Month: June 2021

I got a personal response from Karl Penner

Hi Allegra

Thanks for the kind words and support.  There have been hundreds of them today, and I can barely keep up.  I am grateful.

In terms of a donation to my church, don’t worry it. We’re good.

Rather, pick your favourite charity and send the money there.  I’m sure they need it more than we do.

Thanks,

Kyle

Kyle is a pastor with Grace Mennonite in Steinbach and he participated in an advertisement to encourage people to be vaccinated. He’s gotten a lot of shit for it so I wrote his church to show support.

 

Yeah, I know, no gods no masters but is that personal or prescriptive? At the heart of that is my approach to anarchism.

also: my https://johnniejae.store/listing/likunklo?product=369&variation=6520&size=1906 tshirt arrived today so I’ll wear that for canada day and it’s got a hummingbird on it

 

feeling somewhat better

Jeff went out yesterday and came back with Iced Caps from Timmy Ho’s and IT WAS GOOD. They taste a little chemically when you’re done with them but they are a tasty treat in hot weather, I’ll tell you.

Current temp outside is 21ºC, a welcome improvement.

shown is the King of Sweden yelling at a footie game LOOOOOOK AT his wife’s face, look at the face of the woman in front of him LOL

so freaking hot

I forgot my on line appointment with my doc so of course I’m sitting in my room crying about how stupid I am. WHY WOULD I MISS THAT APPOINTMENT.

I’m so fucking stupid.

House is really hot from yesterday. It will be a while before it cools down.

Jeff’s off at a dentist consult. I’m waiting another week for my crown. Very bored with this.

what happened to the doll?

She ends up finding her former owner, getting all her limbs ripped up/off, and becoming a talking head queen of the rats when her severed head is thrown into a tip.

Yeah, not a happy story. Much body horror and interpersonal rejection.

Unbelievably hot yesterday. Worse today. I have to go to the dentist and I just don’t know how I’m supposed to walk over there when it will be 40 degrees C on the way back. I’m scared, I literally think I’ll collapse if I have to walk in that heat.

I don’t feel like blogging

when that happens all I want to do is whine.

Whining is not attractive. Ranting is more attractive. Roar roar, let’s follow this fool off whatever rhetorical cliff is attached like an Ambrus sketch to the following: alas! alas! she said (picture a small porcelain doll, animated in dim natural light from two directions, flailing on a rag rug in a child’s bedroom) this means that I must come up with a topic! (montage of said porcelain doll, set to martial music, outlining something vague with a wavering stick on what appears to be the world’s smallest square sticky note, climbing up an expressionless and motionless one eyed teddy bear to deliver a rousing speech to the rest of the completely unresponsive toys, tossing a sticky-hand over to the door knob from the highest height close to the door that she can climb, with a book tied to her leg – the music shifts from martial to moody  — you hear a terrifying rip and the door has sprung open, but the porcelain doll has paid a terrible price and -music shifts to glass harmonica horror with processed bowed bass and stays like that for the duration- now she walks a-kilter like a zombie, even though she is not a zombie, and man, it does not do a damned thing for her and she was pretty scuffed up when she started and you’ve only seen her from behind since she made it through the door but now the POV swings round to the front and you realize she isn’t porcelain she’s some kind of icky bakelite in white people’s skin tone beige and her nose has chipped off from her fall from opening the door) for the life of me I can’t think of a topic.

RANTING ABOUT 10TH AND CANADA WAY

oh FSM, Parking Goddess, anydeity on this frequency, aid me now and for all time to come https://newwestrecord.ca/local-news/opinion-someone-is-finally-trying-to-fix-this-gong-show-burnaby-new-west-intersection-3904159 YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND HOW BAD THIS INTERSECTION IS
Opinion: Someone is finally trying to fix this gong show Burnaby-New West intersection
·

1/ within the first 90 seconds of my brO having a dashcam, we watched a black suv go through this intersection southbound through a red light at 70 kph while stopped in the next lane over.

2/ there are three *heavily* trafficked driveways and two bus stops within metres of the intersection so you are continuously making evasive bumpercar/whackamole maneuvres with the most rancidly incompetent drivers in the lower mainland

3/ the advance green lights are wrongly bad and they should run all four ways, this is a busy intersection!!

4/ it’s at the bottom of a 150 foot elevation drop (over 6 intersections) people come screaming down that hill hoping to get through both the pedestrian crosswalk light which is two blocks away and the intersection itself, so drivers are routinely going 20 over the speed limit

5/ There’s a 7-11 + gas station on the corner and this weird fucked up fake lane that is basically how Mr. Audi and Ms. Accord get to know each other as one smashes the other trying to sneak around to the right while the other’s doing the same thing from the 7-11

6/ I’m not blaming the teens who go to the high school next to this intersection, they don’t usually seem too intent on throwing themselves under cars in my experience, but gawdam some of the wildest ad lib pedestrians on earth stroll adjacent to these crosswalks

6/ continued… I mean brO and I are happy if they make eye contact, mostly they don’t.

7/ every pole for a block around pleads for witnesses to accidents

8/ IT’S A SHARED JURISDICTION intersection. So the Burnaby RCMP (eye twitch) and the NWPD (shrug) get to share the duties when the blood/debris crosses the intersection. I don’t know how they figure out who does what but I’m sure it doesn’t make things sparklier

9./ I’d need a contour map and some dinky toys to demonstrate some of the ways in which momentum, gravity, common sense and, provisionally, space/time itself, fail to operate normally at this intersection, so please I beg you just take my word for it.

Further comments: I travel through this intersection an average of 4 times a week during the pandemic and more like 10 times otherwise. I live close enough that I once heard a collision there. This is on the bus route I mostly use.

So I read with interest that they intend to spend a quarter of a million dollars on this intersection, and this would be great except for one teensy problem. Not a single intersection ‘improvement’ I’ve seen in the last 20 years actually made things better.

brO and I are going to watch them spend a quarter mil to make it worse. The banging and construction delays will be horrific. and in the end…. I’m prepared to wager twenty bucks that it will be distinctly & measurably worse.

And I haven’t even MENTIONED the truck traffic, which is heavy and continuous during the day and steady at night because the biggest food storage depot (400 SQ METRES OF BUILDING and much more for truck parking and storage) in the lower mainland is a kilometre west.

content warnings all the way down

CW murdered children.
 
The next time I notice a white person say ‘our Native’ or ‘our Indigenous’ people, I’m going to go cold as a fucking mackerel and say, “The dead children in the ground are yours as well?” Just to watch them turn that colour, you know the one.
CW sex workers
I am now to the point in my deliberations about my love life when I’m glad that sex workers exist. I could add many other things, but my mOm is reading this.
CW automotive nostalgia
Me and my twitter buddy in Georgia this morning exchanged pictures of the red two seater sportsters our daddies owned when we were young. Ours was a Honda S600 (1966) and his was an Austin Healey. This man is half my age and honestly he’s one of the people I’ve found on the internet that I agree with about 87 percent of the time, and when we disagree, it’s usually for the entertainment of others.
CW whelp we’re hoobled
You can predict 49 degrees C in Kelowna but however fucking hot it gets we’re definitely going to be thinking about the future of air conditioning. Also, Jeff had a post to nail up about how we completely fucked up climate change, per European scientists, and we can’t actually push the peanut back into the shell, but he decided not to. Great grandchildren get a terrible world.
and the folks it’s aimed at

Beautiful walk

Went for a lovely walk in Fraser Foreshore yesterday with Paul and Jeff before it got too hot.

This morning did a shop; time for a cup of tea and an apple turnover.

I got a couple of ‘kudos’ for old stories on Archive of Our Own, and one complimenting me on a single sentence, so it’s nice to know that a sentence which I am not going to repost here because it’s rather risqué is enough to make someone provide spontaneous plaudits.

The two worst characters in Supernatural are getting their own prequel show, and it’s going to be a disaster because John and Mary Winchester should not get their own fucking prequel show. Why? No. Don’t get me started. Anyway. Rifts are appearing in the fan continuum and it’s fascinating to watch. A lot of people who are huge fans of the showrunners/producers are saying they aren’t going to bother with it because …. it’s about John and Mary, who are fucking dirtbags. OK maybe not so much Mary, but wow.

I am still in a very low point but continuing to work on tunes in a desultory way. I haven’t had what it takes to write for ages now, but summer is usually not my peak writing time…

goddamned tooths

The dentist was unhappy with the crown and now I have to wait another week, and what does THAT DO?

It means that I have to get a crown installed, vote in a by-election and finally wring an ADD meds scrip out of my doctor all in the same fucking day. I plan to drink heavily when it’s all over.

everyone was here yesterday

Prior to all this Paul and I had a lovely walk at Fraser Foreshore. We saw two adults and one juvenile bald eagle play fighting in the trees and making a hell of a racket at the same time, it was quite funny. Parking lots were bung full, we had to park miles from the lot.

I decided there was no reason for Paul to clean up after his own party so after a brief consult with Jeff we threw Paul’s Father’s Day celebration here.

Paul came over first, then Katie and Alex came over next, then kMike, then the kids (those three) left, then Mike came, then Paul left, then Keith showed up and Paul came back and then Keith and Paul left and then Mike left. Nobody was driving drunk at all, like, no one.

Seafood salad consisted of, here, have a green salad (iceberg lettuce, salad mix of seeds and cranberries, heritage tomatoes sliced, purple onion in relatively large chunks, grated carrot, broccolini) and put over top of it your choice of Argentinian prawns, Digby Scallops, or Alaskan Sockeye Salmon. This was 123 dollars of seafood, mostly salmon cause I got two fillets. I know, insane. There’s just enough leftovers for salmon pate tomorrow morning with mascarpone cheese, and we got lemon juice and capers. Anyway, I cooked the shellfish on the stovetop and baked the salmon for 20 minutes at 400. On part of the salmon I put a ‘ground pecans cut half and half with maple syrup’ crust. kMike hosed that shit down like a good thing, and declared it quite fine. (I had a bit.)

Alex had to go home to eat, that’s why he left.

Mike serenaded me on the back deck in the golden hour.

quite inebriated me

solstice sound poem with Alex

This is not a song. I am only peripherally in it – at one point you can hear my phlegmy cough, sorry about that lol. This is so my mOm can hear her grandson’s voice babbling and laughing any time she wants. It’s two and a half minutes of sonic mayhem. it was the winter solstice….