Author: Allegra

Born when atmospheric carbon was 316 PPM. Settled on MST country since 1997. Parent, grandparent.

sideways thought

I’m a left-loonie, so-far-away, no brain, no balance sheet, no COMPETITIVE VIGOUR kind of person, except for my fondness for guns.

How on earth can I justify such a thing?

Well, I had never tried to, and then an Organizing Principle appeared from the writhing and fuscous depths of my sensorium: why not make a list of who else carries guns in Canada and, you know, compare and contrast?

I’m not really that much of a left-loonie I guess, since I have these libertarian and anarchist stripes, which I need to bury under a more ancient way of knowing.  No anarchist or libertarian ever fucking learned to live inside an ecosystem without destroying it, and the ancestors of the current First Nations actually had that well in hand, from the Haudenosaunee to the Gwich’in and all the peoples many days’ journey around and between.

Note that the slave based culture of MesoAmerica did not prosper.  They fucked up their water table and had armies of drones to support one big hereditary family of fucking parasites (who made nice art possible, sure, that’s the Eurocentric response and it was but an armature for later development like the Enlightenment and Oh Look there are still Royal houses in Europe bla bla bla.) Yeah, they put too many people on too little land and last few generations of the lower classes were in such rough shape that it’s amazing they gave as good an account of themselves as they did when the Spanish arrived.

The people who figured out the buffalo, and the salmon, and the caribou, and the three sisters, now THOSE are people we should respect.  We don’t even know how many of them lived here before white people came, but it was a fuckton, and if they didn’t leave much behind maybe it’s because they didn’t ruin everything.

 

12015

I hope everybody appreciates how I stayed home yesterday and wrote rather than go to a house filk. But a thousand words is worth it (broken up into three stretches of writing.)

Only 76000 words to go! Plus extras for editing.

11081

Lovely brief visit to Tom and Peggy’s for the AntiThanksBaking, starring Jeff and Jeri Lynn and Callie and her sweetie.  Plus bonus Cindy and GREG.  Plus bonus home made 3D printer.  Plus OMG best tea cookies on surface of planet nearly fell face down in it to devour entire sheet.

Which was a distinct tactical error since Mike was taking me to dinner.  Shrimp and salad, a light meal, with a Fat Tug, which about nuked me. I was thinking of a pitcher; Mike burst out laughing and the server blanched. So, no.

Lost my brother’s car keys.  Later, found brother’s car keys.  In the middle PANIC O MY GOD JEFF WILL NEVER TRUST ME AGAIN.

Lost my brother’s external hard drive cables.  Jeff went into the chaotically artistic debris field that is my room and rescued the cables with the grim determination of a mother cat rescuing her offspring from a house fire.  I am killing myself laughing as I type this. I must be the luckiest woman alive.

Fed Ayesha.

Breakfast at Coming Home.  Kassidy was working.  We had many giggles. They are welcoming to everybody.  Coffee ran through me faster than a Vlad’s Special.

Now I’m watching F1, time shifted, from Abu Dhabi.  The architecture for this circuit is graceful and superb even if it is a glazier’s wet dream.

 

10879 word count

Not making fantastic progress, but I washed dishes and put the now clean front hall mat and upstairs sofa cover back down, got out of the house to feed Ayesha and get deodorant and laundry deterg and  – chocolate – which I have stashed somewhere in the house so Jeff and I don’t devour it.

I can’t find the power supply and connector cables for the other external drive Jeff loaned me.  I don’t know what the hell happened to them but they are not in my room.  I never would have thrown them out but Jeff assures me they were all together.  It’s very annoying, and now I have to figure out how to get replacements.

I am about to have a flurry of engagements – today feeding Ayesha plus hanging with the American Thanksgiving blowout at Tom and Peggy’s (they have a cross border Christmas Cookie fest every year because they have TWO OVENS.) Supper with Mike.  A visit with Alexander somewhere in there. Sunday afternoon hanging out with Janice L and her roomie.

Thus the deodorant.  It’s actually an odorant, but everyone calls it deodorant.

I’ve actually written 180 more words this morning, let’s see where this chapter goes.

 

10863 is the count

Anyhooverville, today is a walk to Planet Bachelor to feed Ayesha.

I have already rehearsed When I Go.  FUCK THAT SONG IS HARD sHE DID IT ON PURPOSE THE SLIPPERY jackanapes.  Dave Carter, who was a woman and died before she could come so. I perform on this mourning moon a keun-jeol for Dave Carter, but it’s kinda virtual, so please understand.

In the allowing myself to feel sad I can go back and write the isolation that is hounding all of my lead characters in various ways.  Will they ever be a krewe again and will it ever be the krewe it was before? The answer depends on what more of yourself you will bring this time.

Today’s affirmation: Organization makes the impossible possible.

It shows worms and flies chasing away a chicken, who is shall we say nonplussed.

Back to work, trying hard to make wordcount by noon.

 

365 Daily Affirmations for the Revolutionary Proletarian Militant

I’m not a prole by virtue of upbringing, education and unemployment, so I really got it in memory of John.  I do like it, even if I don’t agree with all of it.  I supported the Kickstarter and it arrived yesterday and it’s gorgeous.

Yesterday the weather was so yeesh Paul and I mall walked at Brentwood instead, and I came home with more soap and more undies and much sorer feet than normal since we normally walk on more yielding substances than the terrazzo floors one finds in malls. I picked up a dark chocolate Sweet Georgia Brown for Jeff.

THE FOLLOWING RANT TRIGGERED BY THIS.

The novels I am working on honour and name some women’s experiences that don’t get spoken of much in fiction, and while I meant to write something overtly feminist and goofy (there is a LOT of goofiness in all of the novels, also stuff that’s really sad or formal or media-crunchy or just kinda sideways to the normal flow of contemporary novels) I wanted to deconstruct a lot of issues I find with fiction.

The first novel is written almost entirely from the points of view of the main characters.  They lie, they address the camera with every show of sincerity, and in some cases they go off into wacko country to expose themselves and their feelings to demonstrate how real and how weird they are, on purpose, kinda like a performance piece that you can’t look away from despite how terrible it is.  Later, you hear from a sympathetic female character that she doesn’t believe a word that our heroine wrote on the subject of her relationship with the lead alien, to which her sad response is, “I can’t believe the things that really happened,” which is me saying that erasure happens at every level of human life, fictional or not. Not everyone in your lifeboat is your friend.

What we are willing to consider unbelievable defines us.  When we open the floodgates to unmediated human experience and see with our x-ray eyes the patterns and radiating webworks of connection and alienations, our prejudices will define what we see, our linguistic traffic patterns will define how we talk about it OR IF WE CAN TALK ABOUT IT AT ALL and what springs into the foreground for me as a writer is how crabbed and censored and tied in moneyed, legalistic, sexist knots all of my life is, including, overwhelmingly, most of the media I consume.

I am over the side of a little boat, trying to get a big damned net off a whale that has begged for my help BY BEING IN FRONT OF ME AND NEEDING MY HELP.

And if I’m really lucky, I will experience that moment of success. I’ll get the net off ONE WHALE. The whale will leap into the air and take me to the place of gratitude that belongs to all thinking creatures – at least the mammals.

I am trying to free language so that we can speak about things that mean something to us.  Women, men, everybody. We are all in a net of clunky concepts and ambiguous words.  It’s my job to jump over the side and free the whale.

So no, I’m not going to be a revolutionary militant, but I’m going to hold myself to my goal.  I want my readers to laugh and cry and think and shake their fists. And when they are done, to think about their own lives, all the risks untaken and all the kind words left unsaid, and all the fucking homophobic narcissistic sexist racist assholes who, every time we rub up against them, take a little of our skin and humanity with them.

My son said that the idea of reading ‘a book about alien pregnancy’ made him squick.  Paul laughed uproariously.  Nine months in my body, but disgusted by pregnancy, was his comment.  What a kid. The pregnancy is less than 10 percent of all the words in all three books but see what he has chosen to believe defines it.  And so, in the words of the black activists I follow on twitter, this is me shaking my damned head. (SMH)

current count 9714 plus miscellany

Sweetie and Michel are communing in Raven’s side yard.  Michel’s distributing new phones, or so he says.  What is his REAL purpose in coming, we wonders we wonders.

Once again Buster did not turn up for breakfast, and I surveyed the backyard around 7:30 am and said, “He’s got himself locked in a garage again.” He turned up like a bolt of lightning at 8:23… hm.

I am too old to go out and see live music and drink beer, except for this inner demon that says, NO UR NOT. Jeff administered a very light mocking, as well he should, when I scarcely ate or emerged from my room yesterday.  Hey, I lasted the whole show, but I paid for it.  And we transited, too, like responsible adulties.

Donated to Wikimedia so the next time you go to wikipedia don’t all thank me at once.  You might think about making a donation yerself, yanno.

Rubik’s Cube record now stands at 4.904 seconds, for those of you who deride the mad skillz of the new generation.  I never solved a Rubik’s Cube in my life, but I can appreciate the cognitive challenge from a distance sufficient enough that I don’t have to smell the room full of competitors.  It’s like listening to a Catholic choir, or admiring a mandala.

THIS IS VERY HOT, but extremely cool.

This is something I’m adding to my pile of YES SIRREE BOB my aliens CAN SO be rapidly vibrating stacks of subatomic flapjacks.  BEST PULL QUOTE Sebastiano Peotta “If our predictions are verified, common sense will suffer a big blow, but I am fine with that.” Of course my aliens use fermionic memory, since the carrying capacity is so ‘uge.

World’s easiest prediction – the more we get into superconductivity the weirder and weirder and weirder our understanding of subatomic particles will become.  At different scales, it will appear that the laws of physics are running backwards (they aren’t…. we need new laws.) As a epistemologically nihilistic anarchist libertarian feminist, I’m usually against passing new laws, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that physics is close to smashing itself against a very weird, inherently complex and potentially extremely profitable paradigm shift.  Or not.  I love making useless predictions.  It’s easy, I could do it all day.  Oh yeah, I’m trying to turn myself into a science fiction writer.  LA LALA LALA LA!  More research? More research!

Back to the salt mines.  Next stop George gets a grip.

 

 

word count 7953

Yeah not much but it was an Alex day.  Being with him and everyone else in our little family and then going for a walk was about as much excitement as this body could stand.  Moar today I hope.

I may see live music tonight, we’ll see how it goes.

He’s a wonderful little boy.  I wanted so badly to take video of him running around the house like a little grinning mad naked thing with his diaper in his hand, with his momma frowning at him to get him to put it in the diaper bucket.  (He obliged.)  He’s 13 months old.  Not quite running, and certainly never in a straight line.  Also one hand on weiner one hand waving while running around, extremely funny.  Keith laughed until he choked. He and Alex and Paul and Katie and I played catch the kid.  Alex doesn’t scream with laughter, he grunts ecstatically and grins his face off.

It’s better when we see Alex in his own house. Dax was working (and it was an awesome day to be outside, so better than raining.)

Paul’s off to Seattle.

Gonna be an el niño year.  The last time the ocean looked like this we got a meter and a half of snow the week between Chrismas and New Year in 1997, but they are saying it won’t happen this year and we’ll have a warm relatively dry winter.

I would like to believe it.  If we get a pineapple express crashing into an arctic outflow situation we’ll get punishing amounts of snow all at once.  We need the snow pack for drinking water, tourism and farmers. FINGERS CROSSED.

We’re going to start a family buying coop.  More details later.

Buster bunked in with me

Very strange.  He’s an extremely physical cat and as warm as a heater – he’s extraordinarily hot, actually, Jeff and I have commented on this many times.  Margot bunks in with me once in a blue moon too, it’s nice for a change.  Mostly she’s in with Jeff.

Word count is 7813.

This third novel is proceeding well…not in the direction I’d planned.  O well.

 

CARNAGE

Buster brought in 4 RATS yesterday, laying them all out in a row downstairs.  He’s killing them all so Jeff doesn’t have to deal with rats which have died in locales where they are like to rot or little bits’o rat everywhere, just secure tail and trash.

THE HEATER IS NOT BROKE.  It merely has an absurdly sensitive orientation sensor and Buster probably knocked it off its flatness while jumping down from my desk.  Everything a-ok there.

Took a walk down to get cream yesterday morning.  It was a crisp crisp morning so I wore the mitts my mOm knitted for Katie that I somehow ended up with and the cute animé hat Keith got me a couple of years back.

Later I went to the interview.  It’s always interesting seeing myself and all my imperfections as a potential employee reflected through someone else.  The poor little gal who interviewed me.  I hope my pity for her didn’t show.  She’s probably just barely making a living at what she’s doing, but she was wearing a thousand dollars’ worth of clothing and a freaking expensive watch and had the coldest, limpest handshake I’ve shared in probably years. I thought that when she shook my hand it was probably the first time her hand had felt warm since the last interview.  Stupidly big office, in one of the industrial/office complexes on Still Creek. The entire courtyard had so much bird shit in it I felt ill walking through it and you all know me as being somebody who can deal with disgusting with fewer collywobbles than most socialized women. Drove away thinking what an incredible waste of time it was, but I’m still going to send her my references.

Then got beer and various foodicles, why not, it was on my way home.

Then we caught up on the Librarians and Robot Chicken, etc.

I have no idea what will happen to my writing energy if I get a job.  We’ll see. I know I can work and write, but it needs a ‘specially calm kind of job to allow me to think about stuff and write.

Jeff is awesome.  He has been helping me with technology (backups), when he’s not trying to pull info out of third parties and disposing of rats.

Word count over 7000 as of today.

Tomorrow the bday party for Katie. I already got her her present, and I’m not talking about it in a public forum, but most of my friends already know and so my expression of precarious and secretive amusement is thus explained.

Heater’s dead

The little heater I bought (20 bucks) to warm my room has burnt out already. I will ask Jeff to look at it but it is probably DED. Sigh. I didn’t notice until just now, but I think it must have quit a couple of days ago, my room has been FREEZING.

Yesterday Paul called (woke me from a sound sleep at 2 pm) and said the weather is shit but it should stop raining for the next 1.5 hours so we went to Oakalla.  Twice stuff snapped off trees and fell close to us but no harm done and then he feasted me at India Bombay Bistro where I had OKRA and chicken vindaloo. (They have an okra dish that is so good Paul and I had no difficulty polishing it off.  Kingfisher beers to round off the meal, and then Paul had to drop me home so he could go off and fetch Keith who was just back from Victoria.

Word count now stands at 6310. So not exactly a big day yesterday, but satisfactory.

I should take a walk and get cream for coffee at some point this morning.  I think we’re going to take a walk in the rain (in the novel.)

Current count 5813

What an amazing 57th birthday I had!!

I ate a meal I didn’t cook for brekky (left over Desi Turka chicken tikka masala with rice pulao), I ate a meal I didn’t cook for lunch, for Jeff feasted me at Switzerland Chicken, and I ate a meal I didn’t cook for dinner, as Mike feasted me with pan fried oysters and new potatoes.

We watched all the rest of Black Sails more or less because we couldn’t help ourselves.  Then I watched the season 3 teaser trailer just to drive myself nuts; god willing and the crick don’t rise I’ll have more in January around Conflikt time.

I brushed and degunked Margot and avoided being killed on the stairs by Buster.  My rapid increase in wordcount you can tell for yourself and I shipped off some new stuff to mOm.

I got phone calls wishing me a happy birthday from Mike, Katie, my mOm and ewishes from Patricia and DJD. Absolutely nobody on facebook wished me a happy birthday.  258 facebook friends and you get a prompt for friends’ birthdays, but not a sausage (hey I needed the message about social media not being as important as my flesh and blood friends…)

I slept over at Mike’s so we had just enough to drink to be festive but not to drive, and I do not feel muzzy headed this morning so I think I titrated the dose properly.  ASBACK BRANDY BE GREAT YO. Tecate Beer tastes like a man complaining of an unhappy marriage.  I shall not drink that beer again. I even wrote 185 more words last night while I was here.  It was a particularly writing sort of day.

I got prezzies! A foot soaker tub and a headrest pillow for air travel.  SO HAPPY and so very unexpected, but I’m not too old to appreciate it.

I wrote a letter to my MP and ran a load of laundry and backed up my documents.

am I not awesome!?

Lots of writing yummy food and yes I know I am a big kid. And we’ll feast again on Katie’s bday on Friday, yay!

Weather’s the pits and the wind’s going to come up but I’m snug where I am and it’s wonderful. Vitamin D and probiotics make me a better person.

 

OH AND ONE LAST THING. I have an interview with a job agency on Wednesday.  Just came right out of the blue.  Isn’t that a perfect thing to happen on my birthday?  Nothing likely will come of it but you never know, and I got all those nice new work clothes from EShakti, and nicer bras and underwear too over the last six months so if I DID get a job I wouldn’t be going O M F G what do I wear tomorrow. So really, a spectacular day.

While I’m all bubbly and babbly….

TOBY STEPHENS PULLS HIS BEARD AND IT MAKES ME HAPPY gratuitous Black Sails reference. Especially since it’s really his beard, and did you know he’s Maggie Smith’s younger son, and married to that Plowman actress who played Sarah/Osiris for 4 seasons on SG1?  Screw Kevin Bacon SG1 is where the connections really fly.

Deadwood of the Caribbean

Higher body count and more cannons but you get the general idea. That’s Black Sails, which I heart so much only the prospect of there being two more seasons is preventing me from panicking about there only being 2 or 3 more episodes from season 2 before it runs out.  I honestly want to go straight to Jeff’s door, bang on it and say IT IS MY BIRTHDAY I want to BINGE WATCH THE REST RIGHT NOW. He’d probably agree though, and then what? We have nothing awesome in prospect right now except mopping up on seasons 6 and 7 of The West Wing.

Current word count 4379. Things are a little smoother after a rocky start. Glykeria has arrived at Raven’s door.

I have applied for ISBN numbers for my ebook editions of the novels.  Two weeks to wait.

Getting irritable over no Alex except for two seconds when I went to meet his momma at London Drugs and he was asleep.

Weather here is damp and nasty.

Margot got her Sunday dinner last night (I wait right until 6 pm to give it to her) and she SANG FOR HER SUPPER which was three anxious little merps – she can’t actually mew since she had the surgery. Then she stuffed her face in the dish and ate like she had no expectation of ever receiving food again from anyone.  Every time she slowed down, she’d back away with that funny little caterpiggle in reverse movement, pause, and then she’d jam her little face in like a front end loader and scarf again until she ran out of breath.  I watched her eat, it was a tender combination of hilarious and sad.

So many of my friends are having pets die and animals put down right now the Rainbow Bridge is getting crowded. Love your people critters and your fur critters as hard as you can!