I texted my mom. I took her last week to get the J&J vaccine (she's deathly afraid of needles, though she doesn't know or understand why), so I've done my part. Also I'll probably see her next weekend when she goes to see her granddaughter (my niece) for the first time. She was born in January, so... COVID. What else can be said that hasn't been talked about everywhere all the time for over a year now. I could talk about how yesterday was my dad's birthday and I haven't talked to him in 4 years, but I'm not really interested in discussing that right now.

Today I walked down to South St to meet a friend at Tattooed Mom's. She's flying back to Mexico later this week and is hoping to pick up some cheap insulin for my diabetic cat--assuming we can figure out how to get it back to the states. When her husband tried a couple weeks ago he was told that it wouldn't last the plane ride, but, I mean, diabetic people exist. They live normal lives during which they travel, sometimes great distances, and presumably still take insulin during those times. She tells me he was much more concerned when he thought it was for me than when she informed it was for my cat. So it goes.

Something I think about a lot while I'm walking is fences. I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, but this one passage from Numlock really stuck with me. It reads:

In the American West, you’re never too far from a fence. A new study estimated that at any given point, the nearest distance to any fence is usually less than 31 miles, and on average is roughly 2 miles. It’s estimated that the global length of fencing on Earth is 10 times the length of roads. Fences have unexpected impacts on ecology. For example, migrating pronghorn antelope have difficulty navigating the fences crisscrossing once traversable expanses, and fences that have long since outlived their usefulness have similar effects despite their vestigial use for landowners. Indeed, there is a serious issue for some species with “ghost fences,” which are when you remove a fence that has existed in a place for a long time but species continue on for generations avoiding a place because there used to be a fence there, because animals are weird and we kind of broke them with fences.

I don't think I had ever thought about it before reading this, but there are literally fences everywhere. Part of our capitalist obsession with property, of course, but I do wonder how much is actually necessary? When I think about prisons, the first thing I think about is all the fencing. There's fences all over the place, both indoors and out. There's fences between fences to segment people into even smaller gaps. How much of that is actually necessary? Years and years ago there was a report on the Daily Show, of all places, about a women's prison that ditched all of its fencing. A quick google search indicates it was probably about a prison in Shakopee, Minnesota, that later may have actually implemented some fencing. They never had any issues that would seem to implicate the need for fencing, so why bother? Evidently they reason they were considering it was an increase in drug-related crimes, which... is a whole other thing.

We're such a lazy society. Everything revolves around what you're being sold, not what you need. The whole point of an invention isn't that the world needs it, it's that you can convince the world that it needs it. The world has existed up until every invention perfectly fine. I won't prop up overpopulation myths, I think a lot of our issues lie more with limited perspectives and initiative. Because everything we do is based on cost, we cut corners and end up with endless landfills of plastic bullshit, daylight balanced street lights, and fences in the middle of nowhere protecting nothing because any more effort or redoing anything would cost too much up front.