THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER - 131 - SPAWNING
Added 2024-11-29 18:44:00 +0000 UTCMy old friend Danny Shoup sent me a picture of a dead salmon in Oakland’s Lake Merritt. For those of you who don’t know, Lake Merritt is an artificial lake in the center of central Oakland. It is an actual tidal estuary that has been too toxic to allow for salmon to go anywhere near it for a hundred years. Salmon would have had a hard time getting into the lake & then into the streams that feed into it. Oakland was barely affordable for me in the 90s & starting a family there was way too much, only affordable for people making that non-independent artist scratch. But, just because it wasn’t affordable for me, doesn’t mean that I wasn’t genuinely moved by this amazing example of nature healing itself. I mean this is a lake that no one would swim in, no one would fish in it because there were no fish & if there were they were probably full of toxins & mutated. There were only ugly little crabs scuttling along the bottom, rusty cars, dead bodies would be dredged out every year. The Lake is a bird sanctuary so lots of birds hang out around the lake, the pelicans were particularly awesome. Later it was Canadian Geese along the shores, eating grass & covering everything with their dolma-like shit. Seeing salmon in the lake, when there weren’t any for my entire life & I assume well before it, is just amazing. I’ve always been environmentally minded, but it was harder for me to claim this when so much environmentalism is tainted with this anti-human tendency. It’s hard for people to remember that the reason for so much of their politics is to improve the lives of people & not become an embittered slave to an ideology that puts itself before the humans that it should serve. The ideologies are just so clean & uncomplicated & you’re lucky if people will even go along with them, let alone work inside of them & follow the rules. It was hard for me to leave Oakland & just accept the reality of money & not being able to afford to live in the place I grew up. I love Oakland, but not enough to change around my whole life in order to live there. Still it is just so awesome to see salmon returning to the lake.
x SEAN
