Day: February 17, 2021

I’m just going to come right out and say

I think this is my favourite picture of myself currently. You can actually tell my eyes are green. Why would it be one in which I’m wearing a false moustache? I don’t think I’m trans.  I have actually thought about it, have thought about my relationship to my own body, my own gender, my own self-conception as a woman. I am very interested in trans issues, and have been for decades, but I’ve always felt quite comfy in this body, so no dysphoria, and no soul deep awareness of there being something misaligned between the  frame and the spirit. I am repelled by the requirement for female bodies to wear certain kinds of clothes and makeup (for the convenience of men, and policed by other women BLEAUGH)  and to be accoutred in very specific and specifically socially harmful, dangerous and infantilizing ways, so I’m a gender non-conformist. I might have thought I was non-binary at some point but not enough to have public opinions about it, or any ability to hold that idea in my mind as possibly true for longer than it took to acknowledge that as a cis white gal I really do have to question all this stuff since I may believe a bunch of colonial bullshit that just is not true. And no matter how hard I pull at the big ol rubber band known as reality I’m still a mostly straight cis white woman, coasting on my privileges to a strange old age.

I just backspaced over the next two sentences, and the world is a safer place. I have started taking a lot of hair off my face and I’m quite liking the results. I’m rounding out my hairline and keeping my eyebrows quite policed. Both men and women mess with their facial hair. Is it a gendered thing? oh yes.

Paul took me for a walk today and I got letters to Mary and Barry into the post, finally. Pork chomp and coleslaw and broccolini for dinner.

I am not Wilford Brimley

I AM SO WILFORD BRIMLY

Allegra wisdom for the day “Peace of mind is harder to find than the outhouse on Gilligan’s Island.”

on learning that Rush Limbaugh had departed this world

Speak nothing but good of the dead? I shall certainly oblige you in this instance, goodsir, most directly, by ejaculating: “He’s dead? good!”

 

I have to add, because I am a fucking asshole, that he leaves no children to grieve him, so either he was sterile or the women he married were smart enough not to breed with him. Sometimes a heavy hearted world catches a break.

she’s on that poetry thing again – The people they chose

the endearing fascist is everywhere

o,O

the words are a smear of nice, a pretend of nice, a klieg light of nice that burns everything
that’s good and makes it nice, nice, nice
everything orderly

this is a map and these are the lines
and inside these lines we are nice

and I with disrumption have come
have come, and ev-e-ry niceness is glum, was glum.
Tripulations and farkakte derivations of bad things
are apiece with nice,
bakelite
worked
into
one of van Meegeren’s canvases

hanging in a steady machine tic of nice
nice
nice

(THIS IS A CULTURAL TREASURE)

but if you test it, it is not

so apt is my example

Nice is a mill that grinds little Black girls into powder
or tries, and fails to succeed in a vale of Death
just so she doesn’t forget what she’s up against
Nice is the good white girl with almost perfect teeth
who has Done Something Nice
in a perfectly recursive way,
at this point it hardly matters what ; those
people on the receiving end of nice
normally do not get
an opinion

Nice is the nun
educating Cree boys

into a nicer understanding
of their true place in the real world

It’s not for me to say which way is nicer
I already know and you don’t much care, being at the end of the poem

but as for me and the tirelessly nice and
clueless gallery of my colonial foremothers
whom I am pressed to carry now that I have grandchildren
I will choose the lands, and the people they chose
and stay out of your very nice heaven

An evening of serious drinking

An evening of serious drinking
that we have so long planned
an evening of serious drinking
at last at last is at hand
o fall on your knees to the porcelain god
as into the temple you crawl
and pray for the strength of your liver
as into a stupor you fall

An evening of serious drinking
that we have so long planned
an evening of serious drinking
at last at last is at hand
aaaaammmmeeennnnnnnn

Written for Jerome R (whom I brought to my mother in Victoria many moons ago to advise her that I stood in sibling relation to him) on the occasion of his 25th bday a solid 2 decades ago, and it was a fucking awesome party, thanks.

No mOm, you’re not expected to remember meeting every random stranger I’ve dragged in front of you.

Spare a thought for Jeff who occasionally gets this song as an earworm. Man, what a life.