Pig Mamma Sows

bullet surprise

 What is meditation? Dunno honestly, though I think it's the sort of thing that you can never really know if you know it, like all words for personal subjective experiences. In any case, I've done some things called 'guided meditations' where some calm voice tells me to focus on certain things, my body, a spot on the wall, or something like that. The voice leads you along with the aim of good things.

It's all about at least the very experience of it, but also the positive lingering effects. Maybe I have it wrong and it's a whole modern Thing with a whole world of competing meanings and ways to be wrong, but I still think the term 'guided meditation' is what I mean when I talk about the following:

From my perspective, the homonculus can be a little tiny hairless guy in your head or a dimensionless point or coextensive with my whole body and all of these are fodder for reductio ad absurdums (side thought, are reductio ad absurdum arguments positive arguments for soi dissant absurdists?). Whatever it is, I still feel it watching and experiencing stuff and now those two words, watching and experiencing, converge or diverge depending.

The watching/experiencing bit is most often just stuff going on around me in the world that I can only turn off by closing my eyes or plugging my ears. But in the last 15 years or so it's been a lot of screen and speaker mediation, way more and I think too much.

Even a little screen can dominate. The way that the darkened theater curtains cease to exist to my little internal guy when absorbed in a movie, even the rest of the website disappears to him when watching an embedded video. 

I've always thought the portrayal of 'subliminal messaging' as super quick flashes of words or images inserted surreptitiously into video as sort of corny or unrealistic, the sort of thing that just doesn't seem to work. (There's a whole psycholinguistic result cum methodology that employs this and I did some related experiments using it back in the day. The idea here, or phenomenon more accurately, is that given a task where you have to indicate whether a string of letters flashed before you on a screen is a word of English or not by pressing one of two keyboard buttons as fast as you can (you're shown 'blimp' say, or 'grost' say), you'll be quicker on the draw if a semantically related word is shown, so fast you couldn't consciously recognize it, first. You're faster to say 'yes, 'doctor' is a word of English' if the word 'nurse' is flashed on screen for a few milliseconds beforehand.

Make of that what you will. Maybe it's transparent evidence that the cartoon version of subliminal message actually works, or maybe it's evidence that very fragile weak effects, immaterial to the real world, arise out of this sort of priming. I personally don't think it's an especially weighty phenomenon practically, though probably helpful for investigating nuanced parsing stuff. I think the flashy version of subliminal messaging is schlocky paranoid scifi (fun, but fiction))

But continual corporate screens leading round-the-clock guided meditations are more impactful. It's not all bad I suppose. I dig Alan Rudoph, the Cocteau Twins, Nabokov and loads of others. But most is bad, harmful, and even sifting through the endless bargain bin that is mediated life now really sucks and fucks you up.

Books are cool cuz, as guided meditations, there's a little more need for active involvement. But the infantile masses clamor for audiobooks to passivize things more imo. And, god, have you seen what's going on at bookstores these days?!

Instead I daydream about a scenario where me and my family and friends entertain each other in person, in spurts, with folk everything, awkward and ours. Stories written only to be passed by hand or better yet orally retold. Joint painting, personal jingles. default ephemeral.

Obviously this is far from what we currently have, but why not have dreams and aspirations. Most things I write I don't post here. 

I won't tell, if you won't tell

 This is a beautiful phrase to me. Whenever I've heard it, I've felt a zing, this refreshing clarity of anti-authoritarian cahoots. It causes in me a flash recognition of joint freedom, especially if shared with a near-stranger. Anyone I have a real relationship with, this phrase is assumed

twilight: breaking down

 The alley was and has been gravel dirt since its creation and aside from a yearly summer tar streak, remained so. The dirt roads invisibly beyond the alley had all at one time become further reified from the earth into paved solids, making rigid the abstract 2d net that was piecemeal knit to keep people in the right place. This is generally perceived to be a completed process around here of the sort that finished in the dusty naive past. 

But now the alley has been paved, the process is still ongoing, the grid is tightening ever-tightening, in effect easing travel the right way and maximizing time in place. The transition from the old, loose ways is not past, the fetters strengthen and tighten in real time even now.

From the grid grows 90* the fledgling shoots, cells for human stasis. Now there take the form single family homes, but bigger more efficient storage slowly replaces them like asphalt the dirt. Apartment warehousing hasn't fully arrived yet, but the Marlborough glowers eerie waiting its modern incarnations. Individual space capsules for smooth living are being perfected and a tesseracting new direction is gelling, a future hive for production and again with covid it's bining and binding. Water and heat and power are piped into our pods along with propaganda ports to keep us all on the same page. Zip deliveries from ghost kitchens and ghost grocers to feed our sedentary productivity.

The nice places to live are the ones that in some ways resist this tightening. The nice streets don't have paint on them, but harlot garish palettes are ever further dictating the rules on the roads. Unmarked, gravel roads are the weak flailings of the core which is apparatus, left hand twin specific bike cordons and stockpiled people modular strips for dentistry and bbq. Towns, cities that are themselves specialized into the growing world village. Extravagances of self-sufficiency are earthen barnacles on the metastatic nodules of the globe state matrix.

A dead night through light fiber optic why isn't it uniform? why the diversity even now? The sierras are a partially submerged block, sinking below to the west and pushing up in the east. Force pushes the whole earth ascending as if inexorable, ever upward in regiment uniform, but gravity's rainbow counterforce ch. 4s in countervail striating down the slopes in perfect infinite intricacy breaking that fucker down. A glorious carved and glowing green tapestry is a not-to-scale hyperdimensional microcosm of our true human free will and testament to the ultimate futility of this cinching vise. The Counterforce in each of us as given life by our own whims and active beauty. 

Are we still caught? Counterforce regiments rolled out deployed in a numbers game?

The quiet Monday evening in early June is a pink/blue purple backlit sky and light from some other telluric source enlivens the wet green of the boughs and lawns and moss. I'm struck still and stunned by the beauty just as the naval base plays its trumpet record echoing around the town from down the rampart bluff and before the vibrating slate sea.

This is a universal sign I say to myself and stroll on down the street to the park where people gather nightly and I'm blissed gawking all smiles. An arab man and his 4 year old girl smile back and she sprints the grass alongside and pounces to grab the smallest imaginable flower from the emerald carpet and hands it to me in an act of perfect grace as the world dissolves in lightheaded spangles.

A child messenger or the inviolable purity of the will to power I'm not sure but both are God. The park is now an immanence and me too. A few more lolling strides I carve along nearly visible grains of our joint creation and hear a white dad urging his 4 year old boy on a wobbly 2-wheeler to make the circuit yet faster this time. He speeds ahead of me but his grassy turn around bogs him and I emanate an offer to help him and steady the handle bars and hand flat to back push him towards dad. But what did I do there? We were playing at the grid, training play counterforce and conspiracy me and the boy, and as long as we don't give in, unlearning insignificance.

history report

regime documentations cmt.

batch: 22a primary ed

item: 2023298544

transcript:

7.25.44.13:22:09 [unintelligible] a world of visible speech [unintelligible] 

7.25.44.13:22:16 born [unintelligible] 

7.25.44.13:22:21 born into a world of visible speech kids in the two thousands needed to learn technology fast. if they didn't learn how to use visual language tools they would be ost- ostracized from the community. using these tools well was a highly prized skill and elders would train and train the kids so they could stay in the community. my report is on the invention of camps parser.

7.25.44.13:23:12 albion camp was born in baustin as an only child. his elders [unintelligible] at fort bellamee. he almost didn't succeed in learning these tools by the cutoff point of age ten. he was a slow learner and his elders were very worried. lucky for us he was not ostracized and he was aloud to stay in the community and he became a very good operator for visual speech. when the via less system stopped working albion camp discovered parsing and his invention saved many lives. and we all still use this invention today in our everyday lives.

7.25.44.13:24:55 on the morning of may eleven the kingdom of america woke up to discover that the vealess system was starting to break. any tool can break so we need to be careful not to be to rough with them. to many outside people were coming to the kingdom and they put a lot of pressure on the vee ellis and they caused it to break. the visual sym- sim b- symbols huuuh [unintelligible] stood for language and they stopped being stable because they couldn't bare the wait of everybody using them so much.

7.25.44.13:26:11 this made things very bad and most people died. people thought that the kingdom of america might not survive. but albion camp was smart and realized that our voices were still stable enough to be used for machines so he invented parsing. parsing doesn't need visual speech. it just needs voices which we create naturally. parsing aloud people to go back to work and make money for food and apartments.

7.25.44.13:27:27 we still can see the ruins of the vee el ess system all around us today and people like to wear them on their tee shirts and put them on their apartment walls. thanks to the genius of albion camp the kingdom of america is strong and free today.

7.25.44.13:28:16 alec sander h. eleven

the truman audience

A sort of surreal situation arose last week.

In San Francisco they're trying to implement this thing where the police can tap into private cameras as live surveillance feeds. One in a long line of encroachments on a free life. The board of supervisors was holding a meeting to discuss this and other pending legislation and they have a period for public comment. So me and some friends went last monday to voice our futile opinions in person. I went through the metal detector at the grand old city hall building and wended my way through the tour groups and wedding photo entourages and actual live wedding ceremonies into the main chambers where the invisible surveillance infrastructure of our lives and and a bunch of other topics are gummed over and settled upon.

Only 3 of the 11 supervisors were there in person and public section was totally empty aside from me, my three friends, and some guy bent over passed-out in the back row. The rest I guess were watching through their computer screens. Another one of the sort of things that covid hysteria has apparently locked in place, all in all a bewildering acceleration of generalized atomization.

The police chief called in from his car like it was some idiot right-winger vlog, providing a fascinating 5th-grader take on the subject and me and one friend got up to talk for a minute or so, just for fun? just to flail? dunno.

But the surreal thing happened after we sat down and the call-ins started. There were a heartening amount of disembodied voices ringing out into the chamber against the proposed surveillance ramp-up, but they slowly started getting overwhelmed by disembodied Mandarin. Call after call was all Mandarin except for their final 'yes yes yes' coda. So the 8 of us, the supervisors, me and my friends, and the passed-out guy were sitting quietly as a language no one understood played over the speakers. The calls alternated with a 'thank you, next caller' and we eventually got up and left.

There's a weird thing going on here, kinda akin to the new thing of pro-cop black mayors in big cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, etc. I'm too much of a dummy to fully get it, but the school resegregation efforts, the DA recall, and this surveillance stuff seems to share in common some anti-black effect, if not animus, and imo astro-turf asian support. There's clearly more going on, but this is equally clearly a component.

wizard of ours

The Webb telescope news has grazed my consciousness, but I've kinda been tuning it out along with most news. Back in like 2013 or so I hung out a bit at the NASA compound in Greenbelt MD cuz I had a friend that worked there. Got the tour of the place and watched the transit of Venus from there. I also saw the Webb telescope being built, from behind some thick glass into a cleanroom. Feels like a lifetime ago now.

I was thinking about how words and the concepts they point to sort of slowly glide past each other as if they were on different planes. They keep sliding and their links dissolve, other links appear. It happens sometimes fast enough for us to catch, and sometimes so fast it's not easy for us to keep up. Sometimes it's so slow we barely notice it. The concept that the word 'phone' points to has clearly shifted over time from a wall tether to a portable surveillance device and we seem to occasionally recognize and marvel at that shift. That was a slow one, happening over a few decades I guess. 

Likewise, sometimes the word that points to the concept changes. This is usually a little more intentional, I would guess, because we have more control over words that we do concepts. The lead-up to the 2003 start of the Iraq and its execution had a bunch of these, ranging from the silly 'freedom fries' to the more important 'enhanced interrogation'. New words sliding in to point to the same old concepts. Or the mercenary corp originally named Blackwater becoming Xe Services and then becoming Academi. There are surely loads of other instances of these. This era seems to have really made an impact on me and how I read the world nowadays.

I've also been thinking about that inspirational quote that I started seeing the last couple years. It goes: "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings." This said I guess by UK Le Guin and it inspires a welcome sense of changeability in this fallen world, you know, the 'Divine Right of Kings' is gone, think of what else might someday be gone.

But the stuff that led to the Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence and that sort of thing, the things that are indicative of the dissolution of that Divine Right didn't really upend the power dynamics all that much. We still have the pinprick elite minority in control over the masses. Sure there are arbitrarily many fine-grained distinctions between different types of rule, but it's still broadly the same ruler-rulee relation that has existed for the last fraction of human history.

I buy the idea that the big asymmetry that still defines human life got its start way back when a couple of things happened. 1) Adept hunters took the death-dealing skills that were of use on the hunt and expanded their remit, using them on their fellow humans. Basically a proto-police and military. 2) Clever sky-watchers developed increasingly recondite, and in turn propriety, knowledge and predictive capacity when it comes to the moon and the sun and used them to wow the preterite. Basically a proto-science and religion. These guys sorta, dunno, joined forces, Power and Justification, broadly stroking.

Being able to mace heads in and foretell the heavens of course took on new and progressive and mutually reinforcing forms as time went on, but the basic combo of cudgel and awe was only ever further cemented. The Justification courtiers started out as priest, soothsayer, magician in the role of explaining the world. And during their time the words Divine Right pointed to that Justification concept. Eventually the words scientist, economist, statistician came to point to those whose role it was to explain the world and Divine Right was no longer appropriate as the words we used for Justification. We can think of the words we use now, instead. 

I think the Le Guin quote is really just an example of finding false comfort in what amounts to a re-branding. Sure, Divine Right isn't used as Justification anymore, but that's just a sleight of hand word trick and the priest class continues to bedazzle the masses with their Whitey on the moon and their Webb telescopes.

The moonshots and visions of farther and father galaxies serve the court. The court wields them to make you feel small and impotent in the face of apparent unimaginable scale and their command of those wonders justifies the ruling class's position. This is just another trick, one in a long line reaching back to those early days. We scoff at the bronze age priest but praise his modern day counterpart with a funny sort of peasant submission. But the moon is actually just an inert dark gray rock and it gets less real from there on out. My interior life and friends and family is vastly realer and greater.

A Lewis Mumford quote: In the light of human consciousness, it is not man, but the whole universe of still 'lifeless' matter that turns out to be impotent and insignificant. 

That's kinda my approach to these things. They're dangling some pretty pictures in front of me like a ring of keys to a baby when I'd rather a tit

News Tip

I have a news tip. It's about something that might not otherwise be entirely traditionally newsworthy, but in my opinion that's just so much the worse for the news and says nothing about its own merits.

There is a wall, though some could call it the remains of a wall, here in Everett that has persisted through many changes happening all around it including very much indeed changes that have directly impacted the material condition of the wall. But the wall persists and I am going to describe it to you and hopefully explain why I think it is newsworthy.

Before it was the domain of the Seattle Children's clinic, the plot of land on 13th street in Everett belonged to Everett Community College and housed its sports facilities, including a large field, tennis courts, maintenance building, and recreation center with an indoor pool, basketball court, weightlifting facilities etc. This plot of land was generally open to the public to use as they pleased, for baseball, playing with dogs, tennis, etc. You could walk or ride your bike to school at Whittier Elementary and back home through the parking lot or across the field to openings in the fence where Rockefeller and Oakes dead end to the north. 

There was a grassy hill with some blackberry bushes near the east side of the field where one could relax and even sled down when it snowed. And the maintenance building was such that the eaves of its roof reached just close enough to the slope of another hill that ran up to the alley in the northeast corner of the lot that one could lay a plank of wood from the hill to the roof at a near horizontal angle and use it to climb on top.

The doors to the main building, during business hours on weekdays, were generally open and anyone could just walk in and look around. There was a long dark corridor on the second floor which led past a number of locked doors (one with a rattling machine behind it) to a back entrance to the men's locker room down the stairs in the back of the building. This building was home to of course the school's basketball team, but also local children's recreational programs and served as a caucusing site during election years. I remember it hosted a native tribe powwow and also the pool was the site of Everett High School swimming home meets. I even recall one of those end-of-the-season soccer team pizza parties taking place in the upstairs classroom that had a bank of windows that looked out over the field.

In any case, it's not this building that I am writing to you about, but a wall behind where that building once stood. The building had this arcing support structure on its south side that curved up and over the pool area. It was all enclosed and you had no way of knowing that that's where the pool was. Though there were these sliding doors on that south side wall, which, though I never saw them open that I can recall, had a narrow slit such that if you peered through it, you could see into the pool area and literally make out the glimmer of the water.

These arcing supports served as a means to climb onto the roof of the building (to retrieve lost tennis balls or otherwise look around) and also arced high enough off the ground at a steep enough angle that you could ride you bike under them with ease. In fact, there was pavement all around the building that was wide enough to right a bike on (and cars in principle too, but they only occasionally drove behind the building). It's a shame there are basically no pictures of this building or the grounds as they were before the current state. At least not in a way that is readily accessible to the public who used to be able to explore and play and use the grounds. I have only my recollections, but they are of a vastly higher fidelity and accuracy compared to what an internet search results in. 

The pavement around the building was enclosed on the west side by a concrete wall maybe 4 or 5 feet tall. This wall held back a hill that sloped up another 10 feet or so and ended in a surface level parking lot where there now stands a multistory parking lot. On that sloping hill above the wall, there were assorted blackberry bushes and grasses as well as just some more or less level dirt where one could just relax with their friends and talk. I recall instances where me and my friend would prowl around the parking lot, looking for cars with appealing valve stem caps. We would unscrew them, all four wheels, and build up little collections of our favorites, and sometimes trade them or just admire them on the level dirt and grass above this wall on the back side of this rec center building.

Of course this was all demolished by the hospital to make way for what is there now. Though from what I understand, the Chestnut tree was intentionally left standing for beautification's sake, still there in the southeast corner of the lot. Though, and this is the newsworthy bit, part of that concrete wall that used to run along hill behind the main building also still remains. I (re-)discovered it on a recent little exploration around the lot. Where 12th street meets the lot on its west side, there is a wooden staircase leading down to the current parking lot. A version of this staircase has long been at this site. While facing west, you can see the remains of that wall to your right. It looks a little sunken and eroded, but it's still clearly there. The rest of the wall heading south is not clearly there unfortunately.

This, in addition to the Chestnut tree, seems to be about the only thing left from that previous recreation center, the last remnant physical evidence of what was once a beautiful multipurpose node of freedom in Everett. A node that has been destroyed along with the relaxed, flexible opportunities for unplanned ad hoc living that it afforded anyone who wanted to use it.

Like I said at the outset, I understand that this is not traditionally newsworthy, but so be it. In Rome or similar places, the discovery of remnants of arguably mundane day-to-day living from the past is uncontroversially newsworthy. And one could consider the discovery of this wall to be of a similar sort. Concerns that I can imagine about this being perhaps a little premature to be newsworthy seem at least to me to be missing the point, which is to remember. The point is not to intentionally forget something for a sufficiently long time before rediscovery. This is the sort of thinking that rends us, the living, from our only home and environment. Maintaining our collective memory is the truest news and something not dictated from on high, but gathered from below.

A Concerned Citizen

Vernal Hill

 I was walking back from the coffee shop on 24th and folsom. I never like the coffee there, no clue why, but theirs always feels too hot and dry(?) and makes me feel dehydrated. But it was open and I wanted a tall ceiling, natural light place to sit and maybe zone out a bit. This place had a sort of grungy, chipped paint concrete floor feel, which felt like a real honest-to-god simulation of the type of place I used to hang out in back in the latter days of the good and old. But then I would look and see all stripes of people, the whole shop, a silent chorus all staring at their phones, and that breaks the spell for me still. 

I sat there a bit and then hiked up Folsom in the late late late afternoon sun. Rounding the curve near the top I hear someone yelling Riley! Riley! with a marked amount of force and seriousness. I thought to myself: chill out, guy, imagining this guy as some softy guy who can't handle his dog or human interaction with even a little bit of script free friction, someone without my 'trust a dog to be a dog' easy remove that I've cultivated over many entirely dog-free years. A couple are making a camera phone video of the scene and I stop to see how it plays out. I see a dog chasing another along the side of the hill, below the guy where he can't see and then realize that the golden retriever tail, hey, was chasing a coyote! I forgive the guy mentally with immaculate grace, though he's probably still a softy, because I understand a coyote could probably fuck up most any domesticated dog. Riley runs back up the hill to master. Wile E. has escaped and sits, panting, looking out over our shoulders to the city

What color is that supposed to be?

A few years of prognosticating about future celeb turning politician as creepy dangled key coercion for whatever the powers that be want, feel like kinda alert. oprah, rock, or matthew mcconaughey uvalde-valued maybe too perfect

typo negative

In my ever-increasing experience, people who I otherwise don't really respect (though this is generally through a screen and I don't actually know them, so this might all be some form of internet mirage: caused by hot air, inferior) often liken some new word or phrase to something in 1984, the book, usually as examples of Doublethink or Newspeak. I haven't read that book since I was a kid and maybe I should go back to it, but I vaguely remember thinking those concepts were kinda unrealistic, but fun enough for science/dystopian fiction. And Orwell was, I can imagine, probably going for some metaphorical effect with those terms anyway. At least that's why I read science/dystopian fiction, as a funhouse mirror on contemporary stuff.

These people who I don't really respect usually, it seems to me, get hung up on some new euphemistic (or seemingly more and more often simply non-rude) term replacing some newly-beloved sneer. The new word or phrase is taken to be some instance of doublethink-inducing newspeak or whatever and therefor in effect an attack on their very minds (though I suspect these new terms make the old ones just all the more juicy and potent. There are words that have come to be bad in my lifetime that I use among friends and I can definitely attest to this feeling). 

There is another sort of people, who I also don't really respect, who seem to see it as their duty to fight back against this sort of discomfort with new words, or at least condescend to it. When someone complains that a word is 'made up', this group swoops in to say something like: 'wait till you find out about literally all other words' or something like that. This always seemed a little needlessly deliberately obtuse because though it's in some sense true that all words are made up, there is still an obvious and real felt distinction between 'cat' and 'toyotathon'

I think this defense of new terms, in some people I know, leads them to a sort of passive credulity when it comes to any new term, mistaking corporate marketing (because more and more of their view of the world is delivered to them through their omnipresent corporate screens) and social engineering for something other than that. Or leads them to these, to my mind, unthinking pivots to old words as some sort of remake or gritty reboot spurred by non-profits trying to stand-out from the crowd and secure new money. out: 'equality', in: 'equity' (my dimwitted ass can never remember what the distinction is supposed to be, but I always thought equity was some stockmarket, real estate, capitalism term, dunno).

This is all just lead up to this thought I had: it's funny to think of terms like 'body-positive' or 'sex-positive' as pitch-perfect examples of newspeak.

tentacle porn

One day I won't have a face. I suppose this could will be like a hairless french king situation, but still, my face won't be there. I had this thought this morning as L asked me whether I was gonna squish her face. Whenever anyone refers to their bodily parts, it always sounds a little alien, body-horror as if they were referring to their ink sac or ovipositor or something. My arm, your face, as if these abstract soul-like beings are temporarily and embarrassingly forced to pilot these wacky animals.

Is that just christianity? or buddhism? or scientology? dunno, in any case it made me think of course about death and nonexistance and at some point no longer having a face that can sense all these things visually, aurally, etc. and that people can look at, admire, pity, whatever. And how that sensation is a fleeting gift no matter whether you like your face or not

 

cape cod gape god

One thing that I always get caught up with is how much people mean what they say. I, for one, definitely say pretty vacuous stuff all the time for a variety of reasons but mostly because it sounds good and I don't think there's much harm in that. But sometimes I say what I think is at least glancingly contentful, so I know there's a difference and I like, I guess, exploring that difference.

The question of whether people mean what they say of course holds for loads of things, but right now I'm thinking of this one that I often hear science- and science-adjacent people trot out, something like: The more we learn the more questions we have. That rings roughly true to me in my experience trying to learn things, though maybe it's some artifact of the drive to justify future employment in investigating things. 

Do people really mean this? Maybe I'm being naive, but that kinda sounds to me like learning things has this side-effect of shrinking the ratio of what we know to what we don't. Sure, what we know probably grows absolutely (though I think this is mostly just assumed), but it seems pretty notable that people appear to be saying that learning about the world proportionally shrinks our knowledge. You'd think this would make scientists mystics generally. That's nearly how I feel myself but maybe people don't really mean it when they say it.

This idea taken seriously also seems to interact interestingly with the derided 'god of the gaps' that some talk about. My understanding of this idea is that god is taken as an explanation of the world except in areas where science offers explanation. Since science is assumed to be ever-increasing our knowledge and filling the gaps in that knowledge, god is less and less useful as an explanatory force. But if it is indeed the case that our ignorance is outpacing our knowledge, then it would seem that god explains more and more.

I think this is an interesting idea, but I think in this case it's really just that people don't mean what they say

writhe a bit

 Yesterday I walked to the grocery store, falsely thinking it opened at 8 and not 9. Returning with nothing I spotted this white cat up the block on the sidewalk ahead of me. It hopped into a yard, a rabbit all along.

I didn't have much hope I'd be able to get that close to it as I continued walking toward it, but it didn't scamper off when I reached it. I made a few little tsk tsk noises like I do with cats, crouched down and held out a puckered fist. The little guy was scratching around on some fallen pine boughs and stood out bright white with little demon eyes against the shaded green.

I scooted forward a bit and he didn't flinch. His eyes were less demonic and more mundanely bloodshot when I finally got close enough to stroke his ears and down his back. I left the yard and continued home.

Dunno, I thought it was kinda enchanting