death – Science teacher

October 19, 2025

Molting

As the daylight shortens and the shadows grow longer, critters, human and otherwise, hunker down for the hungry days.

A ghost crab sits at the edge of the bay, exposed by the low tide, molting its summer shell before crawling deep into the beach to wait out the dark.

My skin lightens, melanocytes no longer waving tentacles laden with packets of pigment, no need to do the work when it no longer matters.

Through billions of years of evolution, doing pointless work leads to extinction. Laziness is a gift.

And here we are, pretending machines can make the pointless worthwhile.

Me? Time for a handful of freshly made bread, time for a nap, time to sit in the still warm October light.

October 6, 2024October 6, 2024

Stealing the souls of children

“People pay for what they do,and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”

James Baldwin

In the end, it’s the ground that will save us, if we are, or even want, to be saved.

We’re of the mud, of the air, of the water, of the sun. We diminish the folks before us on this once fine land when we “honor” these as metaphors.

We diminish our ancestors from our homelands who spoke of the spirits and the blurring of the lines between the living and the dead as autumn darkness presses on our souls.

Cliffs of Moher, County Clare (Aaron Logan via Wikimedia)

These are not simply metaphors or myths or models. They are ways to understand the world, the world beyond the digital.

You cannot grasp a fistful of earth through a screen.
Our hands were made for more than pushing keys.

We are stripping the souls from our children.

We become who we deserve to become.
But we should let our children decide whether a soul is worth keeping.

Winter is coming, again.

December 30, 2022December 30, 2022

The quick, the yeast, and the dead

Every damn time I throw dough in the oven or clams on the stove I pray to the Holy Whatever (for who knows the agony of heat besides the heretics, the saints, the damned, and the unlucky).

Consciousness is as overrated as life is underrated.

Yeast are alive. I know they breathe (or else we’d have no crumb), and I know they convert wheat and water into alcohol–I can smell it.

Before I cast the yeast into a hot oven they are eating, fooking, budding, breathing, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. They know other yeast are nearby.

You are not special–you will die, too.

So live a yeasty life, while you can.