people want mature stories that reflect their lived experience under fascism?
the only candidate who didn't defend paedophiles
Goddamn swamps are beautiful. The only place I've been to which felt more alive is deep jungle in Panama. Driving to Miami, I stopped in Big Cypress before the Shark Valley area of the Everglades. Whereas the latter is mostly sawgrass marshes with islands of trees that are a few inches higher in elevation, Big Cypress has extensive cypress swamps that took me an hour and a half to drive through. The life there grows in layers and everything has a rich network of epiphytes growing on it. I couldn't ID the specific air plants but they're so large that I think they're the endangered giant ones. Similar species grew over almost every other tree, some of them as massive as witches brooms.
Surprisingly not as many vines as I thought there would be, but the climbing asters that dominated the area were probably 10m long and coming off a bush as large as a car.
I'm definitely going back to Florida to explore its ecosystems more and kayak around the tip. Both carnivorous plants and live fungi were totally absent that far south.
With every snake I've handled, maybe a dozen species of domestic pets and wild ones, they've always been more afraid of me than I am of them. Even the rattlesnakes on hiking trails. One small part of their body is a defensive weapon while I have four limbs and tools. They can't see well, they're pretty dumb, and their mouth might not even be large enough to bite me.
They don't really have mammalian affection but snakes do seek warmth. My chainlink kingsnake was almost 2m long and he wanted nothing more than to hold onto me while I did things. He could have constricted but I wasn't posing a threat and he was fed regularly on a predictable schedule. On feeding and shedding days I didn't handle him to minimise that conflict. The reward of having that pet was peaceful coexistence with something I have a mild phobia of and being able to see the behaviours that humanise it. They're all the fun of an aquarium but you can hold the fish.