Lurkers decloak

the rules keep changing…..

OMFG.  This is disturbing, and yet I found myself laughing anxiously.  Somebody I had NO CLUE follows my blog has emailed me something by way of comment.  I’m paraphrasing massively, but it went like this.  “Next time you’re having problems why don’t you do something useful and strap a bomb to yourself?  I can think of a few handy places to put it, and I’ll even help you with the technical side of things.”  The rest of the email was a charmingly spelled rant about how even insanity is not an excuse for suicide (??!!), it’s for elderly and terminal people neither of which I am and I should be ashamed of myself for talking about suicide publicly.  Oh, yes, I should definitely take your advice and not the advice of people I love, who love me.  Let me just sit with that a moment.

Man, I know a lot of strange people.  The idea of repurposing my private turmoil for a rather expansive (in the gaseous sense) comment on public policy has a certain amount of flair though.  I couldn’t do it, even at the height of my belief that I’d be better off dead…. my rights end where my skin does, and I can’t imagine taking somebody else with me; it’s against everything I still believe.

Anyway, I’ve been lurking in MY OWN blog, which is weird.  Over the years I have had it… have I really been doing this for years and years???? I have said less and less about more and more.  I have been afraid of offending people; afraid of hurting people’s feelings; worrying about what people who already hate me think.  I’ve been afraid of losing my job, making my parents stop loving me, or being the kind of person who gives Unitarianism a bad name.  (I’ve had it pointed out that might not be a bad thing).  I’ve been very very scared.

So I’ll decloak.

I am one opinionated mofette.  ça veut dire mauxfaits.  On va recommencer.  I am going to stop beating myself up and start kicking the verbal snot out of those who more richly deserve it.  I won’t talk about work except to say when things are going well or badly.  I won’t recount personal conversations without the informed consent of the folks involved. I won’t repost emails without permission, this morning notwithstanding and besides it was a paraphrase and further besides he was obviously upset at somebody who isn’t me.  I was just the… lightning rod?  Dude can comment directly on my blog any time he likes… if he doesn’t like, he can take a sex holiday in Enumclaw with my compliments.

Leaving horsefuckery behind…. and yes, I’m against the use of animals for the sexual pleasure of human beings because of this whole ‘informed consent thing’, I’m just being sophomoric and rude…..

Foremost among those I would hear praised, Jeff, Katie, Paul, my parents, Peggy, Tom, Lady Miss B, Sue, Rev Katie, Keith, Chipper and two people who have asked not to be named publicly.  Thank you thank you thank you.  You are wonderful people and I know that you will keep doing what you do, so it’s good to know you are there.

Katie, thank you for telling me that you are and you intend to remain childless by choice.  I was sure I’d never want children when I was fourteen; I wanted kids by the time I was your age.   I think you’re old enough to know what you want.  Keith, haw haw, the joke’s on you.  My dreams of becoming a successful organizm now rest on your creamed-animé-on-tropes-stuffed cranium.  And if I’m never a grandma I’ll be fine; there are enough neurotic white folks in the world already or so I scan it.  One of my other relatives will breed when I’m longing for a baby to spoil.  It’s no biggie.

Back to the real world:

Eddie is wandering up and down the house HOWLING for Jeff.  He cries upstairs, downstairs, and outside (freaked me out, I couldn’t tell where he was; he sounded like he was locked in something).

Yay! Canadian tech for a better world!

Jeff, there’s rice pudding in the fridge.  Maybe you’ve gone off rice pudding but this rice pudding is very superior, and even if you don’t want it I intend to eat every scrap of it before it goes bad; Rozo and Katie already extracted some for their own use at home.

Damn Paul but that was an awesome roast.  I’d forgotten how much I love carrots and onyums done around a roast beast.

Al-Jazeera has been added to our roster of cable stations.  I watched, with amazement, a documentary that didn’t even have a single Arab name attached to it; who knew I’d get a very damning picture of the Latvian forest industry, with lots of lines drawn between the first world’s desire to greenwash everything and the destruction of the last pristine forests in Europa?  Honestly, I want to send an email to the Latvia PM telling him the satellite pictures of the Latvian forests are calling him an asshat and a full bore liar.  Latvian politicians and functionaries are disturbingly smooth voiced and calm, they all seem to speak idiomatic bureaucratese English, and the bigger the lie the calmer they look.  And they are destroying the traditional sustainable forestry operations which are family businesses.  The guy who won the international farmer of the year award was foaming at the mouth showing how all the ‘scientific’ forestry immediately around him – clear cuts all – are causing blow downs on his property and destroying the margins of his sustainable forest.  This is sustainable forestry in Canada.  That’s pretty much what it looks like in Latvia.  Anyway, at the current rate of clear cutting in Latvia- which is going to subsidize DIY homeowners in England, who get to buy wood that has a sustainably harvested sticker on it, sticker purchased by the Latvian forestry ministry from a fucking scam non profit in Britain – they won’t have a forest let alone a forest industry within ten years.  The habitat destruction of rare species is blandly ignored by the politicians because it’s all about employment.  Forestry sustains 40 percent of the Latvian GDP.  They are going to kill their economy.  One wonders, when forestry collapses, what the government will tell their unemployed young men to do.  A social, political and ecological disaster in the making, I’d say.  When the young men of Riga rioted after the economic downturn in 2008, this was the response of the government.  Clear cut Latvia.  Can’t even blame capitalism.  It’s state socialism that is doing the job, ably assisted by the English demand for board feet.

I think of the Ukrainians who froze to death rather than cut down the trees in the parks in Kiev during WWII and I wonder what the hell happened to the Latvians.  Shame.