I think that Elizabeth Holmes is not real. It’s hard to tell at a distance. There’s enough evidence, an affected voice, style, and habits are only part of it. The greater part is the cliché childhood narrative, more than that however, is the long hours. From everything I’ve read there was never a functional product, no real founder-driven development cycle, and nothing, concrete that may have required long hours. Re-papering a tiger may take time, lots of time even, only none on the part of the founder from what I can tell.

I think the only reason the names Theranos and WeWork are mentioned in the same sentence is simply that each is an example of the enthusiastic parting the gullible wealthy from both their reason (however feeble) and their cash. On the outside, investors decided wealth made up for a lack of knowledge. Plenty of folks on the inside knew it wasn’t going to work, eventually, they acted. I’m not clear after one book that Elizabeth actually understood that her requirements; must be countertop, must work with a drop, must test everything, was the cause of failure. All the fraud, outright lies, toxicity, stemmed from that. She wanted to build a desktop computer without building ENIAC first. Simple.

I can’t get past the long hours though. If your not part of development, if your not a chemist, an engineer, a developer, an inventor or wrench turner, and by all accounts no kind of project manager, what do you get out of fourteen hour days except a chance to do coke at work and posture in front of the real workers? I think it was the chance to play the role, to be in a place, surrounded by things, that provided the sensation of being the founder of a unicorn. It wasn’t about going home and living in privilege, it was about staying at work and cultivating that glow of being the smartest, most successful person in the room.

It’s note worthy she got jail time. Over promising and under delivering is fine. Outright fraud and compliance failures are not. Still, I believe the crime for which she was sentenced was nothing more than making the wealthy look foolish. At the end of the day the naked emperor is still emperor, it’s the crowd of functionaries and advisors that won’t have a job tomorrow.

Look, I want there to be a conspiracy to put chemicals in the water to make the freaking frogs gay, at least as much as the next person. Probably more. It would be amazing, mostly because thinking deeply about what could possibly motivate such a thing would surely quiet the voices. The fact the fertilizer Atrazine is a teratogen in amphibians and may cause hormonal changes in as much as 10 percent of male leopard frog tadpoles which turns them into hermaphrodites. It’s a great illustration of ignorance that something affecting gender presentation is “making the frogs gay” because sometimes knowledge isn’t even as deep as a puddle. I remember thousands of tadpoles boiling desperately in rapidly evaporating puddles. Tragically, we are continuing to learn that puddles aren’t nearly as deep as they were thought to be.

Over the course of a life an individual may accumulate things which are best described as “oh no.” Common examples of this may be a weapon found in a storm drain or fished up by a magnet tossed off the side of a bridge. A matched set of phalanges or a jaw bone pulled off a skeletonized corpse and secreted away before notifying the authorities would fall in the same category. It’s hard to blame anyone for collecting something like that, the opportunity may never come again. This needn’t be something found though, it could be something produced. Disclosures in a diary that should never have become a physical thing apply. That’s just the easy stuff. The careless artifacts things that may derail an otherwise pedestrian life. Of greater, but general rather than acute hazard are intrinsically dangerous products.

It’s possible through intentional or incidental action to end up with something genuinely dangerous. Pharmaceuticals are an easy, familiar, example. Go to the doctor. Get a prescription. Have a pharmacy fill it. Have a bad reaction or find it ineffective. New prescription. Old leftovers. Now here’s this chemical that most people shouldn’t be exposed to. It’s hazardous to the point that no less than two licensed professionals have to collaborate in order for someone to even purchase it. Someone who is explicitly not a knowledgeable professional must now dispose of it. Trash it, flush it, pitch it down the garbage disposal. Take it to an organized pill-drop where the claim is it will be “safely” incinerated. All of that puts it in the environment. Even medication that is consumed ends up in the environment, or at least the metabolic products of it do. This is the end condition of everything that isn’t ejected into extra-orbital space.

Everything ends up in the environment. From there it ends up in everything else. One way of dating old things is to test them for strontium-90. Ever since nuclear weapons were tested, strontium-90 is present in the environment. Bottle of wine from the 1800’s? If it contains strontium-90 it’s fake. Oddly enough that’s a rather harmless thing, there’s plenty of other stuff that’s been dispersed on a much larger scale. Lead is a perfect example and it’s accessible enough to be a reasonable example. Lead in gasoline is a thing of the past. Lead in the environment is forever. Lead in paint is found not just in buildings but in glazed pottery, cheap jewelry, and toys. Lead is disturbingly common in plumbing, if not water pipes themselves, then the solder holding the same together. The body treats lead like calcium, and purges itself of lead with about as much ease as it does calcium, which is, none at all. Microplastic is the lead of the new millennium. Above, I wrote about the individual responsibility of a person as a source of pharmaceuticals in water. As with greenhouse gasses, individuals are a source, but manufacturing is the main contributor to such an extent that it’s not even worth mentioning an individuals contribution except as an example more familiar to most than a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility.

And it continues from there. Agricultural run off causes harmful algal blooms when it’s not directly poisoning the watershed. Human waste puts viruses in the water at high enough levels that COVID is monitored at a municipal level by testing at wastewater treatment plants. Don’t worry about a conspiracy to poison the water, worry about the carelessness and corruption that’s triggering boil water advisories and enabling videos of people igniting their tap water. Amoeba, eating brains or only causing a week of dysentery. Parasites, coliforms, mercury, chemicals, purification byproducts, and this is all in the first world where tap water is “safe”. Don’t concern yourself with what’s being put in the water. Understand that what we know is in there is one thing. What we need to be afraid of is what we don’t know is in there, what we don’t know about what is in there, and what will be in there tomorrow because of what we’re putting in there today.

I stopped drinking water straight from the tap forever ago. I bought bottled water when it was popular. I read the municipal water quality report. I never had a boil water advisory, but I boiled. I got the best reverse osmosis activated carbon filter I could find. I bought the weird empty-tasting distilled water jugs in the laundry aisle. I got a bottle that runs on batteries and blasts anything that may be alive in there with sterilizing ultraviolet light. I became concerned about all the dead bodies I’ve been drinking. So I bought a strange water-purifying bottle with the vaguely religious name of Grayl. It’s replaceable filters mechanically remove particulates, including microplastics, sediment, and silt (which is oddly apparently not a sediment I guess). It’s activated carbon removes chemicals like PFAS, chlorine, and chloroform. Through some electroadsorption process it filters out heavy metals like lead, arsenic, and chromium.

Their ad copy includes a lot more contaminants, more living things, more of everything being removed. That’s important to me, removal. I don’t want to drink dead bodies. What happens if I accidentally think about them and then they suddenly aren’t inert corpses anymore?! What then!? No answer for that is there! I have absolutely no reason to believe there is anything in my water present to be removed. It’s probably a bad sign that I feel like I must remove something that is almost certainly no there.

The Grayl Ultrapress (and the larger Geopress which is the same but too large for a cup holder) has three basic parts. There’s the outer cup. This is the dirty side and is filled to the mark with source water. There is also the inner bottle, the inside of which is the clean side. Drinking access to clean water is available at the top of the inner bottle. The bottom of the inner bottle is open, and a replaceable filter threads in there. It is well gasketed, and it’s wise that the gaskets are part of the filter so that they are replaced when the filter is and therefore don’t wear out.

When the empty inner bottle is pressed into the filled outer bottle water is forced up through the filter. This is a lovely design. Unlike many filters, one is not obliged to suck on a straw, an objectively unpleasant way to drink. There’s also no extra bits, no hoses or pumps. The two bottles, they are the pump. Grayl offers a titanium version, and that’s odd as it expects you to boil water in the dirty outer bottle. From everything I’ve see their customer is expected to be the camper, the wilderness backpacker. I think they may be missing an important class of customer. They should market to the harmlessly paranoid, we’re sure to use more filters.

Taxes, at least in the United States of America, are everything that’s bad about taking a test plus the experience of being politely and nonconfrontationally mugged. You have to do it, and doing it correctly relies on a number of judgement calls on your part. There shouldn’t be an objectively right or wrong question that you are not given the answer to, but there is, and the I.R.S. will tell you, but only after you get it wrong. For example, people who do art as a business have to pay taxes if that business is a person. It’s even the same form a person submits, a 1040. It’s a schedule C, instead of the itemized schedule A or standard-deduction 1040-EZ. If you, making art, amounts to another person consuming resources and brining in cash regularly, then that person needs to pay taxes even if they are a only a convenient legal fiction. They get to deduct business expenses from canvases to rent on studio space, but they gotta pay taxes on their income.

Maybe you get out the watercolors when you’re feeling stressed and sell an 8 by 10 of the façade of a listing to a relator for a couple hundred dollars every month or so. Chances are that’s you doing it, not a business. I’m sure it’s not the only thing you’re painting and even though you’re making a few bucks it’d be a stretch to call it anything but a hobby. Another good indicator in deciding the business or hobby question is your behavior. Do you save receipts and have a separate bank account? Maybe a DBA or LLC for your own protection? It’s a business, even if it operates at a loss. Do you have a website and shoot a few local weddings on the cheap for friends of a friend? Chances are you got an LLC for liability, so yeah, still a business. Use social media to connect with followers who commission works including their original character and trade nausea for a few thousand extra bucks a month while still cashing your check from the gas station? Probably a hobby, seriously, especially if you stop doing it for weeks or months at a time because you’respending too much time crying in the shower. Do commissions as your sole form of income while spending hundreds of dollars a month on un-see juice? Probably a business even if you throw caution to the winds and don’t register a P.O. box at the UPS store to keep your personal life separate.

You should support the arts. You should support artists. You should support people who aspire to be but are too meek to claim to be artists. No I don’t mean me. I mean the homemakers at the local arts council. The teens and no-bodies on Etsy. You should go to the craft-sale day of the annual carrot harvest festival two towns over and buy that 5×7″ watercolor of the old mill. You should shell out for a caricature from that lady way down at the empty end of the street fair, the one who looks like she’s trying to disappear between her own shoulders. And by you, I mean all of us.

I have never regretted buying something from the person responsible for its existence. I have regretted being the person who is responsible for somethings existence.

This is the story of that regret. It’s been a long enough time and I’ve moved around enough that I’m sure this wont identify anyone unless they somehow come upon it and out themselves. A gig I had a long time ago was working as a photographers assistant. Film was still more common than digital then so I mostly ran and kept film backs loaded during weddings then stayed up all night processing film so it’d be ready to go for the real photographer in the morning.

Every now and then the photographer would get a call from someone with next to no budget or a couple hundred dollars and a city-hall ceremony. Some of those calls would lead to me shooting a roll or two and eventually providing some very school-picture-day quality prints. I’d get some “practice”, a few dollars, and a bunch of admonitions of the “what you should have done…” type. If that’s an apprenticeship, it’s a wonder anyone ever becomes a professional.

I got called off once for a job that was on the calendar Friday, and canceled the Saturday before the Sunday ceremony. That never happened. Cancellations happened, sure, but with weeks or more of notice and even then security deposits being non-refundable made them rare. With nothing to do Sunday, I tried doing some shot-from-the-waist street photography Saturday with the understanding that I could use the darkroom to proof and print the next day because the place was always closed Sundays.

Sunday morning and I’m mixing up some D76 when I hear a pounding. The place was a camera shop, when those were still not such a rare thing. The photographer sold cameras, ran a lab, and shot weddings and portraits all out of a narrow storefront that barely had a window big enough for a cap and gown draped on a chair. I went in the back door from the alley, because I didn’t have a key for the front and was told to keep the lights off and “look closed” whenever I was there alone. Banging turned to screaming, like bloody murder screaming and I peeked through the curtain to the front, half expecting the place to be on fire. A tiny woman who looked about a hundred and twenty years old and dead for the last two was beating on the door. And that’s how I got roped into shooting the canceled wedding.

Grandma drove me to a big white farmhouse at a speed that I think was probably faster than any ambulance I’ve ever been in. There was a field full of cars, a crowd of people in front of the house, and just like a very tasteful arrangement in the back. All classic white chairs and a rose covered arbor that put commercial wedding venues to shame. It was perfect, if you could tune out the farm smell. Everyone there seemed either on the edge of violence or sincerely relieved when we pulled in. Grandma gave some of the angry young men orders and disappeared into the house. People were seated, some kind of vaguely martial operatic organ music started blasting, and I did my best to pretend I knew what I was doing.

I really felt good for a while, like I was accomplishing something. Then I learned why this had been canceled so suddenly. The officiant said a lot of stuff, the only bit I remember, and I’m paraphrasing, was about the couple’s sacred duty to secure the existence of our people and a future for their white children. So yeah. Did Nazi that coming. I should have found a way to leave, even if it meant just walking until I was out of there. I should have opened the camera and pulled out all the exposures I had made to un-make them. I should have done anything other than what I did do which was to just carry on. When I don’t know how to react, I just don’t, react.

I shot the ceremony. I shot the wedding party. The couple, the bridesmaids and groomsmen, and families. I stayed and shot the cake, the first dances, all of it. Then three different people gave me envelopes of cash and an absolutely jacked teenager in work boots and red suspenders drove me back to the shop. I dropped the film at a drugstore and went back afterwards to order enlargements and additional prints to be mailed to the address on the thank you note that I found in one of the envelopes. I couldn’t not do that, I had every reason to literally take the money and run under the “it’s okay to punch Nazi’s” law. I however, am completely spine-free.

Two of the envelopes I was passed had $2000 each and the other had another $1000 but all in odd bills, as if it was filled by a passing hat. The thank you note was in one of the big envelopes and it was very normal. Their money paid for their processing and prints. Everything that was left, I should have donated or something, but I didn’t know how to do that. I should say I couldn’t spend it, that it was tainted. The truth is if I had needed the money right then, I would have spent it. I carried it around for a few weeks and then I had an incident and lost it, or spent it, or had it stolen. I don’t remember what happened to it. It would have been very useful when I got back out of the hospital.

When I was stable again, and in another new town, I decided I’d spend double that money creating something good to cancel out the karmic debt. Some thing awful existed because of me, so now, something beautiful needed to as well. I bought folksy watercolors tentatively daubed on the worst paper ever. I commissioned portraits from people who didn’t know what to charge, and paid them too much. I know it doesn’t undo anything I made that Sunday. I know it’s nothing to those hateful people.

T’was the night before x-mas and-nope, #fuckthisshit we’re not doing poems don’t think about it!

Look, I get that this hellsite is anything but, the holiday spirit’s stuck in a rut.

It’s the night before twitmas So ready yourself for tweets from twats who can’t help themselves.

Bae caught me sleeping with elf on his shelf in this influencer nightmare of paid-add-self-help.

My tweets are all crafted with care and precision the better to garner public recognition.

Give me likes and retweet’s that I care for deeply, but shut up about Rowling, the net mutters weakly.

The truth is I am as important as shit, and this little holiday, who cares about it?

But do remember that shit is just waste, so leave this in the toilet, and flush it post-haste.