ones, decide how long they’ll take, and chunk your day up to allot time for those tasks. (I’m always overly-optimistic with this one but that’s why tasks transfer over from the day before, and that’s why we keep the progress journal but we are getting ahead of ourselves.)

The schedule is especially excellent if you’re a bit distractible like me and have a problem with task-switching. If I ever find myself wandering around wondering what I’m supposed to be doing, the schedule has me covered. I just pull it out of my pocket and i’m back on task, even if I’m a bit behind as usual.

The Progress Journal

This is your accountability system and it ensures the list and calendar are actually doing their job. Every day you make a small entry with the date, and whether or not you completed everything on the schedule the day before: SUCCESS or FAILURE

If you find yourself writing failure, you need to write down what you missed and analyze what happened that made you miss that thing.

The progress journal is very good motivation. The prospect of writing SUCCESS and not having to explain myself is sometimes enough to keep me on task all day, which is a massive improvement over the old system.

Poetry

Every time I do my morning journal, I make coffee or tea first. I take my time with my coffee, I silence my phone and don’t let anyone bug me. I avoid scrolling like the plague. Starting off your day on facebook can ruin everything surprisingly quickly.

I do my affirmations and ideas and my schedule and progress journal (if I’m really on one that week) and then I sit somewhere pretty and write haiku until I run out of coffee.

Sometimes my brain is sluggish and I can only manage 1 poem, sometimes I’m on hyperdrive mode and write 20. (Seems to correlate with how much coffee I’ve had up to that point.)

Both are fine, what matters is you got the creative brain going and thinking creatively.

It doesn’t matter what type of poetry you write. I love haiku because it gives you just enough space to capture a single thought if you’re clever enough. I’ve also been known to dabble in limericks and freeverse though. (sidenote if you’ve never played with limericks you’ve been missing out. They are so fun. Their structure is MADE for making good jokes and making you giggle.)

This adjustment was all it took to make my first volume of poetry: Hideous Haiku and I’m already 700 haiku deep into my second volume.

Sidenote if you want to get a copy you can get one on my website HERE or on Amazon HERE!!!

Object write

This one is for you creative writers out there. I got the concept from one of the best books on songwriting ever written: Writing Better Lyrics by The Berklee Songwriting Professor Pat Pattinson.

Between the lackluster title and his name that book totally sounds made up but I promise it’s not and if you’re a songwriter I cannot recommend enough that you go on thriftbooks and get a copy like right now.

ANYWAY the point is this: You set a timer for 10 minutes. You pick something to write about. It can be anything. Start with a noun or a noun with an adjective attached and just go where the mind wanders. Write and write and describe your chosen object vividly and with much imagery and metaphor as you can. Write about scenes that the object brings to mind, write about the feelings. Write about ANYTHING as long as it is creative and at least starts pertaining to that object you picked to write about.

I would put an example of one of mine in here but I haven’t seen my songwriting book in a week. It got lost somewhere in my truck. But there are entire subreddits committed to this concept if you need ideas for prompts and whatnot. Apparently this technique is used by many great songwriters and they even throw entire parties where everyone sits around and does this and shares with the group!

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING is that once your 10 minute timer goes off you stop writing. Don’t even finish the sentence. The lack of resolution will make the creative brain all sorts of frustrated and you will notice that it is more active for the rest of your day and you find more creative solutions to everyday problems.

Wicked freakin powerful ‘broh.

Brainstorm/research/study

Sometimes you just have an idea you can’t get out of your head, or you have an upcoming genetics test that contains a terrifying amount of information. Sometimes the best way to deal with that is get your idea notebook out and dedicate an entire spread to the concept.

In my opinion, this is the best way to work out complex concepts and make sure you understand the information. It is also the best way to make a study guide and is another technique taken pretty much directly out of How to Become a Straight-A student.

Start with a descriptive title so you know what you’re dealing with when you come back to it.

QUESTIONS - The first thing you do is list all the questions you have on the subject. Take some time on this, it’s the foundation of the brainstorm. Once you got all your questions you’re going into research mode

EVIDENCE - This is where you gather data for all your questions. Deposit them into the page below each question until you feel like it’s been satisfactorily answered

CONCLUSIONS - Summarize your evidence section into a succinct, 1-2 sentence answer to the question. This is what really drives it home. The best way to make sure you understand something is to teach it to someone that doesn’t! This emulates that nicely without the need for social interaction.

This is the OTHER system that turned me into a straight-A student. I have hundreds if not thousands of pages of biology study guides rainging from genetics and evolution to ornithology and entomology built on this method.

In fact if anybody can think of something cool we can do with those, let me know! I’ve been pondering that for a while… Seems like there’s some cool potential there.

Listen to an album

This one is more something I do in tandem with the morning rituals. I find that it all takes about the same time that it takes to listen to an album. So almost every day I pick a new album to listen to while I work in my notebooks! It’s a marvelous dimension to add onto all this, though sometimes an album that is too lyric heavy can intrude on the thoughts you’re supposed to be writing down so I usually recommend an instrumental album if you’re going to go this route. That’s fine though, with the world of Jazz and Classical alone there is more music than I could ever hope to listen to in my lifetime, yet alone stuff like bluegrass and even flute music like Native American flute and shakuhachi!

Sidenote: You know what shakuhachi is. It’s that real mystic sounding Japanese flute that plays right before the fight scene in all the kung fu movies. If you still don’t know what i’m talking about here’s a great shakuhachi track

It’s a marvellous instrument and I’m definitely going to get one someday.

That’s the Whole System!

I know it’s a lot. Here’s a brief overview of the whole thing for quick reference later -

Emergency Protocol

1. Water

2. Exercise/outside

3. Brain dump

4. Optional but helpful:

   1. Eat a bunch of veggies get your nutrition on point

   2. Tidy up

   3. Create ANYTHING

Maintenance (daily) Protocol

Morning Ritual - mandatory

1. Make Bed

2. 10 Reps

3. Morning Journal

   • What Would Make Today Awesome?

   • I am Grateful For…

   • Affirmations

   • Ideas/thoughts/brainstorm

Bonus Morning Rituals

1. Calendar, list, progress journal

2. Write a poem or 20

3. Object write

4. Brainstorm/research/study

Icing on the cake

1. Listen to an album you’ve never heard while doing all this. Or one you have heard, doesn’t matter to me. I’m not your mom.

That’s all for this week!!!

If you have any recommendations or rituals that you think would fit nicely into this little system, I would LOVE to hear about them. I’m always looking for ideas on how to start my day off better and learn how other people cope with this whole existence thing. Please leave a comment or message me if you got anything cool!

Without further ado,

You know what time it is!!!

Weekly Things

Album of the week

Our album of the week is one that has held a special place in my heart since I discovered them back in 2013, the first time I went to college.

The harmonies that sound like they are being sung in a cathedral, the great big drums, the incredible imagery and lyrics, this album has it all and there’s hardly ever a bad time to listen to it. Especially if you’re riding your bike around town on acid and it’s blasting in your headphones. I never felt more like I was flying in my whole life.

Plus for you indie folk heads, Father John Misty is actually the drummer on this one!

Without further ado

I humbly present

Fleet Foxes by Fleet foxes

What’s Hideous Gomphideous been up to?!

Oh you KNOW I’ve been making some cool music while doing all this Substack Procrastinating.

This one is a doozy. It’s VERY underdeveloped and the intro is either way too long or needs to build up to an entire orchestra to justify it

BUT

I think it’s just so COOL.

The tensions between the strings and the brass section and then to have the whole thing fall apart and the arpeggios take over. I’m excited to work with it some more and see where it goes. Mostly I just love the harmonies and dynamics right now!

Ladies and Gentlemen I present:
Peanut butter on tortilla chips (working title)

Also I forgot to pay my Distrokid bill so we fell off the streaming services for a minute last month but we are BACK on the music scene too too!!! WOO!

Quote of the Week

The quote of the week is one I just keep thinking about. It’s from the Bulldog himself, the great British Prime Minister from WWII - Winston Churchill.

In typical Churchill fashion, its sure doesn’t beat around the bush.

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Like many great quotes there is no official record of him EVER saying or writing this but it’s a banger anyway innit?

SO

Because we can’t be sure he said that here’s one he really did say, you know, probably -

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Short story of the Week

We are doing another Mark Twain story this week because I guess I’m just obsessed with him this year. His book of complete short stories is one of the best investments I ever made

This is quite possibly the funniest thing I read last year. And the only writer that even gave it a run for it’s money was also Mark Twain.

It’s about the best lightning rod salesman of all time. Or the most ridiculous lightning rod customer, not sure which.

Either way -
He’s a genius, especially his short stories.

May I present to you, dear reader

Mark Twain’s Political Economy

Kindly provided to us through project Gutenberg - one of the most incredible things on the entire internet:

Don’t let the title discourage you, it’s a hoot and a half.

Read the Story

That’s all for this week!!

Until next week! Yes, we are BACK!! I’ve figured it out and we will be back on a weekly schedule from here on! If you have any opinions on what day would be the best day to release new posts let me know your thoughts please. I’m not trying to drive up engagement or anything, I literally just have no idea and need some data and don’t know where to find any hahaha.

Anyway

Until next week! Don’t forget you are awesome and capable and I BELIEVE IN YOU!!

Thank you so much for being here. I feel so lucky to have this beautiful Substack community. <3 You FREAKIN ROCK.

First things first. Half of this post is all about music, therefore I’d like to provide some good reading music for you to get things going.

This is our album of the week but don’t worry, I’ll give you like 1000 more below!

It’s also some of the cheekiest feel-good music I’ve ever encountered. You can’t be in a bad mood when you’re listening to this album. Makes me feel like Spongebob getting ready for work in the morning.

So ANYway

My new phone just came in the mail

I waited a week for it.

Last week my old phone died. Quite suddenly, it wouldn’t hold a charge. I kept putting it on the charger but soon noticed that the screen was being pushed out of the housing.

The battery was expanding.

At least, the battery is the only thing I can think of that would expand in an iPhone and if it kept on expanding it would blow up, as far as I understand.

So I quit trying to charge it immediately

Lucky timing, I suppose.

So I went without a phone for a whole week.

Sounds pathetic now saying it out loud (so to speak.)

BUT

The whole experience made me feel nostalgic for a time before cell phones, when things were simpler and more complicated at the same time.

This is kind of silly because I was born 21 years after the first cell phone was released by Motorola. My nostalgia for the era seems to be imagined.

There were experiences in not having a working phone for the first time in years that surprised me. I observed some cool and interesting stuff during the experience and want to share them with you and maybe together, we can work out how to have a healthier relationship with the magic little computers that we take with us everywhere.

So without further ado, here’s 4 interesting little things I observed while phoneless for a week:

Not being available all the time was liberating almost immediately

Within 30 minutes of deciding my phone was a goner, I felt a weight being lifted off me. I realized that now that I didn’t have to worry about my phone, my world was suddenly a LOT smaller. I don’t have to worry about my friends across town or across the country, it wasn’t an option. I found myself more easily sinking into the moment and being more present in general.

I found myself bringing my book everywhere, reading whilst waiting for breakfast burritos instead of doomscrolling on my phone or getting my ass handed to me on Chess.com.

It almost felt like my phone split my attention into a million little fractals and not having it around allowed me to start rebuilding the prism so I could see more clearly.

In the future, I plan to cling on to some of these factors. Leaving the phone in my truck when I’m adventuring. Maybe I can sustain the sense of presence I’ve felt even though the attention shatterer is back in my life.

Making plans changed completely

This is one I did not see coming. I found myself feeling like a kid again when making plans with my friends. Instead of ‘we are going camping, i’ll send you a pin and a time’ it was more like ‘we are going up the mountain to go camping around 6. Drive up this road, I hope you find us!!

I did not find them.

Not the first try anyway.

I got high enough up the road that I decided they wouldn’t go further than that and turned around to go back and explore the fork where the road split off about a mile previous.

Little did I know I was a quarter mile from them.

But I went back down and had a gorgeous little drive through the basalt caps of the red cliffs desert reserve. I saw a little field of the Utah State flower - the sego lily - glowing in the sunset light. It made the diversion 30000% worth it. What a gorgeous and peaceful sight and moment.

Not to mention, the sense of adventure was heightened when I was out there on my own looking for my friends. No maps, no calling to tell them you’re lost, just you and the wilderness and you never know what’s going to happen next. I was on the verge of quitting and going home when I found them. It could have just been a boring drive into the forest but it turned into an adventure and I kind of loved it.

I’ve been pondering how to keep this newfound sense of adventure in my life and I think the best thing I can come up with is just to stop using google maps when it’s not necessary. Maybe I’ll even switch to paper maps.

I’ve always felt a strange sense of nostalgia for the old days of automobile travel where all the maps were paper and you had to stop every 100 miles to fill up your radiator. It seems like a peaceful and more exciting way to travel. No freeways, just the landscapes and the car.

Phantom Vibrations

This was a weird one. Even though I knew I didn’t have a phone, I felt my pocket vibrate on a daily basis. Sometimes it was just my keys shifting in my pocket or the fabric of my pants rubbing against some furniture, but every time I reached into my pocket to check my phone.

This wasn’t very insightful or nothing, except perhaps to demonstrate how much our brains LOVE these wild little pocket computers. I’m convinced the phantom vibrations were a withdrawal symptom, my brain was just looking for a cheap dopamine hit because it’s become so used to them, and it wanted one so bad it decided to make them up just to give itself some hope.

The brain is an unruly beast. You are not your brain. Therefore, the more you treat your brain like a weird little pet, the less you have to buy into it when the brain throws a hissy fit over something dumb. You can just watch your brain and giggle at it for being silly, or you can buy into what it’s ornery about and get ornery too.

Like Vonnegut said,

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”

Anyway…

More time!

So much more time it makes me sick to my stomach

It’s so easy to fall into the habits surrounding our phones that eat up the little chunks of time in our day. Before my phone broke, I felt like I was a tiresomely busy man. After it broke I just realized I had been managing my time pitifully bad.

Instead of checking my phone, I found myself playing guitar, reading, whittling my hiking sticks, organizing the systems in my beloved truck - Morganucodon Jones - and even working on my DANG Substack!!!

I certainly felt some withdrawal symptoms outside of the phantom vibrations and fought through the urge to be entertained constantly.

But now that I’m through them, I want to keep those bad habits off and out of my life as best I can.

Losing my phone for a week made me want to change my relationship with it entirely.

It is the most powerful tool ever put into the hands of the general public, and that is certainly enough rope to hang yourself with, if you’ll excuse the phrase.

It has been an honor to live through the adoption of these technologies, and though the growing pains have been interesting for society, I’m quite glad I got to be a part of the experiment overall.

Plus I love google so much and I sincerely don’t know what I’d do without the ability to use a search engine to answer a dozen random and strange questions a day.

For example

I just saw a milkweed bug outside.

Turns out they are poisonous because they eat milkweed, just like monarch butterflies, but some birds still have the ability to eat them, as well as mantids, spiders, and even some wasps and other bugs!

Sidenote - Bugs are not the same as insects.

Bugs are a classification of insects.

The true bug family, also known as the Hemipterans or Shield-Backed insects, are also known as the true bugs.

The trademark trait that binds them all together is their piercey-sucky mouthparts. That’s not a technical term but I’m a biologist and you can trust me when I say this is what real entomologists call it.

Anyway they use their piercey-sucky mouthparts to pierce leaves and suck out the juice, or just about anything else that can be pierced and sucked.

Wowee that was quite a sidetrack but there you go, now hopefully you know a little more about bugs!

ANYWAY

Where were we?

Oh yeah.

Part two

Ok strap in we are doing a hard right turn, it’s time to talk about music. Specifically, how on earth one can keep track of every band they ever heard and enjoyed.

This one takes a little backstory.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been completely overwhelmed with the amount of music there is to dig into. (It’s the same problem with books.)

There’s over 100 million songs on Spotify alone. If we estimate conservatively that each song is 3.5 minutes, that’s 665.91 years by my very brief calculations.

There’s an estimated 200 million songs on all the streaming services put together.

AND an estimated 100,000 songs added every day.

That’s too many songs to listen to. That’s too many songs to keep track of. It’s freaking paralyzing how many awesome options we have these days for media and entertainment, especially music.

So

On Jan 10, 2013 I came up with a satisfying solution to this overwhelming problem.

I made a playlist on Spotify called “Bands to Look Into” and every time I heard a song I liked and not recognized in the last 12 years I added it to that playlist.

Quickly I reached 100 tracks added to the “bands to look into” playlist and realized that this system would not be very useful if the playlist got too big, it would make it hard to find stuff. So I came up with the very natural plan of making a second playlist, this cycle repeated over the years and I ended up making another every time I reached 100 on the old one.

Thus, ‘Bands to Look Into’ was abbreviated to BTLI and slowly, over the years, BTLI II, BTLI III, BTLI IV, V, VI, VII, etc. were born.

Last week I had a bit of an epiphany as I was making BTLI XI. I’ve got about 1000 tracks from different bands that I, at one point or another, thought were interesting or of quality in some way or another. These playlists document most of my music-nerd career and what more, in order!!

So I compiled them into ‘The Ultimate Bands to Look Into” and it is totally fascinating to me.

The first thing I noticed was the sheer variety. The first track I clicked on was a heavy metal song called “Tastes like Kevin Bacon” by iwrestledabearonce. It’s absurdly heavy metal with some video game influences, it’s wild. But the next song is a very jazzy number by Herbie Hancock and Jackie McLean. Then some very vibey RnB from Sade in 2000, then a fantastic German house/rock track that gets my head banging every time. THEN another very heavy rock track with the 7 string guitars and all, then a lovely bouncy little piano concerto from Stiebelt, then some RAUNCHY latin fusion from Al Di Meola, then a psychedelic funk klezmer track (I don’t know what this is, it’s wild. No idea where I found it.)

You get the point.

You probably got the point like 3 songs into that rampant little description.

We got every genre in this bad boy and some WEIRD deep cuts.

The REAL point is this playlist is the ULTIMATE grab bag for discovering new music.

It spans all genres, it is almost all high quality, it is chock full of surprises. From classic rap to bluegrass to jazz fusion to 70s japanese funk. It is so wild. From the grateful dead to Stravinski to Madvillian and everyone in between.

That’s my use case for this playlist.

It’s what I’ve been using these playlists for for years.

If you ever get in a music rut and just NEED to break the cycle, try something new, or branch out of your comfort zone, The Ultimate Bands to Look Into is the answer. Put it on shuffle and go to town until you find something that piques your interest! Every band I’ve come to love in the last 13 years is there and many that I still have not explored fully.

As I scroll through this Goliath of a playlist, I do notice a few things…

The first 100 or so are very psychedelic, indie, and indie-folk leaning with some harder rock and even heavy metal, but mostly bands like The Head and the Heart, Two Door Cinema Club, Alt-J, and Tame Impala.

However, a year into starting this project I took a class that would change my life forever: History of Jazz.

Seriously I didn’t expect that class to change who I was as a person. I just took it because history of rock and roll was full. History of Jazz has enriched my life perhaps more than any other class I ever took in my long, chaotic, and illustrious college career…

The first jazz track to make it onto the bands to look into is Art Blakey’s absolute epic masterpiece: Caravan. If that sounds familiar it’s because it’s the track at the end of whiplash that finally makes the scary music professor proud of the protagonist like he realized his life’s mission in going into teaching or something.

Sidenote: if you haven’t seen Whiplash, why the hackin heck not? It’s spectacular.

The next 100 tracks start mixing in jazz, classical, neo soul, and even show signs of me dipping my toe into rap. About number 200 is where it starts getting really diverse, from 200 on you never know what you’re gonna get. Could be the most beautiful solo jazz piano you ever heard, could be Tastes like Kevin Bacon, could be prime era Outkast.

A lot of people say they listen to everything when you ask them what kind of music they listen to.

This is almost always a lie.

This playlist doesn’t have everything. There’s a distinct and intentional absence of country music from the last 30 years.

Something bad happened to country in the 90s and it became all too formulaic.

That’s why when someone asks what I listen to I say “everything except stadium country.”

And today I have the reciepts to back it up.

I would like to humbly present this project to you, my reader. For you are so fair and have such good taste, I am sure you will put it to good use.

(If you don’t like Spotify let me know! I can duplicate it onto Apple Music and the others without too much trouble I think)

Anyway, here it is. All 67 hours of it. There’s only 922 songs. I guess I’m not so good at counting sometimes.

I will continue to update it over the years so if you like this concept make sure to follow it to keep up with what I’ve been keeping up with!

I recommend poking around and picking a random song and seeing what you find. I’ve found this to be highly entertaining for the last 6 days and I’m excited to share it.

That’s all for this week!! Feels good to get things going again. I got stuck on my last post because I bit off more than I could chew in a week but I’m going to get through it and get it out don’t you worry! It’s a neat concept I’ve been working on for years about how music theory is just high school drama and anyone that’s seen Mean Girls can understand it.

That said it is TIME

FOR

Weekly Things

Album of the week

We already did our album of the week at the top but here it is again just in case.

I bought this album on a whim from a thrift store about 6 years ago. Mostly I bought it for the album artwork, it’s spectacular. I did not expect it to be an absolute banger as well. If ever i’m in a funky no good mood, Whipped Cream and Other Delights pulls me out almost immediately.

I adore it, as usual. I’ll probably never give you an album I don’t adore because what would be the point of that? The Tijuana Brass never misses.

What’s Hideous Gomphideous been up to?!

Goofing off with dang arpeggiators dawg.

Crash course music theory: arpeggios

Chords play all the notes at the same time like this:

(Imagine each x is a note and there’s a vertical bar sliding through them toward the right side of the screen and when the bar goes through a note it plays)

X. X. X. X. X.

X. X. X. X. X.

X. X. X. X. X.

X. X. X. X. X.

So this would sound like chung. chung. chung. chung. chung.

(chords go chung or ching in my head idk why. Something about that CH sound seems to sound like a group of notes, at least on guitar)

Anyway

Arpeggios play each note on a different beat like

X. X. X. X. X.

X. X. X. X. X.

X. X. X. X. X.

X. X. X. X. X.

This one would sound like doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo

So anyway now that I tried to get you to hear it in your head, here’s an example of that in song form I’ve been playing with this week. Let me know if it sounded like you expected!

The first minute is chords and the rest is arpeggios! The arpeggios get progressively faster as you move through the song! It’s neat to hear how once it starts going fast enough (1/128 for you rhythm nerds) it starts to sound a lot like a choir.

Bear in mind it’s a demo and as usual needs all sorts of love but it’s fun and that’s what matters!

Quote of the Week

This week’s quote of the week is one I think about all the time. It’s from the man known as the German Shakespeare - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The more I think about it, the more it rings true in very beautiful ways.

“Music is liquid architecture; Architecture is frozen music.”

-Goethe

Short Story of the week

If you’ve never read Ray Bradbury, I think you should rectify that. He’s one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. He wrote two hours on his typewriter every single day until his death in 2012. He only used a typewriter because he didn’t trust computers and didn’t want to be part of the inevitable upcoming computer uprising. I suppose writing a thousand stories about science fiction will put those kinds ideas in your head.

Anyway

I’ve got a book of 100 of his most beloved short stories. The first time I read them was in 2012, when I was a sophomore in high school. The short story of the week stuck with me then and has stuck since. I think about it often, it’s touching and beautiful.

The thing about great Science fiction writers is they aren’t obsessed with science or the future, they’re obsessed with people. The best science fiction writers use science to put people into extreme and novel circumstances so they can explore their characters’ humanity on another level.

This story is a shining example of that, plus it’s about cute as hell.

I humbly present:
The Rocket by Ray Bradbury

The Rocket

That’s all for this week!!

I’ll see you next week! I can’t even hardly wait. It feels so good to be back. Until then remember

I love you so and I think you are awesome and capable of anything you set your mind to. <3

Good morning!

As many of you probably know, I went to school for “Natural Science Biology” which I mostly take to mean ecology, evolution, botany, mycology, zoology, geology, ornithology, and entomology. That is, basically everything that lives outside in the great wild unknown.

I don’t like to study things that are inside, especially inside our bodies, I’m a bit prone to getting woozy at the sight of blood.

Anyway

My specific skillset allows me some particular joys when I am in the wilderness and I’d like nothing more than to be able to share this experience with the everyone I can. I find wonder everywhere I go because I’ve learned enough about the natural world to have a teeny bit of understanding of what’s going on, and I deeply believe if everyone picked up this hobby the world would be not only a happier place, but one much more in touch with the ecosystems that support life on this planet.

So here’s what I’m thinking.

I’m camping in a new spot today and I want to guide you through what I see when I get to a new place, how I learn about where I am in the wild, and more specifically, how to find the stories that every place has to tell!

I am sitting in a field of juniper and pinion pine. The dirt is soft and sandy and very dusty. The rocks around here are all polished like river stones, which means to me that there’s a river downhill from here or at least there used to be.

Geologic time scales really have a way of getting your head all twisted up. These rocks could have been polished up like this 20 million years ago. Or 20 thousand years ago. When I try to imagine either of those amounts of time my brain short circuits. The feel just about the same to me.

I can’t even hardly imagine 100 years yet alone 1.6 billion, which is the age of this neat piece of granite I found the other day.

Turns out large swathes of Nevada are made of similar or the same granite.

Turns out also that there’s an exposed layer of gneiss in Canada called the Canadian Shield formation that’s ~4.03 billion years old

Also we have a rock from the moon that’s 4 billion years old.

Anyway

The first thing I notice, usually, when I am in a new place is the plants. This makes sense, they’re real big and they don’t ruin off nowhere so it’s easy to keep track of them.

They tell me a lot about the ecosystem. For example, the trees here are all really short. I’m parked next to the biggest pinion pine I can see and it can’t be more than 12 feet tall. To me this means there’s some serious stressors in this environment. My first guess would be the soil is not very nutrient dense just based on it’s dusty loose condition.

Also (and probably more importantly) there is not much rainfall here if I had to guess, as that is a common theme among little trees and little plants in general.

This hypothesis is also backed up by the other plants here, which are almost all grasses which are dry and crunchy.

Sidenote: grasses do well in harsh environments for a couple interesting reasons.

Very basically, they are much simpler. They grow their new cells in straight rows instead of complex leaf patterns and so they can grow much faster.

They also have vast and shallow root structures.

In fact this fun fact from “Stern’s Introduction to Plant Biology” Says this

“A single, mature ryegrass plant may have as many as 15 million individual roots and branch roots, with a combined length of 644 kilometers (400 miles) and a total surface area larger than a volleyball court, all contained within .57 cubic meters (about 2 cubic feet) of soil”

That blows my mind. No wonder since hitting the scene like 90 million years ago they have taken over the planet.

Anyway

The plants can tell us more interesting things.

I’ve also noticed that there are very few leafy plants here.

It takes a lot of water to be a leafy plant so if you are one, you gotta live near water, so I know there’s no water here.

To learn more from the plants, we are going to have to learn more ABOUT the plants

This is where our first super awesome tool comes in!

It’s called Seek.

It’s a project by iNaturalist which is a great big species identification photo database and social network for outside nerds.

It allows you to point your phone camera at a plant, fungus, or animal that you’re not familiar with, and it will tell you all about it! I use it constantly. It’s free and freaking awesome and has provided me with countless hours of learning and entertainment.

Just go around and point seek at every plant you can find until you’ve seen them all and you’ll know way more than expected about the ecosystem!

But that’s just the plants! What about the rocks and animals around here?

Well

I went for a little walk earlier to try and learn more about the rocks.

What I found was an exposed layer of bedrock. I found 2 types of rock there: basalt and andesite. They’re both made by volcanoes which makes sense because there’s cinder cones in the distance. Basalt and andesite are very similar, but andesite has more silica whereas basalt has more iron and magnesium. Basalt tends to be more bubbly and andesite tends to be denser and closer in look to granite.

In fact this is cool let’s do a little crash course on types of volcanic rock for you rockhounds out there.

There’s 6 main types of volcanic rock in two categories. They’re classified based on how much silica they have in them.

The two categories are simple: Were they made inside or outside.

From least to most silica the 3 types of outside rocks are basalt, andesite, and rhyolite. Rhyolite has a lot of silica in it.

These 3 have inside equivalents: gabbro, diorite, and granite. In that order.

So gabbro is basalt that didn’t get to leave the volcano before it cooled down. And granite is rhyolite that didn’t get to go outside before cooling down.

You feel me?

(There’s also pumice and obsidian which are both ejected (usually violently) from a volcano but obsidian has high silica and pumice has low silica.)

This is very rudimentary volcanic rock stuff there are many more thorough sources out there if you want to go down this rabbit hole.

So I’ve been looking through the rocks around me and I’m seeing what seems to be every type of volcanic rock. The granite is pink and rich red, the basalt is purple and has long streaky bubbles in it.

On the way back to my camp I took some time to look around and imagine this place covered in molten lava and great chunks of rock falling from the sky. It’s so peaceful here, hard to believe it was once a volcanic hellscape devoid of life. Nature is so metal.

(One day I’m going to go see a real live volcanic eruption. I’ve always wondered what a brand-new rock is like.)

This is where our second awesome outside tool comes in. It’s called ‘Rockd.’

Rockd says these particular volcanic rocks are called the Cerros del Rio volcanic rocks. They were formed somewhere between 3.6-1.8 million years ago. Apparently there were some great big shield volcanoes that made the basalt and the andesite came out of “high relief, steep-sided vents.”

Whatever that means. Probably something about the andesite lava being more viscous so it pushes up more earth around it when it erupts.

Rockd has fossil and mineral guides, and geology compasses built in but my favorite part about it is the map.

Each color on this map represents a different exposed layer of bedrock. You can tap any spot on the map and Rockd will pull up papers and citations, as well as summaries of said papers, for that rock layer. This is the easiest and most incredible way of learning about rocks I’ve ever come across. I use it every time I am in a new place. It’s especially good for rock hounding. For example, here in the lava fields I know to keep an eye out for sweet crystals! Many precious gems are formed in volcanic rocks including diamonds, and all sorts of sapphires.

If I find myself around limestone deposits I know to look for marine fossils and things like that because limestone is made from the skeletons of countless little planktons that died and sunk to the ocean floor.

If I’m in sandstone I know to keep an eye out for dinosaur tracks and Moqui marbles (ball-shaped iron concretions.)

You get the point. The more you learn about how the rocks formed, the more cool stuff you can find in them!

Ok so we’ve done rocks and plants and learned a lot about this place already. What about the birdsong filling the air?!

Merlin to the rescue!

To my right there’s a an orchestra of croaking and deep throaty sounds that almost sound like tapping a block of wood with another. Behind me something keeps going “SCREE, SCREE.” And off in the distance I hear the twittering and whistling sounds of some perching songbird.

If I open up Merlin and turn on the microphone, it listens for bird calls and pops up the species on a list as it hears each one. Furthermore, as each call is happening it lights that species up yellow on the list so you know who is making what sound.

Merlin says the croaking is ravens, the SCREE is a Northern Flicker, and the singing off in the distance is currently being drowned out by an overpassing airplane so Merlin can’t hear it.

This app makes birdwatching about a thousand times more fun. Not only have I gotten MUCH better at identifying birds by their calls since I’ve started using it, I also find more bird species every time I go out with my binoculars.

Knowing what birds are around helps you know where to look. If Merlin says there’s warblers around, you look around the middle of the trees, if it says towhees you look on the ground, if you’re looking for a raven or flycatcher you check out the highest points, etc. The more you play with it the more patterns you’ll recognize and the better you’ll get at finding birds!!

Merlin also keeps track of all the birds you’ve seen AND gives you lists of what birds you’re most likely to see based on where you are. PLUS it works offline because you can download all the data for whatever region you are in and identify bird noises even in the middle of nowhere.

Of my three favorite outside apps I use merlin the most. Especially this time of year because it’s migration season!! Approximately 1 billion birds fly over southern Utah every night on their way to the great salt lake during peak migration season. It’s a wonderful time of year.

So what are you waiting for? The weather is beautiful, the flowers are starting to bloom, the birds are migrating, the rocks are just exactly where they always are, download Merlin, Rockd, Seek, and get out there and EXPLORE.

I am so excited for you. There are so many wonders in store out there.

Just remember

Red touches yellow you’re a dead fellow. Red touches black you’re okay jack.

Leaves of 3? Let it be. Berries white? Run in fright. Red hairy vine, no friend of mine!

Also don’t eat the yellow snow unless it was made by reindeers who have been eating Amanita muscaria and you’re in the mood to trip balls and discover the true meaning of christmas.

Also most wasps are chill, the yellow jackets just give them a bad name. I find they mostly practice the ol’ “speak softly and carry a big stick” philosophy.

Also don’t forget to drink plenty of water.

Also sunscreen is probably a good idea.

ALSO if you find anything particularly cool please send me a picture of it! Especially if it’s a critter or plant you are having trouble identifying!! I get those kinds of messages all the time and they always brighten my day.

That’s all for this week!!

You know what that means!!

Quote of the week

This week’s quote is from a modern master of botany and science communication. His name is Joey Santore. He runs a great YouTube channel/tiktok/instagram under the name ‘Crime Pays but Botany Doesn’t.” He’s a legend and legitimately one of my heroes in this day and age and I cannot recommend his work enough. He’s a crass and brash botanist with a wicked Chicago accent that knows all the plants and isn’t afraid to talk some shit. I want to be just like him when I grow up except maybe without the accent.

In fact I couldn’t pick just one quote because there are too many relevant and great ones for today’s post so here’s two!!

I just want people to take a closer look at the nonhuman world and ask more questions. The first steps to learning more is realizing your own ignorance, and then being willing to work beyond that.

My aim is to give people a context in which to place [the nature] they see around them. Things that were formerly bland to them become these organisms with their own evolutionary lineages. One single rock can tie a person back to the event in which that rock was created, whether it was a volcanic eruption 20 million years ago or the gradual deposition of sediments in an ocean 400 million years ago. It makes life a lot more interesting.

-Joey Santore

You see why he’s my hero right like omg what a legend.

Hideous Gomphideous demo of the week

I didn’t have as much time this week to play and record as I’d like but I still made something cool for you! Sometimes all it takes is sitting down in a cute little coffee shop for an hour and getting over caffeinated and playing with synthesizers. Sometimes it just takes one cool synthesizer sound and some drums to make at least a cool demo!!
I humbly present - ‘Hotel Glorieta strawberry jam coffee’

Short story of the week

This week’s short story is one that affects me greatly every time I read it. It’s a masterclass in what a good short story can accomplish in just a few pages. It’s by J.D. Salinger and it’ll rip your heart out - fair warning.

Ladies and gentlemen - A Perfect Day for Bananafish

(Kindly supplied by Mrs. Lamp of englishwithmrslamp.com)

Read it here

Album of the week!

The album of the week is something I’ve been obsessing over for about 2 years now. I like to listen to a lot of Japanese funk fusion from the seventies. The musicians are prodigies, the grooves are head banging, the bass is DISgustin’ and the rhythms are as funky as you could ever ask for. This is one of the great classics from the genre and era. May I present CASIOPEA by CASIOPEA

Until next week!! Get out there and explore and remember that I think you are awesome and I love you so!!!

Good morning!

I am currently in a very different type of desert from last time we talked. I’m on the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

This landscape is dominated by Juniper trees, cholla, purple prickly pear, and yuccas. The Northern Flickers never stop chattering here.

For reference, here’s a picture of a northern flicker.

They are freakin cutie pies. They are technically woodpeckers but they don’t do so much pecking of wood. Usually a woodpecker puts a hole in a tree and then uses its long sticky tongue to get bugs out of little tunnels in the wood.

These woodpeckers skip the pecking part altogether and just eat ants and beetles off the ground. Though they still nest in cavities in the trees and they excavate these holes themselves! So all that beak and brain cushioning doesn’t go to waste, it’s just not used as much as other woodpeckers use them.

There are also massive flocks of robins here. I’ve never seen robins in such big groups. There’s a little pond for the cattle nearby my camp and at any given time of day there must be hundreds there. The chatter is delightful and mind-boggling. I’m going to go over there later today to get a sound sample of it. You can probably expect next week’s Hideous Gomphideous track of the week!

I am prone to being a bit distractible, so no promises. But I am excited about it.

The Rocks around here are all the result of massive volcanoes from about 10-20 million years ago. The cliffs just to the west of me are basalt at the base and tuff on top. This tuff is 200 feet thick in some places.

For the uninitiated, tuff is a rock made from volcanic ash. It spills and falls all around the landscape when a volcano erupts. Sometimes the ash is so hot that it welds together with the other ash immediately upon falling to the earth, sometimes it falls out of an eruption cloud and something else very heavy, like an ocean, packs it all together. Either way it has been mind boggling to me trying to imagine this place with 200 feet of volcanic ash sitting on top of it.

It’s very good for rock climbing. It doesn’t hurt the hands and it makes all sorts of wonderful little 90 degree shelves for holding on to.

The weather here is wonderful. Though I’ve been told it’s often covered in snow here this time of year, it’s sunny and in the high 60s every day. I think this has the plants quite confused. I keep seeing flowers in bloom that shouldn’t be for another month or so. There’s also birds here that aren’t supposed to be for about the same time, as far as I understand.

The Soundscape in the night is particularly interesting out here in the juniper and lava rock. It just after sunset the great horned owls start singing duets. I’ve read this is part of their mating rituals and I think it’s very cute. Once they get real warmed up to each other the male will start bringing dead mice to the female all the time.

Then the crickets really get going and a strange little critter that I have not been able to identify yet starts beeping constantly. 3-4 times a second. The first time I heard it was late at night and I thought there was some dude out in the bushes with a metal detector or something. I’ve asked google a dozen different ways and have gotten some strange and wrong answers. Most insultingly, it keeps trying to tell me it’s crickets, or cicadas, like I don’t know how they sound.

At this point I suspect it’s some sort of frog. I intend to find out and will let you know when I do. Tonight I’m gonna go sneak around and see if I can’t find it.

Anyway.

I’ve been thinking about old-timey activities and hobbies lately and realizing that I have a lot of them. Furthermore, I’ve noticed that I absolutely adore just about every one.

I think there are 3 main reasons:

Firstly, they have been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years, which means that the technology for them is extremely cheap and accessible. Contrast something like knitting or reading, with flying drones or building battle bots and you get the idea pretty quickly.

Secondly, they take time and patience. We live in a world where time is increasingly valuable. The social media companies have literally commoditized our time to the point where the more time you spend on their apps, the more money they get and you don’t even have to pay with anything but time!

One of the biggest downsides of this particular problem is when everything is moving so fast, the brain doesn’t have any time to just sit and chew on things. But when you are doing something slow and mindful and deliberate, like whittling a hiking stick, you have to be present, there is no rush, and the mind is free to wander and ponder. The slow activities of yesteryear have meditation built into them. When you’re whittling, the danger of the little knife you’re using keeps you present and doesn’t allow distraction. Instead, it encourages the flow state and allows the mind freedom to work out problems, or just sit in the peace for once. I find that each of my whittling sessions yield both deep thought and peaceful quiet. Whittling, to me, feels like the opposite of doomscrolling, along with things like baking, gardening, hiking, and writing.

Finally, thirdly, the old timey activities allow me to feel connected to the tens of billions of humans who have lived before me on this planet, and to learn and think about how life was for them, and consequently, how lucky we are to be alive right now.

Nowadays, If I’m going to spend 3 days making and baking beautiful sourdough bread, I do it for fun, not because it’s one of the few things available to feed my family that day, or even just because it’s the only way to get bread.

If I really want bread I can just go to the store and spend 5 dollars, but if I want to explore the uniqueness and magic in the world of bread, learn about the science of tradition of bread, and have better bread than I can even buy at the store, I simply pull out a few cups of flour and water and my sourdough start and go to town! I can do that a thousand times and never get the same loaf twice. The old activities can lead you to some beautiful realizations about how big and weird the world is, which as we know, is one of my favorite things about existence.

Sidenote, if you don’t have a sourdough start and you want one, I’ve discovered a most incredible and magical trick for starting one up in a week or less, compared to the traditional 2-4 weeks.

The traditional method for starting a sourdough is to mix your water and flower and then just leave it out on your table with the lid cracked. You gotta feed it more flour and water and stir it periodically, and eventually the yeasts in the air (they’re everywhere, you hit like 100 thousand every time you swing your hand through the air) start to inhabit the sourdough and that’s what makes it sour. Yeast is good at extracting the sugars in the flour and doing all sorts of magic with it.

A few years ago I had a revelation about juniper berries. If you go to your local juniper tree and look at the berries, you’ll notice that they’re covered in a white powder that you can pretty easily wipe off with your fingers. That powder is wild yeast! Usually a mix of species, just like in your sourdough start! So you delicately pick about a dozen of those, caring not to wipe off all the yeast and put them in your baby fresh starter! The yeast will go to town and you will have a working sourdough start in about a week, depending on what temperature you are keeping your start at!!

I thought this was an original idea but just learned today that it’s a very common way of making a sourdough start.

It’s also the main source of yeast for Gin, which explains why gin has to have juniper in it!!

End Sidenote

SO

If you’ve been feeling the weight of existence and it’s been extra heavy lately, maybe it’s because you need to take some time for some grandma activities. I’m going to share some of my favorites down below in hopes that they can give you some ideas and inspiration to chase your inner grandma/grandpa and let your mind settle down, if even just for a little while. Each of these activities costs less than $40 to get into in a pretty serious way and can give you hours of peaceful enjoyment for the rest of your life should you decide to pick them up!

Whittling

As previously mentioned, this is one of my favorite grandpa activities. I travel with Four hiking sticks and three of them are active whittling projects, one of them is done. I like to carve fancy little grips into my sticks and turn the tops into mini little totem poles with animals and flowers and whatnot. The cool thing about this is sticks are free, just go out to the forest and get yourself one! The best sticks in my opinion, at least in the western US are aspens. Aspen hiking sticks are lightweight and strong! Plus the wood is rather soft and very pleasant to carve. But maybe my favorite thing about aspen for hiking sticks is that aspen trees grow in little clumps and eventually one or two trees outcompete the other ones around them and they die. This means if I go find a clump of dense aspen competition, I can almost always find a sapling that is inevitably going to be outcompeted by its siblings in a few years. Which makes me feel less bad cutting it down.

I’ve got two whittling knives and a strop to keep them sharp, I have had them for years and I expect they’ll last decades if I take care of them appropriately.

Before I got my whittling knives I used a pocket knife but it’s really much more satisfying and fun with a good whittling knife so I’d recommend the expense.

Baking and Cooking

You have to eat every day anyway, and if you learn to cook good things to eat, you’ll save money AND have fun doing it!!! Chances are you already have all the equipment, and if you don’t you can get good pots and pans and utensils at the thrift store for a few dollars (DI is especially good for this for all my Utah/Vegas readers out there.)

The world of spices can be a bit overwhelming but if you start to group them by culture that likes to use them, it becomes very manageable. For example: French food likes the Scarborough Fair treatment - parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. Mexican likes cumin and chili and oregano, Italian also likes oregano but paired along things like basil and parsley instead of chilis. Indian food is a whole other ball game with things like cardamom and turmeric and all manner of aeromatic spices running the show, as you’ll find in spice blends like curry and garam masala. Learn to cook by culture and you’ll never run out of fun things to make, plus you’ll build a plethora of techniques to keep your stuff tasty!!!

Baking is also highly recommended and one of my favorite things. The world of bread alone is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever encountered in my life.

One of the best and easiest examples I can think of for cooking being an elevating and meditative practice is making your own pasta. It’s so much easier and more fun than you think. You mix flour and eggs up until they reach a play-dough like consistency and then you roll it, fold it, cut it, and cook it for like 90 seconds. You don’t even need one of those fancy pasta rollers, though they do make it a bit easier.

Fair warning, once you have had fresh pasta, you’ll have a tough time going back to the hard stuff. It’s on a whole other level.

Ceramics

Ceramics doesn’t seem like a free-to-cheap activity right? When you think of working with ceramics the first thing that comes to mind is you’ll need a kiln, which is a few hundred dollars at the cheapest, then you’ll need a spinning wheel and clay and all the little tools. It’s an old-timey activity that has scaled up to a modern activity, but it doesn’t need all those fancy tools.

The truth is, ceramics were made for free without kilns for centuries. All you got to do is go out and dig around for some clay, sculpt it to what you are trying to make, and put it in a fire pit with some coals! This is the only ceramics I’ve ever dabbled in outside of a middle school art class and it’s amazingly simple and fun, plus the wood-fired look usually turns out gorgeous!!

Visual Art

This is an ancient activity. There are cave paintings in Indonesia that are at least 67 thousand years old. Nowadays all you need is a sketch pad and a pencil and you can make cool stuff for countless hours.

I’ve recently discovered, to my absolute delight, that if you take an empty soup can, fill it up with sticks, put an empty tuna can on top of it to seal it up, and gently place that little contraption in the fire for like an hour, you can make endless charcoal for drawing, or starting future fires with.

Painting gets a little more expensive unless you are sourcing and grinding your pigments yourself, which is definitely fun but very painstaking work. Watercolor is pretty cheap but oils get pricy quick. Still, compared to building computers or working on cars, your dollar goes a long way.

Gardening

This one is basically free if you have land, and very difficult if you don’t, but it’s one of the most satisfying things in the world to work a little patch of dirt to a flourishing plant-haven. The smell of the dirt does magic things to calm the brain and set it straight PLUS if you’re growing veggies you can feed yourself?! AND THEY TASTE BETTER THAN ANYTHING AT THE GROCERY STORE?!?!?!

My heck is there no downsides?

Backpacking and hiking

This activity is one of my great loves. You can do it anywhere, it literally takes you places, it’s good for your body, and it nurtures a sense of exploration, which is very empowering and fun.

Not to mention it pairs extremely well with one of my other great loves - landscape photography.

It’s a little harder in the city but even then you can just put on a backpack with supplies and walk out your front door and toward the mountains and go on a great adventure. Even if you don’t make it to the foothills you’re almost guaranteed a nice time.

Reading and writing

Another one of my great loves in life. I write haiku as part of my morning rituals every day and read every night. Writing is practically free and with websites like Thriftbooks.com reading is too! Classic novels can be got online for a few dollars each and provide hours of entertainment.

I can’t even remember the last time I bought a book new. I don’t allow myself on thriftbooks very often because I end up buying more books than I can possibly read for the rest of the year.

The result of only buying used books has pros and cons.

The pros are they are cheap, especially classics that have been in print for more than like 40 years. This is cool because the classics have survived the ages for a reason and I’m almost never disappointed by one. The biggest downside is that the classic writers is a good ol’ boys club so I have not had the opportunity to read many woman authors, a fact that I’ve been trying to rectify since I had a fascinating encounter with a writer at a bar and told her what I’d been reading and she immediately pointed that out.

However, I’ve recently picked up a copy of Maya Angelou’s I Know why the Caged Bird Sings so I’m on the path.

Knitting and sewing

I sew to keep my clothes alive. It’s much cheaper than buying new clothes and it’s usually pretty fun. Plus you can add pretty little details when you’re doing stuff like that which is fun and makes you feel proud of your clothes!

You can also make your own clothes and you can pick up a sewing machine at the thrift store for twenty bucks! That’s like free money and you can make whatever you can imagine!!

I’ve never got into knitting or crochet because I’m positive I’d fall in love with them about immediately and I am not at a point in my life where I want to devote that much time to it yet. Same issue with oil painting now that I think about it.

Stretching and Exercising

This one is obvious right? Yoga is free and makes you feel good, same with running, lifting, and even simple things like playing frisbee in the park with your friends! Exercise is good for regulating hormones and endorphins and can push the blues away in practically no time. The only hard part is starting!!

Playing Music

Music is not in the fancy guitars and expensive drumsets but in the magic of the music itself. You can go get yourself a $10 recorder or little hand drum and play with that for years if you understand the math that makes music work.

This is a subject that I am obsessed with and have been for many years now, I’ll be making a post about it soon because I think it’s one of the coolest things in the world and not many people really understand it.

Bird Watching and the like

For all these activities, all you really need is a good field guide like the ones made by Audubon.

Binoculars have been around for a long time. You can get a pair of solid ones for $40 if you’re lucky and then venture out into the unknown and just look at critters and identify them. Birds tend to be the easiest. You can also get a butterfly net for like $10 and start exploring the wonderful and wild world of bugs.

(I don’t recommend catching butterflies with your butterfly net for two reasons. First, butterflies are terribly delicate and the net can render their wings damaged and useless. Second, it’s almost impossible and makes you look like a dang goofball while you’re doing it. I have tried once or twice when I was in entomology class and was left bounding around in the grass swinging my net through the air not catching anything, it’s silly. But mostly it’s just no fun hurting butterflies)

Also in this category is one of my favorite activities - rock hounding. You do not need to learn much about geology to gain the ability to go out and find cool rocks. I keep a coffee can in my truck full of cool rocks that I find in my travels. I’ve been collecting them since I was just knee high to a grasshopper and the thrill of finding a pretty rock never ceases. They’re everywhere, you just gotta learn to look a little bit!

Finally, though there are certainly more activities that go here, flower spotting and leaf peeping. Going out into nature in the spring to look at all the flowers is one of the finest pleasures known to humankind. Same thing with going out in the fall to see the aspens and maples changing colors. I cannot recommend them enough. They should each have a national holiday.

Tattoo

I know what you’re thinking, if you want to do tattoo you need a fancy gun and all the inks and the printer that makes it so you can stick drawings on people and all that. Wrong. All you need is ink, soap, gloves, transfer paper, and needles. You can buy a set of tattoo needles of all shapes and sizes for like 10 bucks on Amazon and each color of ink will cost you another 5-10. If you get 4 colors and needles and the other stuff you’ve got enough equipment to do a hundred tattoos for forty bucks.

You can practice on fruits like bananas and oranges, then practice on your feet! At least that’s what I did.

Really the hardest part is coming up with drawings that you want to tattoo on yourself, though that’s also the most fun!

That’s all for this week!!!

You know what that means.

Time for our little weekly rituals.

The Quote of the Week

This one is short and sweet and seems to fit todays theme. From one of my favorite authors of all time - John Steinbeck.

“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”

The Hideous Gomphideous Demo of the Week

I am awful at naming songs, especially ones that I'm working on that don’t know what they are yet. A few years ago, while working on my third album - Goblin’s Day Off - I discovered a neat little trick to help me address this. I was sick and tired of trying to come up with cute things to call my tracks, or just calling them stupid stuff like “twangy guitar thing number 3.” So I just started naming them after the place I made them and the last thing I ate.

With that in mind, I present to you a little thing I came up with just after new years - St. George Spam n’ Eggs.

(please keep in mind that I’m basically only putting up unfinished tracks for this segment, so they’re gonna be a little rough and ready)

The Short Story of the Week

I don’t really know why I picked this. Perhaps because It’s one of the most haunting and well-done short stories I’ve ever read. It’s the first thing that comes to mind when I think of masterful short story. Ladies and Gentlemen, The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

The Lottery PDF

The Album of the Week

This week’s album is calming and peaceful, just like the old-timey activities we have been talking about today. It’s by one of the greatest jazz pianists that ever lived and perfect for mindful meditative activities like whittling or giving yourself a tattoo.
May I humbly present, Bill Evans - You Must Believe in Spring.

I don’t know what’s going on. Substack won’t let me embed this album from Spotify. It’s a humdinger of a mystery but look it up on your favorite streaming service anyway. It’s perfect wind-down music for relaxing, and also perfect gateway jazz, you won’t regret it.

Anyway

Until next week!! You are awesome and capable of anything you put your mind to and I love you so!!! Thank you for being here with me.

I write this from the beautiful and rugged landscape just west of Phoenix. I am camped on the edge of a small hill with a breathtaking view of the 4-peaks mountain area. 20-foot saguaros, ancient ocotillos, cholla, prickly pear, palo verde surround me. As well as thousands of blooming brittle buttonbush, teeny little purple lupines, and golden California poppies.

I am 20 miles from the sprawling, endless, urban hellscape that is the phoenix metropolitan area. It is 93 degrees down there but up here it’s a balmy 80. At night I can see the city lights. They’re marvelous.

Sidenote. Saguaros are amazing. I am in awe of them every day. The other night I learned that they spend the first 10 years of their life bring like 2 inches tall, then something happens and their growth explodes. A saguaro doesn’t start growing its first arm until it’s at least 70 and up to 100 years old. They can live like 250 years. Even the youngest saguaros I can see from my little hill are almost definitely older than me. The one to the left of my camp must stand 25 or 30 feet tall and it has like 8 arms.

anyway

Two things have surprised me and filled me with endless delight in this little mountainous area in the Sonoran desert: The soundscape and the sunsets.

The soundscape is like nothing I’ve ever heard. There is ALWAYS a cacophony of incredible birdsong. Yesterday when I woke up it sounded like a group of red tail hawks with sore throats had my camp surrounded. They kept screeching back and forth to each other.

I crawled out of bed saw they were dark, fierce-looking hawks known as Harris’ hawks. This species is very cool because they hunt in packs. I spent 40 minutes watching them fly low in a group above the sharp pointy brush. Apparently they were game-planning their hunts for the day at my camp.

Once they vacated the area, the soundscape came back to life. Meadowlarks, sparrows, wrens, and gila woodpeckers spend all day shouting back and forth to one another. I’ve never heard so much bird chatter all at the same time, at least in a desert area.

When the sun sets, things don’t quiet down. I hear at least 2 types of owls every night. One is very screechy and one is very hoot-ey. I have not ID’d either yet. Turns out that’s difficult in the dark and every time I pull up Merlin they quit making noise.

(If you don’t know about Merlin you gotta look it up, it listens to your surroundings and tells you what birds are around based on the calls/songs it hears.)

When the owls aren’t hooting the coyotes howl late at night and early in the morning. Also there’s something hanging around my camp with a crazy loud ultrasonic peeping every 6 seconds. I’ve never heard anything like it. I suspect some sort of bat but cannot pinpoint the sound for the life of me. It must be among the highest pitches I can hear and it makes my teeth ache when it’s close.

Even the flies and other bugs seem to be extra loud here. The noise is amazing.

I’ve been recording samples and putting them in my music. Maybe I’ll even share what I’ve been working on this week at the end of this post?! It’s a wonderful little ditty between me and a pair of arguing gila woodpeckers. It’s cute I’m gonna do it check the bottom for that.

Anyway

The SUNSETS

Yesterday the sunset was so nice that I literally forgot rule number one of the Sonoran desert which is look where you’re stepping. I did not. The sunset was too beautiful and I was way too excited

I ended up full on kicking a massive prickly pear cactus. It took me 10 minutes to get all the spines out. One was buried a half inch into my shin.

THE POINT IS - That’s how good the sunsets are here. I wasn’t even mad. Just riding the adrenaline high from that INSANE sunset. I kept shooting until the light died before I pulled them out.

I think the sunsets are so good because I’m east of Phoenix which means that the sun sets through all the smog from there. The result is the reddest, pinkest, and purplest clouds I’ve ever seen. Plus somehow they are always whispy cirrus clouds. I might never be able to leave, it’s just too many good photos to take!!

(Brady from the future here, editing near Payson AZ. I left. It got too dang hot. But the sunset here was also excellent. )

Another sidetone: how to tell if the sunset is going to be DANK a few hours before it even starts. Rule 1: look at the place the sun will touch the horizon. Thick cloud bank there? No sunset tonight take it easy. No cloud bank or thin and wispy? It’s got potential… Rule 2: Cirrus clouds are the best. They are way high in the sky and they are not thick, they almost always turn to cotton candy for at least a few minutes. Rule 3: Some cumulus clouds are excellent, too many will strangle the colors. they sit below the cirrus clouds so they make a whole new layer of colors and shapes. CUMULONIMBUS are the best if they’re far away from you but they’re on top of you they’re gonna kill the sunset. This is cool though because cumulonimbus tend to hang around mountain peaks so this rule typically works in our favor.

Right now the whole sky is covered in cirrus clouds and there’s no cloud bank to the west so the sunset is going to be amazing again. I was supposed to leave today to head into the mountains but these sunsets just keep me around.

ANYWAY

That’s all that’s going on here. I’m still writing poems every day. I’ve spent a few hours recording music every day this week. I’ve been listening to history podcasts and whittling my hiking sticks and relaxing hard. I think in the morning I’m going to head east to the mountains and look for some pretty rocks. I hear there’s geodes and these wonderful little double terminated quartz crystals (called Payson diamonds) about an hour east of here. Plus the temps are in the low 70s which sounds perfect.

It’s wonderful here, I’d never expect it because it seems so inhospitable but as long as you don’t touch any of the plants and you bring some shade, it’s downright pleasant.

If this isn’t nice, what is?

I’d highly recommend it if you’re ever in the area looking for some adventure and wonder out in the wilderness.

OK

SO

Last week I promised you animal behavior fun facts. It took some DANG organizing and some spreadsheet work but I am totally prepared to deliver on that promise.

Without further ado

Here’s like 100 fun facts from what was my favorite course in my entire degree: Animal Behavior.

1. Ticks have like a million smell receptors for butyric acid. They can’t smell much else.

   Mammals make butyric acid on their skin so its a nice thing to be able to smell if that’s like your whole deal…

2. When a human sees a newborn 88% of people see similarities with the father. Especially the mother’s parents.

   Everyone knows who’s the mom on account a she made the thing so it’s an evolutionary advantage if we are good at telling who the dad is.

3. The coefficient of relatedness.

   You share 50% of your genes with your siblings and parents. 25% with uncles aunts and grandparents, 12.5% with cousins, etc…

   This could also be used to explain why bees are so good at cooperating with one another. Bees in the same colony, the sisters at least, share 75% of their genetic material. The males only share 25% of their genetics which is maybe they’re just locked away in a little weird sex dungeon for the queen.

   Anyway the coefficient of relatedness says MORE of your genes are passed on in a colony where everyone is 3/4 related, so that might give them the push they need to live in a social environment, which is extremely ra]

4. This also explains the Gay Uncle Effect, which we will get to below.

5. If you tilt a beehive on its side they lose the ability to navigate

   Like, the waggle dance still works because it’s simple but the round dance breaks down because they get disoriented. For what those two things are see the next fact.

6. Bees do 2 types of dances to communicate news about flowers.

   Karl von Frisch got the novel prize for this. He discovered them and named them, they’re called the round dance and the waggle dance. The round dance indicates that there’s food nearby, the waggle dance indicates the direction, distance, and description of the food.

7. Long-Tailed Mannequin Birds are the ultimate wingmen.

   This just makes me so happy it’s the cutest dang thing ever. They work together to get the homeboy a mate by dancing in a group. The whole thing is choreographed, it’s just incredible just watch

8. Naked mole rat queens stress out other females that live in the colony so much that it messes their hormones up and they can’t reproduce.

   She just picks on all the other females all the time so she can stay queen. This likely causes the foundation of other colonies, the females leave to start their own periodically. They go out in the night looking for a male or something and makes these weird little squeaks. I don’t know exactly I just remember it’s so cute look into it I promise it’s a worthwhile rabbithole.

9. 9% of birds do nest helping

   That’s like going back to help your parents to raise your little brother or sister. This teaches them to run a nest and makes it so the mom can have more babies.

10. Soldier Aphids are badass motherfuckers

    This is all the note said, hold on looking it up not.

    Ok wow

    Ok

    Soldier aphids seem to be a feature of every colony, they’re a type of baby aphids that never morph into adults, instead they get freakin giant and have great big defense mechanisms and they protect the colony.

11. Utahns have 150% the average American offspring

    I mean… I don’t know what the numbers actually are but basically if America is having 2 kids on average, Utah is having 3. If you need more explaining than that ask a mormon friend.

12. Tibetan farmers take 1 wife with all their brothers because they can’t afford a wife for each of them.

    The world is a great big wild place and this is a neat reminder of that.

13. Rivers used to catch fire in the US

    So apparently, The Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire like 13 times between 1868 and 1969 due to extreme industrial pollution. They were dumping oil and chemicals in there I guess. The silver lining is the time it did it in 1969 lead to the Clean Water Act of 1972, the EPA, and the first Earth Day!

14. Rats can’t vomit so when they discover a new food they do a little taste test and then wait a few or a bunch of hours to see if it makes them sick and if not they go back and eat some more.

    This is what I do too when I meet a new plant!

    (JK don’t put a plant you don’t know in your mouth that’s sketchy)

15. Some Tephritid flies dress up like a jumping spider!!

    just LOOK

    

16. Crows that eat whelks have figured out that the perfect height to drop them from is 5 meters.

    This breaks it consistently without it bouncing too far away and out of sight. They consistently drop them from this height onto the rocks.

    Whelks are like sea snails. Apparently they’re tasty if you’re a crow!

17. One blue whale dive pays for itself energy-wise by 80x the energy it used to do the dive.

    That’s like the human equivalent of sitting on the couch eating like 14 bags of doritos watching TV for an hour.

    Actually I just did the math its 13 bags.

18. Perissodus jaws alternate by generation being right-or-left leaning as their prey learns to predict which side to watch.

    Perissodus is a cute lil fish. Maybe that teeny edge of having their head tilted one way or another really works for them. But then they switch it up each generation?!

19. Burrowing owls put mammal poop on their front doorsteps to scare off predators.

    Clever little cuties omg. I keep imagining a lil’ guy just stumbling on some fox poop and getting it stoked and bringing it home with a lil’ smile on his face…

20. Orb weaver spiders build stabilimenta into their webs which reflect extra UV so that birds don’t fly through it, only bugs.

    They look like little zippers made of web. PLUS it freakin attracts bugs because they love UV. Brilliant.

21. If you expand the black on the throat patch of a house sparrow it gets laid way more.

    This works with lots of species. Probably it’s a good indicator of how much nutrient the males get because pigments are kind of expensive to make metabolically.

22. Swainson’s thrush migrate around glaciers that no longer exist

    They put little trackers on them and they fly from like Texas, to the east coast, up north to Canada, and then back over to the center of Canada. The whole great plains used to be glacier basically and they still haven’t figured out that it melted.

23. Babies instinctively put their arms up when dropped or thrown to lesson the probability of injury.

    Even evolution knows accidents happen I guess…

24. They put flowers on a raft in the middle of a lake and released a bee there. When she went back to tell her homies they didn’t believe and wouldn’t listen to her.

    She did her whole waggle dance thing and nobody listened to her even though it was a serious amount of flowers.

    To me this seems to indicate that bees knows flowers don’t grow in the middle of lakes. Which is insane to think about. What else do they know?

25. Chimps make big clubs for bringing to fights

    They also have favorite little sticks for getting ants and stuff out of holes but I didn’t know they were doing weaponry. Chimps are metal.

26. Chimps and crows have theory of mind. Little kids assume you know everything they know, the crows know you don’t know what they know.

    The crows know you don’t know what they know.

    Can we put that on a T-shirt?

27. Bowerbirds make bowers to make the female feel safe because the males get a little intense.

    It seems in general being a bird is a messy business when it comes to topics like consent..

28. Elk bugles make cows ovulate

    Cows like female elk, not like, those cows. Wouldn’t that be weird though?

29. Gray mouse lemurs have 1 night a year where they have a big orgy and everyone gets pregnant.

    This is sweet probably because it reduces chances of infanticide. It takes a village to raise a baby gray mouse lemur and it’s easier to raise a village if everyone thinks they’re the dad.

    Turns out infanticide is a serious issue out there in the wild.

    Nature is metal.

30. Reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone saved the cutthroat trout

    This one is INSANE and famous. Like so dang cool. ok

    ok

    The cutthroat were losing habitat because the river was meandering less.

    Meandering means going like this ~~~~

    Meandering rivers provide lots of habitat for trout because there’s way more little pockets and stuff to hide and lay eggs and whatever. The river was straightening out. The river was straightening out because the Elk population was out of control and eating all the baby trees and stuff that were trying to establish themselves on the river banks. The trees are responsible for the meandering because they catch debris and whatnot and make little peninsulas. SO when the wolves came back they got the elks under control and that allowed trees to grow on the river’s edge again which made new habitat for trout!!!

    Basically you never know what’s gonna happen if you remove a member of the ecosystem which is why we cant make the dang mosquitoes go extinct probably…

31. The smaller the testes the more they do parental care

    Just a weird little mammal rule. I don’t know if it applies to humans but it seems like it might. WE gotta get our hands on some data.

32. Sometimes gull chicks run away from their shitty parents and get adopted by a different mating pair

    Like if the parents aren’t feeding them or something they just go find a new nest.

33. In Speech patterns - New Yorkers pause ~1 sec for you to respond to something, native alaskans pause up to 30

    Culture blows my mind. Also this is why east coasters stress me out I’m a bit of a slow talker…

34. Vasopressin makes you not pee when you’re thirsty, in voles it causes mating for life

    We did this fact last time but I got the details wrong, consider this an amendment.

35. Female baboons are more vocal during sex depending on her partner’s social rank

    I’m sure we can imagine a bunch of reasons why, seems safer we don’t dig into it, this is a dang family channel.

36. Some newts got in these hunters’ coffee and they all died b/c the newt was toxic b/c evolutionary war with garter snakes

    The newt was just looking for a place to chill but the hunters boiled it and drank it. The reason they are crazy poisonous is garter snakes eat them all the dang time and are immune to the poison so they’ve been in an arms race for all eternity where the newt gets more toxic and the snake gets more resistant.

    This is the same reason the coral snake on the east coast is so venomous except the snake is a weasel in that scenario.

37. If you stop it’s brain from making oxytocin mice stop being able to recognize their friends...

    That’s a sad experiment I’m glad I didn’t have to work on that one… I hope the next fun fact is way more fun.

38. Royal jelly turns all these genes in bees to make them into a queen.

    They give her a TON of it all through her life and it helps her lay up to 2,000 eggs a day!!! It’s the best of the best as far as bee food goes.

39. Locusts become that when crickets touch each others’ legs too much.

    This is caused by serotonin buildup apparently. They just get too excited and it triggers a genetic cascade that changes their look AND behavior! Then they eat everything.

40. Some moths only have 4 neurons controlling their entire steering mechanism.

    They are insanely efficient in making everything work. They have about 1 million neurons total which sounds like a lot until you realize the average human has 100 BILLION.

41. The Tsetse fly shaped settlements in Africa.

    It killed ALL the cattle in 1897 so the colonists tried to destroy ALL the wildlife to get rid of the flies

    They literally burned the freakin Savannahs and stuff all for the flies. AND it didn’t even work.

42. The use Myxomatosis to control rabbit populations in Australia

    This is wild. Some goofus released 24 of them in 1859 so he could hunt them for sport and they basically took over the whole continent because they have no natural predators there. They were causing mad erosion and stuff. In the 1950s they decided they’d had enough and released Myxomatosis, which only affects the rabbits?! And took out 90% of the population!

43. Bandname - malaria area

    Not a fun fact but my notebooks are full of these too. This sounds like a punk band of some sort. They’d have to be like a benefit band or something helping malaria stricken areas else this would be a really bad name.

44. Goats - Capra aegagrus hircus can eat almost anything, even toxic plants. The only things they wont eat is bad water and soiled food.

    Goats man…

45. Pigs can’t look up

    If you’re being chased by a pig or something just climb a tree. Their neckbones and muscles don’t allow it. This is why i hang my garbage up a tree when i’m camping in javelina territory!

46. Horses used to be like 18 inches tall in the US but they got way bigger

    Like 50 million years ago Hyracotherium roamed North America, they were a foot tall. That’s like up to your knee can you even imagine?! There’s some cute pics out there look it up.

47. True wild horses shed their manes. The only true wild horse left is Przewalski’s horse. It lives in Asia. All other wild horses are actually feral domesticated horses.

    just gonna leave this here..

    

48. ALL house cats came from a small group in Europe of a CUTE species called Felis silvestris

    Serious lookat’m this is a WILD cat that lives basically from the UK to Turkei!!!

    

49. Cats do not meet enough criteria to be considered actually domesticated.

    Basically because we don’t control their reproduction or food sources or range of travel. There’s a whole list of criterion for domestication and cats only meet like half.

50. Monotreme’ literally just means ‘single hole’

    Monotreme is the name of the group of egg-laying mammals. It’s because they have cloacas!! The best description of a cloaca I ever heard is it’s like Steve Jobs designed a hole. It handles everything, just like birds! I’ll leave it to you to imagine the rest…

51. Marsupials used to rule Antarctica before it moved south and got so goshdang cold.

    Blows my mind to think Antarctica used to be a flourishing tropical climate. Continental drift is awesome, paleontology is awesome, my heck.

52. the oldest furry mammal we know of was castorocauda it kinda looks like a beaver.

53. The San People of south africa are the last persistence hunting peoples on earth.

    Humans are the best at this that ever lived. They hunt midday because we can sweat and prey can’t so they just overheat and die.

54. Gerenuk specialize in standing up to feed. this gives them access to vegetation that other antelopes can’t get to.

    They’re freakin silly lookin dude check this out.

    

55. The aardwolf is super weird and is an ant/termite expert.

    They look like hyenas but they specialize in eating insects!!

    

56. Avocados are adapted to being pooped out by giant sloths. Giant sloths went extinct like 10k years ago. If it wasn’t for humans avocados would have gone extinct with them.

57. The tube-lipped nectar bat has the longest tongue of any mammal

    gollee get a look at that!

    

58. When ant princesses (probably not a technical term) want to go start their own colony they work together because it’s hard to start one on your own. Eventually the colony is established and the queens have a fight to the death until there. is only one left and she takes charge.

    This one is so metal like why did they not put that in Bug’s Life?

59. Cheater bluegills.

    There’s two types of bluegill males. Big ones and Little ones. The big ones build a nest, do the whole courtship ritual thing and then ideally the female puts her eggs in the nest and he fertilizes them and he fans them until they hatch. BUT the little bluegills have other plans. They’re cheaters. They hide around the corner and at the very last second before the big male does his thing they dash in and release their sperm on the eggs. The result is that the big one raises the little one’s offspring and the whole cycle starts all over again.

    We know it works out for them because that type of bluegill persists in the population!

60. Humans can smell relatedness in pheromones. Hymenoptera (bees and wasps) can too!

    This probably helps prevent inbreeding

    IN FACT APPARENTLY body odor is a good indicator of this!? If a member of the opposite sex that you meet has terrible body odor it’s maybe because you two are related. I don’t want to go find the source you gotta trust me on this one.

61. The Gay uncle effect.

    Gayness is evolutionarily supported because a gay uncle only has to help raise 2 sister’s kids to get the evolutionary fitness of raising one of his own. If he has 3 sisters each with 2 kids he is more fit than any of his sisters.

62. We have seen Evolution happen in real time

    Probably the most famous example of this is somewhere in the UK at the start of the industrial revolution. Coal dust from the factories turned all the white birch trees in the area black. White moths lived on them that were sometimes (rarely) black. Soon they were all black because all the white ones lost their hiding spots and got eaten so only the dark ones got to pass on their genes.

63. Lizard pushups are an honest signal. They are trynna fight you.

    They are literally maxxing out their reps when they do pushups and it’s a good indicator of strength. If you’re a male lizard that can do 7 and you see a guy that can do 8 you are NOT gonna want to mess with him. This benefits both lizards because fighting is hard on the body.

64. Gambel’s quails are safest and most effective when there’s exactly 11 individuals in the covey.

    They’re cute they post lookouts and stuff when the rest of the group is eating or whatever and they got whole little languages for what’s going on. Quail are kinda like meerkats with bird hardware…

65. Elks used to live on the praries but then we showed up with guns and now they only live in the mountains.

    The bison couldn’t escape to the mountains and that’s why they bout went extinct.

66. Testosterone makes you die early -

    if you got too much especially - but on average 10 years. Helluvah drug Ialwaysay…

67. Harlequin beetles are mad pretty

    Dude forreal here’s the female

    

    And heres the male

    

    Don’t you worry nothin’ about those great big arms that’s just for freaky lil’ beetle sex stuff. In fact almost every time you see a bug with something weird about it it’s for sex stuff. Same with birds and even mammals! Deer antlers? For fighting for sex. Crazy colors on birds? For dancing for sex. This is a good general rule methinks.

    Anyway

    Moving on…

68. Pseudoscorpions battle and mate on the backs of harlequin beetles. It’s like a spaceship battle ending in an orgy

69. Squirrels have recreational sex too!

    The fact that this is number 69 was a total beautiful coincidence… I am elated.

70. Red eyed vireos migrate different ways depending on how much fat they packed on during summer.

    If they’re fat they fly direct across the gulf of mexico, if they’re not too fat they fly around through mexico

71. Common loons are truly monogamous.

    This is way less common than you think. Even the ‘monogamous’ birds like albatross got side pieces everywhere.

72. Wattled Jakanas flip the script. Females fight over males.

    and when a male accepts the female just lays eggs in his lil’ nest and dips. The male takes care of the nest and raises the young.

73. Bandname - infanticide reduction hypothesis

    Tell me you wouldn’t listen to this metal band…

74. Anoles have more females when their father is less fit and more males when the father is more fit.

    Ok that’s a wacko way of phrasing that think about it this way. When a female anole mates with a great bit male anole, she selectively chooses to have more sons, because sons benefit more from being big on account a’ they gotta fight other lizards to pass on their genes. When she mates with a little male, she has daughters because they benefit more from being small on account’a she’ll have an easier time hiding.

75. Mother ducks have it SO easy. No feeding milk, no throwing up food in their mouths, just show them where to eat boom bam.

76. Cucoos and Cowbirds

    Are so rude. They are nest parasites which means they sneak into a specific species nest when they’re gone getting food or whatever and they push an egg out and replace it with one of their eggs.

    THE KICKER is their egg hatches 2 days earlier than the host eggs and it pushes the other eggs out of the nest. Then it grows like crazy and becomes like 3 or 4 times the size of their host.

77. This one just says “The lovebird hybrid that couldn’t fly to its nesting spot without looking at its butt”

    I cannot find an explanation for the life of me. I seem to remember a picture of it in my textbook but there’s nothing useful turning up when I type that into google. If you all don’t figure it out i’ll check my textbook when I get back to town.

78. When too many spadefoot toads are in the same lake a genetic cascade kicks off that triggers them to start eating each other.

    Nature is so metal.

79. Birds have specific dialects even within the same species so they can tell whether they are from the same neighborhood.

    And apparently they prefer individuals from their neighborhood.

80. Bees do different jobs over time. Environment changes causes their genes to express different. They start tending young and go through all the jobs until promoted to forager or some shit.

    The order goes: cleaning cells, nursing larvae, attending the queen, comb building/maintenance, guarding, and finally foraging.

    They keep it interesting and I freakin’ respect that you know what I mean?

81. FOSB is a gene in mice that determines how caring the mother is.

    If she gets pregnant in a scary dangerous place she doesn’t cuddle her kids, opposite if she’s in a nice place with lots of food. This conditions her offspring to be at ease or on edge depending on their situation

    Ok dang I keep trying to dig into this one and it goes WAY deeper than I thought we will have to re-address this one when we do genetics fun facts…

82. Male wasps mate with orchid flowers which is why orchids look like that. They would rather risk mating with a flower than miss the chance at a real mate. They got hella little brains.

    Testosterone is a hell of a drug. JK they don’t use testosterone like that they’re bugs silly!

83. Males in polyandrous species have better spatial memory than males in monogamous species.

    Gotta remember where them ladies at I suppose…

84. Noctule moths only hear like 2 frequencies and it’s for the sounds that their main predators make.

    They can hear two sounds and they’re both like ultrasonic squeaks. they have 2 neurons in each ear. Like we discussed earlier, moths are VERY efficient with their neurons.

That’s it!!!!

We made it!!!

84 fun facts.
Great job!

Congratulations!

World’s best cup of coffee!

ANYWAY This week I have 4 special segments we gotta do.

They are:

Short Story of the Week

Brady’s Track of the Week

The Quote of the Week

The Album of the week.

Not in that order

I think I should very much like to keep these 4 things going on a weekly basis. I read more than enough short stories to share some of the gold with you guys and a track a week would be a good challenge. Thoughts?

Anyway

Quote of the week

This week’s quote of the week is from the aforementioned Nobel Prize Winner - Karl Von Frisch.

The ant is a collectively intelligent and individually stupid animal; man is the opposite.

Karl Von Frisch

Brady’s Track of the Week

This is far from finished but it’s got some cool ideas in it. It’s the track I mentioned earlier with the two gila woodpeckers having an argument. They just have such excellent rhythm I couldn’t not.

Short Story of the Week

This week’s short story is from the great Mark Twain. I read this one this morning and it bout blew my mind. It’s about artists. It contains all the wit and whimsy that I’ve come to love in Twain.

It’s free to read below at americanliterature.com

Is He Living or is He Dead

Album of the Week

The album of the week is one I’ve just rediscovered. This is a very chill one to counteract last week’s madness. Jon Hopkins is one of the greatest producers that has ever lived. Every sound is a journey, and he doesn’t rush a thing. The last track is one of the most beautiful peaceful things I’ve ever heard done on the piano.

Ok that’s all!! Until next week, I love you so and thank you for being here with me. You are so awesome I can’t even hardly stand it.

This week I’m in the Arizona Wilderness near a great big pile of granite that the locals call “Cochese Stronghold.”

It’s called that because there was a band of Apache Native Americans here that called themselves the Cochese.

They were a peaceful tribe, at least as far as the U.S. Government was concerned, until an American General kidnapped the chief and his advisors and accused them of kidnapping his wife and child, just after the Mexican-American war. The Chief got away because they tried to hold him hostage in a tent and he just cut the side of the tent out and ran away. His advisors were executed. The General started a war with the Cochese and turns out, it was the next Apache tribe over that took his kid. This massive pile of rocks is where they hid out.

(I took a lot of pictures of these great rocks but can’t show you right now because my SSD is full up and I have to organize before i can even import my new photos.)

It truly is a perfect stronghold. 1000 foot cliffs surround a valley with only one exit and entrance. An assailing army would have a heck of a time getting to the center.

Anyway
I’m surrounded by Ironwood mesquite trees. They are covered in daunting thorns and little compound leaves. Their wood is so dense that if you drop it in water it sinks.

There’s wild blue agave here. There’s great big black swallowtail butterflies and hummingbird-sized brown and pink Sphinx moths. There’s a brown and white bull walking around here whom I’ve affectionately named Big Hoss. He keeps popping up out of nowhere and scaring the shit outta me.

This is a totally different desert from the beautiful Mojave that I grew up in. All the plants here are covered in spines. I know that sounds like an over-statement but literally every plant I’ve seen except the grasses and mormon tea are covered in spines or thorns or prickles. In the Mojave the plants are a lot nicer and most of them smell nice.

It seems here, in the Sonoran Desert, the plants specialized in physical defenses, whereas in the Mojave the plants are specialized in chemical warfare.

This makes me wonder.

MAYBE the plants here are more worried about being eaten by macrofauna like deer and the plants in the Mojave are more worried about being eaten by microfauna like insects. Chemical warfare is especially effective on insects. Their worlds are very much built around smells. That’s what they got those antennae for. Most of them can’t see hardly anything but can smell things from unfathomable distances.

Perhaps the most wonderful puzzle I’ve ever come to know, besides the game of music, is the one of ecology and evolution.

One who is trained in these subjects can come across a new organism and discover a lot about that organism’s stressors.

For example. Take the humble prickly pear. The lobed variety of cactus that spans the west in so many different species.

The first think you notice about the prickly pear is obviously the spines. They evolved from leaves. The spines indicate that this plant is guarding something very valuable. So you look under the spines. The green flesh of the plant is thick and meaty and filled with water. This is perhaps the most important evolution of the cactus. The thing that allows them to live everywhere, even down here near the border where it gets 110+ degrees Fahrenheit in the summer regularly. The water is key.

If you carefully dug up a prickly pear you’d discover something interesting about the roots too. The soil is thin here and often overlays hard rock or hard packed clay. The roots extend very shallowly under the dirt and they can reach 50 meters from the plant. 150 feet in every direction. This ensures that when there is a rain, the cactus doesn’t miss a single drop.

Where on earth are we going with this?!

I got a point I’m working toward I swear.

One of my favorite things about being alive is how complex and weird the world is and how many ways this is expressed. Once you start to notice it, you can’t stop seeing it everywhere.

Whiskey as a vessel for wonder

At its root, whiskey made by feeding grains to yeast. You make a big hot soup of grains (called the mash), cool it down, pour yeast in there, and give the yeast some time. Over the course of a few weeks to months, depending on all sorts of factors like ambient temperatures, sugar content in the mash, and virility of the yeast, the sugars will be digested and turn to ethyl alcohol. This process continues until the yeast suffocates in the alcohol.

They make the alcohol to get a monopoly on this thing they’re eating so no other organisms can get access to it, and once it hits about 16% alcohol, they die.

It’s like, a metaphor for greed or something, man…

(So far, this process mirrors beer production. But this is where the two diverge.)

The mash is then filtered of all the solid material and put into a still.

The still’s job is to separate the water from the alcohol. This is possible because alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, so you heat up the mash to below the boiling point of water but above the boiling point of ethanol and then you cool down the vapor that boils off and boom bam bob’s your uncle you got a whole mess of moonshine. Pure grain alcohol.

But moonshine is not fun to drink. It’s not subtle. It’s just alcohol. Mostly just good if you’re looking to get schmammered. Which I do not recommend.

So you take the moonshine, mix in some good nice water from a local spring and put it in a barrel. An oak barrel specifically. You light the inside of the oak barrel on fire before putting the alcohol in there.

Then you wait and wait and wait and the whiskey slowly takes on the notes of the oak, the tannins are drawn out from the wood and are floral and taste like vanilla.

Eventually one day you open the barrel and you have whiskey.

The amazing thing is every little tweak in this process can yield a wildly different result. If you use barley for your grain, your whiskey will come out with a punch like hot tamales (the candy), tasting like vanilla and oak and cinnamon with some green and floral notes in there.

If you swap the barley for rye, suddenly your whiskey tastes like apples and flowers and pears and dried plums.

If you smoke the whiskey barrels with peat moss, your whiskey will come out smelling and tasting like a campfire, with notes of smoke, leather, and earth, accompanying the floral spice of the whiskey. This is the Scottish style.

Even crazier, the place where you grew the grains to make the whiskey will affect the flavor profile. The geology of the area the plants grow in will affect what minerals the plant can use and this will change the flavor. The weather during the growing season will change the flavor of the grains, and thus, the whiskey. How long you waited to harvest the grain, how long it stayed in the barrel, what kind of yeast you used in the mash, ALL these little factors change the entire experience.

(Side note - I don’t have any way of googling any of this right now because the service is no good in the middle of nowhere, where I happen to be. I’m pretty sure I’ve got the jist of it but don’t quote me or nothing without doing your own research on the subtleties.)

It’s all about the little expressions of what a weird and wild place the world is.

This phenomenon can be found everywhere. Look deep enough into any subject and it’ll be there staring you in the face.

For example.

Beer is categorized by what yeast was used to make it. Ale yeasts and lager yeasts make a totally different experience even if you did every other step of the process the same. Sometimes they even make beer with champagne yeast and it’s delightful and so crispy like green apples.

Wine is severely affected by weather, soil, and climate. The best wines, apparently, grow in chalky soils. The national drink of Hungary is called the Tokaji Aszu. They call it the king of wines. It’s made by leaving the grapes on the vine until after the frost hit so the sugars condense. It’s very sweet and tastes like honey with dried apricot and orange rind in it. If you ever get the chance, definitely taste it. It’s among one of the finest treats I’ve ever had the luck of experiencing.

Coffee from Ethiopia tastes like blueberries. Coffee from java tastes like leather and dark chocolate. Coffee from Guatemala tastes like a fresh fruit salad dominated by strawberries.

Geisha coffees (crazy rabbit-hole look it up if you got a minute), notorious for being some of the most expensive in the world, are so expensive because they express flavors not seen in other coffees. The last Geisha I tasted had a top note of hubby bubba bubble gum and then mellowed into an experience of bananas and chocolate with a bright citrusy green undertones.

Not to mention the brewing process in coffee changes everything. If you take the same coffee and do a taste-off between 3 brewing methods, you’ll have 3 totally different cups of coffee.

This is much too in depth and I don’t even know if it’s valuable or interesting but I LOVE coffee so we are gonna do it. Let’s say we are doing an espresso, a pour-over, and a French press.

The espresso is made with an ultra-fine grind and very short extraction time. The French press is a very coarse grind and a long extraction. The pour over is about in the middle of the two. The espresso will taste like fruit, sour and bitter and bright and citrusy. The French press will express WAY less of these acidic notes and will taste like chocolate and grass fields and leather and petrichoir. The pour-over, if you do it right. Can strike a balance of the two for a rich, warm, chocolatey cup that evolves on the tongue to leave you with a mouth tasting like fruit salad and flowers.

In a world where every McDonalds sandwich or bottle of Coca Cola tastes the same from here to France to China, we are losing the magic of how wild and weird the world is.

Every Fuji apple at every grocery chain tastes the same. You know what to expect. They’re “Perfect.”

But apples aren’t really like that.

If you plant a Granny Smith or Fuji or Gala apple seed, you will not get a Granny Smith, Fuji, or Gala apple tree. You’ll get some other sort of apple, and there’s no way to tell what kind (in fact avocados do this too!)

Sometimes they’re hardly edible, in fact most of them are hardly edible, which is why apples were historically used not for eating, but for making cider!

Johnny appleseed was not a great lover of apples, but of alcoholic apple cider. Much more of a party animal than he’s generally portrayed to be.

Anyway

Every once in a while you get something like a Honey-crisp.

There’s two crazy implications here:

1. Every Granny Smith apple you’ve ever eaten is a clone of every other granny smith. Same with all the other varieties.

2. If you get a tree that makes good apples, you are going to be rich.

This is due to how apples are grown.

The original Honey-crisp apple tree is out there somewhere and instead of growing apples it just grows sticks. They don’t let it grow apples. The sticks are much more valuable.

Farmers take the sticks and graft them on the trunks of random apple trees. This is the only way to make an apple tree grow the same kind of apples as another apple tree, and it ends up being a clone of the original tree except for about a foot of stump.

This is also why all the apples are clones of one another and why the Honey-crisp guy is rich. He has THE tree and probably a copyright or patent on the genetics of it. If you want to grow Honey-crisp apples, you gotta pay him some big bucks and he will send you a bunch of sticks to put onto your little apple trees.

The THIRD implication of this is totally beside the point, but it’s my favorite part.

If you grow an apple tree, you can graft on branches from all SORTS of different apple trees and have a tree that grows like 10 different varieties or more!

In fact I just looked it up and lots of people are already selling apple trees with up to 5 types of apple trees grafted onto it. LIKE THIS

Dang I got distracted again

THE DANG POINT IS

Uniformity is making the world feel like a much smaller place than it is and I think that’s a shame.

Like Captain Jack Sparrow said at the end of that one Pirates of the Caribbean Movie when Captain Barbossa tells him the world used to be a bigger place:

“The world’s still the same. There’s just… Less in it”

Now we got the internet, there doesn’t have to be less in it if we dice there doesn’t have to be. Mass production products and conformity are an option, but probably the least good one.

I have no proposed solution to this problem, except to encourage people to buy weird stuff and take up weird hobbies-

For example:

Get your fruits and veggies at the farmer’s market.

Learn all you can about rocks so that the rocks can be surprising and exciting everywhere you go.

Buy single-origin chocolate, coffee, and tea and notice the subtle differences between them.

Take up cartography, whittling, or old-timey large-format photography.

Try a wine or beer you’ve never had before.

Grow your own fruits and vegetables if you have the capacity to do so.

Go outside and find a bug and follow it around for the rest of the day just to imagine what it’s like to be that lil’ bug.

Buy your bread at the local bakery or bake it yourself! Shoot get crazy get into sourdough.

Avoid products from national and international corporations and you will fill your life with little bite-sized bits of wonder.

Learn deeply about the world around you and the world will repay you with endless surprises.

Try everything at least once, except hard drugs, and probably some other stuff I’m not considering right now, like war, or hijacking commercial aircraft.

Try anything once and follow the golden rule I guess is what I’m getting at.

Notice and pursue the little expressions of how wide and weird and wonderful the world is. It’s free and it fills my life with little delights and I cannot recommend the practice enough.

Also

I truly and wholeheartedly believe you are capable of anything you set your mind to and don’t let me catch you telling yourself otherwise.

Get out there and get weird with it.

You are awesome.

The quote of the day is from one of the funniest books I’ve ever read; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

―Douglas Adams

The album of the week is an expression of how wide and weird and wonderful the world is. PLUS to make it even weird and wilder is TWO albums!!! The first is from an orchestra that is made up of non-orchestral instruments. It’s almost entirely composed of ‘world’ instruments. That is to say, mostly instruments I’ve never heard of before. Most of these players are the best in the world at their specific weird instrument. Yo-Yo Ma, almost definitely the greatest cellist that ever lived, is the creator of this wonderful project, which is how I came to hear about it in the first place.

It’s a wonderful and interesting album and I’ve never heard anything like it.

Without further ado, may I humbly present: The Silkroad Ensemble.

We gotta fangirl over Yo-Yo Ma a little bit because he’s amazing so here’s another from him on about most different vibe possible from the first one.

This is one of my favorite albums of all time. It’s not the environment one expects to hear cello. It’s some of the best, if not THE best bluegrass I’ve ever heard. And it features one of the best mandolin players of all time: Chris Thile. If the Silkroad Ensemble doesn’t do it for you, I bet this one will.

Ladies and gentlemen,

The Goat Rodeo Sessions

That’s all for this week!! Short and sweet. Feels like the last handful of posts have gotten way the heck outta hand because I kept biting off great big subjects. Next week we are going to do more science fun facts!! Get ready for animal behavior!!
Here’s a sneak peek fun fact to get us all excited.

Gray Mouse Lemurs have a weird and interesting way of reproducing.

One night a year all the adults get together and have a great big orgy and the whole population’s females get pregnant at the same time! This solves a couple problems but perhaps most important is that nobody knows who is the father of which baby lemur. Therefore, it cuts down rates of infanticide big time because you’re not gonna kill a baby if theres a chance it’s your kid!

I like to imagine it makes the Gray Mouse Lemur community a bit more tight-knit too just because anyone could be your family!

Ain’t that weird and cute?!

Until next week!!!

Thank you for being here. I appreciate you and I love you so!

This is a post I’ve been excited to make for a long time. I was in school for Natural Science biology for 4 years and took LOTS of notes. I have about 1600+ pages of notes by my most recent estimate.

My notes were Important for 2 things: helping me pass tests, and helping me collect all the fun stuff I learned in each class. Whenever I stumbled upon a fun fact during lecture I would put it on the side of the page in a little box for future use. I had no idea what the future use would be until now.

This post is every fun fact that I boxed in my notes from my Mammalogy class.

1. The mammalian metabolism creates 3-6 times the energy than current reptiles of similar body mass.

   1. This is why we are so much less lazy than those dang lizards who just sit on a rock in the sun all day.

2. Marsupials and placentals are not closely related. Their last common ancestor is somewhere 125-160 million years ago.

   1. This is when the Triassic dinosaurs were in charge. They’re the OGs- kinda weird old school dinosaurs, your favorite famous dinosaurs like the t-rex, brontosaurs, and stegosaurs were not from this era. In fact I just googled it and haven’t really heard of any dinos from this era…

   2. Also I just realized we are talking in serious timescales where the phrase ‘era’ has real meaning and I don’t think I used it right just now.

3. The tailless tenrec can have up to 36 babies. Naked mole rats can have like 28, Same with opossums and the African rat aka the natal multimammate rat.

   1. Freakin hella babies broh. They have so many nipples. They’re the ultimate mammals.

      

4. Mammals range in size from 1.5 grams ( Kitti’s Hog-nosed bat) to 181 tons (Great Blue Whale)

   1. Seriously this is insane to think about. A dime weight 2.3 grams. That’s the teeniest little bat ever.

   2. A 2026 Ford F-350 with the biggest engine weighs 4 tons. FOUR TONS!!

   3. I can’t even begin to wrap my head around how big a blue whale is. I could spit…

5. Mammals and dinosaurs came to prevalence at about the same time.

   1. Like 220 million years ago

   2. Then the asteroid hit and then dinos and mammals got real little and then evolved to be big again over the next 100 million years and then another asteroid hit and we all got real little again but this time mammals came out on top and the dinosaurs evolved into birds. I think an ice age had to do with this but it’s just so impossible to comprehend on these geologic time scales.

6. Dimetrodon is the grandaddy of all Mammals depending on what you think makes a mammal a mammal.

   1. See also Morganucodon.

7. Carbonemys was a turtle that grew a shell nearly 6ft in length.

   1. There was also a snake i think in the same time period called titanoboa or something ridiculous like that and it weighed 2,000 lbs and was like 3-4 feet thick.

   2. It’s called carbonemys because they found it in a coal mine

   3. It lived in the tropics like 60 million years ago. They found the first fossils in Brazil.

8. Nobody knows how the new world monkeys got to the new world.

   1. The new world monkeys are the South American ones. They got the prehensile tails that helps them climb trees and stuff. Old world monkeys don’t have tails, think chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, and they live in Africa and Asia.

   2. The kicker is new world monkeys weren’t around until after Pangea so Africa and South America had already separated so there was a whole ocean to cross. Granted it was 1000km less narrow but that’s still a minimum of like 1500km

   3. That’s ~932 miles in freedom units.

   4. I think they rode across on a raft. In fact that’s our best bet.

9. Monotremes don’t have nipples. Instead they have milk patches. This may be the how milk was originally used - to keep eggs moist before the amniotic egg evolved.

   1. Monotremes are prehistoric mammals, they lay eggs, think platypuses, echidnas, etc..

   2. The whole amniotic egg issue is that eggs didn’t used to be self contained and needed to be in water to hatch. They were more like fish eggs; squishy and wet. If you didn’t keep them wet they would dry up and die. If you keep them wet with milk all the fats will help them stay wet longer. This is how we transitioned from being amphibious to being terrestrial.

10. The Sexiest vervet monkeys have the Bluest Balls and Reddest Penises

    1. translating ‘sexiest’ to biology talk - they achieve the highest levels of genetic fitness AKA how much of your genes are passed on to the next generation AKA they have the most babies.

11. People have pet sloths in Costa Rica

    1. Idk what else to say about that except I am obsessed with sloths and would absolutely keep one as a pet. Also a crow, and a raccoon.

12. Zebras have stripes because it confuses biting flies. Black reflects polarized light and white doesn’t and the flies see polarized light only.

    1. It makes the whole herd look like an old tv with no signal. Like the fuzzy black and white lines.

    2. They tested this by painting plastic horses with different patterns and counting the fly visits.

    3. Sometimes zoology got you out there doing the dumbest experiments. Like they’re watching plastic horses with binoculars trying to count how many flies land on them. Biology is so fun.

13. This might be my favorite from this class. Strap in.

    Three-toed sloths climb down the tree to poop. 2-toed sloths don’t.

    Climbing down the tree is the leading cause of death in 3 toed sloths because it’s the only time predators can really get to them. This is the craziest thing ever because it means that climbing down the tree to poop must be evolutionarily advantageous enough to justify the heightened risk of death.

    1. It took us years to figure out why.

    2. It’s because the 3 toed sloths are farm their own food.

    3. They grow algae in their fur. It’s good nutrition so they eat it. The ALGAE gets it’s food from moth poop. The moths that make the poo live in the Sloth’s fur too. They also eat the algae.

    4. So the sloths are farming algae and moths in their fur. The moths fertilize the algae. The sloths eat the algae You with me so far?

    5. SO The sloths climb down the tree to poop so that the moths can have a fertile and predictable breeding ground (the poo) to lay eggs in!

    6. If the poo just fell from the treetops then the moths wouldn’t be able to lay their eggs there and the moths would go extinct because they only live on sloths.

    7. Once the moths hatch they go find a sloth to live on and the cycle repeats all over again!

       

14. There are 2 species of mammal that we know of in which the male of the species is known to produce milk: The Masked Flying Fox and the Kayak Fruit Bat.

15. Most mammals produce different types of milk depending on period of motherhood.

    1. Like when a baby whale is born their mother’s milk is RIDICULOUSLY fatty for the first few weeks/months so the baby whale can pack on some serious tonnage and not have to worry about sharks and orcas.

    2. Baby blue whales literally put on TEN POUNDS PER HOUR. 250 pounds a day because they drink 150 gallons of milk a day and it’s 50% fat at the beginning of the baby’s life.

    3. At six months that baby will weigh 25,000 pounds.

    4. Humans do this too though I don’t remember the details

16. True horns are ONLY found in bovid artiodactyls (cattle, buffalo, antelopes, sheep)

    1. True horns grow continuously and have an inner core bone with a keratinized outer sheath.

    2. The size of true horns indicates the age of the bovid because they don’t stop growing.

17. Rhino Horns are actually modified (Keratinized) hair.

18. Antlers are not horns because they are all bone and no keratin

19. Monotremes like platypuses have extra shoulder muscles.

    1. This is because their legs are not directly underneath them like most modern mammals, but more off to the sides like modern lizards, and they have to work way harder to move themselves.

20. The Symphysis Pubis is a plate at the center base of the pelvic girdle that breaks during childbirth

    1. This is just so metal. Tell your mom you love her today if you haven’t done so already.

21. Kangaroos and humans don’t jump technically, they ricochet.

    1. In zoology a ricochet uses two legs and a jump uses four.

22. Sloths have locking mechanisms in their claws. This allows them to hang from a tree without having to use their muscles/expending energy.

    1. I just love sloths so much. If anyone wants to give me a sloth tattoo please let me know asap.

23. The Act of Swinging from Branch to branch is called brachiation

    1. Idk I just think this is cute.

24. There are more fossorial mammals than subterranean mammals on the planet

    1. Mammals that live underground are either fossorial or subterranean.

       1. Subterranean mammals live almost exclusively underground like moles, naked mole rats, pocket gophers, etc

       2. fossorial mammals are wicked good diggers but get their food from the surface. Some examples include Rabbits, kangaroo rats, badgers, armadillos, etc.

       3. This is not actually that surprising now that I think about it. But still interesting!

25. The skin flaps on flying squirrels are called Patagium and they use them as little blankies when it’s cold

    1. *insert crying smiling emoji here

26. The latin name for the Manatee family is sirenians on account of lonely sailors thought they were mermaids back in the day.

27. Mexican free-tailed bats consume 250,000 pounds of insects each night in Texas ALONE

28. Pallid bats live in the American Southwest and they specialize in eating ground arthropods like scorpions and spiders. This means they spend a lot of time on the ground which is wicked funny lookin’

    1. They are so silly looking check this out

    2. 

29. Golden-tipped bats specialize in plucking orb weavers from their webs. They can do this because they are good at hovering

    1. I can’t find a video of it but I coulda sworn I’ve seen one before.

    2. They also roost underneath bird nests which is pretty weird and cute.

30. The only venomous mammals are insectivores and they are all shrews. There’s 4 of them. They use the venom to put their prey into a coma so they can bring it back to their babies or something.

    1. Shrews are wicked funny looking. Kind of like moles but less distinguished and more goofball energy.

       

31. Poison kills you when you bite it, venom kills you when it bites you.

    1. even by my third year of college I was still mixing this up.

32. Whiskers are specialized hair - their biological name is vibrissae

    1. Google doesn’t think that’s a word bit it so is..

33. The Frog-eating bat can determine between poison and non-poison frogs based on their call alone.

    1. the frogs out themselves to the bat constantly just by making all that noise

    2. What a frog does for love eh?

34. Giant Noctule bats specialize in eating sleeping birds. Perched OR Flying!

    1. Birds can sleep while they fly, they shut down half their brain at a time. This is what makes them vulnerable to giant noctule bats.

    2. Also these things are kinda freakin cute at least as far as bats go.

    

    1. bats are so weird. I feel like half this class was on bats because they’re just so weird.

35. 2 of the 3 species of vampire bats specialize in birds. All 3 species have razor teeth and numbing agents in their saliva

    1. See what I mean like who does that?

36. Sometimes vampire bats drink so much blood that they can’t fly because their little bellies are too full. Their solution to this is to do a rough filter and pee and pee and pee until they are light enough to fly home and filter the rest properly and thoroughly.

37. Crabeater Seals have fuckin crazy teeth

    1. Seriously

    2. They don’t actually eat crab but krill! The teeth act like the baleen in a whale’s mouth to filter out the water while keeping the krill inside.

       

38. unlike most carnivores, elephant seals have LONG small intestines and we don’t really know why.

    1. Usually strict carnivores have pretty short intestines because meat takes a lot less work to break down than plants.

    2. They are carnivores with herbivore guts. The evolutionary reason is unclear. Maybe they just really don’t like chewing their food.

39. Sperm whales used to sink lots of ships via ramming them.

    1. I thought Moby Dick was overdramatized.

    2. This could be because they confused the ships for rival males and ramming is how they solve fights in sperm whale society

    3. This could also be a reaction to the rampant whaling of the 19th century (when these events occurred.) OR they could just be overly territorial whales.

    4. ALSO I got beef with the name sperm whale. They are called that because the organ in their head that’s filled with oil and helps them be more or less buoyant depending on what they need. In lots of whales this oil has a golden tinge to it but in sperm whales its just white so it looks like sperm. They are literally the most impressive whales in the ocean. They hunt giant squids for a living. They deserve a better name.

40. LOTS of mammals have multiple stomachs. -camelids, geraffids, hippos, antiocaprids (antelope), cervids(deer and such), bovids(cows and such), kangaroos, cloths, and the colobus monkey!!

    1. Pretty much any animal that eats plants for a living. It takes a lot to get all the nutrients out of plants. The bonus stomachs are full of bacteria that are good at this exact task so it’s like a weird little symbiosis.

    2. plus having multiple stomachs means you can expose the food to the bacteria for longer periods of time.

    3. The colobus monkey is very herbivorous.

41. Having multiple stomachs makes it easier to eat plant defense chemicals like bitter tannins and whatnot

    1. This is also on account of those clever bacteria stomachs.

42. Lots of mammals practice Coprophagy (Poop eating). Lagomorphs (Bunnies), shrews, rodents, marsupials (koalas are famous for this) namely.

    1. Rabbits eat their own poop right out their butt so they can pretend to have a second stomach. This is what allows them to eat grass for a living

    2. Rabbits make two types of poop. The hard pellets you see everywhere they hang out are the second type

    3. The first type is dark and soft and half digested and that’s what the rabbit eats

43. Beavers make a little room in their dam and save their first poops for lean times like midwinter.

    1. Like a shitty little pantry

44. Snub nose monkeys spend 95% percent of their time awake looking for fungi to eat.

    1. Fungivores are very rare. They are the only monkey fungivores. There are a few squirrels, rodents, and marsupials that are fungivores.

45. H=M+P+MOC. This is optimal foraging theory. Quitting Harvest rate = metabolic rate + predation + missed opportunity costs.

    1. This one is a little crazy, i hope i can do it justice.

    2. Basically animals take all sorts of things into consideration when deciding where to forage for food.

    3. You can map out these considerations by placing little buckets of sand with snacks hidden in them all over a study area.

    4. The sand makes the study species work for the food a little bit so they can’t get all of it without considering things like predators seeing them.

    5. SO they quit their harvest aka looking for snacks (H) when food gets too scarce (MOC) to justify the predation risk (P) and this changes up or down based on how nutritionally dense the food is.

    6. The other optimal foraging equation is energy gained / handling time+search time.

46. Cells in your body have a photoperiod

    1. They can tell how much light they are getting. In winter there is less light and so the metabolism slows down. In summer it speeds up.

    2. It also affects a whole mess of things like melatonin production, cortisol rhythms, DNA methylation. Wild.

47. Squirrels and porcupines keep regular circadian rhythms even in the arctic circle where it can be dark or light all day. Reindeer can only maintain circadian rhythms when there’s a sunrise and sunset.

    1. We don’t really know why. All we know is the reindeer sleep, produce hormones, and forage sporadically during the all-day summers and all-night winters of the arctic.

    2. Meanwhile the squirrels and porcupines sleep during the sleeping times consistently no matter what kind of goofy stuff the sun is doing.

48. Montane vole reproduction periods start when it smells specific plant compounds. They piggyback on the plant’s circannual rhythms.

    1. I think it’s like the smell of the plant making the vole’s favorite food or something so they know it’s a good time to reproduce so the mom and babies will have enough food to make strong offspring.

49. Some marsupials have a basal metabolic temp of 28*C. Most Eutherians are about 38*C

    1. That’s 82 for marsupials, 100 for eutherians in freedom units.

    2. A eutherian is a placental mammal, as opposed to marsupials (pouches) and monotremes (egg layers).

50. Bergmann’s rule - Species size gets bigger the further north you go. E.g. little cottontail rabbits in the desert vs big HONKIN arctic hares. see also: Bears.

51. ANTARCTICA literally in latin means the place with no bears. The Arctic translates to the bear place.

    1. I still cannot believe I didn’t make this connection until like age 28. That’s how serious an issue bears were to early explorers or what?!

52. Allen’s rule - colder climate - shorter appendages. Warmer climate = longer appendages

    1. Like there’s this fox in brazil with the most ridiculous long legs in the world omg let me find a picture.

    2. It’s called the Maned wolf.

    3. look at those supermodel legs

       

       

    4. And for reference THE ARCTIC FOX look at those cute little legs

    5. 

53. Countercurrent heat exchange allows many cold-dwelling mammal appendages to get close to 0*C without freezing.

    1. This one is a little complicated too let’s see

    2. So like dolphins are famous for this.

    3. The heat of the blood pumping from the heart gets engangled in the blood coming back to the heart and warms it up

    4. This happens in the flippers where the cold has the most extreme affect

    5. It minimizes heat loss in the extremities. Super useful if you live in the cold.

54. Polar bears have the most optimal coloration for staying warm possible. Their fur is hollow and acts like fiber optic cable - it beams the sunlight straight to the skin. Their skin is black for max sunlight absorption.

55. The Heimal threshold - Snow has to be a certain depth to keep enough heat in to keep little mammals alive in the winter. If it doesn’t achieve that depth the little mammals’ chances of surviving the winter plummet.

    1. The heat radiates from deep underground and the snow collects it if it is thick enough.

    2. Then the little rodents spend the winter in tunnels under the snow where it’s much warmer than outside the snow.

56. Kangaroo rats and pocket mice can go their whole lives without drinking water. They have a metabolic process that allows them to convert glucose from seeds into water.

    1. This blows my mind. they can make two waters molecules from one glucose molecule by adding a couple hydrogens or something?!

    2. C6H12O6 + 6H20 + 6O2 -> 6CO2 + 12H2O

    3. So they add water and oxygen and double their water and breathe out the CO2. Amazing cool insane.

57. Eland and Oryx - great big African mammals - have such thick skin that they lose hardly any water. They can go their whole lives without drinking water. They get all they need from their food.

58. The biggest downside of panting is the risk of respiratory alkalosis

    1. This is kind of intense.

    2. basically breathing too hard and fast for too long can exhale too much Carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide binds with water to make carbolic acid, which the body uses to maintain the PH of the blood. With not enough carbolic acid available the blood can become basic (alkaline)

    3. This comes with a whole slew of issues you can look it up. Worst case scenario death. Best case headache.

59. Dromedary camels are fucking amazing. They can drink 100 liters of water in 10 minutes. They can also drink seawater with no ill effects becasue they have the most incredible kidneys in the world. They huddle together like penguins to avoid heat. They dramatically fluctuate body temp instead of using water to cool down (sweating or panting.) Their body temps can range from 34-42 degrees Celsius

    1. That’s 93-107 degrees in freedom units

60. A Marsupial’s pouch is called the marsupium.

    1. aww.

61. Echidna penises are insane looking

    1. Just look i don’t want to talk about it

    2. JUST LOOOK

       

62. Baculum are insane too

    1. Most mammals have baculums

    2. It’s biology talk for penis bone.

    3. Look it up if you dare

63. If a squirrel catches another squirrel watching them bury their nuts with thoughts of stealing them later, the burying squirrel will start pretending to bury nuts to confuse the cheater squirrel.

    1. It’s gotta be so fun being a squirrel biologist I swear…

64. Humans are so loud that songbirds are losing their songs

    1. This one is kind of sad. Birds that live in and around metro areas are getting drowned out by the cars and so their songs are becoming less useful to them and they’re shortening their songs and raising the pitch of them to be heard over traffic.

    2. It’s kind of a sad one you can look it up there’s been lots of papers on it!

65. In cats and rabbits vaginal stimulation triggers ovulation which is why they are so good at having a million babies.

    1. So glad humans don’t do this…

66. Dogs and wolves bow before play so everyone knows they’re playing.

    1. “just so everyone knows im just joking around right now but im gonna GETCHA!!!”

67. Baby hyenas kill each other when mom doesn’t bring enough food home/

    1. Hyenas are so metal wait i got a bunch more hyena facts

    2. They mark the borders of their territory by SPRAYING POOP all over the bushes at the border.

    3. The females have penises (technically pesudopenises) and they’re WAY bigger than the males

    4. The female with the biggest penis is in charge

    5. In fact female hyenas are way bigger and more aggressive than males.

68. White rhino moms put more energy into their sons than their daughters. This is because daughters always have a fitness of 1 whereas if your son is strong he will have exponentially more fitness because all the lady rhinos will want him to be their baby daddy.

    1. Fitness is just the concept of how much of your genes are passed on to the next generation.

    2. you pass on 50% of your genes to your kid. So if a white rhino daughter is only gonna have a couple kids but a son could have dozens if he does really well at the whole sexual selection game because he’s uber strong, and fitness is the goal, then you’re going to invest more into a son

    3. It’s like gambling but for rhinos

69. The Irish elk may have gone extinct due to runaway sexual selection. Their antlers got 12 feet across because the lady elks thought it was sexy.

    1. This is just a hypothesis, we don’t actually know why they evolved to have a 12-foot rack, but it seems like a pretty probable explanation.

70. Mice do this gross thing called copulatory plugging. Males squirt a little glue-like-substance into the female after copulation so that no other males can mate with her until she’s pregnant.

    1. I wish I had something clever to say about this. Nature is metal, man…

71. This is especially true in apes but i think works for mammals in general - the more promiscuous the species = 1. the faster and longer the sperm, and 2. the bigger the testicles.

    1. For example, bonobos and chimps are very similar except bonobos have HUGE testicles and chimps have little baby ones.

    2. This is because bonobos have sex like all the time, it’s like how the whole group bonds. Get in a fight? Makeup sex? Found a bunch of good food? Celebration sex. They even do same sex mating rituals if i’m not mistaken.

    3. chimps get their aggressions out in a different way. They just kill each other all the time. Bonobos hardly ever kill each other. Chimpanzees are much more aggressive and vicious.

    4. Chimps also have teeny little testicles because if you are caught cheating in chimp society that’s subject to execution.

    5. Bonobos are maybe the most promiscuous mammals out there. Don’t quote me on that they’re just famous for it.

72. Male Hammerhead fruit bats set up 10 meters from each other to form Leks. They make weird clanking sounds to attract females like a freaky lil’ farmers market but for sex.

    1. Lekking is so weird, if you want to go down a serious rabbit hole google it. birds do it too, the grouses are famous for it and they make the funniest sounds in the world while they do it.

    2. ACTUALLY JUST CHECK THIS OUT it’s the dang funniest sound I maybe ever heard come from nature

73. Prarie vole monogamy is caused by vasopressin, which is the same hormone that alerts humans to the fact that they have to pee.

74. Subordinate female mongooses undergo pseudopregnancy when the dominant female gets pregnant so they can help feed her offspring.

    1. They start producing milk to help serve the dominant female.

    2. mongoose society is a matriarchy, like lion society!

    3. I would also get a tattoo of a mongoose in about a heartbeat.

75. Dolphins are like bar bros - they make little gangs to go chase females and sometimes even group up with other little gangs.

    1. Idk what they do if they catch females. I’m scared to look it up. I imagine it’s not pretty, dolphins don’t exactly have the neatest reputation when it comes to consent and whatnot…

    2. Ah jeez I just looked it up they basically kidnap her. My bad guys jeez. Hopefully the next fun fact is more fun… Nature is metal.

76. Bighorn sheep can’t be introduced to new areas because they learn where all their food spots are from their parents and they are no good at exploring.

    1. They tried releasing a bunch into the rocky mountains I think and learned this lesson the hard way.

    2. Might have been the sierra nevadas can’t remember.

77. Brazilian free-tailed bat colonies are so large that 17% of the mothers suckle the wrong infant each night.

    1. Up to 20 million individuals have been seen in colonies in Texas.

    2. For reference, 50,000 people visit Disneyland a day and they have personal space. You’d lose your kid sometimes too if Disneyland was 400x capacity.

78. Rhesus Macaques help out in fights proportionally to how related they are to the parties in conflict.

    1. Like if it’s ur brother you are gonna kill that guy pickin’ on him, but if its just your third cousin you might throw a rock or something…

79. Vampire bats do reciprocal altruism because their metabolism is so fast. IF they don’t find food for a night they could die so other bats throw up some blood into their mouths so they don’t die.

    1. THE KICKER is they remember this favor and expect to be repaid one day. So it’s not true altruism, which probably doesn’t exist in nature. It’s reciprocal altruism.

80. Whales navigate via magnetic fields and shifts in those fields may cause mass stranding events.

    1. There’s literal magnetite in their brains. Large scale human - made structures like oil rigs can mess up this magnetic directional system.

    2. Don’t even get me started on anthropogenic noise pollution.

       

81. They tried farming Africa-native species instead of cows in Africa. It makes sense because they have so many big animals there. It didn’t work because the native species were too nervous about predators to get fat.

    1. Turns out the cows just don’t worry like wild animals do

82. Releasing a squirrel away from where you caught it probably results in the death of that squirrel. The competition is already stacked in that new area and they don’t know the landscape so they are gonna starve or get eaten before they have time to figure it out.

    1. This fact isn’t so fun but it has haunted me. I used to catch the squirrels eating my dad’s fruit trees and we would drive 10 miles away and release them at the park. Everyone thought it was such a nice thing to do. Turns out….

83. Fox squirrels do better in areas with lax leash laws and grey squirrels do better in areas with strict leash laws. This is because fox squirrels are faster and gray squirrels are better foragers. This study was done in chicago.

    1. Fox squirrels are better at getting away from unleashed dogs than grey squirrels.

    2. Grey squirrels are better and finding food, so of they don’t have to worry about dogs eating them, they dominate that neighborhood.

84. In deserts around the world - in groups of similar body sizes like mice, each species scales up in the same proportion. For example the smallest mouse is a 1:1.3 ratio of the next biggest and the next biggest from that is also 1:1.3 and again and again all the way up.

    1. This is INSANE if you think about it.

    2. We see this same pattern in the Mojave, Sonora, Sahara, Gobe, you name it.

85. California’s kelp forests nearly collapsed once because the sea otters got over hunted by orcas. The sea otters got over hunted by orcas because humans over hunted the seals so the orcas had to change their diet.

86. Elephants cause the spread of grasslands.

    1. They do this because they eat a preposterous amount of food a day and will decimate entire wooded areas to get that food.

87. Almost all white flowers get pollenated at night.

    1. This is not actually a mammal fun fact but an insect one. Moths see way more ultraviolet light than anything else and white flowers reflect ultraviolet really well. So if you see a white flower, you can basically assume it’s moth-pollenated!!