Darkoshi

I was going through some of my old online journal entries which I don't keep online anymore, and got the idea that perhaps I should post them back on my website. It doesn't matter if hardly anyone ever looks at them; they are a part of my history, and some are quite poetic. But it would be nice if they were tagged, so that I could easily find all posts related to various topics. But I could do that! Instead of just posting the original html files on my website, I could post each entry into a journal system like my dreamwidth account, and tag them at the same time! I haven't even managed to find the time to tag all of my old LiveJournal entries though.

I'm not poetic like I used to be. Out of pain came poetry. Nowadays I avoid writing when I'm feeling bad. There's no point in making other people feel blue too. If I write about pain nowadays, it seems embarrassing, whiny, and repetitive. Not that I completely avoid it.

*
i want
my words
to be
beauty
*

I've been pruning and cutting down some small trees in my yard; trees growing in places where I don't want them to grow. I don't like doing it; I feel bad for the trees I'm killing and/or mutilating; I feel bad for the insects and animals that may have lived on or played on them. I sort of feel like an emotionless killer. It's so easy to cut down living branches. So easy to saw through a 3 inch trunk. Killing things, simply because I don't want them where they happen to be.

There are ant mounds in my yard. I may end up putting down bait to kill the ants. I haven't yet decided... if the mounds didn't get bigger and didn't multiply, they wouldn't bother me; but they do, and I don't want my yard to end up full of fire ants. So I may try killing them. I don't like doing it, but in the end, it is a simple matter to do. I don't have to think about the hundreds or thousands of dying ants... just like I don't have to think about the trees. Emotionless. Easy. I wonder if that is what serial murderers feel when they kill people. No, they get some kind of pleasure out of it, right? So not that. But then, I wonder if that is what hardened criminals feel when they victimize and murder people. Nothing. Expendiency. You don't want the person to be alive, or you don't care about their pain, so you hurt or kill them, for your own benefit.

The particular post I was looking for was one in which I voiced sadness and anger at FF pruning/cutting the trees which grew in front of my bedroom window, when I lived at her house. It's so ironic, that now I'm doing the same kind of thing. No sadness; no anger; it's just what one has to do, to keep things from getting overgrown and overly shady.

Irony.
Not who I used to be.


Oh. There are these very cute little insects that live on the trees around here. They are camouflaged to look like little bits of bark. But they have white fluff/feathery stuff on their tail ends.

I came across an amusing 5-year-long thread titled "So you want to grow a gardenia, huh? (also known as the infamous suicidal gardenia thread)". From the parts I read, it sounds like gardenias yearn to be ignored and left to their own devices, and that they grow best that way. Although it seems to help if you have them planted in the ground in the South, as opposed to in a pot in California.

Although there's also this post (edited for readability):
"... After 3000 hrs on the internet, gardening books and help from 300 professional growers and 4 gardening CDs, here is what I have learned. They like water but you have to keep them semi-dry. They love sun but you have to keep them in the shade. You feed them often. Described as somewhere between two days and two years only on Sundays with a blue moon rising. They love northern exposure if you have them on the southern. They love acid and iron unless you give it to them. They love to grow spider mites, which you can't see, and aphids. I have found that if you buy older plants, they take longer to die. ..."

Of course, that whole thread had absolutely nothing to do with the info I was originally searching on.