Monday, August 26, 2024

Three Beautiful Things 08-26-2024: Everything's Connected, Unnecessary (But Enjoyable) Trip to Pilgrim's, Making Asian Sauce

1. On the face of it, the book Yellow Bird seems to primarily be about Lissa Yellow Bird's relentless search to locate, as it turned out, the corpse of Kristopher "K. C." Clarke, a worker on the Bakken oil fields, who was murdered. But it's so much more. It develops into a book about the history, yes, of the Yellow Bird family, and also of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, reservation politics, the dark elements of the Bakken oil boom, the psychosis of greed, the lasting impacts of generational trauma, the fraught history of the relationship between Indian nations and the U. S. Government, the heedless damage to the land perpetrated by oil extraction and related activity, and a lot more. 

I enjoy expansive books like Yellow Bird. I am almost finished with this book and relish reading the many directions it goes, its cast of countless persons, how it captures the complexity of the benefits and the detriments of the oil boom by telling multiple stories, jumping between them, not staying on a single story telling track through the whole book. 

I don't intend for what I'm about to say to be original: Yellow Bird illustrates how everything is connected. 

When I finish this book on Monday, I'll try to write a more cogent description of the multiple places and aspects of life on and off the reservation that are all connected to the complicated and complex life of Lissa Yellow Bird. 

2. I didn't need to hop in the Sube and drive to Pilgrim's Market in CdA today, but I just did. I wanted to give the Sube a spin. I also wanted to continue testing the waters of going into public places, masked, and gaining confidence that I can do more things where people are around and not necessarily get sick and endure a long, slow recovery. 

3. I fixed s bunch of chicken wings for dinner along with a stir fry and continued to experiment with Asian sauces and mixed one today that worked really well on the stir fry and pretty well on the chicken.  

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