All of sybaritick's Comments + Replies

I don't have any big, epiphanic generalized advice, but one thing that feels pretty useful: People in my experience are almost always willing to make one stretch, in a conversation, especially if it's acknowledged as a stretch. Like, if you ask them "okay, look, for the next five minutes, I'd like to use words in this particular way, and I get that you don't want to use words that way in general and that makes sense, too, but if you could do me a favor ..." Usually, in my experience, people are open to those requests? So it boils down to something like, thinking strategically about which single discourse norm you'd find most useful, for which single five-minute chunk. (This tends to have the benefit of making those groups more accustomed to receiving and granting small discourse requests in general, which is helpful for everybody.) And you can, like, balance it out, too—you don't always have to have the request be "more of a certain kind of rigor or precision." Like, you can sometimes say "okay, I can't express this in reasonable, fair words, so what I'd like to do is spew some unfair gunk and then go back afterward and cut out the parts I don't endorse. Is that okay with you all? Like, can I just get the words out, first, and then we can go back and strike some of them?" Another important piece of this puzzle in my experience is making such agreements with specific conversational partners. Like, if you're on a Discord with 1000 people, it's impossible to get them all to shift modes at once, but you can usually manage to do something like "Hey, username, can I try a different mode real quick?" and then either just don't engage with other people butting in, or gently say "yeah, I'm doing a weird thing with username right now, scroll up for details" or whatever.

I'm not sure that I'm necessarily advocating taking the other chemical names out. After all, they play a necessary role right at the very end, and I don't know how that would work without all the previous use. I didn't mean to imply that there was any doubt that pollution was a central topic! That would be hard to miss. But it's not so clear what you're trying to say about it. (Or whether you're neutrally refraining from saying anything in particular, and just showing it in its natural habitat, as it were.) Perhaps if I were less ignorant that last parenthesis would tell me a clearer story. (Though I guess googling the chemical names would probably have sufficed.)

Some rather scattered thoughts: There are some very nice things here; I think the paragraph where you introduce the convention of treating chemical names like biological ones is particularly good, for instance, though the convention isn't as effective after that when the chemical names are no longer pairs of words. Generally, I like your writing style at the word/phrase/sentence level, at least as it manifests in this particular piece of writing. Many things about this piece leave me puzzled. That may be intentional (leave lots of intriguing dangling threads to keep the reader's attention; leave 'em wanting more, not less), or it may indicate that this piece should really be considered as part of something larger that ties some of the loose ends together (it's clear that this piece is depicting a specific moment in a longer life -- "before we left", "before I left the state", "I often thought of it before I did things", etc.). Though there are puzzles that I don't think any context would resolve. For me, the resulting sense of not being sure what's going on was disagreeable, but other readers might well differ. The thing I liked least about this piece is that it didn't seem to be going anywhere. That may just indicate that there's something I didn't grasp, of course. There are a number of things that seem like themes (pollution and waste; the pin oak, considered as a character who sees things on a timescale longer than ours; what happens to houses and neighbourhoods over time; childhood) but there doesn't seem to be much development of those themes, and accordingly I'm left not sure what the point is (if there is a "point", which of course there need not be). The very end suggests that perhaps the point is something to do with insidious invisible pollution? Our narrator, as a child, thinks something is water but in fact it's water, trichloroethylene, 1-1-dichloroethene. That doesn't seem like enough of a shock, somehow, to pull its weight. So it seems more as i