Art by Katherine

https://aeon.co/essays/the-roots-of-writing-lie-in-hopes-and-dreams-not-in-accounting

“In each of the four sites of the independent invention of writing, there’s either no evidence one way or the other, or there’s evidence that a proto-writing pre-dated the administrative needs of the state. Even in Mesopotamia, a phonetic cuneiform script was used for a few hundred years for accounting before writing was used for overtly political purposes. As far as the reductive argument that accountants invented writing in Mesopotamia, it’s true that writing came from counting, but temple priests get the credit more than accountants do. ‘Priests invented writing’ is a reduction I can live with – it posits writing as a tool for contacting the supernatural realm, recording the movement of spirits, inspecting the inscrutable wishes of divinities.”

https://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/046.htm

Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she's a conjugated verb.
She's been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:

some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious,
and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
suspiciously around her hair, looking
for the door in her corona.
We're all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy,

we've all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap.

“Criticism is something you can easily avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” ~Anonymous

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/easing-the-effects-of-humidity-on-joint-pain_us_57c85488e4b06c750dd8f68c

“When there is already a high level of moisture in the air, it is difficult for the air to absorb the moisture from our skin. This can eventually lead to a loss of body fluid and dehydration. Joint cartilage and the discs in our spine have high water content, and dehydration can decrease the concentration of fluid, agitating any arthritis that may be present. Dehydration in the heat can also cause more serious conditions like heat exhaustion and heatstroke.”

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/tetchy