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!
Suzanne is coming. The specialist!! We have gifties for her, plus her wage of course.
Rage against the Machine is STILL PLAYING ON KISS FM AS OF THIS MOMENT. this is the best part of a day now.
The Value Village at Hastings is still on fire and apparently spewing asbestos errywhere. yoicks
I should move the laundry along.
25163 words.
Fifty three dead migrants in a truck on the wolf’s mouth highway; dying of heat prostration in an airless container for a better life is a refinement of cruelty. Six hundred have died making the perilous crossing from North Africa to Greece and Italy from Tunisia and Libya so far in 2022.
Now think about what happens when those fifty one are fifty one thousand. When six hundred are six hundred thousand. Nothing will stem the tide of migrants, alive and dead. Between autocratic governments forcing people to starve rather than express their rights and climate change drying up water for even an inadequate life, people will migrate. Technologies will be made available for food, for light, for water, for shelter, but here’s the thing; the gap between what is possible and what gets done is going to be monitored and posited and funded and ideologically supported by and profited on by previously existing academics, disaster scammers, politicians and wealthy families. The best solutions will be stick handled out of the way at the top; we’ll be taxed like beasts to support solutions that actively make things worse and then be blamed for having supported it (however involuntarily) when things go wrong.
It’s why it’s imperative to think about local solutions for problems. No-one’s going to save us; there will be a million photo ops and no help, like Doug Ford everywhere all the time. Something weird is happening inside my brain. Maybe it’s the chocolate. Maybe I’m angry enough to feel really vengeful, but in a new way.
Maybe I’ll go back to write. I have a little bubble of energy left I think. And something else happened today that’s knocked me down, and I don’t want to feel this way, I want to shoulder it off.
First 2 eps of “Only Murders in the Building” were funny, VERY FUNNY in spots and embarrassing (as in I THREW MY BLANKET OVER MY HEAD IN AN AUTISTIC ATTEMPT TO SPARE MYSELF THE EMBARRASSMENT) anyway, quite witty and in retrospect pretty damned funny, oi the bleedin’ parrot.
R. Kelly American singer, songwriter, record producer, and convicted sex offender got 30 years in jail for raping and otherwise sexually abusing women, mostly minors. I don’t support the existence of the carceral state and believe he should have been forced to give everything down to his shoelaces away to his victims now and anything in future so he gets ten percent or a living wage, enough to keep a car running, and they get everything else and otherwise he’d be allowed to walk free. Jail just makes money for asshole white investors and asshole food service companies and asshole jailers. It’s no place even for a rapist.
I read to my amusement that ‘this here haunted doll for only 60 bucks can be yours because THE LAST BUYER BACKED OUT what no reason did I tell you this doll is haunted’ is for sale. Still, what a bargoon.
I think one of my favourite things about the Slash/Back script is how Canadian it was. It was cadenced completely differently than an American movie. Anyway.
Just in case you think I’ve gone off the deep end, a return to my normal levels of lunacy. I couldn’t find attribution.
KISS FM IN SOME KIND OF PUBLICITY STUNT or possibly because of angry fired people is playing RATM’s Killing in the Name of NON STOP and a) it’s a supremely kick ass tune and b) if it’s not a publicity stunt it’s an interesting choice of tune. anyway, this is six hours and a bit now they’ve been doing this. I think it’s very funny either way. oh well I HAVE NOW BEEN LISTENING FOR MOST OF AN HOUR if this is a publicity stunt I don’t get it and they’re going to collect a CRTC fine for this.
Jarmo and Susana have sent pictures from a trip to Finland, and they are wonderful and extremely solstice-y, (drumming for solstice) but I don’t have permission to post, so I won’t.
Left a message for mOm indicating I sent her another 850 words; current count is 25,151. Our lads are stuck in MIA and Richie has reappeared, having done some sleuthing in a part of the airport he shouldn’t have visited. Omar has since been despatched for provisions from the food court.
I’ve got a load of laundry on. Lunch, probably in a couple of hours, will be pork chomps, leftover broccoli and cole slaw, and some form of starch. Either that or I’ll make pork fried rice, sort of depends what Jeff wants.
Peggy, because she is a goddess among women, made PIE yesterday and I got to take some of it home to Jeff.
Paul came to the housefilk and had a wonderful time, sang a few tunes upon request including Willie’s Diamond Joe.
Cindy was in fine form and made me realize that I haven’t memorized ‘Lady of Komarr’ so that kinda STOPPED IN THE MIDDLE ah the joys of middle age.
Then after we had such a great time, getting fed lunch with chicken and taters (Peggy) and kale in bacon fat provided by Joe, and singing and playing and talking, I get home and Mike called and he came over for a big chunk of the evening and we ordered White Spot burgers and club sammies for dinner for delivery and all was as it should be.
It was so wonderful to see him. He was in a reasonably good mood. This was amazing, given that his oppression by all things mechanical and electrical continues. He has in the recent past detailed how everything that can break, arc, spark etc. is likely to just fall apart in his hand, but I got to see it last night and he’s definitely under a curse right now. I wish I could help him break it.
Paul and I had another painful discussion about his condition and I told him it doesn’t really matter how many legitimate grievances he has if his roommates are so done with him that he doesn’t have a place to live. He needs help and I’m going to try to get him some now that the denial has stopped.
I’m very much looking forward to it. My head’s as empty as a recycled can right now. I need to put some positive inputs in my life.
Foreshore Restaurant for breakfast w/ Jeff, Foreshore for walkies with Paul, then off to the weed store in New West for YES THEY HAD TRAINWRECK I’M SO HAPPY and also gummies, because I’m out. All in all a very nice day. Woods were full of birdsong and the weather is so splendid (and the sky so beautiful, filled with ripples of clouds) it’s just … lovely.
I complained about Beyoncé’s new video (to my friends on Social Media) having migraine/epilepsy triggering flashies. A technology journalist asked me to comment and I told her that it was my preference that affected Black people comment, I’ve said what I needed to say and don’t need to further grab the mic. Got my own platform (pat pat) right here.
Yeah, so this is me right now. I have a crown made of pain and iron wrapped around my head and I think I’m going to have a very low key day. Also, expect the aforementioned song to be errywhere this summer, because it will be.
I am annoyed for other reasons this morning but there’s no point memorializing them for a censorious future, plus it could be argued that none of the fucking monkeys currently loose in my brain belong to MY circus. I will say that it has nothing to do with any family members.
23828 is the count.
Yesterday I wrote 870 words ran the dishwasher did my brain exercises got the Wordle in 5 played waffle half the day (it’s a game on the cbc website) watched a Burn Notice (season three summer finale, Michael finally shoots Strickler and joy was unrefined) gave someone 30$ on Paypal to honour my Settler Saturday commitment so she can get away from a bad domestic situation, skritched the cat and talked to Dave on the phone.
He’s got a book coming out and his description of the difficulties involved with punctuation was (probably not to him) quite comical. (Once upon a time I had an Anelia font Brother printer and I helped lay out one of his poems and let’s just say it’s better left to experts. And I don’t think he’s overly fussy about any of it, it’s a component of his greatness as a poet; I’m just not as particular and definitely not as internally consistent, go go Allegra ADD.) I spent rather more of the conversation than I should have telling him WHICH social media platform he should be on, of course twitter, and how he should go about ‘developing content’ for it now that he’s a luminary of Canadian letters. I even told him that if he felt like paying for it I’d jump on a train and come visit him (but he’d also have to pay to get rid of me, ALAS TIS THE ALLEGRAGELD which considering how I eat shouldn’t be too hard a sell) if he wanted to do a reading or (bless) won an award. He even riffed on an account name, which I won’t repeat in case he decides to actually do it, and I nearly laughed my lungs up through my nose.
I got a thousand karma points on reddit yesterday by saying something uplifting about someone’s stepdad for father’s day. Happy father’s day Paul: you were a good one. Things change. We get older and less useful to our children (in some cases) but the gratitude for the experience of having been a ‘working parent’ remains.
Happy father’s day pOp, you are one of the sweetest men ever. You were a little crusty when I was growing up and Liz was scared of you remember when I told you she said of you “King Fear gripped my heart with icy fingers” which is (truth be told) a quote from a Lobsang Rampa book (and DID YOU KNOW that after being hounded out of England as a goddamned phoney he moved to Calgary and died there in the 80s?, I mean what would an Allegra father’s day greeting be without a completely parenthetical comment?) but honestly, with mOm’s help you were the best dad out of all of the dads of all the kids I knew. I did have a few minutes when I thought you and mOm must have adopted me because you – ¿ARE YOU KIDDING? – set reasonable limits on my movements and what you spent money on for me but other than that, it was pretty clear you were . the . best . dad, and your continuing kindness and support for everyone in your family, is but one external token of how wonderful you are.
Did you know that there isn’t a single googleable picture of him on the internet? if I post pics of him I don’t put his name in the alt or the metadata
ALL PRAISE THE MASTER OF NOT CARING WHAT THE WORLD THINKS.
I’ve been laying off posting about Ukraine, but check this out, open in new page if you can’t read it:
armed fucking standoffs between officers and troops on the white blue and red side? g’damn.
Jeff worked very hard and did the mowing; I policed up/weed whipped the buttercups and weeds closer to the edge of the property except for the ones under the dogwood tree and the ones that were covering A FUCKING WASP NEST which reduced my joy at working outdoors about as low as it goes. We both got covered in grit and buttercup juice and I still need to do the very front that’s got tall grass coming up through the cedar hedge.
I couldn’t even move for about ten minutes afterwards and every time I raised my arms they shook which made tea drinking interesting. As Jeff remarks, we really should exercise more.
One more week until Peggy’s next mini house filk.
22970 words on Totally Boned.
Well she sure supported me yesterday. She was cleaning and I was writing my ass off. Normally we hang out a bit, but I was electrically charged or summat.
Current word count stands at 22164; total word count for yesterday is a hair shy of 3000 words. As far as I can tell there’s no drop off in quality. I guess mOm, who’s been reading it as it flies off the keyboard into a pixellated state, would have to weigh in on that.
The lads in the story are on an airplane headed home. I am already up to 250 words today.
Paul’s gone to the US for Father’s Day. There are memes to cover this so just imagine me staring unblinking at you.
worked on a fan fic, 300 words (the ‘copaganda special deputy’ story. THERE WILL BE GUNPLAY)
Totally Boned is up to 18753 words. I am really having problems visualizing how to communicate Brad wanting to make a big declarative speech and then just… not doing it because he realizes it’s self-indulgent and tacky. I mean when I write improbable characters I pull out the stops.
Off to do a grocery shop later this morning.
There was a really long and interesting thread on twitter this morning about how autistics communicate and I’ll be sitting with it for a while.
Yesterday I slept a lot and felt really weird and had balance problems. Let’s see how today is.
Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, dressed in brocades and obviously modelled on Slavic women by Pavel Ignatyev.
I am still experiencing the joy of Cindy providing lunch and Peggy providing the venue for a mini filk yesterday. My bucket’s full. I’m writing in dribs and drabs, gaming on my usual puzzle games, and enjoying the weather.
I was supposed to see Alex today but his mama’s got a cold. In other news, I now know someone who’s been diagnosed with Long Covid and they won’t be the last.
My pOp, looking at this. “Well, I feel like shit.”
Literally, the above is a phonetic translation of the title of this blog post.
Many loads of laundry; conversations with me mum, bingeing four episodes of Our Flag Means Death, an expensive delivery meal, working on songs and practicing, and getting Buster to purr when I told him daddy’s coming home today.
Peggy’s invited me and Cindy for lunch on Saturday. I wasted no time replying in the affirmative.
s’all good. No writing though, after the last long blort I’m in plotting and planning mode.
It was time for me to take my meds anyway, what a good brother. Then I look on r/vancouver and twitter and you’d be amazed by how many people took pictures of it!
This says: it is a duty to help refugees.
The CNT says of its membership, (from wikipedia): “We make no distinction at the time of admission, we require only that you are a worker, student or unemployed. The only people who cannot join are those belonging to repressive organisations (police, military, security guards), employers or other exploiters”.
The CNT is one of the longest surviving anarchist confederations in the world, and still has a place in the politics of Spain and the upholding of the rights of the worker, as well as serving as a reminder that people are drawn to those of moral and ethical consistency.