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!
Jeff seems to have done everything that needed doing. So far so good.
Saw Righteous Kill. Not great, but entertaining.
People were bugging me about not asking any questions at the quarterly town hall meeting at work yesterday. Hey, I’m still on probation, folks.
Jeff’s transitioning my hosting/ etc. for the site, for which I can’t thank him enough. To have a webmeister on site is a very big chunk o’ peace of mind for me.
In other news, one of the neighbourhood cats likes sitting under the back deck and bugging the crap out of Eddie. They got into a yowlfest the other night.
Coming up on five years of blogging. I lost the first three months so everything starts in August, but I really started in late April five years ago. We are also coming up on the 1st anniversary of John’s death.
I cried so much yesterday. Paul has tried and tried, and called and called, but it looks like the woman whose negligence caused John’s death will never be brought to trial. Please contact Paul directly if you want to do something to help. I feel very angry (not at Paul, at the hopelessly fucked up situation) – and guilty, and sad. Not a good combination for keeping on a straight head and getting through stuff.
For therapy I’m writing the woman a letter.
Church meeting tonight after supper. Pretty soon I’ll have my own car and won’t have to borrow Jeff’s.
Recommended, if a little grue-y in spots.
Tentacle porn Tarot deck. You bet your ass it’s not safe for work. The shizz you find on Facebook! Anyway, there’s just one card, but the descriptions are pretty awful. If I did a Tarot deck it would be updated for modern life, and there’d be an internet major arcana, and one of the suits would be grease (as in petrochemicals).
Tonight, laundry. Tomorrow night church meeting. And soon, soon, I will go to the opera for the first time in my life. Course I have to pay for the tickets first.
1/4 of Pink Floyd is coming to Vancouver on December 10 and I wanna go.
I stared at a tesseract for a long time last night. It is helping me come to terms with change.
If I sound a little odd…. it’s because…. I am! Bet you didn’t see that one coming. I’m just happy cause I thought I lost my cell phone, but Jeff found it in his car.
This movie has so many funny moments… who knew Gerard Butler was capable of being an action hero, buddy comedian, and red hot sexxay dancer? Anyway, recommended. You might need subtitles, sometimes the anglo dialects and idioms can be a bit much. Written and directed by (as Jeff refers to him) Mr. Madonna hisself, Guy Ritchie.
I lazed and loafed, but I also bought a car and got the paperwork together to get my domain registration sorted out. (Jeff is a fantastic webmaster, but I still have to prove to the registrar that I Yam Who I Yam, and Jeff balks at impersonation.) I also went for a walk at the Quay and down in Robert Burnaby Park, including visiting Dinosaur Rock. I made spare ribs and organic fingerling potatoes for dinner. Singing with the folks was just me and the founder of the group – I think we need burnabites because commuting 45 minutes for rehearsal (like the two women who jammed) is just rude. She’s going to put out another call for singers so if you are a female singer in Burnaby come on down. Anyway, we worked our way through Orphan Girl and Bird on a Wire and in general had a good time and yakked.
It was SO good to get out into the sun. Jeff came out on the walk with us yesterday and then he and Keith worked their way through the back catalogue of games. Every time I went downstairs they were playing something different.
I saw one of these in knife edge flight over Lake Ontario in the first month after I met Paul. So you know, it was a long time ago.
I saw this movie and loved it, I want to immediately see it again. RIP.
Saw the girls yesterday and agreed to buy Kat’s vehicle. I am the shallowest person on earth. Why else would I buy a purple car with a working sunroof? Anyway, the car already has a name. I am going to call her Ziva.
Update…. Seal eats octopus.
Well, it won’t be the first time the Pope had to cancel a visit because the locals were having a hairy.
So I present a recent column from Corey Mintz.
It is ludicrous that anybody in this country goes hungry.
Poor Jeff; I just talked to him and he’s burying him in the garden right now. Crying at work is never much fun. Partly in Gizmo’s honour I’m going to put cat-centric verses to the song I’m currently working on, 40 Million Lightyears.
It’s close to the end for Gizmo but I’ll let Jeff tell the story.
I finally got over to Dr. Katz (Best Dentist in Burnaby) to get a small detail in my occlusion resurfaced; smiles all round for that.
Other than that, and that the weather is finally being cooperative, if cold, there’s not much news.
The Tarot reading yesterday called for Temperance, more attention paid to the men in my life (family members) and church. Atheists should be spanked for participating in such nonsense; that result could have been anything, it’s just like astrology, wonk wonk. I found it interesting though. This deck is pretty big on duty and hard work, may the fairies cart it away…. I may just make up my own deck. I was sure the Chariot would turn up, with all my misgivings and weirdness about cars these days, but no. Temperance. Blech.
I am three verses into the composition of 40 Million Light Years and enjoying it. Paul heard it last night and burst out laughing in all the right spots. I suspect John would have enjoyed it too.
Disturbing William S Burroughs inflected video.
Perfectly catches my neurasthenic, self-indulgently bleak mood.
I am SO tired of the commute, I’ve decided to buy a car. Kat has one for sale and she said she would do the cv joint and the muffler for me if I buy the parts and I am very tempted. It is not a particularly useful car, being, like the MR2, a two seater. LTGW told me to buy a truck. This was in the same week he told me I was wearing sensible shoes. I ended up screaming “Want me to shave my head and start wearing overalls TOO” in the middle of the cafeteria, which certainly made Robof9 laugh.
Robof9 is leaving the Tiled Cell on the Hill later this month. I am just punched out about that too.
The lights over my desk give me a headache every day. My eyes are so tired by the time I go home I feel like I’m in a dissociative state.
The weather is cold and windy. I heard what sounded like ice pellets pinging off my window at 3 am this morning.
Anyway, now that I know I’m getting a car I feel very bad at the same time I am feeling better. It’s just that I can’t read, play games, watch video on my phone or do anything that doesn’t involve looking out the window to prevent motion sickness whenever I ride the bus. I can spend two and one half hours a day commuting, or half an hour driving. I’m 51 and I’ve only got so many hours left. Translink is not bad for my part of the world, and it’s not their fault that there’s a fucking lake in between me and work. I am tired of the asinine creature who takes up five seats on the bus with the rude way she occupies the front section. I’m tired of the men who smell like pee and spilled stuff and the women who smell like air freshener. I am tired of listening to phone conversations in a babel of languages; I am tired of hearing conversations that make me want to butt in and describe in detail the cognitive biases involved. I am tired of fucking rude bus drivers (I’ve seen some good ones, but a couple of events in the last month have left me gobsmacked with disappointment and too disheartened to even complain.) But I should commute because it’s better for the environment. It would be better for the environment if I jumped off a bridge, too, but that is not in the cards.
The house is shifting on its foundations with the wind.
I want rainbows and unicorns and world peace, and I’m getting dying cats, blue relatives and friends, (this item deleted), (this item deleted), (this item deleted too, sigh), and a bunch of other stuff I can’t complain about. Currently there are 18 items on the list; most of them I only wrote down so I could add one last item to the list & I FEEL REEAAALLY SHITTY about not being able to DO anything about the stuff that’s wrong. Oh yeah, Mr. Cheerful Pants, I should just work on the stuff I CAN fix. It’s all about reframing things. Well how about I reframe this by breaking it over your head, how’s that work for you?
The only good thing that happened this week is that Mike showed the pictures he took of Rozo in the woods – nude. Unbelievable. All that hair, and her standing on a tree stump in Robert Burnaby Park looking like something shot out of a New Raphaelite wet dream. There was one particular pic, her figleafed with hair, that I want to carry around with me in my wallet so I have something pleasant to look at when things really fuck up.
That’s not true, there was one other thing that happened this week. I found a website with erotic photos and art that actually has about one in ten pics that I like. I guess it’s yet another sign that I overshare that my first impulse was to email a couple of links to my daughter. That’s not funny, it’s sick.
Jeff cheered me up by loaning the car to me yesterday – he stayed home with Gizmo. I went and got treats after work to cheer us both up.
Now I’m going to do a Tarot reading. The day can get worse any way it likes.
Dear Sir,
My initial reaction when I learned that the BC Liberals think it’s a good idea to axe the mandatory inquiry after a death in custody was, wow. No more coroner’s inquests into government embarrassments. Maybe articles like this will magically go away.
Then I thought, you know, just because I’m a tubby left leaning atheist with queer sympathies and anarchist tendencies doesn’t mean I have to even react to it. After all, a 51 year old white woman who lives quietly in Burnaby (honestly, my neighbours probably wouldn’t even know I was here if my cats didn’t crap in their gardens, and if my brother’s car didn’t rumble in and out of here twice a day) doesn’t really need to put ‘death in custody’ on the top of her most feared methods of checking out. I’d just pull out all of my priviliges and a harassed looking lawyer would show up and I’d waltz out of whatever misunderstanding had occurred.
Then I thought, well, sheeeeit. It’s not like the BC Liberals do 5/8ths of a listless denial about deaths in custody right NOW, so why should anybody care that they are legally mandating what’s happening in truth in the cold light of spring, 2010?
But won’t someone please think of the children? I tried to think of how an appeal to the interests of children might get spun by the BC Liberals.
There are hundreds upon hundreds of children growing up in BC – and other places, thank goodness – who want to be po-po when they grow up.
They want the gun, the badge, the pulling prostitutes over and getting free blow jobs in cars. They want the skittery way meth-high teenagers deke down alleyways just before the Tazer comes out.
I kid, I kid. Really what people want when they grow up wanting to be cops is to be on the right side, to catch dirtbags, to jail pedophiles, to bust drunk drivers. Nobody who wants to be a cop when they are little thinks about the mental hardships and physical perils of being po-po.
Right now all police departments are having a bitch of a time hiring. The RCMP nationally is looking to hire 8000 newbies in the next five years to handle resignations and retirements. Things are so bad that they are hiring – so I have heard – people with known mental illnesses.
So I guess one way of looking at it is that the BC Liberals are canning inquests into deaths in custody as a recruiting ploy. Come and join our police forces, all those with barely concealed personality problems and contempt for minorities! If you get a little enthusiastic with a scumbag and he or she dies, not only will you not lose your job, your badge or your benefits, you’ll never have to face the scorn of the public and you’ll be able to sleep at night knowing that it was all a tragic misunderstanding.
Good job, Kash, hope that works out for you and your somewhat tinted kinfolks in the years ahead. Yeah, I know you were the first Indo-Canadian chief of police in Canadian History, and that you have a storied career. I just have one last question to ask. Given that the Chief Coroner in BC is a political appointment given to a retired cop, do you have your eyes on that job after your political career moves away from you? Cause if the omnibus bill passes, the Chief Coroner’s job just got easier. That’s what I call planning ahead.
Peace love and anarchy,
Allegra
He is so thin now that I started crying when I was petting him this morning. He was on the rug in the bathroom – he’s lucky I didn’t step on him – and staggered to his feet for a good scritch about the hindquarters, purring softly. Then I poured him some water in his favourite glass and he drank about two ounces. Then I caught him as he fell off the bathroom counter. He just leaned, and kept on going, and I gently set him on the floor.
Poor Jeff, none of this is easy. The cats are quite subdued as well.
I had a very relaxed and low key weekend, and I am very happy about that. I got some baking done, took some biscotti to church, actually, and I also saw Frost/Nixon, which I must wholeheartedly recommend.
