it's bad bitch o'clock

...and I'm on vacation

It’s bad bitch o’clock and I am up in Northern Ontario hanging out with rattlesnakes. No new writing this week.

But can we talk about last week’s for a sec? One of my worst habits as a writer is making really bad jokes that no one in the world but me actually gets. Case in point, the title of last week’s email, God save my boat.

It’s funny because:

A) It sounds like God Save The Queen (who had a brief cameo in the email)

+

b) I really like boats

So, in other words, not that funny. But I think I’m hilarious. Plus I just really love boats. Did I say that already?

According to Substack stats, the email got just as many opens as previous week’s though, proving that Mail Privacy Protection is actually a real thing and open rates are not a reliable metric! But that’s a subject for my other email list.

There were zero comments (probably because talking about colonisation makes a lot of people’s stomachs lurch) but one subscriber did reply to poke a few holes in Leave No Trace.

“There are quite a few Indigenous people who take issue with LNT, saying it is a colonial practice to separate humans from wilderness when in reality humans have lived with & in nature since forever.”

She shared an article on Medium about The Leave No Trace Myth that offered a new perspective. It made me think a good rule could just be "Stop leaving your garbage in nature you assholes.” But we still have to contend with the fact that eventually, the garbage has to go somewhere. “We must also realize that following a few rules does not clean up all of our messes,” the author wrote.

Something to think on.

Back next week, Lordwilling (as my dad would say).

XOT