Rick Marriner
@rickmarriner
Houston. Nothing much ado anymore, not by trade, writer by remedial action. Daily #vss365, #senryu & #micropoetry. Learning to make words in public after decades of consuming them in private.
Wildfires. I wake into their breath. Even Glacier National Park, timeless and immense, wears a veil of smoke and haze, waiting patiently for the wind to remember its way home.
Shelly’s chair faces the garden, not the world. Paint fades. Wood weathers. Seasons do their quiet work. Some places aren’t meant to impress anyone. They’re simply where a good life sits for a while, coffee cooling beside the morning.
Pears teaching me patience just yesterday morning at Shelly and Don’s place out on the island. You’ve put me onto this patience stuff… argh.
A Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) pauses at Lake Yellowstone’s edge, twin black bands bright against its white breast. The Canon R5 with 70–200mm caught the watchful eye, wind-ruffled feathers, and blue water fading softly behind it. #birdoftheday
Fun to see @aptshadow.bsky.social on the shelf at Books & Bites in Roslyn, Washington. Small book stores with speakeasy’s in the cellar are my new favorite places to be on holiday! #bookstores
Day 12 of 62 on the road. Made it to West Yellowstone. Departed Houston with a full tank of gas and a simple RV in tow. Moderately connected to the status quo, but seeking peace in nature, and quiet to this cacophony in my mind.
I chased things and found only the mind watching. I chased the mind and found only the world rising to meet it. Call it a quiet #augury: seer and seen folding into each other, neither able to stand alone. #vss365 #AlanWatts
The journey continues! Loving these most recent drops. I am so glad I joined at the Patreon level. Bonus stuff! Yay. It’s not exclusionary, y’all… it’s participatory. Let’s do our part to help show these two we believe in their work and appreciate the little smiles they bring to our lives!
Pets… I think the judges would allow pets as one of the right answers too. Seen here being carried. A dog named Squirrel. 🐿️
Very cool. +3 to your uncles! Thanks for sharing. Merchant Mariners are the unsung, often forgotten, omni-capable champions of our international economy!
Oops… dating myself. My particular “skill set” got rolled up after I separated from the service (1992-2007) :
The #bass beat carried as Congreve rockets hissed across the water, claws of fire across the sky at Pigs Point. We dug in, Norfolk boys with damp powder and dry mouths. I thought, we don’t fight history, we outlast its thunder, and pray our names survives the silence. #vss365 #historicalfiction
The Germans, in their infinite gift for compact truth, have the word : morgenmuffel … someone constitutionally unfit for mornings. Some wake to seize the day. Morgenmuffels want to sue the day for emotional damages. #LanguageOfMood
AI won’t kill jobs all at once. It’ll chip away at the tasks that made us feel competent. People can survive unemployment. What we can’t survive is purposelessness in a system optimized to ignore us. #AIandWork
Four year shelf life? That’s downright sturdy food right there! Best if used by… end of the decade.
I’m not a fan of conscription except in the most dire existential circumstances for a culture. I volunteered back in 1992, and served until 2007, my grandpa, and dad before me and our son joined up last August. As long as people know the risk, and the price of freedom, joining up is still noble.
When the house is on fire, you don’t hold a private meeting about whether to unlock the hose. We need leaders, not hall monitors. The stakes aren’t subtle. The clock isn’t paused. The republic is watching, and so are its enemies. #DemocracyInCrisis #LeadOrStepAside
“Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct…” But when the threat is internal, when power defends sedition, we must recall: here, the people are kings. Tyrants fall when citizens remember their station. #FederalistWarnings #Hamiltonian #CivicDuty
She has my old journals and is holding them ransom? For what, I don’t know. I have the ache of unwritten pages. Fell for her when I was #single. I’ll try, “I am all the writers I have read.” If she replies, it will be to a version of me that still lives in her margins. #LiteraryGhosts #vss365
On Stochastic Models… Deterministic models offer certainty, the kind priests sell. Stochastic ones give you distributions and ask how much risk you want in your adventures. We build tools not to predict the future but to bargain with its most likely ghosts. #QuantNerd #TradingTools #Probable
Booted into flesh again today. … no patch notes, no wings, no firmware, just this damp animal chassis reconciling coffee, gravity, and … thermodynamic surrender. I suspect a bug in my code masquerading as a “teachable moment”. I’ve become ungovernable. #SimulationTheory #MondayMood #SoftReboot
Discovered who’s in my Skircle today. Also today, I learned that a Skirkle is something! skircle.me/api/show/684...
If the universe were infinite and eternal, the night sky would be white-hot with starlight. Every line of sight should end on a sun. But it doesn’t. It’s dark. Which means: The universe had a beginning. And not all light gets here. #OlbersParadox #Cosmos #NightThoughts
Answer : With a 10% spine angle (rear elevated), approximately 47.5% of the cat’s mass is registered on the scale when only the front paws are on it.