Summer lewks leaked. Sunscreen is a conspiracy, cover up with a shirt or heavy layer of clay. I want to be a bird.

Humans have become meh.

Go lay down.

I want to read space operas with shopping and hair braiding and tea.

Life is maintenance. If you live with others make sure to balance the house contributions equitably. Make a plan! Index cards can help.

With each new day it doesn’t rain I lose hope about the future of our species. I have a good performance review this week. Adding some lemon juice and gojuchang to this breakfast soup was CORRECT.

The slap heard round the world is LAPD riot cops descending on climate scientists in battle armor. Fuck the police. We must stop them.

Coding adapters for payment gateways is also not so easy! I’m in love with programming books that have a smooth narrative arch. Describe the problem in all its complexity, with many dash of subjectivity. There’s not right way! Only what’s CORRECT.

Why do I have such a big attraction to teen fictions (like _Never Have I Ever_)? For a while I've been thinking it was the force of a stream, a soak, a wash of saudade made lighter by revisiting that time from a better place; a chance to relive with empathy for myself, to reclaim that time from the incapacitating fear of being vulnerable, navigating _coolness_ in the 80s/90s (a now more mainstreamed cultural topic since all storytellers are approaching their strength ~40). The journeys of these post-modern (mostly young women) protagonists through insecurity, heartbreak, the web of complex material and digital norms and hegemonies; the care they find for themselves and other people, with other people, emerging whole-enough with their collective--family/friend/mentor nexus; learning to survive the patriarchal-colonial system, becoming disloyal, anti-heroes. It's all a differing sort of story from the "prick tale", where the Man-hero takes up arms against foe, real or imagined, creates the world in his vision; fealty to a cause which is his own desire-machine; the desire of the First Man he has inherited through callused, painfully tight handshakes through time.

But the feel-good feel goes beyond. I think something bold happens in these stories.

I’m a bit new to Le Guin’s project of composting our myths but you can’t help but feel new sanguine cultural flow from the advanced logo-ero she develops in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.

If I am allowed a primitive literary-criticism gloss. What is picked up along the way: the misinformation and guidance from elders (both useful to (re)combining a new narrative of self), the wrought learnings from misfired expressions of need (for “boys”, peer acceptance, spiritual stability), the new kinds of love from parents and friends that evolve from changing circumstances. It seems especially apparent in the serials. Each episode there’s a satisfying build, a paced emergence that’s lovely because the wins are not blood-soaked triumphs. Transitions, evolutions, forks, back-tracks, shifting winds, climbs, descents; it’s a kind of Sunday hike through the woods with the Fellowship of the Ring in peacetime. Not the “linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic” (Even the fantastical dragon time appropriations of Percy Jackson still fit the prick), but story that describes “what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everthing else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.” Unending…but not Neverending. (Though perhaps a re-reading of Bastian’s adventures is due now that I’m starting to finally put things into this sack (of a blog).)

Motherland: Fort Salem and Cobra Kai kinda fucks with all this too. Prick tales recast and modulated are problematic. They can be awesome and interesting because they don’t totally abandon tete-a-tete action (which, when crafted through martial arts is personally gripping (especially for an amateur artist of the martial myself)); and yet, these imaginative alternate worlds and thoughtful respun contemporaries can still carry out seditious ploys. Maybe we can think about Motherland and Cobra Kai straddling prick tale and carrier bags as tactics and technologies of xenofeminist adaptations, calibrations, speculations that transform through “seeping, directed subsumption”; since there is no pure refuge from patriarchy and eyeballs of grief-stricken viewers, anyway. Liminal bacteria waved through by situated materialist praxis. I couldn’t reject Cobra Kai whole cloth despite much of the character development of the teens is wrought through pugilisms (everyone literally joins a dojo); it’s softenings and care for men feels valuable when toxic masculinity runs rampant in the culture. Also, I wonder about the dojo. The split lips and bruises that result from Johnny’s tough, mangled love create openings; the kids can take more; take in more; become spacious (punching) bags. Face hits could be a technology of transformation when there are limited options for situated emergence in the hyperreal suburban desert of early 21st century SoCal. How big of a purse do we have here??

The immune system, rather than being imagined as a force of protective soldiers made by the host, can be thought of as a group of passport control agents and bouncers. They know who to let in and who to keep out–and they have learned this through millions of years of evolution.

Delighting in teen fiction is not a trifle. “It matters what worlds world worlds,” reminds Haraway. And of course, a most important reminder from Le Guin, lest we believe the prick tales (which, if they are not careful, could cause major issues like exponential inequality, and/or loss of ecological balance): “People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”

Halfway through _Companions in Conversation_ and I'm having this memory of being in college -- clacking away code points on the cheap silicons of a Micron computer -- practicing new knowledges in my class essays just like Haraway admits while writing the _Cyborg Manifesto_: "trying out some of the knowledges that hadn’t been mine that I was getting from my colleagues _[professors (in my case)]_ and the graduate students in the program." I remember deploying the token "implosion." I probably got it from Haraway.

And yet – perhaps a small singe of regret in my tummy neuronics, and deja vu – this word play was happening while I was coming to grips with the nightmare material of Black and Brown people in America through black feminist and black feminist incarceration studies. Our class journaled, and so I produced heartbroken journaling about the new Jim Crow (before Michelle Alexander would be able to corrupt the nation), taking some liberties with text. I wonder, now, if the linguistic turns in those reflections foreclosed, too soon, real collaborative feeling; like community (or, because it’s hard to resist, kinship and worlding). All these students toiling away in separate rooms and library cublices, synthesizing separately. Autopoietic onanisms. Needed more sympoiesis. I still regret a final project that was a bit too stylistic and “discursive” – performing the film student, trying to dazzle a little with Final Cut Pro; but some good calories lost. The art folks I admired made it hard for me to distinguish between medium and message, or situate with them with grace. (Not that Haraway was successful for everyone. But she kept playing whilst under the microscope.) I’m remembering a kind of safe feeling in postructuralism. But perhaps that was just the safety of academia which easily postpones praxis and doing something while chatting in the corridors of monuments to robber barons. Because, like, I’m also remembering that the materiality was a welcome call to action. Perhaps I wielded it – some subconscious desire for participation in activist and join movement(s) for climate, economic, gender, racial justice – as an antidote to the fist two years of cultural studies and dorm-chair politics. It’s hard to remember exactly if I was that wise; maybe the blunt horrors of the Bush regime’s colonialism/imperialism was enough of a catalytic flow through the student bodies progressive consciousness.

Still, interesting to wonder, now, about the concurrent postructural deluge of neologisms and deconstructing of gender, race, class oppressions, cyborg multiplicities back then; while faced with newly understood, centuries old urgencies of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and Black holocaust. I’m at the same place now, returned, recurred. Which is somewhat shocking and all too expected in America.

That said, the second time around, considering how Haraway’s work traveled and continues to travel in the last 15-20 years, I’m excited to be hailed again, thinking with her. While moving duckets to organizing, talking to white brothers about racism. Worlding assemblages seems really relevant still as the complexes of racial capitalism and white psychosis have become wider, deeper, and more micronic.