Month: October 2022

Jeff very kindly got me a copy of ‘Road Food’, Misha Collins’ show about regional US cuisine. Really enjoyed the first episode. Jeff is no fan of Vietnamese cuisine, but I am; watching the show start with Pho for breakfast (when I used to have it after I got off midnights all the time at the 24 hour place (name keeps changing) on Kingsway) was MOST enjoyable, I could practically smell it through the screen. His former castmates have started a new ‘Winchester property’, it airs for the first time this month.

We watched ‘Catherine called Birdy’ and enjoyed it mightily. The closing credits are absolutely delightful, and everything beforehand was very well done; a perfect star vehicle for the inimitable Bella Ramsey (previously from Game of Thrones and Worst Witch.) I find it amusing that if I’d known Lena Dunham was behind it I probably would have given it a miss, but many of the writing and interpersonal lapses of her past incarnations are not seen here. A woman’s allowed to get smarter. I won’t infest my site with it, but if you care, google Lena Dunham controversy and be prepared to wonder if she has any friends who don’t share their drugs with her. I mean, I could easily say a hundred controversial things before breakfast but she acted like she literally didn’t understand what she was being called on half the time, and dissolved into tears at charges of racism.

Please note that if you’re a settler accused of racism, it’s probably true! Screaming about it doesn’t help. Sit with it and stay off social media until you can represent yourself as a person capable of self-improvement. Not saying I am that person. I have moved my views somewhat but I’m in the post-wallow stage of antiracism (sample of wallow: ah me! hoW CoudL I haveKN OWN … my PAreNTS did their best – there were only two people of colour in my entire grade school, blah blah blah yes I’m 63 and white in Canada, of course I bathed in racism and ableism erryday) in which I feel a brisk disdain for white crybabies and prefer deeds to words on the subject.

There are 50K Beavis and Butthead fanfics on AO3. Jest reviewing my life choices over here.

5278 words on Part II.

For Trotsky Tuesday, please enjoy the famous combination of anarchist ideals like free love and nudity plus scientific excellence embodied in this wikipedia article about ´Élisée Reclus.

I’ve gotten to the stage in the pandemic where I’ve now imagined all my friends and relatives dying of COVID (except Onty Mary because she just WON’T, THAT’S WHY! I DON’T HAVE TO EXPLAIN THAT TO ANYONE) or sequelae and gone to their funerals in my mind. Somehow I get to arrange all those funerals too so I get things how I want them. As you know I enjoy funerals and memorial services and do like a good one. Anyway, if I sound like I’ve been randomly crying throughout the day, here’s what made me cry.

A newborn calf with really bad respiration after a tough birth, dying in its owner’s arms. A Ukrainian woman making a video for her boyfriend on the front and her apartment takes a direct hit while she’s making it. Dozens of Canadian disabled people on twitter begging for food because they have nothing in their house for Thanksgiving. Not being able to do Thanksgiving with the family. Being too lazy to cut olives for pizza. Wondering if this phone call to my mOm will be the last one. Being glad that my daughter trusts me enough to talk to me about important stuff. Being terrified to lose this housing situation. (This place is literally 50% cheaper than any even close to equivalent housing situation in all of the lower Mainland.) Being so tired that I forgot my evening meds. Every time I go to the grocery store now, I cry. I cry about the abundance of food that’s going to disappear into the maw of climate change. I cry every time I put something like coffee or almonds or chocolate in the cart. Not much, I’m not sobbing, but I’m leaking.

The pandemic is dragging us all through a slow motion mass casualty event. We’ve been abandoned by politicians but the wise expect that. What we never expected was neoliberalism is such an indelible feature in our world that it has made the people we thought we could trust – the public health authorities and epidemiologists – into villainous murderers.

During and after the Great Mortality (as the black death was known at the time) people became much more selfish, lonely, profligate, violent and distractable (by contemporary accounts, anyway, as I read in Tuchman’s ‘The Distant Mirror’.)

It’s all happening again now, and I’m in the middle of it with everyone else. These moments of sadness are because it’s easy for me to feel sad. Many beautiful things are dying, but we must rush on regardless and be adults and hide our grief.