Settler words&music in S'ólh Téméxw, (leanpub.com/upsun) living where privilege meets precarity in MST country. she/her/they———– Novels: Midnite Moving Co., Upsun; Sweep Off Those Waves coming soon, Hair Sinister after that. —Restore All Indigenous Lands!
I know I shouldn’t care, but the last episode of the Killing made me want to find the showrunner and bang her head into a coffee table a few times. A happy ending was NOT REQUIRED for this show, it feels a painted on thing.
On the plus side, by Grabthar’s hammer, I have finally seen Galaxy Quest, and I had a damned good time.
Now to see if Jeff is conscious enough for breakfast.
mOm will get more of them, but here’s one.
Grandma laughing. That’s me with 4Hr Callback (a perfectly acceptable nickname for a kid who made his appearance after 4 hours of labour) and his exceedingly mellow mom. The delivery room nurses, when she left the hospital at 8 am on Monday (literally the soonest they would discharge her without putting a big fat AMA on the chart), told her that she had no right to look like she hadn’t just given birth. Apgar 8 and 9 and a solid feeder, although still quite sleepy. He has the least annoying cry of any newborn I ever heard, and only demonstrated it to show he could do it, as far as I can tell. A solid, well-fleshed child, the image of his da.
Now that is a very nice use of the gif format.
I haven’t seen Alexander yet. Katie called yesterday and she’ll call me when she’s ready to receive visitors at home.
This infographic on prayer made me alternately very uncomfortable and amused. As an atheist, I can’t separate prayer from ‘wishing so hard that you’re practically grunting so that an imaginary being of its infinite kindness rearranges causality and the laws of physics for your personal benefit’. As a church lady, I have to say I understand the benefit of GROUP prayer, which is a form of prosocial entrainment. Personal prayer, the petitioning kind unencumbered by meditation or humility, is just plain gross.
Somebody on Reddit said that Gilbert Gottfried and Fran Drescher “should have children. The marines could use them to clear public areas.”
Stop motion parkour fight. I laughed out loud watching this.
The pet relationship is very important to humans and now of course we have the science to prove it.
Dealing with bullies changes with the technology. Professors deal with bad reviews.
Am I jealous because the last time I was catcalled I was 36? No, it’s one of the best damned things about getting older.
Gosh, if only dealing with conspiracy nuts was this easy. Cause it really isn’t.
I know that sounds strange, but it’s true, and I can’t really talk about the other birth; it’s a creative birth, happened right in front of me, on line, in real-time, and I was a midwife. And that sounds very self-serving. I will be still and just post part of what I wrote for the occasion.
being a bard
you write even when your heart
can’t be in it
the people depend on
the story and song you bring them
without story the people die
and without song
they don’t remember the story
;
the bard can’t always be there
.
facing illness
rejection
ill-temper in others
and whatever griefs and shames
and inversions of purpose
may be the bard’s
forward
!
you think you have
a dry stick in your hand
you strike the earth and water comes up
and you have a hand on a tree
and sun in your eyes through the leaves
.
After an easy and fast labour, Alexander was born this morning. More details later.
Church yesterday was wonderful, wonderful. Choral singing is good for brains.
November has long been my favourite month. Most years I get lovely runs of creativity, a spell of anxiety-free gold-spinning from straw in the form of song writing. Sometimes it emerges as prose or poetry. I can feel myself getting that way already, which is good. It keeps me mentally occupied rather than spending every minute worried about whether Katie (who says she doesn’t want more kids) has a relatively hassle free birth experience.
I wrote a thousand words on the novel (the name of which I must now change… Calamari Boy? Underlings: Part 1? Squid Surprise? Sixers? Who Let the Squids Out? Not Really Human? Something Something George?) in three blocks yesterday, practiced with the filk inflected chorus (and WORD OF GOD WILL SOUND SO AWESOME o yes it will). Jeff and Jeri-Lynn are two of my favourite filkers, even if Jeri-Lynn’s strong voice pulls me into the tenor line. It’s like a valence electron popping into a different shell.
I found out what my vocal range is yesterday!
A2 D5!
That A2 sort of depends on what time of day I’m singing, but the upshot is that I can sing tenor or alto, which is good ta know.
The Fountain of Exposition (hereinafter referred to as the FoE) was also at the choral practice yesterday. Little children are squirmy and screechy, but I was in a good mood and every time he screeched I thought, “ah me, this will be my lot in three years, chasing after a squirmy and screechy toddler!” instead of thinking about earplugs and how I really wanted to fold up like an armadillo, and then I thought about moving to Fort St. John again. And then of course I’d start worrying about the birth again. Worry and anxiety are so frikkin useless; the intelligent thing is to channel them into housework or mending or mowing the lawn, or blocking out the arrangement for Just Might Stick Around (which has glued itself, grr, to the inside of my earworm tunnel). One thing I’d forgotten – Keith was particularly notable for this – is that if you do manage to accomplish the impossible (note heavy sarcasm) and say something that amuses the child, you’re gonna get it repeated, at various volumes, for the next 15 minutes… and sometimes for years. I enjoy being able to understand the FoE when he talks. I like to think my auditory fluency is pretty good; small humans can be a challenge but not in this case, especially when it’s so powerful windy today (all kids are drawn like magnets to light switches, fans and power tools, it’s a law of nature.) Dreffle windy (fan blows). Powerful windy today thar, boys! (Infectious giggling).
Keith saw the car parked in front of Tom and Peggy’s on the way home and invited himself to dinner. (Think for a moment how an otherwise reticent individual feels that he is perfectly okay to do that, and it burnishes their reputation for unstinting hospitality yet again. He gave us a slow clap after we practiced Word of God, and I have to tell you, he never likes anything I sing so I guess being drowned out by other people is the way to go. Around 7:30 I felt a wave of nausea and exhaustion come over me and begged off. I had to sit in the car for a bit before I drove, but I was fine when I got home (??!!) and wrote some more.
MUST REMEMBER TO PUT COOKIE TIN IN CAR.
I am pleased to report, that for this Sunday at least, the size of the youth group went up 50%, from two to three.
Katie is talking to Kai on the phone. Matt hasn’t phoned in 5 days and they are discussing how they will abuse him. Fortunately she is just blowing off steam. It’s too bad, really, he seemed like such a nice guy. I said she should wait until he’s explained himself, but she’s justing waiting to see him again so she can dump him.
I’m glad I’m not young anymore.
http://worldbeardchampionships.com/
Go nuts, ma, your Dream Boy is in there someplace…..
I am trying to intuit what Katie’s school fees are this morning; I have emails from the school saying pay up but there’s nothing to indicate what the Viking tax is to keep Katie in school. Yes I know they just declared school fees illegal.
Her boyfriend is trying to pre-emptively break up with her so he can walk away having dumped her. Young love! Katie doesn’t even appear upset about it.
Keith and I watched I Dood It last night. I don’t know what to say about this movie except that it has some of the wildest stuff imaginable in it with interminably long spells of not much happening. The song by the Jimmy Dorsey band and the Eleanor Powell rope dance at the beginning was enough to make my eyes pop out. Anyway, it stars Red Skelton and guests Lena Horne and Butterfly McQueen and the INCOMPARABLE Hazel Scott – her guest bit had my jaw on the floor – what an A MA ZING ivory tickler she was. (Dr. Filk wandered in just before that started and HE was pretty gobsmacked too). Oh, and there’s one piece of physical comedy (Red Skelton trying to get a passed out Eleanor Powell, who appears to be shapely string stuffed into a wedding dress, from the floor to a bed) that was so funny I ran out of air.
If I appear cheerful at the moment, it’s partly because I have a happy secret! I will tell you if you ask me nice, but I can’t post it publicly.
Tonight I would like to rant about the lack of menstruation rituals in our culture. Tonight I’m going to take the man’s view, as the woman’s view about it isn’t nearly transgressive enough for me ce soir la. Jeez, where’s an accent grave when I need one…
If I was a man, I would want rituals and predictive patterns in young women’s lives that preserved their fertility for their true purpose, namely, making babies with me and not with other men. Having some kind of ceremony where it was drilled into the girl’s head that she had one shot at the childbearing game and if she slept with the wrong guy it was game the fuck over would be useful if my strategy for access to childbearing women meant I was employed and civil. Mind you, if my strategy is to just rape the shit out of her and hope for a lucky plug, it’s still better than if she was really trying to save it for the right guy. Her body may betray her and pop an egg for me. I’d be the ‘wrong guy’ — but I’d still be first. Now, the sperm competition theory of fucking, which holds that guys enjoy sharing girls because if you’re second (or later) you come way harder (your sperm will ‘wash away’ that of your, uh, competitor/buddy), so if you let your buddy go first, because you don’t really care if you get her pregnant, and you’d prefer to come harder because of your wiring, you’ve more or less dropped out of the discussion about breeding. You’ve actually given some consideration to the notion, which is why you’re wearing a condom while all of these shenanigans are going on. I mean, it’s still rape, but there’s a different angle. You get it now? All different styles of thinking about ‘the breeding thing’ lead to different results in terms of how it affects the woman’s life. Oh, sorry, I’ve gone back into the women’s way of thinking about this, ‘scuse me all to hell.
So mOm, did I make you laugh really hard on the phone tonight, or what?
Back to the subject at hand. Women should have menstruation rites so that they actually have two whole chunks of time to think about fertility without having to do any work. That is, in part, what rituals are all about. It’s about the whole “stop working and start thinking” thing that has made humanity what it is. Having enough excess capacity in your life to be able to stop and think is what makes for civil life. Having the spare time to develop morality makes morality. Leisure, in short, makes ethical life possible. But don’t worry, in the end it’s all about sex. Yeehaw. Hurry hurry love.
Did I ever say why it was I refer to my mother as mOm? It’s because when I spell her title that way, it is the “Kilroy was here” or “Clem” sign. See his hands, on either side of his head? Te he. But I also do it because of where I got the idea of it, pOp — which is a clown face with a big nose in the middle. Squint and you’ll see.
October 4 2008 – no post
I got off the plane and went straight to Jan and Soon’s. Jan blinked at me and said, “Weren’t you supposed to phone me?”
uh.
I had forgotten how beautiful the underlit sunsets are in this town.
Anyway, life in her household was sufficient for a cuppa, but not really for crash space, as she had hella work to do (I still hung out and we flapped our ears for a couple of hours and she had lots of news, good bad and odd).
So I called Catherine, and we had a very pleasant evening catching up (oooo, gossip about exes, I loves me some of that!) and eating at the Mt. Everest which has berloody awesome food and I had my first Kingfisher in ages. Then we came back here and shot some more s*(t and then I crashed. The wireless here works very nicely. At some point I’m going to ask Catherine for another drum solo. She has a really intense Chinese cymbal that sounds like part of the soundtrack for The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires.
While ScaryClown was sending me a link to This I was showing Colin a picture of him stretched out on HP Lovecraft’s cenotaph.
Ain’t the internet grand?
I have worked up the chords for Just Might Stick Around (it’s in E minor, just like most of Cohen’s tunes). It amazes me that there is A WEBSITE that has THE SINGING RANGES of various popular singers. So I was able to google “What is Leonard Cohen’s singing range” and POOF. All this information, there really is too much of it.
Do you like owls? I do too. These youngsters are adorable.
Keith came over yesterday and we sat on the back deck in the steadily diminishing sun, and watched Beasts of the Southern Wild (a problematic movie BUT I loved it anyway) and around a store bought roast chicken I assembled baby steamed baby carrots and broccoli, plus when I heard Keith was coming I decided to make garlic bread; the lads fell on it with a will and there’s leftovers for lunch. At 4 I go over to Tom and Peggy’s to sing and commune with some of the finest, best, most amiable, intelligent and hospitable friends any sane human can ask for. WE ARE GOING TO SING CAT FABER’S WORD OF GOD IN CHURCH TOMORROW. Means nothing to you, but Tom has been waiting for this day for 10 years. In his glee I reflexively bask. Cat has written some awesome tunes, which you can read lyrics for here here here here and here, and that’s only a fraction. A teeny fraction. She rounds off her accomplishments by being a rather exceptionally pleasant human.
My character George on the subject of death. “I will continue. My perception of that continuance will not.”
Prior to sings0ngapalooza, novel assembly tasks.
There’s a Vogon Poetry Generator on the interwebs! Isn’t it cute?
See, see the Intelligent sky
Marvel at its big kimshee depths.
Tell me, Liz do you
Wonder why the honey badger ignores you?
Why its foobly stare
makes you feel groggy.
I can tell you, it is
Worried by your sploogey facial growth
That looks like
An egg.
What’s more, it knows
Your frigate potting shed
Smells of Kermit.
Everything under the big Intelligent sky
Asks why, why do you even bother?
You only charm compost.
Rehearsal was excellent, more of the same tonight.
I’ll be heading over to Tom and Peggy’s for practice tonight, and I’ll be rehearsing my own part separately earlier in the day.
I really want more acrylic paint. I kinda emptied out the black tube…
I’m about 1/3 of the way through the connecting writing and book assembly… first bit is off to La mOm this morning.
Katie is still pregnant.
The Ebola patient in Texas was sent home with antibiotics. At least 80 people have been exposed. He was put in the ambo vomiting on everything. I don’t know what makes the CDC think they’ll have no difficulty stopping the infection. It’s shit like this that makes me never want to leave the house.
2020 says what a putz allegra is
Paul and I took them to a rally at the Morgentaler Clinic after it was firebombed. Catherine had told me many times, as had John, that the cops LIE about how many people attend rallies. I stood on the base of a lamp post and did a square count to determine that there were at least a thousand people there; the papers the next day said gee whiz there were maybe 200 people.
I told the kids about it too. They lie. That’s what I told them. The cops and the papers lie.
Anyway, when you have your OWN FRIKKIN’ DRONE…. you can tell the papers and the MSM where to shove it.
Fall colours are currently perfect in Ontario. I wish I could see them.
Okay TODAY my calves hurt (but nothing else does, thankfully). I made coffee this morning using the really yummy medium blend that Leo and Linda left us. We haven’t had the coffee maker upstairs for the best part of a year, so that’s interesting. And motorvating.
I love ice cream, but not when the people who sell it don’t know how to store it. I’ll leave the rest of it to Jeff if he can stand it, but I am vastly preferring my version of the I Hate to Cook Book’s chocolate cake. Which reminds me, must put cake flour on the shopping list, as it really makes a difference for baking. Also on the list, more acrylic paint and please some more canvasses, smaller this time.
Chicken’s on to thaw for chicken schnitzel for lunch. Have to figure out which veg to serve, and that means cleaning out the fridge.
Anil Dash on 15 years of blogging (I just passed my tenth anniversary, but like, who cares… except me, I am going back through the entire blog and pinching all the good stuff to put in yet another project called “Broad Hints” which also has recipes and other stuff. Sort of like a ‘cream of condensed Allegra’).
I am learning Big Hard Sun by Indio.
This is to describe the rhodopsin visuals. There are two tricky things about the painting. One is that I used fabric paint, and the other is that the centre colour, this sickly orangey yellow, has both copper and glow in the dark paint in it. Hopefully it will look very odd if you come upon it in the middle of the night. I decided to leave the teal parentheses out, as they would actually be very hard to render on top of this lumpy paint, and I already like the effect.
Info about the ongoing eruption in Iceland. Cam 2, now sadly obscured by fog and ash.
Volcanic eruption in Papua New Guinea. Note the 13 second delay and the travel of the shockwave.
Volcano and earthquake news roundup.
Earthmovers of a different sort.
Well, I took those 478 steps yesterday to Wreck. When Mike and I got there, there was an immense fog blowing across Marine Dr. For maybe thirty seconds we debated going down to the beach, as it appeared a breezy and clammy time was to be had, but by three o’clock the fog had moved across the inlet where it formed an amorphous but solid appearing wall, 15 stories high.
There were alcohol and food vendors there and no cops. I got a little singed but the sun wasn’t very fierce. Mike brought his Taylor and I brought Otto, and we sang and played, Dylan and other gods and goddesses. There was a very light breeze and all in all it was very very pleasant.
We took it easy going up the stairs. I concentrated on breathing and body mechanics to ensure that I didn’t strain anything. I got home and because I am no fool I showered and changed before bed; that beach at the end of the season is like a very scratchy petri dish.
Damn, it was nice. I tripped on rhodopsin for a while, experiencing that wonderful progression of colours and geometry that happens when you stare at the sun with your eyes closed for at least ten minutes and then cover your eyes. First, your visual field goes an inky, depthless black. Then purple, a colour so strong and overwhelming that you gasp as it comes on, fills from the centre to the periphery. Then the centre turns a malignant orangey copper, and from that springs a deep magenta, so it looks like a pop art eye. Expanding out from the magenta is that same inky depthless darkness, now almost deep blue, with teal semi circles radiating out from that centre. Very gradually, everything turns a pale silvery green; then brittle diamond shaped lozenges of fiery orange, yellow and red, march up and down your visual field like the very finest mushroom high. Unlike every other time I’ve done this, the colour progression repeated thrice before the last of the visual effects died off (obviously nowhere near as strong, but it was interesting to look at even as attentuated as it was). As always, I feel as strong as Jack the Bear after I do that, and I am much refreshed both mentally and physically.
A week or so ago I listened via NPR to the new Leonard Cohen album, so his voice was still in my head when I was in the shower last night. Michel, one of the characters in the novel, still didn’t have a song, so I was thinking… Michel lived in Montréal for years, maybe a song in the style of Leonard Cohen? Michel is staying in town simply and solely to get his mitts on Kima, so I thought …. (and this is not a song a Sixer would ever write. They do not infantilize lovers; they don’t smile, they don’t wear hats. So this is what happens when pop culture gets through with Michel. In real life, he’d say nothing, sing nothing, present her with nothing except himself.)
I just might stick around, baby
I just might stick around
Normally after a week I see
Nothing new in town
A light is glowing in your eyes
My very breath is bound
I just might stick around, baby
Maybe I’ll stick around
If you didn’t know you were special, baby
If you didn’t know you’re great
I’d hop a freight, jump aboard a freighter
Tip my hat, say see ya later
But no one else has quite your style
Not your figure, nor your smile
Yes there’s something new in town
I just might stick around
