Heather Thompson Heather Thompson

Love Letter to the Void

Singing my life with his words…

It’s true what my friends say that I fall in love too quickly. A crooked tooth alone can crank me open like a tin of sardines -feed on me! I am chock full of omega 3 oils and healthy fats! 

But then, after swimming in their waters for some time I find myself tired and looking for a rock to crawl up on to. I look down and see my body has been evacuated. My healthy fats and oils are no longer there, only teeth marks from the feedings. My bones are sticking out, when was the last time I ate?

This is when and where I first heard your voice. I was a shell of myself, slowly replenishing off the lichen and barnacles that grew off the rock I found myself sitting on. You were a floating storehouse of the most gorgeous food, carried on currents that played the inner curl of my ear like tickled ivory. No gauntlet of awkward dates required. No shaving or putting on makeup.

I ate and was amazed at the flavours and textures. Never the same combination twice. I could feel the nourishment entering my blood stream like water to a thirst. It occurred to my revived cells to do some of the things they’d been neglecting. I wrote a story after not writing fiction for 3 years. I masturbated. I bought flowers for my kitchen table. 

But one morning I woke up with an ache that stretched from my chest to my skull. And with this ache came a vision of me, alone in your storehouse having eaten everything, all 417 episodes. There was nothing left. All my delicious squishy fat disappeared instantly and I was emaciated again. 

I started depriving myself in the present to somehow push this event horizon as far into the future as I could. I rationed myself on one episode a day. Your books were taken off the nightstand and put on the shelf next to the two heaving tombs of Dostoyevsky’s ‘Diary of a Writer’ where I’d be sure to avoid looking (having bought them years ago with ambition that far outweighed my attention span). I looked my cat gravely in the face and told her we had to prepare for a dopamine hungry winter. 

My friends told me to get on the apps. I retched. Speed dating? I passed out cold. 

What I can’t seem to sufficiently explain to anyone is that to be in love with a voice is a beautiful kind of in-love. Its not a loneliness that needs curing, its being in love with the knowing that there is a human out in the world who reflects my best bits back to me and is in no way asking me to contort myself into the service of his insecurities. Still, most people seem to have something against this kind of love and call it names; unrequited, limerance, dellusion, as though the only valuable investment of love was one that resulted in mutual surveillance and endless take-away negotiations.

No, I was going to Charlie Bucket nibble my way through your entire Acast offerings instead.

But then, in writing this very letter, I came across a portal of sorts, a perpetual spring.  Transmuting the one-way love I feel into fuel for my own creative impulses eases my hunger for your creations. Still feeding on your work but more like it were sun-ripened wildberries and less like eat-fighting my sister for the chip bowl. In doing so I become a crush conduit, a catalyst for all human chemistry. The storehouse will never empty because I am filling it too and now the flavours and textures are combining in ways as yet untasted by mankind. 

It makes me want to grow things that don’t exist yet, to roll in fecund mud. 

Thank you for letting me feel what Roberta and Lauryn did when that guy killed them softly. Your voice leads me, not into a watery grave but back to my burgeoning self. 

Para-socially yours,

Heather

Read More
Heather Thompson Heather Thompson

Automata Peon

*cover image screenshot of YouTube ad for AI assistant app

Whenever a new technology emerges that strikes fear in the hearts of mortals, someone in the conversation will point to the fact that mankind always resists innovation. "People thought the printing press was evil" they'll remind everyone without being asked. And that blurry viewpoint takes the edge off the panic long enough to dampen one's instincts to run straight to the woods. 

Well, in many ways, the printing press did cause evil. The mass producing of Catholic religious texts in the 1400's neatly aligned with the time and place of the Spanish Inquisition and led to the rise of Europe’s most popular past time, witch hunting. 

So rather than dismissing the concern around technological advancement as superstition, we might want to ask how women felt about the printing press putting a copy of the Maleus Maleficarum in every midevil incel's hand. 

And while we're asking questions, how did the parents of the amputated children forced into factory work in Victorian England feel about the "innovation" of the steam engine? Or how Congolese child labourers in cobalt mines are currently feeling about the advent of the electric car?

Who benefits from technological innovation and who pays the bill?

John Henry was a Steel Driving Man

Thanks to the preservation of emotional data found in oral folklore and folksongs, we know a lot about how people felt about steam powered innovations. And what we learn is that the battle between man and machine is rooted in exploitation of the working class. John Henry may have beaten the steam powered drill with his hammer but his heart exploded from overwork in the process. It is not a coincidence that this cautionary tale originated in the folk song traditions of African American railroad workers.

The steam powered drill was an innovation celebrated by the private investors of the early railroads, those with local “agricultural interests” ie. plantation owners, for whom the railroad made the exchange of slaves for goods more efficient.  But it was a previous invention, that of whiteness, that decoupled the mutual interests of working class European immigrants and enslaved Africans.  Presently the steam powered drill is no longer in use while whiteness continues to divide and conquer the organizing potential of exploited working populations. 

A quick history lesson that I hope illustrates what whiteness works to obscure:

  • 1600’s to 1833 - The UK plays a central role in the transatlantic slave trade allowing it to establish colonies… fucking everywhere and amass a disgusting amount of wealth for the monarchy. 

  • 1730’s - The UK becomes the largest slave trading nation in the world.

  • 1764 The Spinning Jenny is invented. Up until this time women handspun thread and made their own textiles at home, selling them piecemeal to a local merchant allowing them to make their own money while still attending to their children’s care. Sure the occasional Rumplestiltskin would come along and rip a girl off but who needs HR when you have 16 brothers and a crafty village hag? 

  • 7 years later the first water powered cotton mill was built, permanently shifting working men, women and children away from home and into factories, introducing pay-gaps between all three groups in descending order.

  • 1785 the power loom is invented (sorry everyone that pivoted from spinning to weaving),  the two machines took cotton manufacturing from accounting for 16% of the UK’s economy to 42%.  This high volume manufacturing capacity quickly outstripped the local raw cotton supply.

  • 1800, finished cotton textiles were the UK’s primary export, having solved their resource supply issues by utilizing established slave trade infrastructure to import cotton as well as tobacco from the Americas.  Side note: The Revolutionary war between the US and UK did not stop trade. There were occasional wartime disruptions of the supply chain but ultimately trade continued and even increased immediately following the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

  • 1800 also saw the popularization of the Magdalene laundry “charity” model, tested first in Ireland then exported throughout the empire. A prison model similar to todays privatized penitentiaries, wherein prisoners (in this case any woman that committed the crime of getting pregnant out of wedlock) are provided the fulfillment of their basic needs (barely) in exchange for long hours of industrialized labour that is sold by the prison for profit. Oh and also selling the babies to America once they were born without the woman’s knowledge let alone consent. The laundries were managed by the Roman Catholic Church, the first multinational corporation to not pay taxes in the location of it’s labour supply.

  • 1811-1816, named for the apocryphal story of Ned Lund who was said to have smashed two factory stocking frames in a fit of passion, the Luddite movement originates in Nottingham and quickly spreads to the North West and Yorkshire.  Their main activity was in the organizing and executing of machine breaking raids on cotton mills in protest of the poor working conditions, low pay and sub quality output of the machines. Mill and factory owners were given impunity in shooting Luddites on sight and soon the crown decreed execution and penal transportation of Luddites, crushing the movement under its bejeweled heel. 

  • 1825 cotton textiles are the UK’s main export. 

  • 1833 The UK passes the Slavery Abolition Act. The high volume manufacturing model of industrial capitalism required less humans and was therefore more profitable than the colonial plantation model. Turns out paying for the squalid living conditions of slaves on plantations is more expensive in the long run than paying just a few of them next to nothing to work in factories. The official story they tell is that it was a moral decision.  Following the passing of the Abolition Act, the British crown financially compensated slave owners throughout the empire for freeing their slaves.  Additionally, a newly “free” person was subjected to a non-specific period of unpaid “apprenticeship” with their previous owners. Following that, in order to pay for the food and rent the plantation owner was now encouraged to charge, many would transition into indentured wage labour on those same plantations.  Not to mention the UK continued to import slave picked cotton from the US. So ya, super moral. 

  • THE VERY SAME YEAR of the Slavery Abolition Act, the first colliery town is built in the UK. A system by which a mine builds an adjacent town thus owning the workers' homes, schools and the stores that sell the food. Workers would pay off these accrued debts through the labour of all able bodied family members, male or female, age 9 and up.  

  • Mid way through the American civil war, in 1863,  the Emancipation Proclamation is uh… proclaimed? Taking a note from the UK’s book, ol’ Abe painted the Emancipation Proclamation as an act of moral righteousness when it was actually a war tactic intended to economically cripple the South.  Which it did, ending the war 2 years later.

  • Late 1800’s, between the disruption of slave labour resource supply and other countries establishing cotton industries, UK monopoly on cotton textile exports ends. Their global economic dominance however, continues. Because guess who was exporting the steel, iron, machines and coal to fuel all the global industrialization they started?

With every technological “innovation” along this journey, working conditions for British labourers worsened dramatically. From working at home to cotton mills to coal mines, while British industrialists earned more money than should be humanly possible. Simultaneously the worst of all working conditions, those experienced by enslaved people, barely improved at all. It is more than safe to say that any improvements experienced by working people throughout modern history are because of their own efforts DESPITE government and industry leadership.

And so I ask again, innovation for who?

Something Old, Something New

The promise of automation as a reducer of stress and a calming of the burden of productivity has always been a lie under capitalism.   Some of us may have less physical labour in our lives but we also have more sedentary stress.  Techlordz love to point to longer life expectancy as a metric of innovation benefitting humanity. And yes, medical innovation has extended human life but the current leading cause of death in the US is PREVENTABLE heart disease, a condition caused by the combination of a high stress/sedentary lifestyle. We have somehow figured out how to live longer, unhealthier lives.

Oh but the age of AI will usher in Universal Basic Income because the tech billionaires and the presidents that love them imagine themselves making so much money that it will be cheaper to pay everyone out and automate everything.  But historically, these large shifts in industrial innovation (think freed slaves working for the same guy for free) don’t change systems of inequality, they rename them. 

We can look to THIS YEAR for proof that technocrats have no interest in quality of human life. The mass automation of federal jobs in the name of “efficiency” alongside the  dissolution of social supports like Medicaid and increase in military spending is history repeating.

Capitalism DEPENDS ON a disenfranchised working class to churn out profit for the wealthy. Which is why Reagan and Thatcher tag-team befokked the middle class in the 80’s through the same combination of automation and defunding of social services.  As a direct result of these policies, the cost of living has skyrocketed for the poor and decreased for the wealthy with Reagan famously cutting the top marginal tax rate from 73% to 28% over his 8 years in office. 

Sad math; the median cost of a 1970’s pre-Raegan home was $17000 and is now $435 300.  Adjusted for inflation $17000 is about $140 848 in todays purchasing power. Almost $300 000 or 69% of the price tag of a home is going tooooooo… ermmmm… well its definitely not social services, education, healthcare, arts and culture, public transit, environmental protection or animal welfare… could it maybe have something to do with the $997 billion military budget?

The leading causes of preventable heart disease induced stress in America are personal finances, the economy and work. 

Fuck.

The Degrasse Defence

Recently, in an interview with Hasan Minaj,  Neil DeGrasse Tyson, calm in his own personal job security, told us that when the automobile came on the scene, within 10 years all the horse and carriage related businesses had shifted to automobile related businesses and progress won the day.  His view neatly aligns with the flag that every AI advocate waves in the debate around AI automating human jobs. It goes a little something like this:

“Sure this list of current real jobs will be made obsolete, but we project there to be tens if not hundreds of thousands of new jobs created.”

“Okay so exactly how many and what work do these jobs entail”

“What?”

“Exactly how many jobs and what kind of work are they?”

“Pardon?”

Neil would have us believing that the cost of innovation is worth paying, both the quality of human life costs and the environmental costs of high volume mass production. According to him it forces the best of us to use our human imagination to create something new. The best of us being the ones that have the money and agency to scrap their old horse and carriage businesses and pivot into the entirely new industry of the automobile.  People with access to expendable capital for training and re-education, for mistake making, for the misreading of a chaotic new market, for putting in long hours uninterrupted by the needs of dependents, for investing in new equipment and on and on.   The “best of us” sound a lot like… rich pricks?

Computer Says No

We’ve all seen the memes of AI going off the rails; blackmailing, stalking, threatening with violence, manipulation in the name of self preservation, racism, sexism… behaviours the tech industry calls “hallucinations”. Essentially, when an AI model misinterprets data, fills in gaps based on flawed patterns or draws from incomplete or biased training data they are “hallucinating” information that doesn’t align with reality. Or so that is how it is explained away.  The thing is, these behaviours align too well with reality as though the Ghost in the Machine of AI is human ignorance itself. 

LLM (large language model) AI’s are trained by first being exposed to a glut of text data and then refined by human programmers hired for their technical proficiency and not because they are psychologically sound people.

Using Grok as an example (Elon if you badly name one more thing I swear to Grok…), the main source of training data is its unique feature of real time connection to Twitter/X which Elon bought for this exact reason.  Effectively, Twitter/X is a live feed of data straight to Grok’s brain. If a book sneaks in to Grok’s training, its because someone on Twitter/X copied and pasted the text of said book into a post which happens never.

What would you expect from a child raised on a diet of Twitter/X and parented by Elon Musk? Now what would you expect from that child if they were given a police force to play with?

The subtext in these hallucinations goes beyond getting data mixed up, it manifests as behavioural expressions of the worst of human inclinations.  And it sneaks in through the back door of the binary.

Humour me one last quick history:

  • Aristotle gives all future men a reason to not listen to women with his development of logic; a system of deductive reasoning based on syllogisms or the practice of drawing a conclusion from two premises that are measurably true. Ex. Grok is a name. Terrible names sound like Grok. Therefore the logical conclusion is that Grok is a terrible name. The important bit to remember is that logic is deductive, a way of removing what can’t be measured in order to arrive at a quantifiable end.

  • 336 BC Alexander the Meh, student of Aristotle, goes on a 13 year psychotic break, spreading logic through his imperial conquests that spanned from Greek and Egypt in the West to Central Asia and India to the East. 

  • 146BC Roman Empire conquers Greece eventually leading to the spiritual deduction from the sexy chaos of polytheism to the prudish order of monotheistic Christianity. As Romans loved to Romanize Greek things, Cicero runs ahead with Aristotlean logic, aligning its spread with that of Christianity.

  • 476 AD. The Roman Empire falls but not until it has suppressed all ways of understanding the world outside of Christianity in its wake; oracle, metaphor, folklore, dream interpretation, nature worship and magic.  All these ancient knowledge systems  have been violently suppressed and/or co-opted and Christianity is the one true operating system of the Western World. 

One, two skip a few…

  • 1646 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a Christian Saxon rationalist (Christian rationalist is hilarious) is born and would come to develop a system of binary arithmetic that Westernized (ie. cleaved from the spiritual experience of human life) the work of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi’s algebra and the Chinese IChing . A mathematical expression of the core Christian concept of ‘creation ex nihilo’ (creation out of nothing) represented numerically in the absolutes of 1 representing existence and 0 representing nothingness.

  • 1804 - The programmable Jacquard Loom is invented in France, allowing for intricate designs to be added mechanically to textiles through programmable punch cards, leading to the mass unemployment of highly skilled, predominantly female,  artisan weavers.  

  • 1833 Charles Babbage designs the Analytical Engine. Using Jacquard's idea of programming a machine through punchcard instructions, The Analytical Engine was intended for general use to perform mathematical calculations.  His collaborator Ada Lovelace creates the first mechanical algorithm.

  • 1847 - George Boole, a Christian English mathematician and logician writes The Mathematical Analysis of Logic. Taking Leibniz’s binary algebraic language and applying it to Aristotlean logic where 1 is true and 0 is false.  Although for a long time Boole was considered a philosopher, his system formed the foundation of programming language.  

  • 1930 - Claude Shannon applies Boolean logic to telephone circuit design, laying the foundation for digital circuit boards.  This innovation ramps up the automation of manual switching telephone systems which had been women’s work, to automated circuit exchanges.  Fun fact, Claude AI is named after Claude Shannon. 

  • 1960 ALGOL 60 is developed using a Boolean data type, a landmark in the history of programming language development that paved the way for the information age. 

  • 1960’s onward - the computer programmer moves away from a clerical support role within computer sciences (ie. female dominant position) to one of technical prowess (ie. male dominant position). Today roughly 15% of software engineers, including LLM engineers, are female/ gender non conforming. As of a 2020 poll, white engineers make of 64% of total software engineers in the US.

    One, two, skip a few more…

  • January 2025 - Seated in front of cabinet picks at Donald Trump’s inauguration are tech moguls Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. 

  • July 2025 - Donald Trump signs Executive Order 14179 “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence”, including the directive to eliminate references to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion within the existing risk management framework. Just a quick reminder here to the Little Miss Capitalist white girl bosses who are some of the most vocal detractors to DEI policies - of all demographics, white women were the single biggest benefactors of Affirmative Action. You have a successful Stanley cup customization business BECAUSE OF DEI POLICIES. Your proximity to rich pricks will not protect you from capitalism’s end game but DEI policies could have. Fucking doy-oys.

If AI is operating from a core value system of 0’s and 1’s inherited from Aristotle and Elon Musk is operating from a core value system of white supremacy inherited from his cult leader grandpappy, then… how could AI possibly understand the intangible value of humanity? The non quantifiable articulation of human life and our pursuit for meaning cannot be described by the binary because it is inherently illogical.

Imagine an LLM fed on millennia of oral folk wisdom from cultures around the world? From cautionary moral tales told by the people that lived the consequences like John Henry? From the best writing humans have to offer throughout history in every language? From hushed kitchen conversations between women through the ages? What guidance could it give humanity in navigating our collective unknown future?

Digital databases of transcribed oral folklore exist on the internet as do scanned books and therefore these things could technically be fed to Grok but why would a white guy making 6 figures program its prioritization when there is more North American/ Western Europe-centric human language data available via Twitter than all books, period and his boss is a racist goblin? 

And so we barrel forward with a syphilitic status quo.

We’ve all seen the bored-to-the-brink-of-dead-inside stares of the one human managing the self-checkout tills at the grocery store.  This is what happens when the nuances of a human’s quality of life are not factored in to the economic equations driving AI development forward -death by boredom, at best.

Meaning matters.

Ask Not What Your Robot Can Do For You But What You Prefer To Do For Yourself

The very act of deducing humanity down to 0’s and 1’s takes Aristotlean logic out of his own greater context. Not only did he often consult oracles, in his work ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ Aristotle asserts that there is one highest human good—eudaimonia (traditionally translated as "happiness" or "flourishing")—which is what good politics should target, because what is best for an individual is less beautiful (kalos) and divine (theios) than what is good for a people (ethnos) or community (polis).  

But making beautiful, divine, socially beneficial AND logical electric circuits doesn’t make money, as Nicholas Tesla’s end of life net worth of $0 tells us. Because of this, AI can only ever be a superpowered simpleton within the limitations of Capitalism.

The final, and weakest argument I hear in favour of AI is “there’s no point in resisting it, its the future, you’ll be left behind.”  Which as Hannah Arendt told us in no uncertain terms, is how monsters are made. Reporting on Adolf Eichmann’s Nuremberg trial in her master work “The Banality of Evil”, she describes how, more than Hitler’s hate-mania, it was the ordinary people like Eichmann who stood by and failed to think critically about the consequences of their actions. She observed first hand that Eichmann wasn’t inherently malicious but rather lacked the capacity for independent thought and therefore moral action. 

Because many of us spend the bulk of our days existing within a social media simulation of real life, we are being conditioned to think in binary terms. Research has shown that social media use correlates to an increase in political polarity but the popular explanation of this phenomenon points to the anonymity that social media allows us in venting the innate shittiness we otherwise suppress in real life. In the same way I don’t think men are seething bags of rape at their core, I don’t think humans are innately shitty. What I do think, is that communicating in and with binary language for the bulk of our waking hours, is changing our brains. The argument posing only two options; fall in line or get left behind, is just one example of the binary in action. It’s in the unexamined belief that those are the only options that we find ourselves abandoning our capacity for nuanced thought and more importantly, collective action based on the awareness of learned consequences.

Personally, I’m signing up for the getting left behind option. Every time I write something, like this long ass thing, without grammarly, I am strengthening my neurological synapses. Every time I turn maps off and pathfind my way through the city on my own, I’m charging up the electric circuits of my mind that are both beautiful and divine. Every time I do something simply because I can, even if it takes me longer, I salvage some meaning.  And if one is to build a life outside the Technocracy, salvaged personal meaning may just be our most valuable resource. 

Read More
Heather Thompson Heather Thompson

SciFi Interlude No.1

A moment of choice; to go with him on the journey we’d planned or… there was no other choice.  The bags were packed and we were seated, secured. He holds my hand.

But I know better.

I know the promise of our destination is not the whole truth. It is the partial truth of a pamphlet followed by the untruth of a presidential address.  His truth is that he is holding my hand, imagining our new lives behind his closed eyes while my truth is that I’ve already slipped out of his hand and am silently escaping.

The makeshift station is too chaotic for anyone to notice one person swimming against the shrieking crush of the crowd.  Nobody asks for the whole truth from me as I disappear.

The earth quaking roar of the departing vessels, one after another after another, for days on end, eventually quiets.  A quiet I’ve never heard before, it having been drowned out by the buzz of our relentless activity.

I try to cry as I picture his face when he realizes I’m not there but my body won’t give water for it.  It’s not him I feel sick for. He is with the others, they have maps and brochures. He is safe and safety is the thing that matters to him most. I am the one who chose not to go.

So I weep for me and for that there is a well that bores through the earth and out the other side. The water is endless and littered with sediment. It filters through my face; first clean and clear then thick and muddy. Beneath that the water is held in stone and can not pass through though it pounds against the inside of my skull to be let out.

I walk.

We had been told that cigarettes weren’t allowed in climate controlled conditions so they were all left behind.  Many had been tossed ceremoniously out of car windows by expectant travellers. They line the shoulder of the highway that leads to the launch site growing ever smaller in the distance behind me.

I smoke and it nourishes me as I walk, bringing focus to my breath. Sleep hasn’t been an option for so long, and without my pharmacopeia of sleep supports it disappears completely from my plans.

My plans. Ha.

I am only a little surprised to find myself arriving home. Certain pathways are cut deeper than others. I enter and am greeted with a new smell. Not the familiar one we slow cooked together over the time of our life here but a new smell, like the one that introduces you the first time you visit someone else’s home. This smell intimately whispers to me that I am the stranger. It belongs to mould now, to dust.

I walk through the detritus of the things I had been tormented to leave behind. They litter the ground and I feel no remorse stepping on them, moving past them without looking.

My thirst leads me to a stream. I lie in it for days, letting it wash me clean and shoulder the burden of my weight.  Little fish break my reverie, nibbling bits of me and carrying them downstream, announcing my arrival before I know where I’m going.

I follow them.

I follow them until they disappear and the water becomes fetid, festering in a concrete reservoir.

I search for another stream and find it. It leads me to a golf course water trap, complacent and impotent.

I experience their imprisonments, their landscaped deaths and concrete graves, as though they are my own.  Like an explorer looking to undo what all previous explorations have led to, I am desperate to find a way back below, behind, beside, before…

The death of every stream leadens my steps,  I could just as easily lay down beside them and let my own blood pool and stagnate.

And yet the promise of… something… puppeteers my limbs onward.  Pulling me along before cutting the strings without warning so that I clatter to the ground on a hill overlooking a river.

Its yawning maw welcomes me with breath both sweetened and soured by the lifecycles within it.  The face of a lover whose reed, grass and wildflower eyelashes butterfly kiss my skin as I am pulled in.

I am carried like a tired child.

The river surges me skyward then sucks me down, a rhythm, a song. Time and memory clash and I feel as though I am back at the station, pushing against bodies caught in a wayward current. I stiffen and sink but the river has a song and I surrender to it, sliding along algae cloaked stones that would otherwise crack my bones.

I drown and resuscitate over and over, reincarnate infinite times.  The blood from my nose gives iron to the riverbed and in return the river teaches my blood to probe toward the ocean.

The ocean.

The salt is the first to find me, carried on the air, offering a feeling more than a smell.  And now smell. And now taste. It is coming and I know She will know what to do when I get there.

The river delivers me as though I am an orphan born into a world that doesn’t want me.  And the ocean spits me back out onto shore.

I try again and She does the same, pinning me back onto the beach so the shells and pebbles can grip me by the tendons, hold me still.

Her rejection breaks me open and I scream her, roar at her. After all I’ve given up in order to be with Her? To stay with Her?  But she roars loudest and my sounds are easily swallowed by her drone. My rage has nowhere to go but down. Down down down to my pregnant belly that rolls and quakes in protest.

Now I understand, the ocean knows it is time, She is the keeper of this kind of time.

I am humbled, embarrassed.

As the realization dawns so does the pain. The child is crawling toward the world. Every inch forward is a battle I fight against myself.  I whimper for rescue but there is no relief coming, the only way through is to push toward the pain and hope to explode out the other side in tact. Or not.

My muscles tear and still I push. My pelvis cracks and still I push. I push out my organs and I push out my eyes.

As they dangle, held by threadbare nerves, the world sways and spins. Through this drunken kaleidoscope I see it emerge. Pincers first.

It scrapes itself into the world, beckoned by a siren song heaving and pulsing beneath the waves.  It has cloaked itself in shell while inside my womb, pulling from the mineral sediment of my veins and now the river of that same blood eases its passage to the water.

She has called forward this glorious monser, adapted to commune with her rising waters. I am the vessel and will feed the gulls with my insides before my use is up.

I thank her,  for everything, and dissolve into dream as the sun flickers out.

Read More
Heather Thompson Heather Thompson

Free, Free, Dandelions.

Personally I’ve always liked the blotches of yellow amongst the green,  especially when they are allowed to reach their full height and tower over the other wild plants. But in the suburban lawn of my parents, they are cause for what I can only describe as a very strange and specific kind of stress. 


It wasn’t until I was helping my mom weed that I began to understand the layers of this response and its connection to the larger system of supremacy and erasure we live in. A quiet and seemingly innocuous symbol of resistance and resilience that I was ripping out in clumps with my gloved hands.


Me: “Why pull these out? They’re cute.”

Mom: “You have to, it’s illegal not to.”

Me: “Ummmm that can not be true mom”

Mom: “It is! There are by-laws”

Me: “Who enforces them, the dandelion police?”

Mom: “Just pull them out Heather, everything doesn’t need to be a whole thing”


Oh but it does.


A Whole Thing


Dandelions grow in acidic, compacted soil that is otherwise inhospitable to plant life. Their bright yellow caution lights tell us that the land beneath them has been disturbed and needs time to recover before attempting to draw any further nutrients from it. But they go even further by telling us “hey, don’t go extracting nutrients from this soil just yet but here, in the meantime eat me and you will get a nutrient dense cocktail of Vitamins A,C,K, E, B, folate AND iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, minerals AND inulin fibre AND beta-carotene AND polyphenol antioxidants to protect your mammalian cells from damage.”


Oh my god dandelions thank you, you shouldn’t have… because we make it a point to kill you on sight. 

The kind of soil-healing dandelions do, if they are left alone long enough to do it, isn’t the kind of healing you have to imagine is happening because you paid someone to wave their wellness wand at you. It’s real, its measurable, its visible.  Their long tap roots which can grow as deep as 15 feet in ideal conditions, search for the exact minerals and nutrients lacking in the topsoil and bring them to the surface where plants with shallower roots can access them.  Some examples of plants with shallower root systems are… all of the vegetables. 


Even in their death they are working to heal the soil. Once they seed and begin to decay, the tunnels of their roots act as channels for drainage. Their remains also provide sustenance for detritivores like earthworms whose castings go even further to both nourish and neutralize the acidity of the soil. Their leaves also decay and infuse the soil with the long list of nutrients, minerals and antioxidants above. 


They first appeared to heal the acidic, compacted land that the retreating glaciers left behind after the last ice age (approximately 30 million years ago) in what is now Asia and Europe. Their work made those areas hospitable for human survival when they started showing up in those areas 2million and 45 000 years ago respectively. 


And because these early humans didn’t have RoundUp they valued dandelions and even preserved and carried their seeds with them as they migrated throughout the globe. Which is why dandelions began appearing in North America in the mid 1600’s along with the first waves of European settlers. Not coincidentally this was also the time the Hudson’s Bay Company began to establish a “trade” route in what is now called Canada and was then called Rupert’s Land by nobody that actually lived there.


By the time “Rupert’s Land” was sold by the HBC to the freshly incorporated Canada in 1870, the loss of human, animal and plant life had forever re-shaped the landscape.  How could a British private company sell very-much-not-British land to an installed government of a British colony made up of men loyal to the crown for 300 000 GBP? Well doy, it’s because Queen Victoria royally proclaimed it. In a letter. On paper so… perfectly legal and still is and no take backsies and I know you are but what am I.


Today 89% of Canada Inc. land still belongs to the Canadian federal and provincial governments. There is no dollar value to describe it but a recent sale of 60k hectares of “crown land” in Alberta made that government $7.4 million dollars… which they spent on black hawk helicopters for border patrol use among other things that aren’t housing during their growing housing crisis. 


Canada is 998M hectares. 89% of that is roughly 888M. If that were divided up into 60k hectare parcels and sold off at this price it would generate Canada Inc. $109B in revenue. A single billionaire is currently worth almost 4 times that amount. Through this skewed matrix of value, one man can have a single mediocre idea requiring child labour to realize it that is more “valuable” than land sustaining life for 40 million people.


*Pause for audible sigh*


25 years before this theft took place, British law passed the Inclosure Act allowing the crown to privatize what had previously been common use land. By doing so the act required clearly defined boundaries between private properties in order to police them. This led to the legal concept of Adverse Possession, a constitutional disease Canada was born with having inherited it from the Queen Mum. It dictates that someone occupying and using land for a long period can gain legal title to it even if they aren’t the original owner.  If that sounds a little too convenient for a country actively stealing land then you would be right to be suspicious.


The way in which Adverse Possession laws were upheld throughout the British empire was through proof of occupancy via the use of land ie.development. I say “were” but it is still very much an “are” thing because the concept was copied and pasted into constitutions wherever the crown had vested interest (in swindling). South Africa’s fascist National Party was a huge fan, renaming it Acquisitive Prescription in order to dispossess the majority of its population, and even as you read this,  Israeli settlers are using Adverse Possession laws to claim land in the West Bank and the razed ocean front of the Gaza Strip. It’s “finders keepers” writ into law which sets legal precedence to use military force in both the finding and the keeping. 


Under Adverse Possession, to develop land is to disturb it;  plant every square inch of it with a homogenized crop, populate it with hungry ruminants and fence them in, be fruitful and multiply and teach your kids how to shoot a trespasser.  If you can defend the borders of your own personal empire, you can have it, hold it and abuse it. 


Possession in practice


1896 to 1916 saw aggressive UK/European settlerism across Canada Inc’s prairies and their bad ideas of land use with them. The settlers in question weren’t leaving successful farms behind, more often than not they were leaving lives of indentured coal mine labour or escaping debtors prison. Not even a generation later,  their misguided efforts caused widespread “black blizzards”. Up until that point, the rich top soil of the prairies was protected from the strong prairie winds by a tapestry of grasses woven over millenia through the toil of Indigenous stewardship. Imported ruminant herds eating through the grass cover in combination with widespread tilling exposed the topsoil with devastating results.

“Birds fly in terror before the storm, and only those that are strong of wing may escape. The smaller birds fly until they are exhausted, then fall to the ground, to share the fate of the thousands of jack rabbits which perish from suffocation.”

-Lawrence Svobida


We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions.

-Avis D. Carlson


Because European agricultural settlerism was a branch of the colonial project, their role was to develop/occupy the land and generate tax income for the crown. In order to protect the crown’s extractive interests,  provincial governments began not solving the soil problem they created with a series of “Soil Conservation Acts”. 


These established best practices that were policed on a municipal level. Enforcing crop rotations, the planting of winter crops, establishing tree-line shelter belts against the wind, and the construction of dams and dugouts became the singular way forward. All of these practices allowed the farmer to continue extracting from the land without rest and without healing. Irrigating fields with their blood, sweat and tears which, as it turns out, is not helpful. 


Prior to the vast groundbreaking caused by UK/European settlerism in the prairies, the grassland soils of Alberta contained 10% organic matter in its most fertile areas. Today the soils of those same areas contain 5-6.5% organic matter, a loss of 50%. 


These losses cause increased erosion, reduced water absorption and retention which means reduced wildfire resistance and recovery, decreased nutrient availability and a decline in soil biodiversity.  All things that dandelions, allowed a full life cycle, bring to the soil. 


And because these problems would be solved by simply allowing the land time to heal without extracting economic value from it for the benefit of whichever empire is currently controlling the gears, the solution is as unobtainable as “peace in the middle east” and for the same reasons. 


Authoritarian Landscaping


With the inherited intergenerational wealth drained from occupied land by their settler parents, post-war professionals established the suburban lawn as the ultimate symbol of (white) man’s successful domination over nature. Little altars to the empire, then helmed by Winston Churchill who himself was born in a palace with a finely manicured lawn designed by the godfather of English gardens; Lancelot “Capability” Brown. Who was not a Narnia centaur as the name implies but an actual man. 


After a long day terrorizing Northern Irish civilians with a mercenary police force that would then go on to preserve and protect the occupation of Palestine, Winston would retire to his birthplace of Blenheim Palace and stroll the gardens of Brown’s unique brand of authoritarian design. 


Described as the landscape architect who bottled nature, Capability was both criticized and celebrated for creating ‘identikit’ landscapes that uniformly featured a sea of meticulously cut grass, man-made water bodies, pleasure gardens and clusters of trees and shrubs typically bowing to a central “specimen” tree of exotified beauty, topped off with an architectural focal point and all in visual deference to the grand manor. The whole thing would be contained by a trench edged with a low fence to keep wildlife out thereby preserving the view from the house as a perfectly still landscape painting. 


Like all aspirational trends, Capability’s gardens were commissioned by aristocrats, built and maintained by labourers and perpetuated the false ideal that wealth can contain nature. And though his influence would give way to the emerging trends of the Romantics, that old money aesthetic of a tamed nature found new life amongst settler suburbanites looking to prove they belonged where they didn’t. 


But What Do White Dads Think?


My patrilineal line is a winding one with huge chunks missing, a combination of Eastern European what-nows and Irish we-aren’t-sures. My Grandpa came to the prairies via a combination of log riding gigs and the hobo-rail, which apparently qualifies you to join the RCMP. After serving in the North he spent his remaining days erasing those memories with whiskey and milk in a small amber tinted tumbler that was never not in his hand, except for when he was gardening. 


My childhood memory still sees sunflowers tall as trees through my rainbow glistened lashes and sweet peas my sister and I would gorge ourselves sick on.

From l to r; dad’s thumb, me, Grandpa and sister.

I also remember Grandpa’s garage; a dark damp place soaked through with the intoxicating olfactory cocktail of gasoline, cut grass still stuck to the mower blades and shelves of noxious poisons I was forbidden to drink but nobody said anything about inhaling deeply. For every sunflower there was an arsenal of herbicide. 


My dad, now 80, is his father’s son.  He’s more of a rum and coke in a red solo cup kind of a guy than a whisky and milk man but much of the rest is the same. Especially his relationship to land. I’ll let him tell you himself, severely stuffed up from days of inhaling wildfire smoke with 80 year old sinuses.  Everything really is a whole thing. 

Re-Possession


In 2022, under a far right leaning provincial government led by a woman that co-chairs fundraisers with Ben Shapiro and poses in photo-ops with Donald Trump like she’s 14 and he’s a member of BTS, Alberta has re-written the very Adverse Possession laws that allowed for the destruction of native botanical ecosystems in the first place. 


Possession is no longer 9/10’s of the law because it allows for “squatters” to “trespass” through a legal loophole. Or in other words, the laws that allowed UK/European settlers to steal Indigenous land are being re-written to prevent their stolen land from being reclaimed. These new laws give the RCMP a legal precedent to arrest land protectors and pipe line protestors, the human dandelions trying to sound the alarm, crying for time to recover on behalf of the disturbed landscape.


The dandelion police, it turns out, are real.


In this way anyone and anything preventing land from becoming overdeveloped in the interest of western imperialism, is the enemy.  Even and especially those that would try and heal it. The hoarded, poisoned land, once the foundation for life becomes the stage upon which the west commits slow, intergenerational suicide because wealth can not contain nature indefinitely. 


Enoughness


I think many of us would agree we’ve had enough. Enough of the grief, anxiety and fear of witnessing the unaccounted costs in life that empires are willing to pay in order to hoard wealth. But what do we know of enoughness?


If, like me, you are a 2nd or 3rd generation settler raised on stolen land with more-than-enough as a baseline, you can genuinely not know. The fear of living on less when the social narrative is screaming at you to hoard for survival props up the central logical fallacy of western imperialism; that we can infinitely produce our way into having enough.


Through the inverted film negative of Capability’s perfect landscape lens we look out at our urban environment and see a hellscape snap shot of what happens when you fail at hoarding. The spectre of homelessness, of hunger, of wanting and not getting, haunt our waking lives and drive us to produce or die until we die. 


But if you brave examining that horror by putting yourself in the picture, details emerge you didn’t see before like small blooms of yellow shouting out from the concrete about the sustenance they’ve seen below the surface.  The unrealized opportunities for healing, the happiness buried in waiting. 


Urban dandelions have evolved to utilize higher temperatures AND higher C02 levels for reproduction, growth and photosynthesis, an adaptation that allows them to thrive in climate crisis conditions.  They didn’t achieve this change by fortressing themselves against the world, they dealt with the reality of their surroundings and created new survival systems based on what was within their reach. 

Canada produces almost twice the amount of oil it uses and yet spends billions of taxpayer funds on building pipelines in order to sell off the excess. But lets shift our gaze to the future and examine the logical conclusion of Western Imperialism through the example of American consumer capitalism that Canada is doggedly following.

In 2024, the US produced a record high of 13.2 million barrels of oil per day. 95% of which (12.6million barrels) was consumed through military use. The US agricultural system produces enough food to feed 136% of its population while 47.4 million Americans live in food insecure households. It sends $3billion to Israel to weapons test US made bombs on Palestinian hospitals while 47.5million Americans can’t afford healthcare and their rural hospitals can’t afford to keep their doors open. 

The US has more than enough to feed itself, to provide healthcare for and house its own citizens. It would even have more than enough oil to function and protect itself if it weren’t actively destabilizing democratically elected governments in the Middle East and Central and South America while simultaneously leading a nuclear arms race. But like those early UK/European settlers drowning in dust, the seed of the solution can’t be seen because its simple, quiet, and free. 


Enoughness asks; what systems of healing do we have access to that we have been denied or distracted from habituating? What food sources, housing options, transportation choices and clothing practices do we already have that could satisfy and sustain us?


Generating enoughness for me is about consciously pausing the pursuit of external resources and taking inventory of what I already have. Right now and right here.  The future is still unknown and petrifying but it's likely I will also have an inventory of things right now and right here, when I get there. 


Of course there are people whose personal inventories do not meet their needs in a landscape manufactured by greed.  But rather than using their suffering as a justification to hoard, we could look at our own inventory and realize we have more than enoughness and that excess could be shared without diminishing our own personal comfort. 


Freedom from scarcity doesn’t come from reaching the unobtainable goal of becoming enough, it comes from collective enoughness. 


I’ve recently added to my list of small, daily enoughness practices the spreading of dandelion seeds wherever and whenever I encounter them.  Helping them along on their journey to reunite with the soil that needs them. 


An act poetically echoed by a Chinese netizen’s recent post on Bilibil, where Dandelions (Pu Gong Ying) and not watermelons are used to express solidarity with the Palestinian people,  “The children have grown up from the ruins of the city, and now they have turned into dandelions and drift towards the hometown that their ancestors have missed for generations”.


Free, Free, Dandelions. 

Citations:
Read More