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iwadori · 3 years

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When they neglect you for another girl Part 5 (Kuroo)

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five

Word count: 1.3K

Genre: angst, fluff

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You and Kuroo have been dating all throughout highschool and now your in you first year of university

It’s a bit harder to see each other because of your conflicting class schedules

But when you did see eachother kuroo has been acting a big suspicious, ‘secretly’ glancing at his phone or always needing to head out early.

And you were going to get to the bottom of this.

You were just finished with your class, and you had plans to meet your boyfriend at the library so he could tutor you for your chem test that you on Tuesday. On your way over there, you got boba for both of you and some study snacks to get you through the session.

You arrived their first, which you didn’t really mind as Kuroo was usually a bit late to your study sessions (especially recently with his dodgy behaviour.) You decided to go over your recent class notes as you were waiting, which was pretty useless as you didn’t understand anything.

You actually met Kuroo bonding over chemistry, since it definitely wasn’t your best subject so in your first year your chem teacher suggested getting a tutor and recommend Kuroo Testuro the self proclaimed best ‘chemist’ in the school.

It’s been half an hour and Kuroo hadn’t shown up, you were about to call him until you saw a quite disheveled looking Kuroo who is heaving out of breath.

“Tetsu, what happened to you?” you exclaim with amusement.

“Umm I kind of got in a fight?” he said questioning himself “well not really a fight but a disagreement.”

“A fight? With who?” you said a bit too loudly, as the librarian gave you an obnoxious ‘shusshhhh’ glaring at you.

“It doesn’t matter babe.” he said nonchalantly “I see you have your electrolysis work out, why don’t we get started.”

“But what abo-”

“So what is positive, the anode or the cathode?” he asked distracting you from asking him about what happened.

You spent two hours going over all the topics that were going to come up on your exam, and you can’t lie and say Kuroo didn’t help you. However, you weren’t as focused as you were wondering what happened to him.

After your study session, you both went to your dorms. Sadly, you couldn’t share a room since your University didn’t allow co-ed dorms (and maybe if you did live together, you’d be able to understand his odd behaviour.)

Even though he was still in highschool, every Friday afterschool you and Kenma made sure to spend atleast an hour playing a game online together, and today it was minecraft.

“Kenma help, theres a creeper outside my door!” you screech frantically running around on game.

“One second Y/N” he murrmed

“Kenma, do you know what’s going on with Kuroo.” you inquire.

“What do you mean, isn’t he being his loud cat-like self?” he responded

“Well yeah of course, but recently he’s been on his phone ALOT, and always leaving our dates early or showing up late and stuff so I don’t know I thought maybe you’d know something.”

“Oh maybe it’s just that he’s been pretty busy with Hana right now.” he said nochalantly

“Who’s Hana?” you say, your eyes squinting.

“Oh you don’t know Hana,” he said a bit surprised “Ooops Kuroo’s going to be so mad at me.”

“Mad at you, what do you mean mad at you?”

“Um, I got to go by Y/N!” he said quickly

“But Ken-” the sound of him leaving the party cut you off, and now you were in more of a confused slump then you were before. What is Kuroo hiding? And who the hell is Hana?

Since you couldn’t go over to Kuroo’s dorm right now because of your universities weird curfew times, you decided the only thing you can do right now is call him. After a few rings he finally answered and you could hear his background was really loud.

“Um, Y/N this isn’t really the best time right now – ow shit.” he said frantically.

“Kuroo, what's going on it sounds like you’re at a rave. Wait are you at a rave?”

“No I'm not at a rave I'm just – Hana stop doing that.” he said trying to whisper the last bit.

“Who’s Hana, Kenma mentioned her on PlayStation tonight but he didn’t explain.”

“Kenma did what? God – Ouch “there was ruffling in the background before Kuroo finally “Sorry Y/N I got to go..”

He hangs up before you could respond. What is wrong with these boys today?

It was your study week break, so you don’t really go into school to do classes you just have to prepare for studying. Which was great for you, since you could actually get revision done without being distracted and you can avoid Kuroo whilst thinking about what happened a few days ago.

Kuroo didn’t message you anyways, which kind of sucked, since these chemistry notes aren’t going to learn themselves. You went over each of your topics that you need to learn and you’d say you were pretty much ready for your exams. So for the rest of the week, you didn’t have much to do. Kenma was pretty busy with volleyball and his high school life and your boyfriend was still being odd and you didn’t have any real close friends at Uni since you’re only a first year and Kenma and Kuroo were mainly all you needed anyways.

You chose to go on a date, by yourself, to your favourite bookstore café to have some ‘self care’ time. On the way their you heard a familiar voice shouting down the street, looking in that direction you saw your boyfriend yelling “HANA!” “HANA!” repeadetly.

Going over to him you said, “Kuroo, are you okay?”

“Umm hey Y/N...” he said awkwardly rubbing the back of his neck “to what do I owe this pleasure?”

“The pleasure of being my boyfriend properly again,” you said smartly.

“Oh Y/N shit, im sorry about that” he apologised “I’ve just been really busy right now with Ha-”

“Hana.” you say rolling your eyes “Who is she?”

“I can’t really say Y/N, it was meant to a be a surprise.”

“A surprise for who?” you say

“Well fo-”

Before you can finish you say a loud ‘HISSS!’ Come from near your feet. “Hana! Thank god!” Kuroo said picking her up, but then dropping her again when she did a even louder HISSS at him. “Umm I really need to work on that..”

“So this is Hana.” you say a bit stunned “She’s a cat.”

“Indeed she is.” he said “ surprise...”

“You got me a cat?” you said still very stunned

“Indeed I did.”

“A feral cat?”

“Feral!” he said shocked “What do you mean feral!”

“Tetsu! She’s obviously feral!” you say reprimanded him.

“No she’s not! Look” he tried to pet her again and she nearly bit him and then sped off “Okay...maybe she is.”

Kuroo explained that he saw this cat one time outside of his dorm building and wanted to adopt her and give her to you as a gift. He’s been spending his time trying to ‘train her’ but every time it would result in Kuroo getting scratched up or him having to try and chase her around the city. You did appreciate the sentiment, however you reminded Kuroo that if he would’ve told you, you could’ve easily shown him that she was feral or if he listened to Kenma, then Kenma would’ve told him (which he did) that she was feral.

Kuroo did feel bad that his big plan didn’t work and he ended up looking like an idiot, not knowing the difference between a stray and feral cat. But you took him to a cat café as a little ‘pick me up,’ and promised him that for his birthday you’ll adopt a real cat for him.

An: this is basically a shit post but who cares 😃 Also am I the only that thinks that hana being a feral cat in the end is funny? Or is my humour that dry😭

#haikyuu x reader comfort #haikyu angst #haikyuu fluff #haikyu x reader #haikyu scenarios #haikyu headcanons #haikyu #kuroo testuro #kuroo x reader #kuroo tetsurou x reader #kuroo fluff #kuroo angst #signedwithane😌

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karliesbuzzcut · 3 years

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So I don’t know how you guys feel about the ‘Realistic Kaylor Timeline’ that’s been doing the rounds on this corner of the internet. I’m guessing some of you might feel conflicted, others might strongly disagree with some parts of it - but do not worry. I’m here to tell you how to feel about it: you love it. Because it’s mandatory to love anything that can get such a feral reaction out of TTB.

Today I’m bringing you

Top 7 Moments from TTB vs. Swiftiesleuth 2020

Fair wairning: I’m going to be very biased - I’ve not made my adoration for @swiftiesleuth a secret at all.

1. TTB’s grand entrance. LLLLLET’S GET READY TO TUMBLRRRRR!

Her disjointed sentences already let you know she’s a bit shaken “FAKE NEWS! The author admits they do not have inside knowledge like I do! I have all the inside knowledge, they only have outside knowledge, which ew - it’s muddy outside, and there’s bugs.”

2. Married people don’t ‘bonk’ - they make respectful and dignified love to each other. Preferably from opposite sides of the room.

My favourite was definitely when she said “if you’re a queer woman then you should really think about how you talk”. I vote for unpacking this one.

That ‘if’ - because of course, TTB has to perform a background check on you before she allows you to join The Gays.

That ‘should’. Please, TTB, complete that thought for us. Why is it that, as a queer woman, swiftiesleuth should do something in particular? You are not implying that she has to be especially careful about her words because she’s queer, right? I mean, you wouldn’t 😱 you’re a Social Justice Warrior after all.

TTB doesn’t like to be called “dude” either:

Which is why I suggest we all start calling her ‘Our Dude’. She will be our collective dude. And we can all be her little Dudes! It’ll be delightful, I’m telling ya.

3. In the year of our lord 2020, TTB decides it’s a good idea to pull the “I can’t be racist; my best friend is black” - but make it Jewish.

On this one I want to take a bit of a more serious tone, so I’ll limit myself to only one fart joke. I had no idea there were circumstances in which you couldn’t say you ‘converted’ to Judaism. I genuinely love that this seemingly silly passtime of mine actually teaches me new things. Now, I’m going to take a wild-ass guess and say TTB didn’t know that either... but more on this coming up.

Right now, let’s all rejoice at her choice of saying “I have facts” and right afterwards “Kaylor is likely already married”.

Kaylor, the sole entity, is married.

4. TTB tells herself “You know what? I haven’t been racist enough today”

At this point, TTB has become a cautionary tale about what happens to a person when they get married to an idea. It’s genuinely scary for me to think that my brain could trick me to such an extent that I could no longer process information that contradicts my beliefs. Just imagine it, there’s something about someone else’s religion that doesn’t make sense to you, and you decide to draw your conclusions from there. Okay, cool. Then someone from said religion explains that thing that didn’t make sense. And your reaction isn’t “oh, I maybe I should think about that, this person clearly knows more than me about this particular subject”. No. Your reaction instead is “I am entitled to my beliefs”

ISN’T THAT TERRIFYING!?

But more importantly... Isn’t that fucking racist? Wait... what? You are saying that isn’t racist enough? You think TTB should’ve also said that people don’t get to be offended by a word ‘only because it has been used as a slur in the past’? And then suggest to the person who asked her not to use that word - a person who is directly affected by that kind of bigotry - to get a dictionary? Nooo, come on, that’d be overkill. We are not trying to build a cartoon villain here!

5. Whaler and TTB are disappointed parents.

Truly emps, how dare you have a mind of your own. We raised you better than that!

I loooove that this day and age a fucking reblog means unconditional support to the author of the post... I’d watch that Black Mirror episode.

6. Both swiftiesleuth & TTB leave the chat with a motherfucking BANG.

I thought that I had hit comedy nirvana when Swiftiesleuth asked if her LGBTQ flavour bothered TTB and I thought no way in hell would TTB respond to that. BUT SHE DID. Aren’t you glad to be alive to witness that? “I have no knowledge of your flavour” she says. Well, TTB, I have no knowledge of Swiftiesleuth’s flavour either, but I’m working on fixing that *double winky face*

BUT TTB was like “talking about someone’s flavour isn’t hilarious enough, let’s leave this conversation with my best material”. And reminded us all of the percentage of black people she has working for her. I wonder if she decided to do the maths right after assembling her team or after she realised she could use it as an argument. Either way, super normal behaviour.

Also, also. I’d love to know what she considers a minority “well... Gerald has a pet snake... that should bring my minority percentage up by a couple points”

7. Special guests!

You wouldn’t be able to tell by how late to the party I was, but this was a big event here on Tumblr. Everybody was there... I’m told. Because I already feel like I’ve been working on this post for the past decade, I’ll keep it short and cute.

In one corner we have whaler and swift-79,

Obligatory bulletpoint list about all the things I loved about this post:

It wasn’t enought that TTB questioned swiftiesleuth’s queerness. Whaler said “fuck it - I’m questioning this bitch’s name as well” “Nat?” “you don’t look like a Nat” “but if you insist on identifying yourself as a Nat...” “I’ll put it in air quotes though”

I’m sorry... “If we are judging from pictures”? Isn’t that all that Kaylors do in 2020? No. No. I’m sorry. You guys also have emojis, sorry!

“Even Enty has questions about his sexuality” 😱 What? Enty? A blog dedicated to posting a constant stream of celebrity gossip once said that someone, somewhere, might be gay? No! 😱

I think swiftiesleuth was accused again of working for Scooter? Conspiracy Theorists are so adorably predictable, every time anyone disagrees with them (worse if that person seems to have done some research) somebody has to yell “they’re working for the enemy!”

Anyway, time for our final guest: the lovely @youlooklikebadnews , who I could’ve asked to write this whole post for me because they definitely did a better job than me at summarising the whole thing. But not only that, they were lucky enough to get a response from TTB.

...At this point I’m fairly certain that I’ll get invited to a Secret Session before TTB ever acknowledges my existence.

Doesn’t this read like what the villain says at the end of a shitty movie? Teasing a sequel and everything?

“You have not seen the last of TTB! I’ll be back with more proof and no copyright issues! KARLIE AND TAYLOR WILL RISE! Then you will see! YOU WILL ALL SEE!”

*flourishes cape and disappears into the night*

#ttb i love you #but not as much as i love swiftiesleuth #sorry

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dansnaturepictures · 4 years

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19th July 2020-Day 2 of dog sitting: Flowers, Missy, Lakeside walk and garden birds

On my second day alone with Missy I took the first two pictures in this photoset of a wet flower after a little rain over night on the balcony at the front of the house and Missy. I also took the third picture in this photoset of three Starlings on the roof opposite out the back. As we left for Missy’s walk there was very light rain falling which cooled me down a bit in humid conditions. After the Fleming Park walk yesterday I had sort of felt weird setting off to go to Lakeside, as whilst this was quite the staple of a Sunday afternoon walking here the usual dog walk we do around the perimeter of Lakeside really alongside little walks on my lunch breaks whilst working from home in early lockdown days ever since the first set of restrictions lifted whilst observing social distancing always our weekend wildlife/photography walks have gone back to normal. Some nine weekends prior to this one, with my lunch time walks as spring went on and there was more to see across the animal world we’ve had some amazing weather for it getting longer. So I thought would it be overload whilst I love Lakeside so much.

But doing the walk here with also a little look at the lake to let Missy swim safely away from any birds for a bit an addition to the usual dog walk felt great to do and the familiarity was comforting. It was which is the beauty of it an entirely different walk to any this week at Lakeside as no two walks are the same at all. I think this probably would have been so anyway, Sunday afternoon trips to Lakeside were some of the highest points in my week in my childhood before I got into birdwatching so I have romantic feelings towards being here at this time of week anyway. It was a very frequent time of week we came here me and my Mum in my early birdwatching days allowing the most magical moments like seeing my first ever of one of my favourite birds the Great Crested Grebe that fantastic afternoon in 2007 too. I also managed to meet up with my Dad for the walk at a social distance too making this quite the novelty him sharing two walks in two days with me likely for the first time since he and my Mum separated in 2013 actually. So I was suitably connected to him this weekend which continues to be so crucial as whilst I’m working from home I cannot see it is feasible to resume my two nights a week staying over his house its just at our house I can shut myself away in my room and work so easily and I think the need for social distancing would make this difficult as a weekly thing also.

The walk wasn’t without its unique wild moments too to add nicely to the last few weeks, a quick view I got of a Stock Dove was special. In and around that towards the end of the walk I saw a sea of Gatekeeper butterflies near vegetation in overcast conditions mostly and three Small Whites. More useful data in a slightly different area mostly to what I’ve surveyed before this summer for Butterfly Conservation’s ongoing ‘Big Butterfly Count’. https://bigbutterflycount.butterfly-conservation.org/ Small White and Large White seem to be doing well both in my surveys this year but in the big butterfly count generally notably to different years which is nice.

When home I took the fourth-seventh pictures in this photoset in whilst the sun did appear a little this afternoon a rather more greyer garden session than yesterday’s. The pictures are; two of Collared Doves, Rex and Violet the regular Feral Pigeons and another Lesser Black Backed Gull on a roof visible from my room. The Feral Pigeon picture very fitting as they’re called Rex and Violet as my Mum nicknamed her after her late parents. Rex my Grandad passed away fourteen years ago today I sad day I remember well. So a nice point for remembrance today. This comes after I, well I say remembered but its not the best world really my father’s father this week who passed away before I was born. As I got another picture into the Hampshire Chronicle via the Hampshire Chronicle Camera Club Facebook group my stag beetle picture at Fishlake Meadows late last month. My Grandad on my Dad’s side was the editor of the Eastleigh Weekly newspaper at one time which eventually became defunct and was merged into the Hampshire Chronicle. So it was just a nice time for reflection seeing this bird. This evening I took the eighth picture in this photoset a tail end of a nice red sunset, the day got sunnier as it went on.

And reflection has been key this weekend as its been nice to be looking after Missy and have a quieter and slower paced Saturday and Sunday and get a lot done and reflect on things whilst having two days of great walks and lots of photos and wildlife too. I do love seeing wildlife wherever though and taking photos whether that be one to produce or twenty plus. And I am happy to have another day’s leave tomorrow to go out somewhere when my Mum and her husband have returned. I hope you’ve all had a nice weekend whatever you’ve done, and have a great week.

Wildlife Sightings Summary: Goldfinch, House Sparrow, Long-tailed Tit, Jackdaw, Magpies making some interesting noises, lots of Blackbird, Collared Dove, Stock Dove, Feral Pigeon, Lesser Black Backed Gull, Black-headed Gull, Mallard, Canada Goose, Greylag Goose, Gatekeeper, Meadow Brown, Speckled Wood and Small White.

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milf-shizun · 5 years

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Allowing me more opportunity to be hungry for character lore? Excellent! Vorna: ☀️ 💐 🌼 👀 ❓; Luca: 🌙 💎 👀 ; Althea 🦋📚 👀

Allowing me more opportunity to talk about my dumbass children??? DOUBLE excellent! No seriously, ty, ilysm.

Vorna:

☀️ What makes your OC genuinely happy? A person, an item, their hobby? Where is the place they’re happiest, or most at home? What is the happiest they’ve ever been?

Her family makes her genuinely happy. All she wants is to see Moroven again. As far as hobbies/activities go, she's really into cooking. She knows how to handle rations and she's not opposed to simple foods, but if you give her the opportunity to make a real meal, she's almost too eager.

As of right now, she's the most at home whenever the group stops to make camp. When she was a soldier, they had to do that a lot. And the people she's with right now, while most of them clearly aren't soldiers, they remind her of people she used to know.

The happiest she's ever been, I can't quite share yet. But it was before she left her clan. She had everything she thought she could ever want.

💐 Does your OC like flowers? What are their favourites? Do they keep a garden of some sort? What flowers would they use in a flower crown? (and if you like, research the meanings behind those flowers!)

Ooh, good question. I don't think I've thought of that before. I think that while Vorna is definitely a pretty hardened individual, and she's come to appreciate some of the little things. She's no flower aficionado, but I think she would be really touched by the gesture of someone giving her flowers.

She doesn't keep a garden, but her favorite flower would be a snowdrop. If I were to make a flower crown for her, it would consist of snowdrops, pansies, anemones, gladiolus, and white heather. We love flower symbolism, folks.

🌼 Write a short drabble from your OCs POV meeting their LI (or if they don’t have a love interest, their best friend. If you don’t want to do a drabble, describe their first meeting instead!)

Okay, so I started writing for this, but I quickly realized that it was getting WAY too long. But I loved what was going on, and I didn't want to cut it, so I'm gonna keep it and finish it at a later date. But for this ask, I'm gonna try and explain how Dekran and Vorna came to know each other.

Dekran and Vorna actually knew each other as children. They played together with the other children in the village. They even both went to begin training to become soldiers in the same class, but Dekran dropped out after a month. He was really mouthy and sarcastic, and it got him in trouble with authority a lot. It drove Vorna insane, as someone who took her future as a soldier very seriously. So she wasn't too heartbroken to see him leave.

It wasn't until Vorna finished her training and became a member of her troop, the War Pigs, that Dekran popped back up again. He'd become a hunter/trapper and a bard (not like a battle bard, but a bard, he sings really badly). He'd begun trying to get Vorna's attention so he could start courting her, but she just.... REFUSED to give him the time of day because she thought he was a disobedient, immature little twit. But then also he was really funny and sweet to HER. But Vorna is Vorna and so she crushed those feelings under her iron boot. And Dekran didn't push her.

One day, Vorna was training with her friend Bushki, and Bushki was teasing her about Dekran so they could throw Vorna off balance. And it worked. But Dekran was there watching, and Bushki quickly pushed a sword into his hands and was like "oh hey you, you have a go" and he was just like "uH".

And Vorna was like "FINE just to prove that he's a weak lil bitch and I do NOT have ANY positive feelings towards him, I Will Fight Him." And Dekran, bless him, is no soldier. And Vorna laid him out on his ass.

But you see Dekran, having one brain cell when literally under the boot of a punk lady with a greataxe, just smiles dumbly and calls her amazing. That just makes Vorna *windows dial-up sound*.

He kept showing up for sparring practice after that, and Vorna didn't stop him. And the rest is history. Though, fun fact, it was much later during one of these sparring sessions alone, when Vorna pinned him by the chest under her foot, that he once again only had one brain cell and asked her to marry him.

👀 Describe your OC through the eyes of another person! (bonus + specify who)

Oh BOY. I don't even begin to know where to start with this one, aside from just copy-pasting her character description, and that seems very uncreative of me. YOU tell ME how your character sees her, how about THAT? Gotem.

❓ A random fact or short drabble! Or make up your own question to ask the OC!

Random fact? She loves snow. She would die in snow, if she could. I mean, she wants to die in battle, but preferably a snowy battle. She's also EXCELLENT at making snowmen.

Luca:

🌙 If your OC could have one wish come true what would it be and why? Would there be consequences to this wish or would they regret it once they get what they want? What would they give in return for this wish to come true?

Luca would give almost anything to know who his parents were. I have NO IDEA what my DM has planned, so the consequences of this wish are currently unknowable to me. But he does wish he knew who his parents were, and had gotten to stay with them instead of being raised by an Orc warband. The only good thing that came from the Orcs was that he met Mafareth.

💎 Does your OC collect anything? Is there a reason? When did they start and is it beginning to turn into a little bit of a hoarding issue? What do they do with their collection?

Does "things i've eaten that i probably shouldn't have" count as a collection? Because so far, he's eaten iron bars, giant spider webs, and an unknown number of mysterious mushrooms (one of which made his teeth into a lantern light). He's been eating random shit for most of his life, and he's only planning on eating more random shit in the future.

👀 Describe your OC through the eyes of another person! (bonus + specify who)

I CAN actually give you "Luca the Feral through the eyes of Gnerkle" considering Luca is 6'3" and Gnerkle is like 3" or something, ahsjdkd.

Luca is just a towering hunk of tatted-up, red-skinned muscle with a handlebar mustache and two big ol' bull horns on his head. And he swings a really, really big sword, and stands over Gnerkle like a safety barn whenever demons are about. Which is a lot.

Althea:

🦋 If your OC could change everything (or just something) about their life would they? What would they change? What do they think would happen if they did? What would their loved ones think?

Before going on her adventure, she would've changed everything. She wanted a sign from Oghma so, so badly.

But now, with the campaign over, I think she's happy. She's felt what it was like to have a purpose, to have people need her, to love two people more than herself. And now that she's saved the world, they can do anything they want.

The only thing she wants now, I think, is maybe to start her own library in Oghma's name. She'd be really competitive about it and make it big and full of MORE BOOKS than ANY OTHER temple to Oghma. Aolis would think she's pretentious and probably threaten to burn it down whenever Althea got on his nerves (though I don't think he ever would). Terri wouldn't understand who COULD or WOULD read that much, but if Althea needs her to swing her axe at some monsters in order to get an ancient tome, hell yeah she will.

📚 If your OC was given some kind of forbiddon knowledge, what would they do with it? Would they tell anyone? Use it for evil or good? How would it change their outlook on life, if at all?

Oh, boy, that's all Althea is AFTER is forbidden knowledge. She would curate it for her future library. Probably put it in the restricted section. She wouldn't use it for evil or let it be used for evil in any way, though. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is Althea's creed, but not at the expense of others.

👀 Describe your OC through the eyes of another person! (bonus + specify who)

She just LOOKS like a nerd, especially to Aolis. Terri sees Althea as tall, bony moon elf with almost no meat on her bones, but to quote Terri's player Rae when Althea cast a level 3 Guiding Bolt with a nat 20 and killed a giant worm, "I just remembered that Althea could seriously fuck someone up if she wanted to".

#Vorna the Unyielding #althea moonwhisper #luca the feral

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encephalonfatigue · 6 years

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wrestling with eden

some first thoughts about trying to grow vegetables this summer. seedling photos taken from march 18th to 25th.

I have too often fantasized about withdrawing into some solitary rural utopia to live off vegetables planted with my own two hands — fingers cloaked with the damp scent of decay, gentle bird song, and the quiet promise of new life. I’ve probably had this fantasy at least as far back as when I first read “Jayber Crow”, a novel by Wendell Berry in which the protagonist abandons the path of a seminarian to return to a quiet rural town called Port William where he grew up as an orphan. He lives simply as a barber and plants his own vegetables in his backyard. For some reason, both back then and still now, something was really quite appealing about this. Granted Wendell Berry’s poetic prose is hardly what I would call resistible, more often, extremely gorgeous. He feels like one of the last great literary Romanticists, and so the idea of “returning” is thematic to his work, even if it is to a place characterized by painful imperfection and finitude. I suppose Berry’s insistence is that this proverbial ‘old home’ even with all its shortcomings has its own sort of abundance, and that modernity’s ideas of progress and abstract economic growth can so frequently fall very short, even precipitating a type of gratuitous scorn for ‘neo-Luddite’ simplicity, physical labour, or the soiling of one’s hands.

I: Returning to Where?

This theme of “returning” (e.g. to the labour of growing food) surfaces as a rather common literary theme, from Voltaire’s Candide to Huxley’s Brave New World. Yet I’m also aware of the great shortcomings of the Romanticist notion of “returning”. I think one of the best twists to this literary trope was in Margaret Atwood’s magnificent novel “Alias Grace” (one of my favourites) where Dr. Simon Jordan during his time in Kingston interviewing Grace Marks tries to start a vegetable garden of his own, very unsuccessfully. Admittedly, I will be attempting to undertake a similar quest this summer, and I (only half-jokingly) anticipate the same sort of fate for myself.

Atwood has a lot of fun with this image of a desperately failing gardening endeavour, poking fun at Dr. Jordan bringing vegetables bought from the market each day to his sessions with Grace (as Grace proverbially rolls her eyes each time) and also describing the dirt underneath Dr. Jordan’s fingernails, seemingly symbolic of the deprivation characteristic of his time in Kingston and how consumed and exhausted he becomes with his case. In my reading of it, Dr. Jordon’s lack of success with his garden seems emblematic of his own sexual frustration — the lack of the garden’s fertility paralleling his own sexual life under pressure from his mother. In other words, this Eden we yearn to return to does not exist in the way we imagine it does, or if it does, it’s often full of failure and disappointment. Like Marks it is something we feel obligated to nurture and protect (in our imagination), yet its jouissance remains unattainable. The image of a failing garden also seems emblematic of Dr. Jordan’s growing disillusionment with finding innocence where he once thought it could be. Atwood’s reminder is that the bucolic ‘paradise lost’ we want to reclaim is fictive construction all the way down. Caddy smelled like trees and it’s comforting, but in reality, we were always in the midst of the sound and the fury, and life is more complex and messy than we can often imagine.

In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway wrote that “the cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection…” As a first-year student reading Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”, I became deeply absorbed with the book of Ecclesiastes, and it’s proposal that Haraway’s cyborg cannot quite recognize, an interesting exegetical elaboration on Genesis 3. The claim goes:

“for in respect of the fate of man and the fate of beast, they have one and the same fate: as the one dies so dies the other, and both have the same lifebreath; man has no superiority over beast, since both amount to nothing. Both go to the same place; both came from dust and both return to dust.” (Ecclesiastes 3:20, JPS)

And I admit I have often had this fantasy of returning to soil. Ecclesiastes like Genesis is surprisingly materialist in this respect. Mary Oliver elaborates quite beautifully on this Epicurean theme, saying:

“everything’s a little energy. You go back and you’re these little bits of energy and pretty soon you’re something else. Now that’s a continuance. It’s not the one we think of when we’re talking about the golden streets and the angels with how many wings and whatever, the hierarchy of angels… But it’s something quite wonderful. The world is pretty much — everything is mortal. It dies. But its parts don’t die. Its parts become something else. And we know that when we bury a dog in the garden. And with a rose bush on top of it. We know that there is replenishment. And that’s pretty amazing… And what more there might be, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure pretty confident of that one.”

II: Speaking of Death

Wendell Berry so often talks about death like this; for example, in The Unsettling of America, he quotes Sir Albert Howard talking about “the Wheel of Life (as he called it, borrowing the term from religion), by which 'Death supersedes life and life rises again from what is dead and decayed.’” Part of the consequences of our alienation from directly nurturing our own food is that we have grown so distant from the cycles of death and growth that such practices necessarily entail and guide our attention towards. I suspect that is in part where the Freudian diagnosis for modernity’s denial or repression of death comes from. Terry Eagleton, in a talk at the London Review Bookshop, mentioned that:

“For most of history, societies – pre-modern, tribal societies – have always believed that somehow an acknowledgement of death in some ritual kind of way is the condition for living well. Modernity tends to repress death; it can’t do anything with it. If you are seized by the ideology of progress, then it’s hard to fit death in at all. It’s embarrassing and it’s certainly not definitive (as it is for some pre-modern thought) of what life is actually about.”

Eagleton as a Catholic Marxist recognizes resurrection's centrality to the Christian tradition, and as John Polkinghorne has astutely pointed out, a proper acknowledgement of death’s finality and gravity is prerequisite for resurrection to mean anything at all, hence the distinction between Christian resurrection and Plato’s ‘survival of the soul’ (which so commonly passes for Christian eschatology).

Our alienation from death’s ubiquity is something I also sense as related to our unconscious fear of death, exhibited by euphemisms like ‘passed away’, the countless commercial products offering us body parts that appear younger (and farther from death), and especially in the enormous amounts of expenditure poured into military and carceral institutions, which promise to keep death at bay, and give some illusion of control.

III: Self-Sufficiency and Control

Contemporary vegetable gardening can often be framed in terms of these illusions of control and radical self-sufficiency. I think Wendell Berry is someone who’s very attentive to the ‘giveness’ and grace that unfolds quietly around him as a farmer, and growing food for a living allows him to see that there’s nothing to congratulate himself over with respect to this earthy practice. Also, that he is in no position to treat plants and the soil in any manner he wishes, with chemical byproducts from militaristic research. In the beautiful film “Look and See” Berry says:

“The world is in fact full of free things that are delightful. Flowers. The world is also full of people who would rather pay for something to kill the dandelions than to appreciate the dandelions. Well, I’m a dandelion man myself.”

It’s alarming to see the ideology behind the preemptive strikes of American militarism filter their way down into how North Americans engage in gardening or the pervasive ubiquity of hand-sanitizer dispensers. And how laughable it is when we use the language of “invasive species”, when we are of course the most destructive “invasive species” we know of. Ironically, even the U.S. Army in its "The Complete Guide to Edible Wild Plants" recognizes that all parts of the dandelion plant are edible. Euell Gibbons' "Stalking the Wild Asparagus" gives some good tips for when best to pick them. The Berkeley Open Source Food project is also a great place to learn more about feral foraging.

Anyways, I think Donna Haraway’s elaborations on Eden in “Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science” help expose the extent to which self-sufficiency narratives are constructed and crafted, especially in her chapter on Jane Goodall in a National Geographic documentary being filmed by her husband:

“[The National Geographic film] Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees (1965)… is a first contact narrative, recognizable within science fiction conventions… it is a story of the self-sufficiency… of a young single white woman in nature… The narrative of first contacts proceeds in several stages… Goodall, constructed as rigorously alone and undergoing hardships and dangers, first is shown spotting the elusive chimpanzees only by signs of their passage—a tuft of hair on a bush. She descends toward where she spotted the animals, but “the wild chimpanzees flee the pale-skinned stranger invading their domain.” No cameras are visible; no clue has been given so far how Goodall herself has been made visible…

Day ends, with Goodall on the mountain top. “Here Jane will spend the night, high above the African forest.” Goodall’s voice confirms, “…[I] enjoyed those nights in the mountains with no human companionship. …There is only one jarring note in the scene of the female representative of man alone in the Garden—she eats a spare dinner of pork and beans from a tinned can. The odd sign evokes the history of the transformation of systems of production and of daily habits in the mid-nineteenth century, when large-scale canning in the U. S. got a huge boost from demand created during the Civil War (Boorstin 1974: 309–22). The tin can on Jane’s mountain top preserves pork, beans, and the social relations of industrial capitalism enabling the colonial “penetration” and division of Africa.”

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As I try growing vegetables in my backyard this summer I also recognize the risks of getting a little too carried away with the fictive mythos of self-sufficiency. At the same time I’m deeply shaped by the story of Exodus, with its story of manna in the desert serving as a counter narrative to self-sufficiency. Gardening can be both a reminder of how dependent we are on things beyond ourselves, or it can yield a false impression of self-sufficiency. One view accounts for the variety of species we have co-evolved alongside for millions of years and the planetary systems that make our lives possible, the other does not quite register this reality. In some sense growing food does feel like an exodus of sorts from the type of capitalist commodification of food. Like Kool AD once rapped: “Some don't eat enough, food should be free, what up? It used to be, when it was growing on the trees and stuff.”

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Yet that “used to be” is also in some sense a fictive construction, though one that serves a purpose I think to be somewhat worthwhile. It really doesn’t take long though to realize there is no adequately or satisfactorily untangling myself from the inevitable contradictions of capitalism. I’m firmly implicated in it. Beyond the plastic gardening pots I bought from Dollarama, there are many other contradictions lurking less obviously out of view, like Jane Goodall’s camera-wielding husband and the long commodity chains and imperialistic military history buttressing her can of beans.

IV: Sphagnum Peat Moss

Starting seedlings for this summer vegetable garden, I shelled out a couple dollars for some dehydrated sphagnum peat moss pellets. Needless to say, I had almost no idea what peat moss really was when I purchased it, and how it was ‘harvested’, or rather ‘mined’. Having read somewhere that normal soil from by backyard e.g. was not ideal for getting seeds started (as they often have pathogens and seeds of other plants mixed in) I set about trying to find some starter soil at the closest big box retailer near my home. Jiffy peat pellets were all I could find. Only in the process of writing this did I gain a better sense of what sphagnum peat moss really is.

Sphagnum moss is in fact a moss (a rootless plant) as the name suggests that grows in wetland bogs. When sphagnum moss dies it is honoured with a new name: “peat.” (As Jesus once said: “I tell you, you are Peat, and on this bog I will build my garden, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it!”) Yet ironically, it’s dead vegetation from the very realm of Hades we are talking about here. This peat accumulates in layers submerged in wetlands. Peat pellets then are basically dehydrated moss corpses that provide a good substrate to start seeds on. Maybe they are emblematic of capitalism’s capacity to commodify the cycles of death and life, alienate these cycles from their contexts, and then render their underlying ubiquity invisible to human attention that is so conditioned by modern processes of production and consumption. Or maybe just invisible to people as clueless as myself.

Peat harvesting if done irresponsibly can contribute to the disappearance of wetlands, which is also well underway by worldwide wetland draining for agricultural or urban development. Peatlands are important carbon sinks, but become large sources of carbon emissions once drained, as they release all that carbon back into the atmosphere. They are also important treasure troves for historians and scientists trying to learn more about our past. Because of their acidity and anaerobic conditions, peatlands are very good at preserving the remnants of organic life. “Koelbjerg Man” is the oldest human bog body (‘mummy’) that has been found, dating back to ~8000 BCE.

The peat pellets I’ve started some seedlings on were harvested in Canada, probably somewhere in Quebec or New Brunswick, where most of the country’s peat harvesting is concentrated. There is a report put out by the Government of Canada that claims peat accumulates in Canada 60 times faster than the rate at which it is being harvested. And peat harvesting in Canada is subject to regulatory oversight ensuring measures for peatland restoration after harvesting takes place. The report also claims peat harvesting accounts for only around 0.02% of wetland loss compared to agriculture’s 85%. However, it’s difficult to get a sense of how benign peat harvesting is from a government that has such a vested economic interest in ensuring as much of its land remains as productive as possible. What I do know is Tim Moore, a professor at McGill, did explicitly identify peat harvesting as one of the threats to wetlands. It’s proportional contribution was not mentioned. There’s also a 2009 paper by Winkler and DeWitt at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who identify US peat-mining impacts to include:

“1) toxic-metal release from peat,

2) eutrophication of surface waters,

3) increased runoff (including flooding and impacts on fisheries),

4) release of organic pollutants,

5) changes of salt and freshwater systems,

6) changes in ground-water supply, and

7) air pollution and fires.”

So however marginal the impacts of peat harvesting/mining are, I still find the little seedlings sprouting by my window implicated in this strange situation. It’s certainly not an innocent Eden I’m ‘returning’ to, yet I haven’t quite escaped Eden either. Unable to escape the gravitational pull of that primordial Garden, this story of summer vegetable gardening also begins with the theme of death.

V: In the Beginning / Death

In “Genesis and Apocalypse”, Altizer’s thermodynamically inflected theology speaks of:

“the beginning of a full and final actuality, an actuality which is perishing itself, and a perishing which we know as history. For the advent of history is the advent of death… Thus the beginning of history is the beginning of fall, a fall from a consciousness that is closed to the full actuality of perishing and death, and a fall from an original or primordial state or condition that is an undifferentiated condition and therefore an original state of serenity and silence. That fall is the inauguration of the revelation of I AM…

…with the closure of the cycle of eternal return, ending becomes manifest and real as an irrevocable perishing, a death… The advent of irrevocable death is… the advent of a final actuality, an actuality inseparable from unique and irreversible events, and an actuality bestowing upon life itself the finality of an inescapable and irrevocable death. Consequently, the finalities of life and death are now inseparable, as the advent of irrevocable death bestows upon life itself a new finality…

Only the final ending of eternal recurrence or eternal return makes possible a once and for all and irreversible beginning, an actual beginning which is absolutely new, and is absolutely new only by way of the absolute ending of an eternity which is eternally the same. Consequently, God is the self-emptying or the self-negation of that eternity, a self-negation which is a once and for all and irreversible event, and therefore is the actual event of death.”

Altizer suggests that if we imagine God within the domain of eternity, ‘outside time’, unchanging, then Creation for God is a type of death, or the beginning of a death. It is the death of primordial eternity that allows temporal history to burst forth. Soil and peat both allude to this untidy paradox intermingling death and new life together. Many modern peat bogs formed around 12000 years ago after the glacial retreat of the last ice age, around when agriculture was beginning to emerge. A tiny and silent eternity, broken, in the act of harvesting, all for some superfluous seedlings to begin the irreversible process of sprouting.

Sphagnum peat moss, apart from being biologically dead, also alludes to the threat of a much larger and menacing death. As peat becomes a quickly disappearing carbon sink across various global ecosystems, these little seedlings sitting by my window cannot help but allude to the menacing global warming apocalypse very vivid in 21st century imagination. The Edenic resonance is stark: “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” Jack Miles, in his book “God: A Biography”, suggests:

“When the serpent tells the woman that, contrary to what the Lord God said, she will not die if she eats of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the serpent is telling the truth. She and the man do not die when they break the Lord God’s command; certainly, they do not die, as the Lord God had warned, ‘as soon as you eat of it.’”

Yet it’s far less certain the prophetic warnings of climate change are full of empty threats. Death is impending. Peat is one of many carbon troves being mined and released into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases. Ta-Nehisi Coates yields a prophetic warning that connects the historical plunder of colonized peoples with the contemporary plunder of the earth:

“Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves.”

VI: Vulnerability and Interdependence

What this looming threat of death instills if anything, is a particular realization of fragility and vulnerability, both in ourselves and those around us. If the crucifixion is to mean anything to the Christian imagination, it must recognize God in the middle of this fragility and vulnerability also. If loving God and loving others are one and the same great command, it must recognize this fragility as reality, and therefore also the urgent need to care and protect. And this fragility and vulnerability in both others and God, must also lend itself to a realization of a vulnerability in one’s own self, and an understanding that being ‘self-made’ is an implausible narrative that, like bad soil, holds no water.

This complex interdependency however implicates all of us, even in getting a vegetable garden started I now realize. Is self-sufficiency plausible, I ask myself, when I did not make the laptop I’m typing this on, or when I did nothing to pump the water for my plants all the way from Lake Ontario, to say nothing of cleaning this water or constructing the infrastructure to get it past my doorstep. Did I carefully tend and select cherry tomatoes year after year like Alan Chadwick, or start a corporation to commodify such a plant and sell it in a local hardware chain store? Before making a delicious salsa verde, did I gather seeds last season from beautiful little Tomatillo fruits to return to the Port Credit seed library?

What I think the Port Credit seed library is so beautiful at reminding me of is that planting and growing things is a community affair. Seeds imply people who came before me, and my dependence on them. A seed library suggests that this dependence does not require capitalist commodification. There is an alternative mode of being and relating in this world. Maybe someone will tell me the better alternative to sphagnum peat moss to get my seedlings started next year. But seriously though, if Dr. Simon Jordan’s gardening fate is my own, there will be a few less seed packs at the Port Credit seed library next year. For that I will be deeply sorry, but it will also be something to laugh about. After all, I’m a long ways away from untangling my own eating habits from capitalist commodification. There is maybe no innocent utopia to return to here. I don’t know what to do with myself most days. I suppose though that these seedlings have germinated some thoughts in my own head, thoughts that would not have otherwise made their way there. That’s an ancient and old miracle about plants. I like to think there’s something to having conversations with plants and there’s something to the Amazonian Cofan notion that plants can sing and speak to us. I will finish with this lovely excerpt from a Wade Davis talk:

“the thing about tryptamines is they cannot be taken orally because they're denatured by an enzyme found naturally in the human gut called monoamine oxidase. They can only be taken orally if taken in conjunction with some other chemical that denatures the MAO. Now, the fascinating things are that the beta-carbolines found within that liana are MAO inhibitors of the precise sort necessary to potentiate the tryptamine. So you ask yourself a question. How, in a flora of 80,000 species of vascular plants, do these people find these two morphologically unrelated plants that when combined in this way, created a kind of biochemical version of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts?

Well, we use that great euphemism, "trial and error," which is exposed to be meaningless. But you ask the Indians, and they say, "The plants talk to us."

Well, what does that mean? This tribe, the Cofan, has 17 varieties of ayahuasca, all of which they distinguish a great distance in the forest, all of which are referable to our eye as one species. And then you ask them how they establish their taxonomy and they say, "I thought you knew something about plants. I mean, don't you know anything?" And I said, "No." Well, it turns out you take each of the 17 varieties in the night of a full moon, and it sings to you in a different key. Now, that's not going to get you a Ph.D. at Harvard, but it's a lot more interesting than counting stamens.”

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