UP + DOWN (the inextricably extractive)

there are many angles from which to photograph a pumpjack, but then there is THE angle. you know the one: iconically associated with texas, this sidelong profile features the petrochemical apparatus perched like a praying mantis, sucking the earth like a mosquito. google the word "pumpjack" and 95% of your results will only feature this profile, this silhouette that screams "texas tea."

let me spill some tea: this image is the antithesis of that. it is a self portrait of a time which just precludes the transformation (and deep disruption) of daily life that was (and is) the covid era.

let me spill some tea: i used to call pumpjacks "the up and downs" as a kid. on roadtrips we would pass through fields laden with the machinery. sometimes my dad would drag me out to the field; "going to visit the up and downs," he would say, attempting to placate my annoyance.

let me spill some tea: the boom bust cycles of a deeply texan economy tethered to the petrochemical industry do not make for a stable childhood. "the up and downs" beget ups and downs.

let me spill some tea: i cannot extricate my biography from an umbilical relationship to fossil fuels, and neither can you. the device you are reading this on, the light above your head, and the togo container you last ate a meal on are both literally and metaphorically tethered (deeply) to a vast series of interconnected ups and downs.

let me spill some tea: i write this on march 29, 2026, when an estimated 2000 vessels are waiting outside the strait of hormuz. i imagine these tankers, gently swaying up and down, bobbing in the fluctuations of the most surface level fluid that is the persian gulf.

let me spill some tea: in this country, the lights are on but no one's home.

let me spill some tea: in this country, it feels impossible to disentangle from the extractive within this lifetime.

let me spill some tea: the energy in the lightbulb nearest you, dear reader, is comprised of once-living creatures which saw (or at least experienced) the cretaceous. some schools of thought may extrapolate, then, that this energy contains vestiges of memory. the memories of ups and downs, bobbing within the millions-of-years-ago sea.

let me spill some tea: there is something deeply metaphysical and alchemical about petroleum. it is a substance comprised of life which – only via millions of years of compression – transmutes through a series of substance states to be burned, becoming light itself.

let me spill some tea: if the earth is a mother, she is a witch who has brewed this potion for millions of years; it is only since modernity that the cyclical and interconnected petrosystems of life, death, and energy have become perversely connected to actions of potential (probable) planetary demise.

let me spill some tea: the brew moves up; the brew moves down.

let me spill some tea: it is not the fossil to blame, but he who uses it as fuel.

let me spill some tea: it is a perverse cycle, but we must understand it in order to build an alternate energy infrastructure, one in which we listen adequately.

let me spill some tea: it sounds like up and down.