Phthursday Musings: The Guano Islands Act

Our village has a setup where yard waste, if put into those big paper bags, will be taken away (on garbage day, but by a different vehicle). But they only do this from April 1 to November 30.

We have multiple mature sycamore trees in the yard which start shedding leaves on about December 1, so this arrangement is fantastic.

April 1 is approaching though so guess what? That’s right: there are eight bags of yard waste stacked in our garage. And there could easily be eight more!

This is the sort of thing that we are freaking blessed to have the freedom to think about and offer mild gripes about because we happen to live in the richest nation in the history of this or any other known world where we have generally functional and reliable services built up over decades of mostly competent low-level administration.

For all of the buzzing and screeds and horrific nonsense that washes across our eyes and ears on a daily basis, you’d hope that through it all people might be able to gain perspective, but of course so much of the point of the buzzing and screeds and horrific nonsense is to prevent people from being able to gain perspective.

As I get older I find that I just want to spend more of my time appreciating the beauty and wonder of the world and with people who also appreciate the beauty and wonder of the world and who can maintain a sane perspective on all of the insanity, like how the sycamore doesn’t shed until the day after they’ll pick up yard waste, or how our federal government is being run by the criminally deranged and the same major media who wouldn’t think twice about roasting a prominent woman if she dared have her hair done the wrong way are perfectly content to act like what’s happening is perfectly normal.

This is where I want to write something very funny that unfortunately I think only a couple of people will get so instead I’m going to ruin the joke and just offer this picture of Bono from Achtung, Baby because it’s pretty much the same joke:

I’m pleased to say that I’ve finally gotten over myself and will be publishing the first META-FIFTY installment this weekend. As a public service announcement (with guitar!) I will remind / inform that the META-FIFTY is a sort-of-countdown of “top fifty albums”, except that I’m maybe blowing up the ordering and part of getting over myself seems to be to not care if I manage to wind up with more than fifty.

Getting over onesself is not always an easy thing to do, especially when onesself is meself, or selfI, or whatever. Surely you know what I mean, except, of course, you cannot. Also, Hugh cannot.

Anyway, I’ve mentioned going through a series of weekly sessions of reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way through Molly Knight’s The Long Game newsletter and what I think I’m finding is that I am often the biggest obstacle to accomplishing things. This happens all the time with META-SPIEL ideas which take months to pull together, like the long piece I finally published this past weekend about the Chicago Red Stars. From me, writer, to you, reader, I say that as much as I wish I was one of those people who might “just write for myself”, it requires having an audience to really drive myself most of the time, even when I’m pretty sure I’m liable to either make no sense or simply bore the hell out of you. What I’m really concerned about is upsetting you because I do not want to upset anyone, but that’s not usually what blocks me, what blocks me is thinking that if I put something out there that I want to have be really good and it falls flat that I’m somehow letting myself-I down, letting you down, maybe even letting Hugh down. (I know what you’re thinking here: Make him stop saying that!)

I go into all of this to say that I actually think Phthursday Musings have been incredibly helpful to me over time because, and I hope you, dear reader, will not take offense at this, but, you know what, I think it’s okay if I put something out there some week and, well, it’s just silly. It’s okay to be silly. We should all probably willingly embrace it more than we do.

With that in mind as I roll out the META-FIFTY I want to disabuse anyone of the idea that it’ll all be all really important and intellectual and whatever. Sometimes fun is just good dumb silly fun and sometimes that’s where greatness is found!

Your Phthursday Flag is that of the New Zealand dependent territory of Tokelau:

The flag is of a Tokelauan canoe sailing toward the Southern Cross. You are of course thinking, where on earth is Tokelau? Well, it is here:

Tokelau consists of three atolls - Atafu, Nukunonu, Fakaofo - and has a population of about 2,500. Imagine for a moment being born and spending your entire life on Atafu. It sounds wonderful. I’ll bet their trees aren’t jerks like mine!

What I like about this flag is that it’s not a canoe sailing toward the Southern Cross, it’s a CANOE!!! sailing toward the Southern Cross. They are so not messing around that they actually went with a 1:2 proportion flag instead of a more common 2:3 flag, presumably so they could make the canoe even bigger.

If you took the flag and changed nothing excepting making it square, I’d assume it was some sort of mid-late-90s math-rock band’s third album with a name like Which Atoll Next? and with at least one song featuring the melodica.

Wikipedia reports that Tokelau was actually claimed by the United States in 1856 under the Guano Islands Act and that Swains Island remains disputed by the U.S. and Tokelau. Look, if you’re not familiar with the Guano Islands Act, you just need to go read that article. In short, it was the American government in the mid 19th century saying that it could claim any uninhabited island for the purposes of mining bat shit. Really. The core Tokelau atolls, it seems, were not consistently inhabited back in 1856, apparently because they were out canoeing.

This all reminds me of not one but two Pavement b-sides:

The arrival of new Pavement b-sides used to serious events and I don’t think there’s a near equivalent to that any more. I mean, there is, it’s the 24×7 footage of your favorite K-Pop stars while they’re trying to drink a grapefruit juice or whatever, but, no, that’s also not the same thing.

This is the second time in as many days I’ve had occasion to bring up “Kris Kraft”!

I am not sure that this week’s installment has a cohesive theme. Sometimes this happens and I get to the end and I have to figure out what to actually call the thing and what picture to use.

So I did this. I went to my phone and I went to my photos and I searched for “canoe” and surprisingly got two pictures. They’re actually pictures of kayaks but that’s close enough. It’s me in a kayak, taking a picture of my kid in a kayak.

I figured, this is good, but probably, Bono should be hanging out in the creek with us.

This could really use some large sycamore leaves, in shocking pink and green.

Yeah, this looks great!

And now I need a name for all of this, and, done.