Ugly outside but not really raining. Haven’t left the house. Two loads of laundry on, the dishes done. Worked on an article for the blog called “How to write a song” and it’s partly good advice and partly ranting, house brand really; spoke to the dietician, practiced and sang a bit, ate the last samosa for brekky and now all I want to do is get another one or six or ten or fifteen hundred. Worked a bit on non Indigenous bits of UPSUN.
Month: December 2020
Two Daves
Two letters written but not posted today; it’s a Two Dave day.
Jeff’s just asked me to go downstairs and watch a Time Team. Hope it’s something Saxon or Roman. L8r Nope, medieval and Tudor. But really interesting if you’re crazy about remodelling castles for successive waves of improvements in warfare, boom goes the gunpowder.
Alex was here recently and I’m just remembering him being happy about getting a tube shot on the Xenon game and it made me happy in consequence.
Buster was past damp into dripping wet, and filthy when he came back in this morning…. must be horrible to have to clean that crap off with your teeth and mouth blech.
Indian food delivered last night. I was very happy with the quality and quantity for the price. It’s a new place (8 months?) that does pizza and Desi food Pasifika style, which is like, so Vancouver, it hurts.
Chuck Yeager, RIP. His autobiography is most entertaining.
Letter from Onty Mary, and I’m so glad she enjoyed the paper art I put in with a recent letter, that was cheering.
Today has been set aside for One Grim Task. I do not want this task. I do not want the cascade of tasks that will flow from this One Grim Task. I AM DISGUST, SON.
It’s 10:20 in the morning and I am still not nerved up for this gd task. I am actually hitting the old moral GPS for a recalc from my new position and fuck me if it’s not taking a bit longer than any reasonable person might expect. What is it that a reasonable person following Stoic principles might expect? I said I’d write first PHEW AN OUT, I HAVE AN OUT.
With that I must now turn my attention to the real writing I need to do today, otherwise known as Quarantine Porn. And that works whether I’m talking about the UPSUN universe or my rapidly-winding-down interest in writing porny Supernatural fanfic. (Not all of it’s porn, some of it’s just fluff.)
And if I’m not going to write that, I have to go back out into the kitchen and either work some more on The Dark Book – current section is “the Calendar” and it’s fucking MOLOCH this and MOLOCH that, as he drives his diesel dick through history and messes us all up, it’s just standard issue eschatology schlock, that’s part of the point of the poem though, disjointing the specifically English language over and past and through its various levels of inanity, legalism and perverse vagueness through to a new horrific understanding about what ‘end times’ actually means for the people living through it, and you are among those people, and what the hell is this poem anyway (this last aside for my parents, who have long since given up on trying to understand what it is I’m babbling about and reached this question much earlier) — or work on my master grocery list, and I finally figured how I can get what my grocery list looks like in my head to my actual grocery list that I use every week and reinforces how I visualize and operate in the world, but I haven’t done it yet. So I have work to do to advance this project, which will assist me cognitively as my brain declines and I’m still shopping, and which may have applications for other seniors and TBI sufferers. (I certainly wasn’t able to find anything like it on line.) So yeah, projects, in order, depending on what I’m up for mood and skill wize.
Yup, I’m going to wander off and reconfigure my reality right now, be back in a day for an update or sooner if something interesting happens.
One last thing, the ‘writing light’ in the kitchen died and I asked for help from Jeff (my shoulder’s frozen…. that was weird, realizing it) and he touched the apparently dead compact fluorescent and it illuminated and it made me think of pOp. Also Jeff is quietly amazing, the best kind.
I’m a proud ZERO
ALAN MCFADYEN TOOK SIX YEARS TO GET THIS SHOT
a very welcome phone call
Last night before supper time I got A PHONE CALL FROM TOM. He’s still in the hospital, but he’s got his phone and charger, and he was getting a magnesium iv, and he was bored out of his gourd, so he thought he’d give me a call.
And it was most wonderful. I tried to be friendly, bracing and accepting of his situation. He says where they cracked his chest he’s healing so well you can hardly see it; but he also says he’s absolutely freezing all the time, and that’s really not fun. I told him to start making a list of the things he needs to do when he gets out of durance vile. He said I’m gonna go home and build the biggest damn fire in the fireplace and park myself in front of it until I actually FEEL WARM.
He should be out this week.
So I’ll mail him one more letter and then go back to emailing him if he wants.
I’m really hating keeping a food diary. Right now I want to boot Jeff out of his bed like a cartoon character and make him drive me to the Timmy Ho’s on Marine for coffee, but nooooo gotta be abstemious.
social justice hobbyist
characterizing social justice thinking, writing and action as a hobby as opposed to a moral choice
even as a joke in defiance (this is in reaction to this) it frames disembodied zeitgeist capitalism as the container and arbiter of human activity
One of the great flaws of English is how easy that comes.
and yes, my hobbies include updating my lingo and nuance on ableist, racist, classist, anti-Indigenous, homophobic, transphobic, acephobic, misogynist, biphobic, penis and vulva-oriented, misandrist, ethnic, gendered, religious and other slurs, scolding other ww and rude rhymes.
holy shit, this cartoon by patreon.com/barry was apparently first published 2008 but I’ve watched with my own eyes how this has come true en masse in social media especially in the UK. Absolutely stunning
Letters, writing, practice, things to do
Wrote two letters, one to mOm and one to tOm, lol. Haven’t posted them yet. One of them has a fake get well card in it (SORRY TO HEAR YOU’RE FUCKIN’ POORLY it says) and the other has a snowflake which if you look very carefully is extremely non standard although it is roughly hexagonal. (There’s a very funny and extremely accidental design in the middle.)
I’m thinking of posting a song a day for a year. I have written enough songs to do that. It would be a horrific thing to take on, but I’m never going to be BETTER at singing and playing, now’s the time to do it if at all. I await a sign from the ancestors that this is a good idea. I will commence in January if I hear back from them.
Romain Grosjean has given his first interview since the crash. It’s remarkable for a couple of things, apart from his sunny gratitude for making it through one of the most horrifying and spectacular crashes in F1 history with no more than burns on his hands and ankles. One is that he admits that he was wrong to whinge about the “Halo” when it was instituted in 2018; the other is that he completely normalizes how YOU SHOULD GET PSYCHOLOGICAL HELP AFTER TRAUMA. None of this shit about gutting it out. He was weeping in the rescue car after the accident (he was burned and had broken several bones) and thank you Romain for being a human being and not endorsing toxic masculinity or trying to hide that when bad shit happens, humans need help. Also, he is one of the few humans to have survived a 53G impact and he crawled 18 seconds later (they’re trained to detach from plugs and harness in 9 seconds) from the FIREBALL of wreckage with a broken foot (the doc didn’t want him to walk but he thought it was important for the fans that he get to the rescue car under his own power and MAN WAS HE RIGHT because our relief when we saw him emerge from that inferno cannot be limned in words). Yay Halo.
@prisonculture sez CYNICISM ISN’T GENERATIVE
almost perfect day
Apart from me yelling at Paul for not keeping social distancing around non mask wearers in Deer Lake Park, it was a very pleasant day yesterday. We saw a hummingbird (which I misidentified as a bush tit until Jeff said nope) and an eagle in the park and heard (I didn’t hear it) a beaver slap its tail. The sunshine was glorious and there was no wind…. pleasant and overdue.
I mailed two letters, et a takeout IHOP breakfast courtesy of Jeff, called my mother TWICE because the first time I had to tell her about the MST Futurism webinar (I stayed for 1.75 hours on Thursday evening, and I’d like to state publicly that I didn’t take notes, per their request, but I went into auditory overwhelm and left… then forgot to take my bp medication until around nine pm when I thought HEY WAITAMINIT) and the second time I received a call from Keith which prompted an update call. And if you can’t happy cry all over your mother who CAN you cry all over. I know how lucky I am to be 62 with a lovely stoic for a mOm. (Part of the conversation was me telling her that she is one of the great stoic philosophers of the 21st century, and her making the guppa guppa noise in response, so then I had to give her the rundown on why she is a stoic.)
I don’t know how many of you can drag Epictetus and ADD into the same sentence but (smiles, buffs nails.)
A long time problem with UPSUN (which I now have to insert for corrections) has been fixed. Perhaps others have been created, I’m just glad that something that’s literally been wrong and bugging me since day one has been fixed, because the first people of Vancouver have a name for themselves now for the benefit of themselves and English speakers.
THIS IS MST COUNTRY – MUSQUEAM, SQUAMISH, TSLEIL-WAUTUTH. These are the territories of the territories of
the xwməθkwÉ™yÌ“É™m (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lÅ and SÉ™lÌ“ÃlwÉ™taÊ”/Selilwitulh (Tsleil- Waututh) Nations.
argella the shitposter
But I suppose I should stop shitposting and put something proper in here
and have something else funny as a chaser
ableism
She really is an advocate for herself. Please read this letter if you’re a cCanadian, it’s about Bill C-7
How fare tr&mp lawsuits
yeah, not great.
Finally mailed the letter to Alex. Got one letter to go out today, to mOm.
Very creative days musically. Very small amounts of writing, nothing noteworthy except section 7 (or possibly 16, or 11) is drafted for The Dark Book.
Christmas is coming, Die Hard too
LOL I did a search and replace on a fanfic and all of a sudden I had a Caserole.
Shopping this am; we’re out of milk. I think I’m going to take a break from writing letters for a couple of days until I actually have some news; I’m to the point I’m making stuff up or talking about the news on the telly (which I don’t watch, it’s just an expression)
goddamn this is rich
another reminder
a reminder
Okay enough lazing about
Today it’s my intention to get a little more work done than yesterday, which was a stellar day for doing as little as possible in comfort and style. I have a sleep hygiene fix to enact, solstice presents to make, flour buns to bake and at some point I’m going to have to try that new toaster.
Also letters to mail, laundry to do, spiderwebs to take down, plans to gestate and plots to thicken.