stackcats

Tomorrow I have to go back to work, but today was one last beautiful day. We drove out to Petroglyphs Provincial Park near Peterborough. The petroglyphs themselves are a complicated and problematic thing; they were stripped of their moss and surrounding environment, blackened, and surrounded by a fairly brutalist structure by settlers from the 50s-80s, and that's obviously not how they're meant to be seen, but now that they're like that, the parks service and Curve Lake First Nation does its best to keep the place both sacred and educational.

It's really stunning, looking at the carving and knowing that the people who made them lived and died and made their mark at least 6000 years ago, and here we are still looking at them and learning their stories and appreciating them.

There are two trails in the park, so we walked one of them.

( nature )

Feeling, I think, a little desperate to extend the Last Day, we stopped for dinner in Peterborough at a cute Mexican place. Our waiter, whose hand was swollen from a wasp sting the day before, was very friendly when we said we were from Toronto, and suggested we visit the Wutai Shan Buddhist Garden. Alas, it was about to close, but we did get a glimpse.

( cool Buddhist things )

Finally, we stopped at an abandoned gas station for moody, atmospheric pictures of slow rural decay.

( the age of cars is ending )

And now it's off to sleep if I can; tomorrow looms.

Just finished: Be Gay, Do Crime: Sixteen Stories of Queer Chaos, edited by by Molly Llewellyn. This was very fun. Uneven as all multi-author anthologies are, but overall strong in quality. My favourites (don't ask me to remember titles or authors, I am tired): A trans woman and her ex-boyfriend steal a drug that is basically perfect HRT but causes your memories to disappear. A woman gets cursed by her ex, who then shows up in an attempt to make amends. A found family group of queerdos fight a developer that's trying to buy their housing development. A woman in an abusive relationship accidentally adopts an asshole rabbit who shits everywhere and hates her girlfriend. My favourite was one where a woman, artistic dreams thwarted in youth, enters children's colouring contests to win prizes. Really a lot to enjoy here, though I would have liked the gays to do more crime. Some of the stories were good but didn't have enough crime in them.

Currently reading: The Jaguar Mask by Michael J. DeLuca. I got this for free in a swag bag and almost hesitated because I have so much on hold at the moment and it looked quite dense but hoo boy it's great so far. It's set in Guatemala and follows two characters, Indigenous artist Cristina, whose mother is collateral damage in what looks like the assassination of a foreign human rights lawyer, and Felipe, an illegal cab driver who is roped into the investigation by El Bufo, a corrupt ex-cop. The writing is devastatingly beautiful. Sometimes I just go too long without reading really great prose, which is such an inherent part of my enjoyment of literature. It's so well-written, and the political intrigue and specificity of the setting and characters are *chef's kiss*. The speculative fiction elements are pretty muted (Cristina gets visions, Felipe is low-key a jaguar wearing a series of human and animal masks) and could just as well be metaphors, to the extent that I almost hope they are. I'm really into this one.

It's still Friday so I can still do a podcast Friday. (Note for the curious: I am back in town in body but not in spirit.)

It is none other than Wizards & Spaceships with "This Episode Is Epic ft. Sophus Helle" and it is the most interesting discussion of the ancient world and the epic form that you will hear this week. Personally I can't get enough of ancient sagas these days and Sophus is the perfect person to talk about them—as the translator of the coolest edition of the Epic of Gilgamesh and one of the brains behind the Electronic Babylonian Library, he is brilliant, knowledgable, and funny, and he has a lot to say about why these stories resonate today.

I would say more about it but just go and listen.

This'll be real quick since I am off in a rural area with spotty internet access, but have some Biodome and Insectarium photos.

( animals )

Pretty/weird

( photos )